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U.S. Attorney General Nominee Todd Blanche and the Antiabortion Machine’s Pressure Campaign
Judges, lawyers and sexual abuse survivors have raised very strong reasons why it would be reckless and unconscionable for the Senate to confirm Todd Blanche to the post of Attorney General of the United States. One of the under-reported issues, though, is Blanche’s backing from well-funded antiabortion groups.
If the Republican Congress confirms Blanche, he could weaponize the DOJ in service of the antiabortion machine’s wish list, increasing the potential for some of the biggest blows to abortion access since Dobbs.
Blanche’s confirmation could mean the further decimation of access to abortion healthcare in the United States at the behest of the antiabortion machine, which has already successfully pressured the Trump administration to meet its demands by, for example, calling for FDA head Martin Mackary to be fired. Meanwhile, the antiabortion machine is ratcheting up the pressure to push its agenda at various levels across the U.S.
Reasonable members of Congress who believe in the independence of the DOJ from outside pressure, including that of the administration itself, will vote to oppose Blanche’s nomination for U.S. attorney general.
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The Biggest Threat to Women’s Sports Isn’t Trans Athletes. It’s the Trump Administration’s Failure to Uphold Title IX’s Promise of Equal Opportunity.
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Survivors Spoke. Men Were Forced to Answer.
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Making Americans Smokers Again: Trump Administration Cuts Anti-Tobacco Programs
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Can You Believe They Put This in Writing? The Wildest Quotes From Heritage’s ‘Project 2026’
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American Democracy on Fire (with Steve Vladeck and Moira Donegan)
In this episode of On The Issues, we confront American democracy on fire. How did we get here and who lit the match? In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the United States Supreme Court gutted a fundamental provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), landmark legislation enacted by Congress at the height of the civil rights movement to eradicate entrenched patterns of voter suppression and promote equality at the ballot box. With key mandates in the VRA now eviscerated under the hand six justices on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, what’s next? The Court has the lowest approval ratings since confidence in the court has been measured. Many Americans now wonder—can the Court be trusted?
The Supreme Court has emphasized that if women want reproductive freedom and don’t like abortion bans, they should go vote. But what happens when the Court plays a strategic role in diluting voting power and making voting more difficult by stripping away protections?
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Join Ms. Magazine and Get Our Landmark FEMINIST 250 Print Issue for This Pivotal Moment in American History
As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us?
In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.
We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.
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Women’s Sports Were Built by Letting Girls In
When the Supreme Court upheld West Virginia’s ban on transgender girls participating in girls’ school sports in West Virginia v. B.P.J., it said the ruling was about protecting the safety and fairness of women’s and girls’ sports. I hear that claim against everything I actually lived.
Thirty years ago, in United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that generalizations about “the way women are” cannot justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description. That principle didn’t just build my generation of athletes. It built a generation of women: the litigators and judges, the surgeons, the CEOs and entrepreneurs, the senators and governors, the police officers and firefighters and fighter pilots, the women who were the first of everything. Every one of those doors was held shut by the same argument Virginia made: Most women wouldn’t want this, most women couldn’t do it.
Women of my generation didn’t fight to be seen as individuals—as athletes, as leaders, as whatever they had it in them to be—only to watch that principle eroded now, in their name and over their objection.
More than half a century ago, this country decided that girls who had been told they didn’t belong on the field belonged there after all. I got to live the proof of that promise. The work now is to keep that promise for every kid who wants to play.
