Today, Explained is expanding into a multi-platform news brand, starting with a daily newsletter offering clarity on the day’s most significant story.
Hey, welcome to Vox’s new daily newsletter!
We’re calling it Today, Explained, and it’ll be run by me, Caroline Houck.
I’m Vox’s senior editor of news, a role I’ve come to after five years at Vox, covering some of the biggest stories of those years. That included the Trump impeachments, the 2020 election, and one of the biggest Supreme Court terms in recent memory, before I took over our international section just in time for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Now I’m here overseeing this newsletter, and I am psyched.
When something happens in the world — whether it’s an explosion abroad, one at home, or even a metaphorical explosion in, say, the world of American academia — my first instinct is always to ask my Vox colleagues about it. I want to lurk in their Slack channels and pop over to their desks to listen in on how they’re breaking down the big stories. That’s how I navigated Covid and how I processed what was going on with the American judicial system after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And it’s how I had something to say about one half of 2023’s summer movie sensation (because yes, I admit it: I still haven’t watched Oppenheimer).
My favorite way to understand the world is through the eyes of our newsroom.
And now, each day in your inbox, we’re going to bring that view to you.
What does that mean?
It means that every day, Monday through Friday, we’ll start Today, Explained with a classic Vox explainer about something interesting and important happening in the world.
It’ll work like this: A reporter, producer, or editor will walk us through that one big story, explaining it with nuance and clarity. It’ll be about as long as this email — maybe a little shorter or a little longer, depending on the topic. And it will always be conversational and approachable, even as we weave in the deep research, reporting, and analysis you’ll always find at Vox.
So today, if we weren’t introducing this newsletter to you, we might have covered the Grammys or dug into economic news after Friday’s impressive jobs report. We want to explain the news. So I’ll look around the newsroom each day and see which Voxxer might be best positioned to do so, then bring them to your inboxes.
But seeing the world through Vox’s eyes also means seeing our societies’ unsolved problems and how we might fix them. It means unraveling the universe’s unanswered mysteries. It means wondering why capitalism works this way, scrutinizing our culture, and thinking intentionally about how we live better lives. We know you all are curious about the world — and that you care about it. To fulfill that need, we’ll bring you explainers to these questions that are out there, all around us.
Whether we’re covering something that’s in the news or not, though, I want all of you to know you’re always going to walk away from Today, Explained with the day explained. We’ll curate the most important news of the day and the most interesting conversations happening around the internet here in the second half of the newsletter. These are the stories that we at Vox are paying attention to — and that we’ll deliver to you.
We’ll also share the latest episode from Today, Explained (the podcast). The team there — led by hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King — shares our mission of explaining the world in a way that’s accessible, informative, and often fun. I might be biased, but you should listen. And we’ll include one link to a great piece of Vox journalism every day, be it an article, video, or podcast.
If you want breadth or depth — or both! — we’ve got you covered. Sign up here, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
Many reproductive health organizations want to codify stronger standards. They’re not going to pick that fight this year.
When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris held their first joint campaign event of 2024 last month in northern Virginia, they left no doubt that codifying abortion rights would be central to the president’s reelection bid. With the rally timed to honor what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Biden stood under a large “Restore Roe” sign and beside supporters holding smaller posters to “Defend Choice.”
“We need the protections of Roe v. Wade in every state. And we can do it. You can do it,” Biden stressed at the event. “Give me a Democratic House of Representatives and give me a bigger — a bigger Democratic Senate, and we will pass a new law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade, and I will sign it immediately.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25260801/1948403542.jpg)
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
In subsequent campaign blasts, the Biden-Harris team reiterated the Roe message. “A vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a vote to restore Roe,” said Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “It’s simple,” the president tweeted to his nearly 34 million followers, under a graphic calling to “Restore the Protections of Roe v. Wade Once and For All.”
After the 2022 and 2023 election cycles, it may not be surprising that Biden is running on an abortion rights platform. What’s new, though, is that prominent abortion rights groups are biting their tongues about Roe and “pro-choice” messaging they disdain and have been trying to steer politicians away from.
In the weeks and months following the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, it was more common to hear influential leaders within the abortion rights movement talk about the necessity of going beyond Roe v. Wade, not going back to it. The old legal standard, they argued, was never good enough, and left too many people without access to the reproductive healthcare they needed.
