One easy-to-resolve mystery of the Jeffrey Epstein case remains unanswered: Why was Ghislaine Maxwell transferred last year to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white-collar crooks?

This puzzling relocation occurred after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general (and formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney), traveled to Tallahassee, Florida, to interview Maxwell for hours, during which she praised Trump and said she had never witnessed him engaging in sexual misconduct.

At the time of her chat with Blanche, Maxwell—who is serving a 20-year sentence for procuring minors for Epstein to sexually abuse—was locked up in a medium-security, co-ed facility. The Bryan facility is a cushier, women-only prison that offers yoga classes and a puppy program for inmates. The government has never provided an explanation of why Epstein’s chief collaborator was moved to Bryan, which at the time was home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraudster Jen Shah.

Looking for answers, last summer I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the Bureau of Prisons asking for information related to this transfer. Specifically:

all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental personnel

The BOP did not rush to provide the information. After months of delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request.

So we sued.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner.

Now the matter is before a judge in federal district court in Washington, DC. In a filing submitted in the case earlier this month, the BOP provided both an eye-popping disclosure and some disturbing news.

The BOP reported that in response to this FOIA request it “has completed its initial search and identified 15.8 GB of potentially responsive records, which has crashed BOP’s system during the download process several times due to the large number of records. This is an extremely large amount of information and BOP is currently downloading the records.” The agency estimates that there may be “approximately 120,000 pages of material to review.”

Possibly 120,000 pages related to this one transfer? So many documents the system crashed? That seems a rather large pile. Far beyond what might be expected. The final number of responsive documents could be much smaller. But why might there be a mountain of material?

The BOP said that once it downloads the material, it will “conduct a responsiveness and deduplication review” and that it hopes to complete that process by June 19. This is just the first step. The bureau states that given the “large volume or records” and “the large number of records that must be reviewed,” it cannot “at this time to propose a schedule for processing of records.” Which means there’s no telling when the BOP will actually review and then (possibly) release documents related to Maxwell’s transfer.

A quick review is not likely, especially since the BOP filing also notes that its FOIA office is a mess:

On February 28, 2025, four senior staff members of the BOP FOIA Office, including the former Supervisory Attorney, left the agency. BOP currently has only two attorneys covering FOIA litigation across the country. One of these attorneys is still in training and in their probationary period. BOP FOIA Staff, including attorneys and processors, are currently handling, or assisting with, over 50 active cases in multiple federal districts. Additionally, BOP currently has a backlog of over 7,400 FOIA requests pending.

What’s happened in the BOP FOIA office is representative of the collapse of FOIA throughout the federal government under the second Trump administration. Cutbacks in staff and likely an increase in antipathy toward openness have led to sharp increases in backlogged FOIA requests.

In 2025, the backlog of FOIA requests at the Defense Department increased by 42 percent to 27,000 requests. One reason is clear: Across all its components, the Pentagon experienced a 37-percent loss or turnover in FOIA officers. At the State Department, according to a recent report from its chief FOIA officer, “staff attrition and contract downsizing left several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant,” and its backlogged cases went up by 6,000 to nearly 28,000 requests.

In March, the Department of Health and Human Services shut down FOIA units at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Last month, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted he would be restoring all the FOIA offices. Still, that’s unlikely to do enough to address the department’s dreadfully slow response time to FOIA requests that averages 490 days and its own huge backlog, which increased by 12 percent last year.

In November, Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit to compel HHS to process its FOIA requests. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”

News about Maxwell keeps emerging. Inmates at the minimum security prison camp where she now lives recently told CNN that she receives “special treatment” and that those who speak out about this are “punished.” The favoritism showed Maxwell has included allowing her to hold private meetings with visitors in the prison chapel—a privilege not afforded other inmates.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing whether Trump should offer Maxwell a pardon in exchange for her then cooperating with the House Government Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the Epstein case. (The US government has previously assailed Maxwell for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”.) Committee Democrats, who oppose such a deal, have called for investigating Maxwell’s prison transfer.

