It is a truth universally acknowledged that the party with a majority in Congress must spend the months leading up to Election Day on bills that make the other party uncomfortable. That’s why House Republicans voted this week to sanction the International Criminal Court over its decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for the war in Gaza. It’s also why, on the other side of the Capitol building, Senate Democrats put forth a bill enshrining the right to obtain and use contraception.

With the erosion of abortion rights in more than a dozen states since the Dobbs decision, and the threat that a future Trump administration could limit access to contraception, Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the overarching issue of reproductive care.

“We’re going to have Contraception Day here in the United States Senate, and everyone’s going to be put on the record, and if [Republicans] say it’s not under threat, then they should all just vote ‘yes’ in order to reaffirm that right,” said Democratic Senator Ed Markey on Wednesday.

The vote on the Right to Contraception Act on Wednesday was deliberately timed just weeks before the second anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the first in a volley of bills intended to put Republican members in the tough spot of opposing measures on issues like birth control and in vitro fertilization.

’Tis a cynical political ploy on the part of Democrats, Republicans say, pointing to legislation by GOP Senator Joni Ernst that would protect access to birth control while enshrining the right of providers with religious objections to refuse to offer contraceptive care. (Democrats say there is nothing in their bill that would threaten religious freedoms.)

“They are more interested in playing politics than they are actually about securing the very things they’re talking about,” GOP Senator Katie Britt told reporters this week. “They’ve engaged in a summer of scare tactics, and they don’t care about the false fear they’re creating in women and families.”

Birth control was legalized nationwide nearly 60 years ago with the Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. But reproductive rights advocates have long warned that contraception could be the next issue targeted by abortion opponents.

“Oh really? There’s no threat? That’s what they also said about abortion: that there was no threat to abortion,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told reporters on Wednesday. “Too many people fell for that last time. Nobody’s falling for it again.”

In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that other precedents could be revisited, including the decisions legalizing same-sex marriage and contraception.

More recently, former President Donald Trump said he was “looking at” restrictions on contraception, although he quickly backtracked, insisting in a social media post that he would “never, and will never advocate imposing restrictions on birth control or other contraceptives.”

Nonetheless, Trump’s administration enacted multiple policies making it more difficult to obtain birth control, including placing restrictions on the federal Title X program, which provides a host of free contraceptive and reproductive services to low-income Americans. Although President Joe Biden repealed these rules, a second Trump presidency could reimpose them. Meanwhile, a playbook by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a potential second Trump presidency would label Ella, an emergency contraceptive, as a “potential abortifacient,” to be removed from the Affordable Care Act’s coverage of birth control.

Meanwhile, in several red states, some Republican lawmakers have called birth control methods “abortifacients,” incorrectly equating emergency contraception with abortion drugs. “Attacks against birth control aren’t theoretical bugaboos. It’s already happening at the state level,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday.

With the exception of Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, Republicans remained largely unified in their opposition on Wednesday, despite the belief by some GOP senators that they should call Democrats’ bluff, as Punchbowl News reported. But for the Republicans who did vote in favor, the decision was obvious.

“If it’s a messaging bill, my message is I support a woman’s access to contraception. Pretty simple,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told reporters. “So if we’re gonna play messaging, that’s my message.”

Each week, I provide an update on the vibes surrounding a particular policy or political development. This week: Why a transgender journalist is leaving congressional reporting, in her own words.

Jael Holzman, a climate journalist who most recently reported for Axios, announced this week that she is leaving congressional reporting. In an essay on Medium published earlier this week, Holzman, who is transgender, explained her frustrations with media coverage of trans rights and issues. I caught up with Holzman this week to discuss her decision to leave, and what reporters—particularly those who cover Capitol Hill—can do better. This interview has been edited and lightly condensed for clarity.

In this essay, you give an example of an issue that was under-covered by reporters on the Hill, which was the inclusion of language to ban government-backed health care insurance from covering sex- and gender-affirming care in the House GOP funding bills. I’d be interested to know more about why you think that was overlooked by reporters. Do you think that they didn’t know about it or that it just was deemed less of a priority?

