++What if you were legally allowed to only ever have $2,000 in financial assets at one time? +
++Saving is hard. Whether for emergencies, special occasions, or retirement, a lot of us fall short. In fact, almost half of Americans don’t have three months worth of expenses saved. +
++And for some, it’s partly because they aren’t allowed to. +
++Imagine you have to stop working for whatever reason, but legally you’ve only been allowed to build up $2,000 in savings. +
++Could you make it through one month — let alone more? First, you have rent. Let’s say it runs you $1,109 (that’s an average monthly rent for Michigan, one of the cheaper states in the US). +
++That leaves you with $891. After utilities and internet and groceries and any other bills, there’s not much left for day-to-day life or unexpected emergencies. And rent the next month would be impossible. +
++But this isn’t a pretend “let’s learn personal finance” moment. This is a real financial barrier that millions of Americans have to live with. +
++Americans like Tyler Lima-Roope, a popular TikToker from California who raises awareness about living with a disability and who receives Supplemental Security Income, or SSI. +
++SSI is a program that supports low-income adults and children with disabilities. So why does a program that’s supposed to help Americans who have nowhere else to turn, instead … trap them in poverty? +
++How SSI traps people in poverty, explained +
++To get an answer to that question on a recent episode of The Weeds, I reached out to Kathleen Romig, the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. +
++According to her, when the program was founded in 1972, it was — and still is — considered a last resort: You receive it after applying for all the other social safety nets you qualify for. Qualifying requires specific medical and vocational criteria, meaning that in order to receive the benefit, you not only need to be living with a disability, but the disability must also prevent you from earning $1,500 a month. +
++SSI is about more than just a stipend, though; health care access comes along with it. In some states, receiving SSI means you’re automatically eligible for Medicaid, and Medicaid covers what’s known as “home and community-based services.” That means people with disabilities can receive care in their homes rather than in institutional settings. +
+ ++But in order to qualify for SSI, individual beneficiaries can’t have assets worth over $2,000 and couples can’t have assets over $3,000. And that’s not just checking accounts: it takes things like mutual funds, retirement, and even car values into account. If you go over that limit, you lose that month’s check. +
++The asset cap hasn’t been updated since the 1980s — and not for any particular reason. When it was created, it wasn’t enacted to be automatically adjusted for inflation; if it had been, the SSI cap would be about six times what it is right now. +
++SSI has fallen by the policy wayside, leaving the 7.5 million Americans who rely on the program between a rock and hard place: lose health care and other benefits, or forgo opportunities like saving for the future and getting married. +
++Is there any way out? +
++Given that not much has changed for SSI in the past 40 years, the obvious answer is raising the asset cap. But that can’t happen short of an act of Congress. +
++The good news? There’s bipartisan legislation proposed in the House and Senate that would raise the limit to $10,000 per individual and $20,000 per couple. This would allow individuals to save more and also rids the program of its marriage penalty. +
++The less than good news? Neither bill has yet come up for a floor vote. And in our current era of hyperpolarization, Congress is moving especially slow, even on legislation that keeps the country running, let alone updating outdated caps for social safety net programs. +
++Romig says the lack of change regarding SSI isn’t really a political issue — she has yet to come across anyone on either side of the aisle who thinks raising the asset limit is a bad idea. It’s an attention issue; many people who don’t interact with SSI on a day-to-day basis aren’t aware of the low asset cap. +
++The better news is that there is a possible workaround: ABLE accounts. +
++These are state-run tax-advantaged accounts, similar to 529 accounts that parents use to save for a child’s education. ABLE account limits can be as high as $550,000, depending on the state, and don’t count toward the asset limit. +
++At its inception, it was for people who had a disability before the age of 26, but a new provision in the 2020 appropriations bill raised the qualification age by 20 years, starting in 2026. +
++But once again, there’s a gap in awareness: less than 1 percent of people who qualify for ABLE accounts have one. +
++Here’s hoping this story — and my full conversation with Romig on the latest episode of The Weeds — are one tiny step toward changing that. +
++This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. +
++
++Democrats are starting their Latino outreach early because they know they have a problem. +
++Joe Biden knows he has a problem with Latino voters. He acknowledged as much during a visit to Arizona last month: “I need you badly,” he said, with a tinge of exasperation, to a room of supporters. +
