02 April 23
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Starting at midnight Saturday, the first of an expected 15 million people will be kicked off Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). At least five states — Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, South Dakota — have said they will begin terminating coverage throughout the month of April.
Other states have said they will follow. The entire purge, which is completely legal, will take place over a year.
What’s behind this mass disenrollment?
The proximate cause might seem reasonable: The covid-19 public health emergency is no longer forcing states to retain every Medicaid enrollee already on the books.
Early in the pandemic, as a condition of receiving additional federal funding, states were temporarily barred from kicking anyone off Medicaid. This was intended to guarantee more people access to medical care while the coronavirus crisis was raging. Better to err on the side of keeping people insured, lawmakers figured, lest any cash-strapped states find excuses to dump patients to save money. Or maybe states would terminate lots of beneficiaries by accident, amid the chaos of office closures.
Thanks to this federal policy change, Medicaid and CHIP rolls swelled, and the country’s uninsured rate fell to a record low last year. But as covid risks abated, all sorts of emergency safety-net measures, from extra food stamps to free covid vaccinations, have been phased out. Everyone knew that, at some point, the relaxed Medicaid regulations would likely sunset, too.
That sunset begins this Saturday. As a result, a lot of Americans are about to fall through the cracks of our haphazard health-insurance system, and become uninsured altogether.
In fact, many will become uninsured even if they still legally qualify for Medicaid!
According to government estimates, nearly half the people expected to get purged from Medicaid (6.8 million) will still be eligible for Medicaid. Among children, the share is even higher: 72 percent of children expected to lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage will technically still be eligible for Medicaid or CHIP.
The degree of government failure here should be considered scandalous. To be clear: These people are not losing insurance because their incomes rose, or they aged out of a given program. Rather, they’re losing coverage for pointless bureaucratic reasons. Maybe a letter got sent to the wrong address. Or a beneficiary had difficulty with a broken government website.
Unfortunately, this red tape is the same reason why lots of eligible families get purged even in a normal, non-end-of-pandemic year. As aberrant as the current “Medicaid unwinding” might appear, it obscures a problem that has long ailed U.S. government programs at virtually all levels: how little federal and state policymakers have done to guarantee access to critical, promised safety-net benefits.
Depending on the state, proving and re-proving eligibility for Medicaid (or food stamps, or other programs) can be somewhere between cumbersome and impossible. In some parts of the country, this is deliberate: Government-hating politicians want fewer poor people to get benefits. Rather than changing eligibility requirements (which courts don’t always favor), officials set up an obstacle course and hope some people get tripped up.
In other states, public officials truly want everyone eligible for benefits to successfully receive them. But vulnerable families fall through the cracks anyway, often because of poor management or bad government IT.
Over the past year, the federal government has been working with states to limit the number of people who will lose coverage when those pandemic-era Medicaid “continuous enrollment” provisions end. States have done more outreach, for example, to help people reapply to Medicaid or switch to different forms of coverage. And to some extent, states are trying to auto-renew more Medicaid recipients, by analyzing the internal data sources governments already have handy (such as payroll tax records) to confirm someone remains eligible.
But one legitimate question is why more states haven’t been doing this already.
For roughly a decade, Obamacare regulations have required states to do these kinds of auto-renewals based on existing internal data (called “ex parte” renewals), as well as other measures to make applications more accessible to the public. Most states, though, are not in compliance with those long-standing federal requirements, says Tricia Brooks, a researcher at Georgetown. For example, only 11 states complete most of their renewals using ex parte processes, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And states face little to no consequences for their failure.
States must do better. More of the burden of enrolling for government services should be on government, not on the vulnerable families the government is supposed to help. The tragedy of the Great Medicaid Purge is not, as it might seem, a one-off, acute ailment; this red tape is a chronic illness, one that governments should have been treating long before covid began.
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A group prays Wednesday at a candlelight vigil honoring the victims of the Covenant School shooting. (photo: Johnnie Izquierdo/WP)
As the stranger wrapped her arms around Sposito and whispered a prayer in her ear, Sposito’s eyes grew watery. “That’s normal here,” Sposito, 23, said afterward. “I did not grow up a big devout Christian, but moving here, you can feel it. Its undeniable.”
Nashville is known as the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” a city with a church on every corner. The Southern Baptist Convention is based here, along with a slew of religious publications. Country musicians, with their strong ties to Christian culture, consider Nashville their unofficial capital. After a mass shooter killed six people Monday at Covenant School, a small Christian academy, the community faced a controversial question: What’s the Christian thing to do about guns?
