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FILE PHOTO: General view shows the United States Supreme Court, in Washington, U.S., February 8, 2024.
Can the government dictate what’s on Facebook?
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday from groups representing major social media platforms which argue that new laws in Florida and Texas that restrict their ability to deplatform users are unconstitutional. It’s a big test for how free speech is interpreted when it comes to private technology companies that have immense reach as platforms for information and debate.
Supporters of the states’ laws originally framed them as measures meant to stop the platforms from unfairly singling out conservatives for censorship – for example when X (then Twitter) booted President Donald Trump for his tweets during January 6.
What do the states’ laws say?
The Florida law prevents social media platforms from banning any candidates for public office, while the Texas one bans removing any content because of a user’s viewpoint. As the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals put it, Florida “prohibits all censorship of some speakers,” while Texas “prohibits some censorship of all speakers.”
Social media platforms say the First Amendment protects them either way, and that they aren't required to transmit everyone’s messages, like a telephone company which is viewed as a public utility. Supporters of the laws say the platforms are essentially a town square now, and the government has an interest in keeping discourse totally open – in other words, more like a phone company than a newspaper.
What does the court think?
The justices seemed broadly skeptical of the Florida and Texas laws during oral arguments. As Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out, the First Amendment doesn’t empower the state to force private companies to platform every viewpoint.
The justices look likely to send the case back down to a lower court for further litigation, which would keep the status quo for now, but if they choose to rule, we could be waiting until June.Texas Governor Gregg Abbott shakes hands with a U.S. Soldier after a news conference near the International Bridge between Mexico and the U.S., where migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. are waiting to be processed, in Del Rio, Texas, U.S., September 21, 2021.
Texas doubles down on border challenge to Federal government
A major constitutional crisis is brewing down south as Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott bucks the Supreme Court, forcing a confrontation between the state and federal government over who controls the US-Mexico border.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration had the right to clear razor wire that local Texas authorities had installed along the border. Abbott has also taken his own measures to police crossings of the Rio Grande and even used the Texas National Guard to block federal agents from entering the area.
On Wednesday, Abbott released a statement declaring that despite the Supreme Court ruling, the Lone Star State will take control of deterring migration along its border with Mexico. In effect, he is defying the Supreme Court.
Although the US president technically controls the National Guard and the federal government has jurisdiction over border security, Abbott argues that states have a constitutional right to defend themselves against an invasion, which is how he and his supporters see recent record-high levels of undocumented immigration.
A state bill allowing Texas to detain and deport migrants back to Mexico is set to take effect in March, although the Justice Department and ACLU have both filed injunctions. The legal battles will continue, right as immigration takes center stage in the 2024 presidential race. But if Texas doesn’t back down in the face of federal and Supreme Court rulings, a deeper constitutional crisis could arise.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Biden challenges Texas immigration law
The Biden administration has said that it will sue Texas if it does not renounce its strict immigration law, SB4, by today.
SB4 is Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest challenge to Biden’s immigration policy, which he says fails to mitigate the surge of migrants entering at the southern border. It gives Texas officials the power to arrest, prosecute, and deport migrants suspected of entering the country illegally. In a state where 40% of the population is Latino, critics fear the legislation will lead to racial profiling.
Under the law, set to take effect in March, illegally entering Texas would range from a misdemeanor to a felony offense. State judges would be able to order migrants suspected of improper entry to return to Mexico or face second-degree felony charges. But Mexico has said it will not accept migrants returning on the orders of Texas officials.
The Constitution gives the federal government the sole authority to regulate immigration, but the Lone Star State is not poised to reverse course. SB4 would create a second immigration scheme, deny asylum to migrants fleeing persecution, and sow confusion at the border. The migrant crisis was already a political vulnerability for Biden, and Texas taking control could make him look weak heading into an election year.
Russian reservists recruited during a partial mobilization of troops attend a ceremony before departing to the Russia-Ukraine conflict zone, in the Rostov region, Russia October 31, 2022.
What We're Watching: Russian draft goes online, abortion pill ruling, US inflation slows, Taiwan gets new presidential candidate, Biden bets big on EVs
Russia’s digital draft
If you’re a young male citizen of Russia, it just got harder for you to hide from the war in Ukraine. The State Duma, Russia’s parliament, approved legislation on Tuesday that allows the government to send a military summons online instead of serving the papers in person. The upper house swiftly passed it into law on Wednesday.
“The summons is considered received from the moment it is placed in the personal account of a person liable for military service,” explains the chairman of the Duma’s defense committee, though the Kremlin insists no large-scale draft is imminent. If the person summoned fails to report for service within 20 days of the date listed on the summons, the state can suspend his driver’s license, deny him the right to travel abroad, and make it impossible for him to get a loan.