++He was visiting a longtime Mexican restaurant, a staple in a working-class corner of downtown Phoenix, as his presidential campaign officially launched its general election effort to woo and win back Latino voters in Arizona and other battleground states. The effort, called “Latinos con Biden-Harris,” is starting off much earlier than the muted version that played out in 2020, long after a bruising and cash-strapped primary campaign had ended and as the coronavirus pandemic spun out of control. This year, it couldn’t be coming at a more necessary time. +
++Across just about every kind of poll and survey, Biden (and his party) seems to be struggling to hold onto the high levels of support that the second-fastest growing ethnic voting group has historically given Democrats. More Hispanic and Latino voters say they are open to switching parties than before. They are dissatisfied with the state of the economy under Biden’s leadership. Many pine for the pre-pandemic Trump days. And more worrying for Democrats, they view Donald Trump more positively today than they did after the 2020 election. +
++Still, none of that means that Republicans are actively taking advantage of this moment. For now, the Trump campaign and the GOP don’t seem to have a concrete strategy to make more inroads with these voters. As the Republican National Committee undergoes a major transition with more Trump-aligned leadership, its much-lauded community outreach centers to nonwhite voters stand in limbo. Those centers were celebrated by Republican politicians and strategists ahead of the 2022 midterms for hosting cultural events and establishing a direct presence for the party in minority communities. Many are now closed, though the RNC has backtracked on reported plans to close even more and shut down its minority outreach program. +
++The recent rollout of the “Latinos con Biden-Harris” effort is a perfect example of these contrasting realities: During the last two weeks, the most the Republican Party, or the Trump campaign, has done in reaching out to Hispanic and Latino voters was to recirculate a fan-created musical jingle that it repackaged as an ad toward the end of the 2020 campaign cycle, and fire off a few social media posts. They made no ad buys, nor did Trump make any campaign stops or public statements directed specifically at these voters. +
++But will this slow Republican outreach end up mattering? The last two weeks show, in a nutshell, the dueling struggles of Democratic and Republican outreach to Latino voters in 2024. Despite having some momentum on their side, the Republican Party seems unable, or unwilling, to seize the opportunity they have in swing states to lock up support from America’s newest swing voters. Meanwhile, spooked Democrats, on the defensive, are ready to pour in huge amounts of money and dedicate resources early on — but they may be focusing on a message that just doesn’t resonate with the voters most upset with the Biden years. +
++The Biden-Harris launch in Arizona is a stand-in for their Southwestern and Latino strategy +
++The launch of the Latinos con Biden-Harris effort was intentional and symbolic. The restaurant Biden visited, El Portal, was opened and is owned by two longtime fixtures in Arizona Hispanic politics, and it has served as the “de facto headquarters” of Phoenix’s Latino and Hispanic Democrats for years. That movement, starting as grassroots pro-immigrant activism through small businesses, has been building gradually over the last two decades. It bore fruit during the Trump era, when moderates, progressives, white, Black, and Latino voters turned out for Democrats. +
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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
++Arizona is now the quintessential battleground state, and at its core is Maricopa County — the county that has seen some of the biggest gains in population through Phoenix and its expanding, wealthier suburbs. A combination of a rapidly growing young Latino electorate, the Republican Party’s shift to the MAGA right, and more independent- and moderate-minded suburban voters concentrated in Maricopa has made the conservative bastion competitive for Democrats. Since the Trump era of national politics began, Arizona has elected two Democratic senators, a Democratic governor and attorney general, and voted for Biden — after not voting for a Democratic presidential candidate for 20 years. +
++That history and those trends contextualize the Biden-Harris campaign’s decision to launch their Latino outreach effort in Phoenix before stopping in Nevada, another Latino-heavy swing state, and then making a fundraising visit to Houston, all within the span of a week. +
++“In both states, we’re building robust campaign infrastructure to meet voters where they are,” the Biden-Harris campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a memo distributed before the campaign stops. “Both Nevada and Arizona represent the diverse coalition of voters who elected Joe Biden president in 2020, including Latino, Black, [Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander], and Native American voters.” +
++That week of March 18 saw Biden and his campaign’s Latino surrogates spread across local and national television and radio programs, in English- and Spanish-language markets, to pair with the president’s in-person visits. The campaign timed the release of its first Latino-focused digital ad with this launch, and the ad ran in English, Spanish, and Spanglish with voiceovers using different regional accents depending on the battleground. +
++Later that week, on March 23, the campaign pushed out a second digital ad in Spanish and English in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida. Both video shorts are part of a $30 million advertising push this spring that is specifically directed at reaching voters in battleground states, including nonwhite voters. +