Some Christian leaders in the city have argued that massacres like this one require prayers, not politics. But others say their religion is being twisted to distract from calls for mental health checks and other gun restrictions. Sometimes, they say, the call for prayer is used as a silencer.
“In Nashville, White, Christian culture and gun culture are practically synonymous,” said David Dark, professor of religion at Nashville’s Belmont University, who says he is an “aspiring follower of Jesus Christ.”
“Marketed Christianity is everywhere,” he added. “And not everything that is successfully marketed as Christianity is moral. Not everything that is marketed as Christianity reaches basic standards of public safety.”
‘All we can do is pray’
After the tragedy, mourners huddled in prayer circles around makeshift memorials. Audience members and local leaders called out to God at the citywide vigil. And residents rushed to impromptu church services for comfort from the pain, lighting candles in victims’ memories.
Tennessee is listed as the third-most-religious state in the nation after Alabama and Mississippi, according to a Pew Research survey, which takes into account frequency of prayer, church attendance and belief in God. More than half of the state’s respondents said they attend church weekly — the second-highest rate in the country — and 78 percent said they “believe in God with absolute certainty.”
Tennessee is 81 percent Christian, the majority of them (52 percent) evangelical Protestant, which includes evangelical Presbyterians, according to Pew.
“Nashville churches are the hub of the Bible Belt. They tend to share a lot of members, ministries,” said David Cassidy, who was a pastor in the Presbyterian church circuit in Nashville for over two decades. “I know from talking to pastors everywhere, [the tragedy] is just a wrecking ball.”
Faith has also been one of the most helpful tools for coping, Cassidy and others said.
“The culture here, it all points back to Christianity and the Lord. And I do think Nashville is an amazing city because the presence of the Lord is so strong here,” said Sposito. “That’s why I think it’s incredibly difficult to see that this happened to a Christian school. But know that it is a strong faith community and we will get through this because our faith is so strong.”
Faith was the first thing Amy Weiland turned to when she visited the Covenant memorial this week, huddling in prayer with her husband and two others to “try to give up our hurt to God.”
She said the fact that the shooting was at a Christian school “makes it even more scary. … You hope the people around here have the faith not to do something like that, that they cope better.”
In the aftermath of the violence, some public leaders have also urged prayer rather than debate. In an address Tuesday, Gov. Bill Lee (R) blamed the tragedy on “evil,” saying it was not the time for political debate.
“This is not a time for hate or rage. That will not resolve or heal,” said Lee, whose children attended a sister school to Covenant and whose wife was close friends with two of the women killed. “The battle is not against flesh and blood, it’s not against people. The struggle is against evil itself. … We must work to find ways to protect against evil.”
Kerry Osborn, a friend of Sposito’s, put it bluntly: “We’re being forced to turn a tragedy into a political agenda.” Osborn said if it hadn’t been a gun, the suspect probably would have used another weapon.
Emily Ryan said she came to the school’s memorial with her children to model the correct way to be part of a community faced with a tragedy.
“We believe deeply in sin. We believe deeply in evil forces that we can’t see. All we can do is pray. Taking away guns is not the answer. You can’t legislate morality,” she said.
“We adore this church. There is a reason it happened here,” she added, almost whispering. “The Lord does beautiful work here and Satan wants to stop it.”
‘Now we need to act’
But not all Christians here think that prayer is the answer — or at least, the only one.
At a rally at the Capitol where hundreds of people showed up demanding stricter gun laws, a young man stood out: the son of Matthew Sullivan, the chaplain at Covenant School, whose family was enmeshed in Nashville’s Presbyterian community. He was spotted carrying a sign reading “This Has to Stop.”
Tennessee allows people to own semiautomatic and automatic weapons, although automatic weapons are harder to buy and require a license from the federal government. The state does not ban high-capacity magazines, and it doesn’t require people obtain a permit to carry a loaded handgun.
Dillon Estes, a law student, went to the Capitol on Tuesday to rally for stronger gun-control laws. Estes said he believes in God but doesn’t identify as a Christian.
The day of the shooting, he said, “was sad. It was a time for crying and reflection. But today is a time for anger. There has been too much complacency. Now we need to act.”
Some visiting the school memorials expressed similar viewpoints. Lisa Spain and her niece Haley Dyer visited it last week and said they have relied on their faith to get through the tragedy, but more than prayer is needed.