Partly as a result of Trump’s war on the federal government, the FOIA system—always creaky and prone to infuriating and excessive delays—has become much worse, belying Trump’s claims of increasing transparency and accountability. But here’s the thing: The public and the press shouldn’t need to rely on FOIA to obtain an explanation of Maxwell’s transfer. The BOP, which is part of the Justice Department, could just say why this happened.

The bureau’s reluctance to do so suggests there’s a good reason to file a FOIA request—and to fight in court for those thousands of pages.

Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move that could disenfranchise Black voters. It’s also supercharged a redistricting fight that began when President Donald Trump urged states to change their maps to mitigate possible losses in Congress.

Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy describes the redistricting happening in Southern states as “a historic reversal of what the Voting Rights Act brought” and could lead to “homogenous white delegations to the South.”

Until recently, Democrats felt optimistic about their chances of taking back not only the House, but possibly the Senate. But they were dealt a major blow last week when their own redistricting efforts in Virginia were struck down by the state Supreme Court. Similarly, the US Supreme Court paved the way earlier this week for Alabama to revert to an electoral map with a single majority-Black district.

On this week’s More To The Story, Murphy and host Al Letson try to make sense of this unprecedented midterm season, gauge the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress, and examine how Trump’s threats to the electoral system could play out in November.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense dream might seem like something out of science fiction, but it would cost real dollars, the Congressional Budget Office says—about $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years, according to a report the federal agency released today.

Trump has held the idea dear since his 2024 campaign, when he made  “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY” to “PREVENT WORLD WAR III” one of his 20 core campaign promises. Later, he rebranded it as the “Golden Dome,” and about a dozen major American weapons manufacturers (and over 2,300 smaller companies) started to compete for the privilege of building a massive interceptor-missile system in the skies over the United States.

As I reported in 2024 and again in 2025, scientists have a lot of questions about how this will work. It would nominally be modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome system, which is designed to protect a very small geographic area (something the US does not have) from improvised missiles launched from within 40 miles (which is also not happening here).

Given those constraints, the administration quickly moved to include satellite-based missile interceptors on their vision board. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein admitted to the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee in April that this Star Wars–esque setup might not be cost-effective, either.

Trump estimated last May that his Golden Dome would cost around $175 billion and be deployable by the end of his term in 2029. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, says that estimate was off by approximately one trillion, seventy-four billion dollars.

Even at that staggering cost—almost the entire proposed Pentagon budget this year—the system still wouldn’t block all missiles, the CBO wrote in their report. “The system could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary,” they said.

“It would not be an impenetrable shield or be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch,” the CBO wrote. “As a result, the strategic consequences of deploying an NMD system with the capacity considered here are unclear.”

Even if the Golden Dome never intercepts a single missile, companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril are likely to profit: they’re among 12 companies that have already been awarded $3.2 billion in Golden Dome contracts.

President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary resigned on Tuesday following political battles over health policy that angered anti-abortion activists and industry executives. 

Makary, who led the agency in charge of promoting public health through regulating food safety, medications, tobacco, vaccines, and more, stepped down after Trump pushed him to approve fruit-flavored vapes earlier this month. According to the Wall Street Journal, advisers told the president that flavored vaping was important to young MAGA voters. Makary resisted the idea, but last Friday, the FDA adopted a new policy that opens the door for tobacco and vape companies to sell the e-cigarettes anyway.

Makary also faced criticism from anti-abortion groups who demanded the FDA reverse their approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, which is used in most abortions, to be given out without requiring an in-person visit. A federal court ordered a nationwide in-person requirement earlier this month, and the Supreme Court is still reviewing the decision. Last week, it temporarily reinstated mifepristone access through telemedicine and mail.