++“This is not parachuting into any community two weeks before the election,” California Sen. Alex Padilla, campaign advisory board member, said in a statement about the release. “We’re starting months and months and months even before the Democratic convention this summer, to get the message out.” +
++The message in Biden’s visit, his surrogates’ statements, and the ads targeting Latino voters is both an evolution and a retreading of old ground. It plays up the well-worn anti-Republican attacks that have worked for them before: Republicans’ opposition to abortion rights and reproductive freedom, their plans to cut entitlement spending, and Trump’s track record of anti-immigrant or bigoted statements. What’s new is the focus on Biden’s accomplishments: lowering the cost of some prescription drugs, attempting to “ease” student debt, supporting Latino-owned small businesses and Hispanic-serving colleges and universities, and lowering Hispanic unemployment. +
++Still, that doesn’t mean the message is resonating just yet. Latino views of Biden’s handling of the economy and job performance, as well as overall approval, are still negative, or on par with the views of white voters. While this initial outreach is playing up elements of social issues that have helped Democrats with other voting groups, the state of the economy and the perception of an out-of-control border and immigration crisis continue to be weak spots for Democrats. +
++And Biden and his allies have yet to develop a coordinated message in response. Biden talked briefly about his vision of economic opportunity in his Phoenix stop, for example, but none of the Latino-focused ads released so far play up those accomplishments. And none of the campaign’s Latino-specific messaging appears to address immigration at the southern border beyond playing up Trump’s previous talk of “an invasion” that is “poisoning the blood of our country.” +
++So to be a Latino — and most likely a Mexican American — voter in Arizona or the Southwest right now is to feel an early sampling of the saturation the Democrats plan for this year. You’re likely hearing more about a choice between two candidates instead of a referendum on the incumbent, hearing about the threat Trump and Republicans pose to the status quo, and hearing about how the economy is getting better, even if you don’t fully agree. You’re hearing little to nothing about immigration or the southern border from Democrats beyond identity politics. Still, at least you’re hearing from Democrats, whether at the local, state, or national level, who are making early entreaties to you and your community specifically. +
++The same is not true on the Republican side. +
++Republicans seem unwilling to make the same kind of early investment +
++The GOP has a golden opportunity, and many Republicans recognize this: They have a window to win over even more Latino voters than in 2020, and nearly all polling shows they have reason to be optimistic. +
++Still, a Latino exodus from the Democratic Party is unlikely to happen without active and intentional efforts to win over voters. At least for now, either because of a lack of money, strategy, or will, the Republican Party is doing the bare minimum. +
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
++Between 2020 and the 2022 midterms, the best piece of evidence Republicans could use to show that they were serious about winning over more Latino (and other nonwhite) voters was the opening and expansion of community outreach centers in predominantly minority neighborhoods in battleground states. Launched when hype over Latinos “fleeing” the Democratic Party was building, these community centers were framed by Republican leadership as “part of our party’s commitment to building relationships with the Hispanic community,” according to then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel. +
++“Democrats take Hispanic voters for granted, and we want to earn your vote and build a better future for our children,” she said when the RNC, in conjunction with a US senate campaign, opened an outreach center in Maricopa County — a center meant to be a part of a “permanent, data-driven ground game in Arizona” and a “place to come together, host events and spark conversations with Hispanic Arizonans.” +
++Less than two years later, that center was shuttered, along with the vast majority of the 20 Hispanic community centers the RNC had opened ahead of the 2022 midterms. Five remain open today, including two that The Messenger had reported were opened in 2023. And these closures seem to be part of a broader retreat by the Republican Party: other centers aimed at reaching Black, Asian, and Native American voters have also been reportedly shut down and their outreach programs ended as new, Trump-aligned leadership purged and laid off staff, including communications staff and those who worked on minority outreach. +
++The RNC contests those closures, saying it is keeping a number of centers open for its early voting education program and says it intends to open more. After the Phoenix center closed, for example, some news reports suggested that the RNC would instead open a new branch in Tucson, another urban area in Arizona with a large Hispanic population and a bedrock of support for Democrats in the state. But the Arizona Republican Party did not reply to requests for comment or clarification on the status of that center, or other centers in the state. Nor did the Trump campaign reply to Vox’s requests for comment on its plans or strategy for Latino voter outreach, instead referring me to the RNC, which provided the following statement attributed to its Hispanic communications director, Jaime Florez. +