“When stuff like this happens, it makes me question” Tennessee law, Dyer said. “They should definitely do mental checks,” a proposed regulation known as a red-flag law that prevents someone who has a mental illness from purchasing a gun.
Anna Caudill, a special education advocate, agrees. She worked for years at Christ Presbyterian Academy, sister of Covenant School, and attended services at its church until a few years ago when she and her husband decided to move to a church that they thought was more inclusive. Caudill said she felt like the governor was using Christianity to abdicate responsibility — and engaged in an example of what she calls “prayer theater.”
“I don’t know that I’m willing to play along with [Gov. Lee’s] desire to posit himself as a pastoral figure for a grieving state, which neatly pushes the responsibility off on God for the decisions that he has made,” Caudill said.
Cassidy also expressed concern over Lee’s words: “The problem for the governor is his language is appropriate in a prayer meeting. If something is demonic, what’s a governor to do? There is this line of hypocrisy. It’s dangerous for an elected official to dismiss to the realm of the spiritual what he’s been elected to deal with civilly.”
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A protester is arrested by NYPD officers during a march against the killing of George Floyd, on June 4, 2020, in New York City. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Expert reconstructions that tie together evidence provide a public record of abuse that’s harder for cops to deny.
The announcement comes on the heels of another landmark settlement, reached earlier this month by New York City and the New York Police Department, which allocated $7 million to more than 300 protesters who were arrested and beaten in 2020 at a demonstration in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx.
The two settlements are both historic in their size and implications for future lawsuits against police violence. Crucially, both cases relied on forensic reconstructions of the events, using video footage and eyewitness accounts to craft detailed timelines of police abuses.
As technology advances and video footage of protests abounds, it’s becoming easier for protesters to win class-action lawsuits and settlements against cities and their police departments. While few staunch critics of the criminal justice system think the cases will drastically overhaul how policing is done, the record settlements in Philadelphia and Mott Haven demonstrate how powerful forensic reconstructions are for providing public evidence of police abuses — and giving its victims some form of redress.
Work from groups like SITU Research, which conducts visual investigations focused on justice and civil liberties, and Forensic Architecture, a group based in London that does research on state violence, has helped make otherwise esoteric forensic techniques meaningful to ordinary people.
“The capability to recreate and show the sequence of events that SITU demonstrated in this video compilation in our case would be really invaluable in showing courts and juries the actions of police in responding to public protest,” said Luke Largess, an attorney in a pending lawsuit brought by protesters against Charlotte, North Carolina, police officials. The case cites a June 2021 visual investigation by SITU and The Intercept. “It is a really powerful tool for showing what actually occurred.”
Eventually, policing critics hope, communities will see that police departments, cities, and municipalities are having to spend huge amounts of public funds to provide restitution, thanks to the proof provided by reconstructions. The Mott Haven settlement is a critical step in the arc of recognition and, eventually, accountability, SITU Research Director Brad Samuels told The Intercept.
“Whether it is monetary damages or injunctive relief (or both), legal settlements are the tail end of this arc,” said Samuels, “forcing police departments, politicians, and taxpayers to pay attention and confront the need for change.”
The Mott Haven video reconstruction, created by Human Rights Watch and SITU, spelled out a chaotic and confusing situation in plain language: NYPD officers deliberately rounded up, beat, and arrested protesters, medics, and clearly identified legal observers. The tactic, called kettling, is often used to trap protesters outside so that they can’t abide by city-imposed curfews. In this case, police brutalized and arrested more than 230 people.
Forensic reconstructions have also played an important role in at least two other cases related to police misconduct during the 2020 protests. An earlier lawsuit against Charlotte and its then-chief of police settled in July 2022, with the settlement terms banning several of the tactics depicted in an American Civil Liberties Union video reconstruction, including kettling and the use of tear gas on protesters.
And in November 2022, the city of Portland, Oregon, agreed to pay $250,000 plus attorney fees to five people who claimed that police indiscriminately deployed tear gas against them during a peaceful protest. A SITU video analysis helped prove police used weapons against protesters that had been restricted by federal court order.
But while the deluge of video evidence will likely aid plaintiffs in similar lawsuits, the implications for police conduct are less clear cut — especially while those suits are paid out with taxpayer dollars.
“When a victim of police brutality wins a lawsuit, the police who are involved in that brutality aren’t the ones paying the settlement,” said Jay Aronson, founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He added that the lawsuits might heighten the public’s scrutiny of law enforcement misconduct, but unless police departments or officials are made to shoulder the financial burden, they’re unlikely to change their tactics.