The database that provides names of potential draftees is assembled from medical, educational, and residential records, as well as insurance and tax data. Thousands of young Russians have already fled their country. Many more may soon try to join them.
Abortion pill stays on the market, but access rolled back
As the battle over abortion medication continues in the US, a federal appeals court has ruled that mifepristone – a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 – can remain on the market until the full case can be heard, likely by the Supreme Court.
Still, the court – made up of three appellate judges all appointed by Republican presidents – ruled that mifepristone cannot be sent by mail and rolled back a 2016 rule allowing it to be used up to 10-weeks gestation, dropping it back to seven weeks. It also rolled back other measures enforced by the Biden administration to enhance access after the gutting of Roe v. Wade.
This decision comes after a Trump-appointed, pro-life judge in Texas recently ordered a temporary stay on approval of mifepristone. Less than an hour later, another federal judge in Spokane, Washington, ruled that the drug must remain available in 17 Democratic-run states plus Washington, DC.
Importantly, the appeals court appeared to back the government's view that taking an approved drug off the market that accounts for more than half of all abortions nationwide would have “significant public consequences.”
As expected, abortion rights are shaping up to be one of the biggest political issues in the country. In Florida, Republicans are trying to fight a recently passed law banning abortion at six weeks, pushing for an outright ban.
US inflation cools — smartphones FTW
Good news for American households as US inflation fell to its lowest level in nearly two years in March. Prices grew at an annual clip of 5%, according to the latest figures released Wednesday. That’s down from 6% in February, marking the ninth consecutive month of falling inflation.
The highlights? Well, if you want to do some shopping in the US, now’s the time to cop a new smartphone, which will cost you 24% less than a year ago. And that summer road trip is on – gas prices are down more than 17%. At the same time, we remain “yolked,” as it were, to the Great Egg Crisis of 2023 — prices are up more than 30% despite easing a bit since February.
More broadly, that headline figure of 5% is still more than twice the pre-pandemic norm, and core inflation — which excludes volatile prices for fuel and food — is running at a toasty 5.6%.
That’ll keep the US Fed in the hot seat as it meets again in early May. Will they raise interest rates once more in a bid to finish off inflation? Or will they stand pat, worried about tipping the economy into a recession?
Will this man become Taiwan's next president?
Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party on Wednesday nominated VP William Lai as its candidate in the January 2024 presidential election.
Lai is widely viewed as a stand-in for term-limited President Tsai Ing-wen, reelected by a landslide in 2020. That means a tough line on China, which has made Tsai a darling in the West and reviled by Beijing. Lai used to support Taiwanese independence openly but has since moderated his position to align with the DPP's: We don’t need to formally break with the mainland because we’re already de-facto independent.
It's unclear who Lai will face, since the opposition Kuomintang Party — which, officially, is not pro-China but favors closer ties with China than the DPP — has yet to pick its candidate. (Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that makes iPhones in China for Apple, is mulling another run.)
The vote will be Taiwan's most closely watched presidential election since 1996, when the self-ruled island ended decades of authoritarian rule. China responded to the democratic vibes by flexing its then-weak military muscles … until the US made it back off. This time, though, expect major Chinese fireworks if Beijing's candidate doesn't come out on top.
Biden’s ambitious new EV proposal
The Biden administration has proposed a new measure that would sharply accelerate the American auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles, and not everyone is happy about it.
The draft marks a big shift from Washington’s current carrots-based approach to boosting EV production to one that relies more on sticks. It would require carmakers to derive 60% of their sales revenue from electric vehicles by 2030, or face penalties. Currently, under a 2021 plan, the target is closer to 50% and manufacturers are allowed to opt in only if they want to. Under that plan, a range of subsidies and tax breaks aimed to incentivize consumers and manufacturers to ditch dirty fuel guzzlers.
Carmakers are already pushing back, saying that changes to assembly lines and supply chains will be expensive and take years to implement. But the Biden administration says the necessary funds were included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked $31 billion in subsidies for EV’s and tax credits for EV manufacturers.
Expect this to become a heated political issue in the coming months. Texas, despite being a leading investor in EV networks, has sued the federal government over the current EV standards, arguing that they are an overreach that violates states’ rights.
Latino dreams, NY States of Mind
Hi there! Welcome back to our new daily feature, Midterm Matters, where we pick a couple of red-hot US midterm stories and separate the signal (what you need to know) from the noise (what everyone is yelling about). Enjoy and let us know what you think.
GOP looks to Latinos for upsets in Texas ... and beyond?