This latest resignation opens up another hole in the Trump administration, which has not yet appointed a permanent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and a surgeon general to Robert F. Kennedy’s health department. Trump has also axed other key officeholders for failing to do his bidding, like former attorney general Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem.

Trump confirmed Makary’s exit on Tuesday afternoon ahead of his trip to China to speak with President Xi Jinping. “He was having some difficulty. He’s a great doctor. He’s going to go on and do well,” Trump told reporters. “Everybody wants that job.” 

Makary was perhaps an attractive FDA commissioner candidate to Trump due in part to his anti-abortion views and promise to quickly transform policy. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones when Makary was confirmed last March, the FDA commissioner has spread misinformation, including telling ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that fetuses feel pain in utero several weeks before science indicates.

This was not enough for Trump and his far right supporters. 

Kyle Diamantas, a deputy commissioner within the FDA, will become the acting head of the federal agency, according to Politico, which first reported Makary’s resignation. Whether Diamantas—or whoever is confirmed next—follows the Trump administration’s lead remains to be seen.

By all accounts, President Donald Trump really, really did not want abortion to become a major issue this election year. But here we are, six months before the midterms, and abortion pills are back at the Supreme Court, as the state of Louisiana and abortion drug manufacturers ask to fast-track oral arguments in what is shaping up to be a blockbuster case. Conservatives are invoking the Comstock Act. And Trump’s Food and Drug Administration has been AWOL, while its top official has been forced to resign.

The swift escalation of the showdown between Louisiana and the FDA over telemedicine abortion highlights just how little control Trump has over the abortion issue—both in terms of the timeline and the outcome. Meanwhile, the case is sparking confusion, uncertainty, and dread among patients, providers, and advocates across the US.

Just to recap how we got to this point. On May 1, the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, siding with Louisiana, issued a nationwide order suspending FDA rules that allow the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and dispensed through the mail. A few days later, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the order, and on Monday, he extended his stay until May 14.

The decision to take a few more days suggests that the full court is struggling to figure out its next steps in a case that could upend abortion access throughout the US—and possibly much sooner than many SCOTUS-watchers had thought likely.

All last week, justices were blasted with amicus briefs from parties with keen and conflicting interests in the outcome. Former FDA officials warned about the dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago. Doctors and reproductive health advocates pointed to the mass of research from around the world showing that abortion pills are safe and effective, including via telemedicine.

Conservatives, meanwhile, repeatedly brought up the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity statute that hasn’t been enforced for decades. Named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, Comstock made it a federal crime to mail or ship “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Reviving the law could end legal access to most abortions nationwide and possibly threaten other reproductive health care, such as IUDs. 

In its own brief to SCOTUS, Louisiana offered an audacious option: If justices don’t allow the Fifth Circuit suspension of mail-order mifepristone to take effect, they should put the case on the 2025-2026 docket and schedule oral arguments ASAP, so that a final decision could be made as soon as the end of June or the first days of July. Drug makers GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories also suggested the court should consider taking the full case on an expedited schedule. The current term already includes such hugely consequential issues such as birthright citizenship and Temporary Protected Status for asylum seekers.

The one interested party that did not weigh in was the federal drug agency Louisiana sued in the first place. Even though the Fifth Circuit’s order was directed at the FDA, GenBioPro and Danco filed the emergency appeals asking the Supreme Court to hit pause.

As of Tuesday, the FDA remained radio silent. “There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government on this,” says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “And in a case that’s challenging the agency’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, sees the FDA’s failure to speak up as yet more evidence that the Trump administration has backed itself into a very uncomfortable corner, caught between voters who overwhelmingly support reproductive rights and abortion opponents who are furious the president hasn’t worked harder on their behalf. “It’s clear,” she says, “that the Trump administration still doesn’t know what to do about this issue politically.”

The anti-abortion movement expected that when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortions would plummet across much of the US. The opposite has happened: In the four years since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely banned.