“I don’t think all of this work is going to have much of an impact on policing,” said Aronson. “But it does make it easier for people who have been harmed to sue to get settlements from cities and other municipalities.”
In an ideal world, Aronson said, police and elected officials would look at reconstructions like the videos from Philadelphia or Mott Haven and have some sort of awakening that changes their approach. “But that’s not typically what happens,” he said.
“There was a moment of Black Lives Matter where white liberals and even many white conservatives realized how racist and horrible our policing system is in this country and went out on the streets and protested. And very quickly, there’s been a retreat from the defund the police movement, from real meaningful reform or abolition at the mainstream level,” Aronson said. Three years after George Floyd’s murder, most people now understand the concept of abolition, which shows how much the conversation has advanced. “But, certainly, we haven’t gotten to the point where policing has actually changed in a meaningful way.”
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Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was arrested in Russia on Thursday. A fellow reporter said they frequently discussed the risks they faced in covering the country. (photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP)
Evan Gershkovich, who works for The Wall Street Journal, knew the risks of reporting in Russia but felt a deep connection to the country, his friends said.
Mr. Gershkovich, 31, an American journalist born to Soviet émigrés, moved from New York to Russia in late 2017 to take up his first reporting role, a job at The Moscow Times and, his friends and co-workers said, he quickly embraced life in Moscow.
“He had no hesitation; he was really ready to try something totally new,” said Nora Biette-Timmons, a friend from college and the deputy editor of Jezebel, adding, “I remember so distinctly how much he loved what he was doing.”
In January 2022, he was hired as a Moscow-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, a dream job, his friends said.
But on Thursday, in a move that intensified tensions between Moscow and the West, Russian authorities said that they had detained the journalist, accusing him of “spying in the interests of the American government.”
Russia has not provided any evidence to back up the accusations, and Mr. Gershkovich and his employer have denied the allegation. Russian state media said Mr. Gershkovich was being held at a prison in Moscow to await trial after being transported from Yekaterinburg, a city 900 miles away in the Ural Mountains where he was arrested. He is the first American journalist detained on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War and faces up to 20 years in jail.
Dozens of global news organizations have condemned the arrest and President Biden on Friday called for Mr. Gershkovich’s release. Top editors and press freedom organizations from around the world wrote to the Russian ambassador to the United States on Thursday, saying that the arrest was “unwarranted and unjust” and “a significant escalation in your government’s anti-press actions.”
The letter went on, “Russia is sending the message that journalism within your borders is criminalized and that foreign correspondents seeking to report from Russia do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke on Sunday with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and conveyed the United States’ grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a U.S. citizen journalist, said Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, and called for Mr. Gershkovich’s immediate release.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago has drastically heightened the risks for journalists trying to report in the region. After the start of the war, many independent Russian outlets were shut down and Russian journalists were forced to flee. Western outlets that had operated bureaus in the country for decades moved their reporters out, and few Western journalists remain full-time in the country today. Some reporters have continued to file stories from Russia by traveling in and out as needed.
In interviews, friends of Mr. Gershkovich described him as an extroverted journalist with an abiding love for Russia and its people, who was cleareyed about the risks facing him in his reporting.
Polina Ivanova, a correspondent who covers Russia and Ukraine for the Financial Times, said she met Mr. Gershkovich soon after they both arrived in Moscow in 2017.
“Evan is a completely gifted reporter and someone for whom journalism is incredibly natural because he is an amazing talker and charms everybody and is very funny,” she said.
Ms. Ivanova said that the pair frequently discussed the risks they faced in covering the country but that Mr. Gershkovich felt he should make every effort to report stories outside of Moscow.
“He always understands Russia with an extreme amount of insight and nuance and depth and that is based on the fact that he’s lived and breathed this story for the past five years,” she said. “And that’s what makes this all so painful because he really cares so much about what is happening in the country.”
Ms. Ivanova said she last saw Mr. Gershkovich in February, when she was traveling with him and friends in Vietnam. Afterward, he flew straight to Moscow for his latest reporting assignment.
Known to many of his American friends as “Gersh,” Mr. Gershkovich grew up in Princeton, N.J. His parents had emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union, part of a wave of Jews who left in the 1970s. He spoke Russian at home and, in an article in the magazine Hazlitt in 2018, he reminisced about growing up with his mother’s Russian superstitions, including not spilling salt on the dinner table, and looking for ways to increase his connection with his heritage.