Watching the coverage as another reporter who was covering those bills on a different beat, it was stark seeing the medical care that I need to live get lumped into what reporters often use as shorthand—whether it be like “culture war,” “anti-woke.” Sometimes I’d see it get lumped into “DEI,” which to me is not accurate. I’d see it get lumped into conversations about abortion. It was often lumped into [issues of] health care, LGBTQ acronyms. It was surprising how few reporters asked about this language.

When I look back on my conversations with my colleagues in the press, those who I’ve worked next to quite often, the conversations about this language usually went something along the lines of, “Either readers don’t care about it, or it’s just another poison pill.” I think often reporters are trained to think on the Hill, like, “Is this going to be law today? Well, no. Then I’m not going to spend my time on it.” It’s a heavily reactive kind of journalism today.

A sliver of a sliver of the American people is being targeted explicitly, and I think there’s just not a prior frame of reference. People thought it wasn’t going to be law, and so they didn’t cover it. Although I don’t really know if that was the case. No one was asking, “Is this going to become law?”

I think in journalism overall, but especially on the Hill, because we interact with lawmakers of both parties on a daily basis, there is a desire to seem “objective” or “neutral.” How do you think that affects how reporters talk about or cover trans issues?

When I became a climate journalist, I was drawn to that field because it was something so pressing, rooted in science, that had been over decades politicized to the point where one side of a political argument—at least when I started in congressional journalism, and in policy journalism—was spending a lot of time arguing that the science wasn’t sound or that the claims made about man-made climate change were somehow questionable. Over time, we as an industry have come to grips with the fact that that’s the product of a number of actors, a number of campaigns, industry-funded and also politically motivated, to somehow convince at least some percentage of the population that the science can be questioned. And we learned how to cover it that way.

I’ve spent a lot of time and continue to spend a lot of time talking to other reporters and editors about what story ideas are out there. I think that’s something that should be happening in more newsrooms on this topic. And what I’ve found is a—reluctance would be putting it mildly to the point of absurdity—an outright refusal, I would say, in some newsrooms, to write about the science behind this medical care the way that doctors and scientists talk about it. And I think that that’s happening because there is a fear of offending readers that don’t like trans people. And I know this firsthand, because I myself have heard that from people in our industry.

I’m glad you mentioned that comparison to climate journalism. I thought that was a really interesting comparison that you made in your essay. And I’m curious to know more why you think it’s so difficult to incorporate that into health reporting. I know you say people are afraid of offending those who oppose trans rights. But do you think that this, like climate journalism, just will take time? Or is this something that you’re less optimistic that people will come around to the science of?

It’s not even a question of optimism. Mother Jones recently reported … on the shadow campaign against this medical care. This is a dedicated, concentrated, well-thought-out, potentially global campaign to take away this medical care for ideological reasons that do not have any favor for making sure that people who need it survive.

I would like to say that I am optimistic that journalists will wake up to these facts. I would like to say that with training and with resources, reporters will cover this in a way that’s authoritative. But they need to overcome that fear, and that hesitation to deal with the existence of trans people as though it is fact. And I think the longer that it pervades, the less likely it is for it to improve. Because this industry’s crumbling. It’s sad to see, as a member of it. At a time when you need to be assigning people to a new story, do newsrooms have the resources to take it on?

I think there’s a huge story in this. Some day, some intrepid reporter is going to dive into it and win a Pulitzer Prize—or, like, seven of them—and I think that that day that person will be looked at as though they were a genius, and all they did was look at the pretty easy-to-find facts around them. When I was at Politico, I wrote at least four stories, investigative stories about the anti-trans movement, on top of the work that I did in climate. I did it because I think that there is a need for those of us who are trans in the press corps to use the privilege that we do have to at least improve somewhat—whatever margin it can be—the misinformation out there, and the lack of proper source identification out there, the lack of context. But I left Politico, and I think that says a lot. I left the Hill, and I think that says a lot. I think people need to recognize that if they’re not careful, there won’t be people around to help cover this better because all of us will be gone. Like the Lorax.

What’s next for you?

Stay tuned. I am staying in climate journalism. I have a really cool thing I’m doing that I can’t talk about right now. But stay tuned, keep eyes peeled. I’ve never been more excited. And on top of journalism, I am literally talking to you inside of my first-ever touring van rental because I’m about to go play a couple weeks of dates with my band, Echo Astral. I’m really excited about that.