As abortion opponents have strategized to stop the flow of pills, they have focused much of their energy on attacking Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes for mifepristone, one of two drugs that make up the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen. Approved by the FDA in 2000, mifepristone was subject to extremely strict rules and placed in a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Starting in 2016, some of those rules were relaxed, including a requirement for in-person prescribing and dispensing that was permanently dropped in 2023. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

The first sweeping assault on the FDA rules, in a 2022 case that also originated in the Fifth Circuit, ended when the Supreme Court ultimately held that the plaintiffs—anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations—didn’t have standing to sue. But the justices made no determination on the underlying issue—the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone—and left the door open to other plaintiffs who might have standing.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill tried her luck with a narrower lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to ditch the in-person dispensing requirement was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political.” It was not based on sound science, she argued, but on the Democrats’ determination to thwart the effects of the Dobbs decision that handed abortion policy to the states. Murrill claimed that the telemedicine rule interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit, while making it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want.

The FDA responded, not by defending the 2023 rules, but by pointing to its own ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced last fall. At the time, Kennedy and Makary cited the Biden administration’s purported “lack of adequate consideration” before making the 2023 rules change; they also cited “recent safety concerns”—such as supposedly high rates of abortion pill complications—raised by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center in a dubious study that has been widely debunked as junk science. In its court filings, the FDA argued that Louisiana’s lawsuit threatened to “short-circuit the agency’s orderly review” and should be put on hold. It also argued that Louisiana didn’t have standing to sue.

But the FDA study has been widely seen as a delaying tactic by a president reluctant to take a stand on abortion that might alienate voters. Trump has blamed many of his past political setbacks on abortion, and in his second term has avoided sweeping actions that would put the issue on the political front burner. For example, in defiance of the hopes of many conservatives, his Justice Department has declined to enforce the Comstock Act. His failure to take meaningful action to stop the flow of pills has infuriated anti-abortion leaders. “Trump is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the influential president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal last week. “The president is the problem.”

In the Louisiana case, the anti-abortion ideologues on the Fifth Circuit did what Trump officials have not. Using the FDA’s sham mifepristone review, and citing the statements by Kennedy and Makary about the Biden FDA’s “lack of adequate consideration,” they have set up the circumstances to potentially gut access to abortion pills. “You have the FDA conceding that there’s a question about whether they did this properly [on mifepristone],” says Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University. “That only heightens the Fifth Circuit’s belief that the FDA had no authority to [get rid of the in-person dispensing rule] in the first place.” 

The FDA’s silence at the Supreme Court may well be construed to further bolster Louisiana’s case, Ziegler says. The state is arguing that the FDA’s actions—or lack thereof—show that the agency agrees that the 2023 rules change was problematic. “The court could easily use the FDA’s silence the way Louisiana is using it.”

But Makary’s resignation, or perhaps firing, on Tuesday—which abortion opponents and others have been pushing for some time—also highlights the agency’s wider “disarray,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.” Given the politics and the chaos, he says, “I wasn’t surprised they didn’t file anything.”

The central question raised by Alito’s extension of his stay against the Fifth Circuit is, why? SCOTUS “seems to be really struggling,” Suter says, “not so much with the legal questions, but with how what they do is going to affect the integrity of the court.” Battered by reporting about the court’s shadow docket, she says, justices “may be worried about looking like they’re rushing too much” to resolve the kinds of hugely consequential issues that the FDA case raises—not just about abortion, but also about the rights of states to second-guess federal drug regulation.

Yet Louisiana and mifepristone manufacturers have all indicated they want SCOTUS to take the case on its merits, perhaps on an expedited schedule during the current term. “Basically, they’ve said, We know what the district court is going to ultimately rule,” Suter says. “We know what the Fifth Circuit is going to ultimately rule…Why wait?”