Mr. Gershkovich studied philosophy and English at Bowdoin College in Maine, graduating in 2014. He then lived in Bangkok for a year on a Princeton in Asia fellowship.
After college, Mr. Gershkovich moved to New York City and worked at The New York Times as a news assistant, first handling reader emails for the public editors Margaret Sullivan and Liz Spayd and then working at the newsroom’s Reader Center, from early 2016 until September 2017. He left The Times to take The Moscow Times job and get the reporting experience he craved. In 2020, Mr. Gershkovich started covering Russia and Ukraine for Agence France-Presse, then moved to The Wall Street Journal.
Jazmine Hughes, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine who became friends with Mr. Gershkovich when he worked at The Times, described a message he sent her in December 2021 telling her the news about his new job at The Journal.
“Remember when we were in The New York Times cafeteria and you were convincing me to give journalism a shot for another few years and not give up just yet?” Mr. Gershkovich wrote to Ms. Hughes. “I just got hired by The Wall Street Journal. I’m the Moscow correspondent. I’m in the bureau. I did the thing. Look at us!”
Ms. Hughes said in an email: “Getting the Moscow correspondent job was basically his too-big-to-dream job.”
Jeremy Berke, a former Insider reporter who now writes the cannabis industry newsletter Cultivated, said he and Mr. Gershkovich had been close friends since their freshman year at Bowdoin College and lived together for a time in Brooklyn.
“Evan’s parents are Soviet émigrés, so he always felt very strongly about connecting with his roots,” Mr. Berke said.
“He felt like not only was this a moment in time in Russia where the country is very interesting but that he was a person who could really bridge the gap between U.S. audiences and Russia,” Mr. Berke added.
Mr. Berke said Mr. Gershkovich had made many friends in Moscow and built a life there before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“He was getting invited to friends’ cottages; he knew where all the cool bars were,” he said. “He loved his life there.”
Joshua Yaffa, a writer for The New Yorker who first met Mr. Gershkovich five years ago in Moscow, wrote in an article on Friday that Mr. Gershkovich, like some other Western reporters, had relocated outside of Russia after the war began, but returned last summer because his accreditation was still valid.
“It seemed like the old logic might still apply: Foreigners could get away with reporting that would be far more problematic, if not off limits entirely, for Russians,” Mr. Yaffa wrote.
In recent months, Mr. Gershkovich had written articles about an artillery shortage hampering Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and an acquiescence to the war by most Russians. His last byline was on March 28, on a story about Russia’s dimming economic outlook as it is squeezed by Western sanctions.
Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, said in an email to the staff on Friday that the publication was working with the State Department as well as legal teams in the U.S. and in Russia to secure Mr. Gershkovich’s release.
“Evan is a member of the free press who right up until he was arrested was engaged in news gathering,” Ms. Tucker wrote. “Any suggestions otherwise are false.”
Mr. Berke said he had spoken with Mr. Gershkovich’s mother on Thursday and Friday. (Mr. Gershkovich’s family declined to comment for this article.)
“It’s really hard,” he said. “They left the Soviet Union and were very worried about him going back. So I think this hits close to home.”
Ms. Ivanova of The Financial Times said foreign journalists who had worked with Mr. Gershkovich were distraught about his detention. She and others have asked people to email letters of support, which they will translate into Russian, as required by Russian law, and send to Mr. Gershkovich in prison.
Ms. Ivanova said there were now very few Western journalists still traveling in to Russia.
“What he was doing was incredibly important,” she said. “It was a story that really needed to be told because we need to understand it.” She added, “It helps no one if Russia remains a black box.”
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Judge Janet Protasiewicz points at former Justice Dan Kelly during a debate Tuesday, March 21, 2023, at the State Bar Center in Madison, Wis. (photo: Angela Major/WPR)
The race comes at a critical time for Wisconsin, with a challenge to the state's pre-Civil War abortion ban already working its way to the court and legal fights ahead of the next presidential election right around the corner.
The stakes of the race go beyond a single issue. Should liberals win control of the court for the first time since 2008, they're almost certain to hear a challenge to Wisconsin's Republican-drawn redistricting maps, which have helped cement conservative priorities for more than a decade.
Republicans are framing the race in terms of what they could lose, which they contend includes key pillars of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker's legacy.
Abortion rights and gerrymandering
On a recent Saturday night in Madison, people lined up down the street outside the Barrymore Theater for a live recording of the show "Pod Save America." The hosts – speechwriters who worked for former President Barack Obama — hold celebrity status in Madison, a Democratic stronghold that's proven critical to recent statewide victories in Wisconsin.