++“Democrats have taken the Hispanic community for granted for far too long, and no amount of money the Biden campaign spends will change the fact that Biden and Harris have been a disaster for our community,” Florez said in the statement. ”Republicans will continue receiving with open arms thousands of Hispanics that are moving to our party, disappointed with Democrats and their policies, and will be fundamental to Republican victories all over the country in 2024.” +
++This intra-party turmoil and a stretched budget for outreach and campaign infrastructure seem to be at the heart of the Trump-era GOP’s ability to compete for nonwhite voters’ support. The tenuous state of Latino outreach in Arizona, for example, is replicated in Nevada and Wisconsin, two other states where Republicans had talked up their efforts to win over Latino voters. +
++So far, the extent of the GOP’s Latino outreach while the Democrats rolled out a highly coordinated effort was a recirculated social media clip of a “Latinos por Donald Trump” ad from 2020 and a few tweets about illegal immigration and the border. Trump did boast about his polling among Latino voters during a February visit to Las Vegas, but he still has yet to visit Arizona. +
++It’s a limited approach, but even at this level of outreach, the abbreviated messages Trump and Republicans are sending may still be compelling. That 2020 ad, for example, was successful when it ran four years ago because it was organically produced — a short jingle written by a Cuban salsa band made up of Trump fans — and because it summarized the key planks of Trump’s 2020 pitch to Latino voters: “la buena vida” (the good life), “la economia” (the economy), and “tu familia” (your family). Coupled with clips and tweets hyping up an “invasion” at the southern border, and Republicans have the barebones of another persuasive pitch. +
++That’s the extent of the messaging Latino voters in swing states like Arizona are getting from Republicans right now. No Hispanic-specific Trump ads are running on television or radio in Arizona, either in English or Spanish. Trump did not hold any campaign events during the week the Biden-Harris operation rolled through the Southwest, let alone anything directed at these voters. And the former president has held only two campaign rallies since Super Tuesday in Georgia and Ohio, aimed at boosting his preferred candidates in primary races. +
++Still, the lack of early investment by the party and campaign might not be as big of a deal, since the work to target and fine-tune a pitch to these voters might be better suited to external organizations and super PACS, the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini told me. “The vast majority of that [Latino shift to the right] is being driven by the environment politically. Right now, both dissatisfaction with Biden and Trump being more of an anti-elitist candidate who has a more natural appeal to working class voters, that is what we’re seeing reflected in the polls right now,” he said. “When it comes to the organization to actually bring that vote out in November, you’re going to see a pretty big ecosystem pop up. We’re no longer in the era of the RNC [doing] everything or the campaign [doing] everything. You have so much outside the formal party apparatus, and I do think you’ll see more efforts on that side to capitalize on those shifts because that’s where the resources are.” +
++Democrats can’t afford to fall behind, while Republicans seem to be riding on coattails +
++This early Democratic start with Hispanic and Latino voters contrasts with the sluggish Republican operation — but it also shows just how much Democrats have to fear and have to lose with these voters. Democrats have no choice but to start big and early because of how far they’ve fallen behind their historical levels of Latino support. +
++The last three presidential cycles have each delivered Democrats consistently smaller margins of support with all kinds of nonwhite voters, but especially with Latinos: During Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, for example, the Democratic advantage over Republicans with these voters was a 39-point difference in vote preference; by 2020, that advantage had shrunk by 16 points. +
++As Hispanic and Latino Americans become swing voters, the stakes of outreach and persuasion could not be higher for the party that has enjoyed their support for so long. +
++Simmering tensions between traditionalist Republican judges and MAGA judges are starting to boil over. +
++A federal court is picking an unusual fight with one of the federal judiciary’s governing bodies — one with implications for literally all aspects of US policy. +
++In March, the Judicial Conference of the United States, one of the federal courts’ internal governing bodies, announced a new policy intended to combat “judge-shopping.” Some federal courts effectively allow plaintiffs to choose their own judges, which has allowed many litigants with dubious or even ridiculous claims to obtain court orders blocking pretty much any federal policy that they find objectionable. +