Wartime emissions rage, but no one’s counting them, by Chelsea Harvey in E&E News
The ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag is all over Capitol Hill, even as it becomes more controversial, by Haley Byrd Wilt in NOTUS
Once a beauty contest, Miss Subways is now a campy, voicy extravaganza, by Haidee Chu in The City
What Europe fears, by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic
How Imagine Dragons became the sound of gaming culture, by Gene Park in The Washington Post
‘We are the world power’: How Joe Biden leads, by Massimo Calabresi in Time
Is sports gambling a public health crisis? by Katrina Vanden Heuvel in The Nation

Want to have your pet included at the bottom of the next newsletter? Email me: gsegers@tnr.com.

This week’s featured pet is Big Silver, submitted by The New Republic’s own Laura Marsh. Big Silver’s age and gender are unknown, although it has lived in Laura’s koi pond for two years. Big Silver is a butterfly koi—so called because of its butterfly-shaped wings—who enjoys eating mosquitoes and swimming under the ice in the winter.

For more than a year, Sudan has been riven by a brutal civil war. The scale of misery is shocking: Nearly 18 million people face “high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to a global hunger monitor in March, and nearly five million were close to famine. Roughly three million children have fled Sudan, resulting in the world’s largest child displacement crisis.

The conflict broke out last year between rival camps in Sudan’s military government, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—both of whom have conducted egregious human rights violations, according to the United Nations.

“While two armed factions launched this conflict, this is less a civil war between two sides than a war which two generals and their affiliates are waging against the Sudanese people and their aspirations to a free and democratic future,” the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month.

The national security bill approved by Congress last month included broad humanitarian funding, and the Biden administration recently promised an additional $100 million in aid to respond to the conflict. The U.S. Treasury Department has also imposed sanctions on leaders and organizations involved in the conflict, although some in Congress believe the administration could go further: The chairs and ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to President Joe Biden this month asking him to determine whether the RSF and its leader were subject to sanctions for human rights violations under the Global Magnitsky Act.

However, within Congress as a whole, the issue has largely been placed on the legislative back burner amid other international emergencies, namely the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It was already a monthslong saga to approve the national security funding, and it’s unclear whether an aid package specific to Sudan could pass in Congress.

This past week, Representative Sara Jacobs, the Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Africa, introduced legislation that would prohibit U.S. arms sales to the United Arab Emirates until the Biden administration certifies that the UAE is no longer providing material support to the RSF. Jacobs, who visited the border between Sudan and Chad in March, said she had been shocked by the fallout from the conflict.

“Before Congress, I worked in international conflict resolution, so I’ve been to many refugee camps, but I had never seen children so clearly traumatized as the Sudanese refugee children I met at the Sudan-Chad border in March. The longer this war goes, the greater the suffering and the higher the possibility of the conflict spilling over,” Jacobs said in a statement. She added that, along with withholding arms sales to the UAE, the United States “must also continue surging humanitarian assistance to the region and hold the RSF, SAF, and other enabling actors accountable.”

Although Jacobs has solicited Republican support for this measure, it is not yet sponsored by any GOP members. Representative John James, the chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa, said that he believed Jacobs’s legislation was “on the right track.”

“We want to make sure that we are being very specific and very measured,” James told me. “We also have to maintain the fact that America is a reliable partner, but at the same time, you cannot commit human rights violations, commit atrocities, with any semblance of U.S. support.”

James also believes the situation in Sudan should be called a “genocide.” This is not an isolated opinion in Congress; several senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in February to recognize “the actions of the Rapid Support Forces and allied militia in the Darfur region of Sudan against non-Arab ethnic communities as acts of genocide.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Black Africans are being murdered and displaced each and every single day, and it’s not rising to the level of public consciousness that it needs to be,” James said, adding that it was necessary to place “increased pressure on those who are not just complicit but funding the belligerencies.” James said that he was hoping to schedule a conversation with the UAE ambassador: “We should talk quickly, or else consequences are coming.”

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said that “the diplomatic effort is likely going to have to be led by African partners.” Indeed, in a joint statement with Kenyan President William Ruto released during Ruto’s visit to Washington last week, Biden said that he “appreciates Kenya for engaging in multiple efforts to de-escalate conflicts” in the region, including in Sudan and South Sudan.