This show is aimed at turning out the Democratic vote for Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz in her race against former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, the Republican favorite. (Races for Supreme Court in Wisconsin are officially nonpartisan, but that's not how it works in practice.)
At the front of the line before the doors opened, Ariel Hendrickson, a Madison resident, said the election boiled down to two issues.
"Abortion rights and making sure that gerrymandering does not get any worse in our state," Hendrickson said.
Abortion has been a major issue in Wisconsin since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last summer, a ruling that reinstated a long-dormant abortion ban first written in 1849. Democrats have featured it prominently in their ads for statewide office over the past year, and it's been the bedrock of Protasiewicz's campaign.
National spending records broken
"I know people keep saying this, but this is probably one of the most important elections for Wisconsin," said Sheila Hosseini, also of Madison. "Especially because reproductive rights are on the line."
In a state like Wisconsin where close elections are a way of life, voters are accustomed to hearing every couple of years — or in this case, every few months — that the latest campaign is the most important one yet.
But there's actually so much riding on Wisconsin's court race this year, that it might fit that billing, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political science and law professor Howard Schweber.
"I have to agree, I think this election really does live up to its hype," Schweber says. "In the sense that the stakes are extraordinarily high across an extraordinarily broad range of issues."
Money has poured into the race, doubling, and by one estimate, tripling the old national record for spending in a state Supreme Court campaign.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the old record of $15.2 million was set in a 2004 race for the Illinois Supreme Court. According to the center's tracking, nearly $29 million had been spent on political ads in Wisconsin's race. Another running tally by the Wisconsin political news site WisPolitics found total spending on the race had hit $45 million.
"It shows that Wisconsin just tends to be the center of the political universe," says Anthony Chergosky, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. "And it also shows that money is flowing into this high stakes battle over abortion in the post-Roe v. Wade political landscape."
For some Republicans, more than a decade of GOP accomplishments are on the ballot
For Republican activists, the supreme court election is less about what they could gain and more about what they could lose.
At a Republican get-out-the-vote party in the Milwaukee suburb of Hales Corners, organizers warned that a long list of GOP wins could get struck down if liberals win the court, including election laws like voter ID and laws that strengthen gun owner rights.
Former Gov. Walker's signature law curbing union rights could also be in danger if the court flips, according to Orville Seymer, a longtime Republican activist. Judge Janet Protasiewicz was among the tens of thousands who marched against the law in 2011. She also signed a recall petition against Walker.
"All those things, they don't appear on the ballot, but they really are on the ballot," Seymer said at the GOP event. "People are voting on those issues. And the people here in this room — conservative people — they want to maintain that."
While seemingly everyone else is framing the court race in terms of issues, Kelly has notably avoided them.
"If I were to start talking about my political views, that would be no more relevant to this race than who I think the Packers' next quarterback ought to be," he said at a Milwaukee Press Club forum in March.
As a private lawyer, Kelly once defended Republicans' legislative maps in federal court, and his recent clients included state and national Republican parties. Kelly offered legal counsel to the state party after the 2020 presidential election when Republicans used fake electors in an effort to contest former President Donald Trump's narrow loss in Wisconsin.
It's not that Kelly has never shared his views. About a decade ago, Kelly wrote in a blog that abortion took the life of a human being, and he wrote a passage in a book comparing affirmative action to slavery.
As a judicial candidate, he says it's inappropriate for him to share his political views, since a judge's job is applying the law.
"I am running to be the most boring Supreme Court justice in the history of the country," Kelly said. "Because the role of the court is not to be original. It's not to be innovative."
Protasiewicz says voters want to hear where candidates stand
Protasiewicz, who spent decades as a prosecutor and judge in Milwaukee County, has no such hesitation when it comes to sharing her personal beliefs, particularly on abortion.
During a brief interview at the Pod Save America event, Protasiewicz was asked what kind of a difference she could make if she's elected to the court.
"I have been very, very forthright that my personal value is that women have a right to choose," Protasiewicz said. "Reproductive choices belong to the person."
Asked about Wisconsin's Republican-drawn legislative districts, which the court's conservative majority endorsed last year, Protasiewicz was similarly outspoken.
"Our maps are rigged in this state," she said. "I would certainly welcome the opportunity to have a fresh look at our maps."
For Democrats in this moment, the Supreme Court race means everything. With a liberal majority on the court and new maps, their hope is that they could finally push the state's politics to the left like neighboring Minnesota and Michigan.