++One court that allowed such judge-shopping, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, announced on Friday that it will defy the Judicial Conference and refuse to implement the new policy. This defiance, if allowed to stand, would render the Judicial Conference’s new policy virtually useless, as the Northern District of Texas is the locus of the nation’s worst problem with judge-shopping. +
++Among other things, the fact that many right-wing plaintiffs can select Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to hear their lawsuits has turned this obscure Trump appointee to this Texas federal court into one of the most powerful public officials in the country. +
++Kacsmaryk is a former lawyer at a Christian right law firm with a long record of hostility toward LGBTQ rights, abortion, and even many forms of heterosexual sexuality. He is the judge who attempted to ban the abortion medication mifepristone. And, in his brief period on the bench, he’s handed down a long line of orders implementing right-wing policies on birth control, immigration, and LGBTQ discrimination. He even backed a ban on theater performances he finds objectionable. +
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Courtesy of the Senate Judiciary Committee
++The Northern District of Texas’s decision to defy the Judicial Conference sets up what could be a very significant conflict between this far-right court, and a broader federal judiciary that is controlled by more center-right judges — and it’s hardly the only such conflict brewing within the federal courts. +
++In its current term, the Supreme Court heard an unusually long list of cases arising out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the MAGA movement’s most loyal stronghold within the judiciary. These include the mifepristone case, a case where the Fifth Circuit held that many domestic abusers have a right to own guns, a decision allowing Republican lawmakers to seize control of what content is published online, and a decision about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that, if upheld, could trigger a second Great Depression. +
++At least based on the oral arguments in those cases, however, it appears likely that an alliance between the Court’s three Democrats and its three least hardline Republicans will prevent the Fifth Circuit from reshaping the nation in MAGA’s image. +
++Similarly, it’s significant that, when the Judicial Conference announced its new policy against judge-shopping, it chose Chief Judge Jeffery Sutton as its spokesperson on this issue. +
++Sutton is a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the Sixth Circuit, and is an intellectual leader among more traditionalist Republican judges who believe in limited judicial power. By making Sutton the face of the new judge-shopping rules, the Judicial Conference seemed to signal that the federal courts’ non-MAGA Republicans shared many Democrats’ frustration with judges like Kacsmaryk. +
++It remains to be seen how the broader judiciary — and the Supreme Court in particular — will react to the Northern District of Texas’s insistence that anyone who wants to sabotage a Biden administration policy should be allowed to select Matthew Kacsmaryk as their judge. And, no matter how the broader judiciary reacts in the short term, lawyers like Kacsmaryk could easily find themselves in charge of the entire court system if former President Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint more of him to the federal bench. +
++But, for the time being, there are significant signs that more traditionalist Republican judges are willing to ally with Democrats against the federal judiciary’s far right. +
++The judiciary is designed to be more resistant to political trends than the two elected branches +
++If you’re an elected Republican, publicly disagreeing with Donald Trump is a dangerous proposition. Some Republicans who cross Trump face literal death threats from MAGA voters, and even those who don’t are unlikely to prevail in their next primary election. As the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer described Trump’s approach to the 2022 midterms, “he made it a near-singular mission to defeat GOP lawmakers who voted for his impeachment and who publicly disputed his claims of election fraud.” +
++The federal courts, by contrast, are designed to insulate judges from shifting political winds. Federal judges serve for life, and as a practical matter can only be removed against their will through impeachment. So they have no reason to take a stance that they personally disagree with out of fear that acting according to their own conscience will cost them their job. +
++Of course, the fact that judges serve for life does not mean that they are immune to far-right ideas. Many federal judges, including Kacsmaryk, already embraced a reactionary worldview when they joined the bench. Others have flexible ideologies that match whatever views are ascendant within the Republican Party at any given moment. Still others hope for a promotion and seek to catch the next Republican president’s eye by deliberately handing down extreme opinions. (Democratic judges sometimes engage in similar behavior, although they often have to temper their views because a GOP-controlled Supreme Court can reverse them if they push too hard.) +
++But the fact that judges have more freedom to break with their party than, say, members of Congress, means that the federal judiciary is currently a better reflection of the diversity of viewpoints within the GOP than, say, the US House of Representatives. Nearly every Republican member of the House is there because they survived a Republican primary, often after adjusting their public stances to ensure that they will not attract Trump’s ire. +