Republicans are betting on three Latina candidates to overturn decades of Democrat dominance in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Dems are still the party to beat, but Republicans have made major inroads with Latino voters in South Texas, seeing double-digit swings to the GOP between 2016 and 2020, when Trump spoke to local Latino voters’ anxiety about disorderly immigration and the impact of Democrats’ climate agenda on the energy industry there. This time, GOP candidates are also appealing to local voters’ conservative and Catholic values.
Nationwide, there’s a lot of noise about Dems' advantage with Latino voters fallingfrom 40 to 27 points since 2018. That’s because the GOP has begun to more effectively campaign among Latinos beyond the reliable Republican bedrock of South Florida Cubans (even if their outreach to them is still catchy as hell.) And with 40% of Latino independents undecided, there are lots of votes up for grabs.
But while Latinos are now the second-largest — and fastest-growing — ethnic/racial group in America, the signal is this: they are hardly a monolith, politically or demographically. For example, Latinos of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin tend to vote blue, while Cubans and Venezuelans skew red. Evangelical Latinos, a rapidly growing community, are overwhelmingly Republican, while two-thirds of Catholic Latinos vote Democrat. Second and third-generation Latinos tend to tilt more Republican, though younger generations across the board are more sympathetic to Democrats. Immigration matters to some Latino communities, while the economy or abortion is more pressing for others. In sum, as one super sharp 2020 study put it: “There’s no such thing as the ‘Latino vote.’”
NY governor’s race tightens
Democrats are noisily freaking out that Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin is closing his polling gap in the New York gubernatorial race against incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, with Empire State voters seemingly digging Zeldin's tough-on-crime message. The two took part in their first and only debate on Tuesday night.
Yet Zeldin winning is a long shot. The race has tightened, mainly due to Zeldin hammering his rival with daily press conferences about rising crime rates outside NYC subway stations while spending millions on TV campaign ads. But Hochul's lead remains well above the margin of error, a strong signal that she's likely to eke out a win.Democrat hand-wringing aside, a shock Zeldin victory would be a tectonic shift for deep-blue New York, whose last Republican governor was George Pataki (1995-2006).
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Demonstrators from across Ecuador march on the capital Quito
Hard Numbers: Indigenous protests in Quito, Russia bleeds troops, Texas school to be razed, Great Barrier Reef lawsuit
10,000: On Tuesday, roughly 10,000 Indigenous people took to the streets of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to protest rising fuel prices and unemployment. The country’s 1 million Indigenous people – who are disproportionately impacted by poverty and joblessness – say that President Guillermo Lasso’s government has failed to make good on a promise to revive the country's ailing economy.
55: The Russian-backed Donetsk militia fighting in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine has lost 55% of its original force, according to British intelligence. Amid such heavy losses, Russia’s proxy administration is reportedly offering one-year contracts to foreign mercenaries to join its ranks in the region.
3: Local authorities will demolish Robb Elementary School, the site of the recent mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 21 people were killed. This comes amid reports that well-equipped police officers were on hand within three minutes of the gunman entering the school – but waited over an hour to go in and end the standoff. The US Justice Department is reviewing the police response.
267: An environmental group is suing Woodside Energy Group, which plans to build a 267-mile offshore gas pipeline in Western Australia, saying that the project will release more carbon into the atmosphere that will further damage the Great Barrier Reef … even though the reef is many miles away in the country’s east. The energy company hit back, saying the pipeline is crucial to helping countries in Asia Pacific meet pledges of getting to net zero carbon emissions.
Lessons from US midterm primaries in Georgia, Texas, and Alabama
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses Tuesday's primaries.
What happened in Tuesday's primaries?
Several states held primary elections on Tuesday of this week with the most interesting elections in Georgia, Texas, and Alabama. In Georgia, two incumbent Republicans who were instrumental in certifying the results of President Joe Biden's victory in 2020 won the nomination for governor and secretary of state against two Trump-backed opponents. The sitting governor who Trump had been targeting for months over his role in the 2020 election won by over 50 points, a sign that while Republican voters still love Donald Trump, his hold over the party is not absolute. This is going to create an opening for challengers in the 2024 presidential election cycle.
In Alabama, a primary for who will take the seat of retiring Senator Richard Shelby is going to a runoff between Shelby's chosen replacement, his former chief of staff, and a very controversial House member who President Trump had endorsed but then unendorsed when he was thought to be too weak a candidate. He now has a shot at the nomination with a runoff election in June and if he wins, he will be one of the first full throated deniers of Joe Biden's election results to serve in the United States Senate.