That prospect has helped Protasiewicz smash candidate fundraising records, drawing from a network of Democratic donors around the country and a handful of wealthy donors, like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who've made million-dollar donations to the state Democratic Party.
Conservatives were badly outspent in the early stages of the race but have closed the funding gap recently. The state's largest business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and a group funded by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein, have spent more than $10 million on ads attacking Protasiewicz as soft on crime.
Both parties have also described this race in presidential terms because whichever side wins will have a majority on the court ahead of the 2024 presidential race. That means they'll get to hear election lawsuits in Wisconsin, the swing state where each campaign feels a little more important than the last.
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New York City. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
Where did this idea of the “urban doom loop” come from?
It’s actually quite an old idea. There’s this long history of certain people seeing urban life through the lens of decline. If you look at contemporary usages of this idea of “urban doom,” it’s actually very similar to the way a lot of people in the ’70s and ’80s were talking about cities. There are a bunch of continuities between now and then. One of them is this equation between the urban general good and the good of downtown real-estate owners. You can very strongly see this. And there’s also a barely hidden — or not at all hidden — racism, clearly articulated from the perspective of a white Establishment that is horrified with the idea of people of color having a stronger political presence in cities. It was tied to political office and elections in the ’70s and ’80s, and now it’s tied to Black Lives Matter and protests against racism and racialized police violence.
You seem skeptical. And yet “urban doom” is becoming a catchphrase to describe our present moment. Why do you think that is?
With the “urban doom” story, all sorts of elite voices — business interests, real-estate interests, members of the political ruling class — are getting together and trying to sort of decide how they alone are going to save downtown. You see this happening across the U.S. But this is a very politicized misunderstanding of urban dynamics, urban development, urban politics, urban movement — and also just a very naïve one. It’s not as if things were great for working-class and poor city dwellers before the pandemic. This particular “urban doom loop” is arguing we’re ending these decades of a golden era of urban life, but it was only golden for some people. This actually could be an interesting moment when the very purpose of downtowns are being renegotiated, as well as this understanding of what urban life is for.
Instead, they’re just hyperobsessed with commercial vacancies.
I would never say that COVID didn’t impact fiscal finances in a massive way. But the response needs to be something that’s thought about a bit more critically. The main evidence that people are offering for urban decline is that commercial rents are softening or declining in some places. The first thing to ask is: Are falling rents always a bad thing? And is it bad for whom? This idea that commercial rents in downtowns are declining, and all of a sudden what had been this great situation is becoming a bad situation, really ignores the degree to which people have been struggling with many of the basic needs of everyday life for a very long time.
So what would you say to people who are worried about everyone moving out to the suburbs?
Migration to the suburbs has been happening for a very long time. Obviously, there are other ways in which middle-class households are also claiming space in the center of cities. But this is not actually any kind of large-scale flight away from cities. It’s the reorganization of power and resources within urban space — but they’re still staying within urban regions. There’s this weird idea that there’s a separation between suburbs and city. Cities are part of urban regions. There’s no essential difference between them.
Some cities are renegotiating how downtowns work or, at least, trying to get something other than offices into them.
What we’re seeing now in cities is very similar to what happened with the movement of industry out of central cities. There was this whole process of churn and reuse by various segments of urban capital that came up with different uses of these spaces. and we’re clearly going to see this again. For example, there has been a concerted effort to diversify land use in downtowns for a very long time by converting expensive commercial real estate — or commercial real estate that’s not the most expensive, but still commercial real estate — into expensive housing.
Yes, converting offices to housing has been a big talking point since the pandemic began.
That’s been happening for a while, and I think it will continue. You can picture a version of adaptive reuse of downtowns, which just maintains them as these sort of elite citadels that just change from commercial real estate to residential real estate, but still maintains the exclusionary class character of these areas. Or you could imagine the democratic transition, which looks at all this urban space located within cities and says, “We’re going to use it to build housing for workers. We’re going to use it to build health-care facilities, schools, public spaces, public institutions, and community spaces.” I mean, there’s no limit to how these spaces could be reused if they’re unshackled from this imperative.
But also, this idea that people are abandoning cities just does not square with reality. That’s another problem with this whole way of seeing the world through overinterpreting the meaning of real-estate data because, as you know, people’s rents are still incredibly high.
Right? Even though pundits are saying that cities are emptying out, housing prices haven’t come down at all.