If the Supreme Court does take the case, conservative groups have made clear they plan to use the opportunity to push the justices on the Comstock Act. At least two archconservatives—Alito and Clarence Thomas—have signaled they think the long-defunct statute remains the law of the land.

In one amicus brief filed last week, more than 100 Republican members of Congress accused the Biden-era FDA of flouting Comstock when it ended the in-person dispensing requirement. “The FDA cannot purport to authorize conduct criminalized under federal law,” the brief contends. “[T]hat would exceed its constitutional authority.”

The far-right nonprofit Advancing American Freedom, writing for dozens of other groups, argues that by failing to comply with Comstock, “the FDA has directly harmed Louisiana and undermined the exercise of its authority to prohibit abortion drugs.” 

Louisiana made similar arguments when it first sued the FDA last fall, but generally, Comstock has remained very much a background issue. The conservative briefs are aimed at injecting it back into the case—and further into mainstream discourse, says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “It’s just an extremely anti-democratic argument,” she says. “…They’re trying to transform [Comstock] into a no-exceptions nationwide abortion ban that they could never convince modern voters to enact.”

The Trump administration has sent subpoenas to dozens of hospitals across the nation over the past year, demanding access to information about children receiving gender-affirming care and the doctors treating them.

Those efforts have mostly failed. At least eight separate Trump administration administrative subpoenas, which would force hospitals to release trans kids’ medical records, have been thrown out. Another massive slate of DOJ subpoenas against California hospitals was dropped in January.

Now, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas is trying a new tactic: Its prosecutors sent out a grand jury subpoena to NYU Langone Hospital seeking confidential information about patients under age 18, according to a statement released by the hospital May 11. As S. Baum of the newsletter Erin In The Morning wrote, this means the federal government is pursuing a criminal case:

[T]his is a dire escalation…this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients. News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings.

“We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” the hospital told its patients. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.”

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on the this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

Since prior attempts to pressure hospitals into handing over patient information have been unsuccessful, Minter said, the Department of Justice is now trying to get that same information by pursuing federal criminal charges. And by doing so in Texas, he added, they’re attempting “to find a jurisdiction that would would likely be sympathetic to the administration’s goals.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter said. “This is mafia-type behavior.”

This isn’t the first time NYU Langone has been targeted for its work with transgender patients. It’s the latest in a long back-and-forth between the hospital, its patients, and various government bodies. January 2025, the hospital stopped accepting new patients into its Transgender Youth Health Program following a Trump executive order which attempted to prohibit federally funded hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. They were met with protests at the time. Then, just over a year later, the hospital announced it was ending that program altogether “due to the current regulatory environment,” and were met with more protests from trans kids and their families, many of whom scrambled to find care elsewhere.

In early March, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered the hospital to resume care. On March 18, then-Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to James demanding that the hospital not reinstate trans youth care. Meanwhile, trans community advocates in New York have pressed the hospital, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to do more to protect gender-affirming care for all New Yorkers.

In New York, patients and doctors are theoretically protected by a state-level “Shield Law,” which is designed to protect those seeking or providing gender-affirming or abortion-related healthcare from out-of-state retaliation. “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told Mother Jones. “Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.” New York’s shield law applies to criminal investigations, not just civil ones; many other state-level shield laws do not.

And there is little case law indicating how such protective legislation would hold up in the face of federal investigations—and this particular investigation is coming from a court with a track record of repeatedly ruling that trans people are not protected by federal anti-discrimination law. “This could turn out to be a very important battleground,” Minter said.  

More than 40 hospitals nationwide have terminated some form of gender-affirming care since Trump took office.

In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

Since the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature has been pushing for a map that would give Black voters, who comprise 27 percent of the state’s population, the ability to elect their candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. But after Callais, Republican leaders of the state legislature have gone further and vowed to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black districts, which would mean that the state that gave rise to the civil rights movement and was the home of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham church bombing, and Bloody Sunday in Selma would have no Black representation in Congress. The court’s Monday intervention puts the 6-1 map into effect, but leaves open the door for the legislature to attempt a 7-0 map, if not in time for this year’s elections, then in plenty of time for 2028.