In Texas, the most conservative house Democrat, who is a bete noir of progressive activists, again held off a challenge from a progressive activist running to his left. The incumbent had been endorsed by House leadership while his challenger had been endorsed by national progressives like Bernie Sanders. But she was unable to unseat the incumbent in a very Hispanic district. Elsewhere in Texas, a son of the Bush political dynasty lost his race for attorney general to the sitting attorney general, who has recently struggled with ethical problems.
Finally, one of the biggest stories of the night was turnout in Georgia, which broke previous records for midterm primaries, despite worries that had been pushed by Democrats about a new election law that they claim would suppress minority votes. We'll never know the counterfactual, how many people might have voted in the absence of this new law but the fact that the turnout was so high will take some of the political sting over accusations of voter suppression for a lot of new Republican laws that had passed and which several American corporations have reacted to very strongly in the wake of the 2020 election controversy.
People react after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
What We're Watching: Texas mourns, Boris caught red-handed, lethal weapons sent to Ukraine, China’s human rights abuses leaked
Will Texas school shooting move the needle on US guns debate?
Another mass shooting has rocked America, leaving 21 dead (19 of them children) at an elementary school in Texas on Tuesday — the second-worst school massacre in US history after Sandy Hook almost a decade ago. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” President Joe Biden said in a nationwide address. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” For one thing, stricter gun laws are vehemently opposed by most Republicans: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz controversially responded to the tragedy by calling for more armed law enforcement at schools. For another, 2nd Amendment die-hards like the National Rifle Association have deep pockets to fight legislation and fund campaigns (Cruz, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and former President Donald Trump are all slated to speak Friday at the NRA's annual conference in Houston). If a bipartisan gun bill failed to pass in 2013 in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, the odds are even longer now because US politics is even more polarized and we're less than six months out from the November midterms.
Booze might bring down Boris
Will a toast burn down Boris Johnson’s premiership? The British PM has long denied that he broke any of his country’s strict pandemic lockdown rules, but now photos have emerged of a party at his residence on November 13, 2020, in which Johnson is holding up a glass of what looks like booze near a table spread with wine and food. The timing could prove disastrous for Johnson: the photos dropped just a day before the planned release of the Gray Report, an official investigation of the so-called “partygate” scandal. PMs who knowingly mislead Parliament are expected to resign, though there’s no guarantee that Johnson will concede to any wrongdoing of that sort. His supporters say he didn’t knowingly lie. Once Sue Gray publishes her report, Johnson will again address parliament on the matter, Downing Street says.
The West’s lethal weapons arrive in Ukraine
The US and Europe are playing an increasingly active role in Ukraine’s defense against Russia. They’ve imposed historically harsh sanctions against the Russian economy, announced higher spending on defense, and moved to ease trade dependence on Russia. They are also sending increasingly potent weapons to Ukrainian fighters for use against Russian forces. This was the focus of a Monday meeting at the Pentagon of the “Ukraine Contact Group,” a bloc of countries committed to helping Ukraine. After a briefing from Ukraine’s defense minister, more than 20 countries pledged to deliver new “security assistance packages.” The Czech Republic promised attack helicopters, tanks, and rocket systems. Denmark is offering anti-ship Harpoon missiles that might help push back the Russian navy from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, potentially easing the flow of grain exports. Greece, Italy, Norway, Poland, and others are also contributing. There are reports that the US has provided powerful artillery for use in the Donbas, the scene of Ukraine’s fiercest fighting and a place where long-range firepower is invaluable. Ukrainian forces have sustained heavy losses, and it will take weeks to train Ukrainian soldiers to make the best use of these weapons. But as Russia’s Donbas offensive grinds slowly forward, its forces may find additional gains are more costly this summer, and that seized territory may become harder to defend. The Contact Group is scheduled to meet next in Brussels on June 15.
The many faces of China’s human rights abuses
The world has known for years that the Chinese government’s “re-education” and “counter-terrorism” programs in the Xinjiang region involve widespread human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim ethnic groups who live there. Now we can see the faces of Beijing’s victims — thousands of them. The BBC has published an archive of local police photos taken in 2018. The release of the archive, which was evidently hacked, coincides with a weeklong visit to China by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the first trip to the country by the UN’s highest-ranking human rights official since 2005. While her visit is an opportunity to place fresh pressure on Beijing, critics worry that China might take the opportunity to whitewash its abuses (history buffs may recall the trick Nazi Germany played on the Red Cross in 1944). The release of the photo archive could also ripple into the US-China relationship, making it harder for US President Joe Biden to move ahead with any plans to lift Trump-era tariffs on certain Chinese goods in order to tamp down inflation.