Real-estate values have been falling, but for years they’ve been rising. It’s not as if anyone’s giving away any real estate. Downtown is still incredibly expensive, especially in cities that that they’re always talking about — New York, Boston, L.A., San Francisco — it’s just laughable the idea that somehow they’re emptying out.
But we do have other worrying indicators, like transit ridership, which looks like it has plateaued as office-occupancy rates hover around 50 percent. A lot of projections are saying that transit in the U.S. will likely only ever hit about 70 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Transit agencies are warning about cuts. How should cities be preparing for that?
Again, this is a time to think a bit more critically about who lives in the city. Whose needs are met? A lot of transit systems have grown as machines for pumping people from residential spaces into downtown to their professional spaces, and then pumping them back. Different patterns are going to have to be developed. Certainly, this could be a really exciting moment for rethinking urban structure.
And it isn’t just empty buildings and subways; doomsayers also point to an increase in visible drug use and homelessness as proof of urban decay, but are “empty” cities really causing these issues? How does the “law and order” rhetoric play into all this?
That’s another parallel with the older narratives of urban decline. When there is crime, there’s a violent response from the state. And then the spectacle of violence is used as evidence for all sorts of disorder, which then is used to justify a more violent response. New York in the 1990s was a dark time in the city’s history with huge amounts of police violence that targeted minoritized communities, and it left a terrible legacy. I think you can still sense it today. Rudy Giuliani epitomized this “urban doom loop” ideology and used this to justify his tactics. These narratives of doom feed into state violence against minoritized groups. The connection cannot be any clearer. For that reason alone, people really need to think twice before invoking “urban doom” so we don’t repeat that. A bit of perspective would also help here. In reality, there is far less crime now than there was then. Yet you see lots of cities already going down that route again.
Some of the commentators telling us that the “era of urban supremacy is over” are also relying on Census data from 2020 to 2021, the very worst of the pandemic. Is this data even useful in terms of projecting long-term trends?
On the one hand, the last few years have been uniquely unreliable in regards to statistics. It has just been a big historic exception. But the search for a new normal is, to some extent, not going to happen either. City life is constantly transforming, erratically. A lot of it depends upon the choices that city dwellers make and that urban governments make. It’s very narrow, this understanding of what counts as legitimate, urban knowledge.
It’s obvious, though, that cities are changing. And they need to! So what indicators should we be watching?
If the only thing you’re paying attention to is certain measures of real-estate value, then you’re going to get one picture. If you listen to the voices and experiences of other city dwellers, you will get a very different picture.
And what counts as important indicators? Housing is obviously a huge one. Health and social well-being. Community life. General measures of social welfare. They’re far more important.
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A recent study is disrupting the conventional wisdom that there is no connection between climate change and deadly tornadoes, such as the ones that tore through Mississippi over the weekend. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
A new study explores the link between rising temperatures and more deadly tornadoes.
Researchers at Northern Illinois University looked at data from the past 15 years, which compared different types of supercell storms. They concluded that these storms, which are precursors to tornadoes, will increase in frequency and intensity as the planet warms.
The scientists also concluded that tornadoes will shift eastward, from Tornado Alley in the Great Plains, where the storms have been the most active for decades.This comes after a series of lethal twisters made their way through Mississippi, leveling towns like Rolling Fork and Silver City, and severely affecting people in the capital city of Jackson.
The study showed an overall increase in supercell storms across the United States, but a greater increase in storms across the South, particularly around the mid-South region which encompasses Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri.
An association between tornadoes and climate change was previously difficult to establish, unlike the connection between climate change and hurricanes. Tornadoes are smaller and harder to measure than hurricanes, but the main impediment to linking tornadoes to climate change is that the latter weakens winds in the atmosphere while tornadoes require stronger winds.
The latest research, however, demonstrates that even with weaker winds, other factors resulting from climate change can make tornadoes more intense.
“That added ingredient of more heat and moisture is going to be the big thing that will influence what happens and we can expect potentially worse tornado outbreaks,” said William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University.
Gallus said that despite the fact that there could be fewer days of tornadoes, those days could feature stronger or multiple tornadoes.
Additionally, a geographic shift eastward could spell ongoing trouble for residents of the region, where housing stock is seen as less secure and the area is more densely populated.
“It’s not just the simple idea that the bullseye of most tornadoes is moving east,” said Gallus. “What’s bad is it’s moving into a part of the country where people tend to [be] more vulnerable to tornadoes. So the risk of injury and death is higher in those areas.”
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