Just last week, Chief Justice John Roberts gave a speech where he insisted the justices were not “political actors,” but the court’s last-minute intervention in favor of Alabama violates every norm the court claims to follow. “The rank disrespect of the Chief Justice coming out and warning people that they shouldn’t assume that the court is partisan tests basic credulity,” says Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “I don’t think you have to have a law degree to recognize that there’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Part of what makes Monday’s order effectively instituting Alabama’s preferred map so brazen is that the court had already rejected it—twice. Just three years ago, the court tossed an Alabama map with one Black majority district in Allen v. Milligan, ordering Alabama to create a second majority-Black district. It then reaffirmed Allen in the run-up to the 2024 election when Alabama Republicans attempted to evade the court’s order. After the Supreme Court’s intervention, a three-judge panel sitting in a federal court in Alabama found in 2025 that the state’s new map not only violated the Voting Rights Act, but was also shaped by intentional racial discrimination, which violates the Constitution.

In last month’s Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court had “not overruled” Allen, even though it had clearly sapped the decision of any meaning. For example, in Allen, the court affirmed its long-held methodology for evaluating vote dilution claims under the VRA, as well as Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment to prohibit discriminatory effects in redistricting. Callais discarded both of those promises. But overturning a decision with still-fresh ink on a highly political issue reeks of partisanship, so Alito crafted his opinion to give the majority plausible deniability that its sweeping ruling was anything but a mere tweak to current law.

Monday’s order puts the lie to Alito’s claim that Callais is a mere “update” that left Allen undisturbed. “Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent to Monday’s order. “These cases are, of course, Allen. So if Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here.”

But Allen wasn’t the only decision the majority discarded Monday night. Just as galling, the order discarded that three-judge panel decision finding that Alabama had engaged in intentional racial discrimination when it refused to create a second majority-Black district in 2023. Instead of drawing a new majority-Black district following the Supreme Court’s Milligan ruling, the state legislature drew a seat that was only 40 percent Black and would have been easily carried by Trump. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a remedial plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the court wrote.

Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed that the Voting Rights Act and 15th Amendment still prohibit intentional discrimination in voting—in fact, Callais is silent on the type of 14th Amendment constitutional violation that the district court found in Alabama. Undeterred, the majority threw out the district court’s meticulous, 268-page opinion that had found deliberate discrimination against Black voters in Monday’s one-paragraph order without any basis for doing so in Callais.

“Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided.”

“This is a pretty disrespectful end to a long case that produced a lot of evidence showing Alabama’s commitment not to abide by the terms of the Voting Rights Act,” Crayton said.

The use of Callais to wipe out a ruling on something Callais did not touch is particularly egregious. “There may be serious arguments for the Supreme Court to revisit the Alabama trial court’s decision as a normal appeal, via the regular appellate process,” Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, wrote to Mother Jones shortly before the court released its Alabama order. “But an emergency order here with a drive-by ruling on an argument that wasn’t at issue in Callais would be the worst version of naked partisanship.” That’s exactly what happened.

As Levitt pointed out, the court’s method for tossing the finding of intentional discrimination—a single, unreasoned paragraph on the court’s emergency docket—is a middle finger to the hard work of the district court. It’s just one of many such recent examples, where the court majority weaponizes the oft-called shadow docket to vacate lower-court findings it dislikes. “Factual findings like discriminatory intent are reviewed for clear error, meaning that if a district court’s factual determination is ‘plausible’ in light of the full record,’ then that determination ‘must govern,'” Sotomayor reminded her colleagues Monday. But that was just another rule her colleagues threw aside.