++The judiciary, by contrast, includes holdovers appointed during the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as some Trump appointees who reject at least some of MAGA’s goals. That explains why Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh has become one of the judiciary’s most vocal critics of Republican proposals to control who gets to speak online. It also explains why some of Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election were rejected by his own judicial appointees. +
++Republican judges still act like Republicans, even if they are not MAGA stalwarts +
++Of course, the fact that some Republican judges are more moderate than others does not mean that they are not Republicans. All six of the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees, for example, voted to end affirmative action at nearly all universities. All of them voted for a sweeping expansion of gun rights. All of them back novel legal doctrines which seek to dismantle much of the federal administrative state. All of the Republican justices except for Chief Justice John Roberts voted to overrule Roe v. Wade, and Roberts did not so much endorse Roe as suggest that his Court dismantle it more slowly. +
++What all of these issues share in common, however, is that the Republican Party long ago reached a consensus on them. Abortion foes, gun groups, and opponents of affirmative action have long been powerful voices within the GOP. And, while most Americans probably have no opinion on how the administrative state should function, the Federalist Society — the powerful conservative lawyers’ group which functions as the de facto legal arm of the Republican Party — has been obsessed with weakening federal agencies since the Obama administration. +
++There are plenty of issues, however, where the post-Trump Republican Party has broken with its pre-Trump consensus. And, on these issues, Republican judges are much more divided. +
++Consider, for example, free speech. Before Trump took over the GOP, there was a broad bipartisan consensus that even the most repugnant speech is protected by the Constitution. Thus, in United States v. Stevens (2010), the Supreme Court struck down a poorly drafted federal law banning “crush” videos, fetish videos that often depict a woman crushing an animal to death (Congress reenacted the ban in a differently worded statute that is less vulnerable to a First Amendment lawsuit). And, in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the Court sided with members of a notorious church who protested a fallen marine’s funeral with signs featuring anti-gay slurs and the message “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” +
++Both were 8-1 decisions, with only Justice Samuel Alito in dissent. +
++Indeed, before Trump ran for office, Republican judges generally took an even more expansive view of free speech than their Democratic colleagues. That’s because Republicans typically saw the First Amendment as a vehicle to dismantle campaign finance laws, while Democrats believed that the public interest in preventing political corruption overcomes the free speech arguments against such laws. +
++Much of the post-Trump GOP, by contrast, is eager to use the power of government to control political debates. The Republican legislatures of Texas and Florida, for example, both enacted laws seeking to seize control of content moderation at major social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. +
++When the Texas law reached the Supreme Court in 2022, however, it cleaved the Republican justices down the middle. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett all voted to suspend the law, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito, and Neil Gorsuch voted to let it take effect. Similarly, when the Court heard oral arguments last February to decide whether to permanently block these laws, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all seemed to cling to the pre-Trump Republican position that the government should not regulate speech. +
++Similarly, while all six of the Court’s Republicans voted in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) to drastically expand gun rights, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all appeared to recoil from Bruen’s implications once they realized it could arm domestic abusers who are subject to restraining orders. Kacsmaryk’s order attempting to ban mifepristone could have also forced the courts to remove thousands of medications from the market if it were upheld by higher courts — which may explain why only two justices, Thomas and Alito, dissented from the Court’s decision to block Kacsmaryk’s order last year. +
++So, while the Court’s Republican appointees tend to see eye-to-eye on issues that unite Republicans, they also divide on the sort of issues where there is no GOP consensus. And that means there’s a meaningful divide between the judiciary’s center right and its far right. +
++That said, this divide could stop mattering very quickly if Trump gets to fill additional seats on the Supreme Court. While lifetime appointments allow long-serving judges like Roberts or Sutton to drift away from their political parties, they do nothing to prevent a sitting president from appointing new judges who share that president’s views. +
++And so, if Trump wins, he could potentially fill the bench with Kacsmaryks — destroying the relevance of holdover Republicans with more moderate views, and tipping the debate in favor of the far right for good. +