However, Murphy continued, the U.S. will likely continue to play a role in diplomatic efforts, citing the “important role” of Perriello and the humanitarian aid passed by Congress last month. “We need to do more,” he said.

How pig welfare became a states’ rights issue, by Grace Segers in The New Republic
The untold story of the network that took down Roe v. Wade, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in The New York Times
The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right, by Dylan Matthews in Vox
‘Just brutal’: Why America’s hottest city is seeing a surge in deaths, by Ariel Wittenberg in Politico
The hidden legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States, by Dana Hedgpeth and Sari Horwitz in The Washington Post
The real “deep state,” by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic
Inside Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s growing alliance, by Emily Glazer, Robbie Whelan, Alex Leary, Cara Lombardo, and Dana Mattioli in The Wall Street Journal

Want to have your pet included at the bottom of the next newsletter? Email me: gsegers@tnr.com.

This week’s featured pet is Killer Patches, a tortie with an attitude, submitted by Antonia. Killer Patches loves begging for food, peanut butter, and opened doors. She’s very persistent and doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “no.”

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, races for state Supreme Courts have garnered increased attention and money, becoming the new battleground for abortion rights and access. This year will be no different, as 33 states will hold elections for seats on their high courts.

“Dobbs was a watershed moment in state judicial politics,” said Michael Milov-Cordoba, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. “As it became clear to advocates and to the public that abortion access in their state would be determined by decisions made by state Supreme Courts, there became increased attention from both the public and national interest groups to win races.”

Although many state Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, the courts themselves tend to have ideological wings, much like federal courts where nominees are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Party apparatuses and outside organizations also get involved, pouring money into the races. The Brennan Center found that 2021 and 2022 were record-breaking years in this regard: More than $100 million was spent in judicial races in 17 states. The high-profile Wisconsin race in 2023, won by Judge Janet Protasiewicz, saw upward of $50 million in spending.

But 2024 may set a new record. This Monday, two liberal organizations announced that they have linked up to invest $5 million in high court races in key states. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is dedicated to ensuring congressional and legislative maps are competitive for Democrats, and Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the organization, will fund digital and canvassing operations to get out the vote for candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

Jenny Lawson, executive director at Planned Parenthood Votes, said that they are specifically targeting “places where Republicans have tried to stack the court with radical antidemocratic justices.” The joint campaign plans to partner with community advocacy groups to tailor their strategies to local needs. “What’s important to voters is that it is clear to voters the biases and hyperpartisanship of judges that we need to reject,” she said. “Our job will be to inform the voters of the choices in front of them.”

Three of those states—North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—have explicitly partisan elections. North Carolina and Ohio have moved from nonpartisan to partisan elections in the past 10 years, with significant ramifications. Since North Carolina Republicans gained control of the state Supreme Court in 2022, the justices have reversed course on major issues such as gerrymandering and racial discrimination. (Other states have seen their legislatures attempt to limit the power of the high court, including Montana, where Republicans have been frustrated by the court’s protection of abortion rights and blocking restrictive voting laws.)

Michigan and Ohio also have a particularly narrow ideological divide on their state Supreme Courts, meaning that the upcoming elections could flip the courts’ partisan majorities. Abortion “looms large” in the Ohio race, Milov-Cordoba said, because the court will be evaluating the right to an abortion recently enshrined in the state Constitution by voters last year. Meanwhile, Democrats are defending their majority in Michigan.

For Ohio, Planned Parenthood Votes will emphasize to voters how the governor and state legislature attempted to stymie a ballot initiative to protect abortion and how the state Supreme Court permitted deliberately complicated wording for the measure on the ballot. “They’re watching their voices and votes being taken away,” Lawson said, adding that PPV’s campaign will argue that shifting the ideological leaning of the court would protect those “voices and votes.” In Michigan, however, the focus will be on how a “favorable” court has protected abortion access.

Even in states where justices are chosen by the governor or a judicial committee, voters have the chance to weigh in on those choices with “retention” elections. In Arizona, two of the justices who joined in the controversial decision to reinstate a nineteenth-century law banning nearly all........

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