It may seem like the GOP’s post-Callais push for districts is coming rather late in the year. Indeed, in Monday night’s decision unleashing Alabama Republicans, the court’s GOP appointees didn’t just wantonly discard precedent in Allen and Callais. There is also the so-called “Purcell principle,” which the justices have often invoked to urge lower courts not to intervene in voting-related disputes in the middle of an election season for fear of causing voter confusion. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the lower court decision was issued when the primary was 15 weeks away.

But on Monday they sided with Alabama just one week before the state’s primary, after mail voting had already begun. That’s the second time in recent days that the court has violated this norm to help Republicans. In Callais, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting was already underway, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision, as is standard practice, the Court put Callais into effect immediately, which gave a green-light to Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

The Callais decision has triggered a frantic rush by Southern states to undo decades of progress for Black voters and could ultimately lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. In a matter of days last week, Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-Black district. Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi are set to follow suit.

Republicans have regained a sizable advantage in the gerrymandering war started by Trump because of the Supreme Court’s decision to release the Callais opinion in the heat of the midterms. It’s clear that the court’s conservative justices have not had any second thoughts about what they’ve unleashed. The Republican appointees may claim to be apolitical, but they keep putting their foot on the gas to accelerate their party’s advantage, destroying whatever credibility the court still maintained in the process.

A new CNN poll on Tuesday found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the economy.

Notably, Trump never reached a 50 percent disapproval rate over the economy during the entire duration of his first term, according to CNN. The Tuesday poll found that 77 percent of respondents—including a majority of Republicans—said that the president’s policies have increased the cost of living in their community.

The poll was conducted by Social Science Research Solutions, a survey and market research firm, and measured a random sample of 1,499 adults from April 30 through May 4. 

The economy and cost of living, clearly, is an important issue: 55 percent reported it as their most important concern. This share is more than double any other problem, with the state of democracy being the second issue at 19 percent. 

Thus, to develop policies that materially benefit Americans, numerous surveys suggest that government officials should concentrate on affordability. But, according to Tuesday’s CNN poll, the public is roughly evenly divided on which political party would better handle the economy.

Three-quarter said the US economy unjustly favors the desires of the elite. Conversely, nearly half of respondents said the government provides relief to too many people “who don’t deserve it”—almost 10 percentage points more than people who said the government is not helping enough people.

But there may be opportunity for Democrats in the lead-up to the midterms. If the votes really count, of course.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan. 

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier—a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. “I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create. “There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. Removal “is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project—which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history—cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year.

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand. “It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” he said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” Trumble said.

President Donald Trump’s energy secretary shrugged when asked on Sunday whether gas prices could rise to $5 per gallon and offered no clear plan to address the affordability predicament the administration has forced upon Americans. 

“I can’t predict the price of energy in the short term or even the medium term,” Chris Wright told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. And regarding potential solutions, he said, “we are constantly looking for different ideas.”

As Welker pointed out, in March, Wright said that it was “very possible” that gas prices would drop below $3 a gallon before the summer. He also told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that “prices have likely peaked and they’ll start going down.”

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the price of regular gas in the US has increased more than 40 cents per gallon since Wright’s April statement. 

So now Wright is backtracking his predictions, instead claiming during his Sunday interview that the US is in a “tremendous position,” as it is “by far the largest producer of oil” and “by far the world’s largest producer of natural gas.” 

“Gasoline and diesel prices are up, and they’ll remain up while this conflict is in place,” Wright said, but after the war, “they’ll come back down lower than they were before.” 

Wright’s claims come as the US and Iran remain locked in negotiations over a new ceasefire proposal. According to a Sunday report from the Associated Press, Iran wants to end the war on all fronts—including Israel’s strikes on Lebanon—and secure safe shipping in the region amid a US blockade of their ports. Iran’s leadership said it would discuss the latest US proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and scale back its nuclear program at a later time. 

In other words, it does not look like the war will end any time soon. And even if transit through the Strait of Hormuz resumes to pre-war levels, it will take months to get oil and gas flowing due to the devastating strikes across the region.