When a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill in summer 2022 to codify the legal protections that existed under Roe just before the Dobbs decision was issued, a coalition of reproductive rights groups came out quickly against it. Activists instead had their eyes set on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a more sweeping federal bill that would not only restore the pre-Dobbs status quo but also ban most state-level restrictions as well as religious exemptions for health care providers. (WHPA passed the House in 2021 but failed twice in the Senate.)
The groups’ opposition to anything incremental meant a more moderate, compromise effort to protect abortion rights in Congress was never seriously attempted after Roe.
The hope to go beyond Roe hasn’t disappeared. Bolstered by decisive ballot measures to protect abortion rights over the last 18 months, election wins for Democrats who campaigned heavily on reproductive freedom, and surveys that suggest voters have grown even more supportive of abortion rights since Roe’s repeal, many activists have pressed Democrats to avoid using “Roe” language at all, and even steer clear of popular “pro-choice” messaging they believe helped normalize restricting abortion over the years.
Yet with the 2024 election now closer and stakes on abortion access even higher, reproductive rights groups have decided to swallow their concerns and enthusiastically endorse the president’s reelection strategy. Vox reached out to a dozen abortion rights groups, and while many offered statements about the need to do more to protect abortion access, no organization went so far as to say they disagreed with the president on his call to restore Roe, or explicitly object to his language.
Most groups handled the tension by saying they supported codifying “real protections” that restore the “original promise” of Roe — even if the restoration of Roe could mean restoring the legal rights available before Dobbs.
“Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s long-term vision includes short-term strategies, and it’s very simple,” Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Vox. “This November, voters will have to decide between an administration that continues to work with us in the fight for freedom or an administration that caused our current public health crisis and will go further with a national abortion ban. We have a very clear choice between holding the line or descending further into what will be irreparable chaos and confusion.”
Planned Parenthood endorsed Biden’s reelection bid last June and recently published a glowing review of the administration’s record on abortion access. “You can be certain that we are fighting for more than Roe v. Wade,” McGill Johnson told me.
“We absolutely need to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade, and so much more,” said Katie O’Connor, the National Women’s Law Center’s director of federal abortion policy. “We are proud to have endorsed President Biden, and pleased he has committed to signing a bill that would lock the federal right to abortion into law,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, added.
“Restore Roe” is Biden’s politics, not his policy
Biden’s campaign and surrogates are quick to point out that the president has already taken steps to protect abortion rights that go beyond the standards of Roe v. Wade. He’s on record supporting the Women’s Health Protection Act, and his administration has expanded access to abortion pills via telemedicine and at pharmacies.
So abortion rights groups and their congressional allies looking to pass stronger protections have decided to tolerate the president’s Roe messaging, trusting his team will do more if reelected, despite what he’s saying publicly now to voters.
“I support President Biden’s campaign message to restore Roe and his administration’s actions to defend abortion access,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren told me, drawing a distinction between his campaign rhetoric and his executive policies.
Whether voters know that “restoring Roe” is not the president’s end goal for abortion policy, though, is less clear. He’s never specifically articulated that fact, and his surrogates are wary to do so on the record, either. They suggest, rather, that a person should be able to infer the president’s policy goals based on a close reading of his administration’s record.
The Biden campaign, for its part, wants to keep the conversation stationed on friendly political ground — where codifying or restoring Roe simply means legalizing or protecting abortion rights. This is safer territory, since most Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases and that overturning Roe v. Wade was a mistake. However, when one starts drilling down into the details about specific limits or restrictions, public opinion becomes murkier and more complex.
Where things get tricky is that Biden has not just praised Roe as a shorthand for legal abortion rights. He also continues to praise the specifics of the Supreme Court decision itself.
“It was a decision on a complex matter that drew a careful balance between a woman’s right to choose earlier in her pregnancy and the state’s ability to regulate later in her pregnancy,” the president said when the Dobbs ruling came down. “A decision with broad national consensus that most Americans of faiths and backgrounds found acceptable.”
Even at this recent Virginia campaign event in January the president went so far as to say, “I believe Roe v. Wade got it right, and so do a majority of Americans.”
This tendency to try and have it both ways on Roe has been frustrating for anti-abortion groups, as they point out the administration will praise the Supreme Court decision that endorsed limits and regulations but won’t say today which, if any, limits they’d now support.
For example, last fall, when Harris was asked if there should be any limits on the right to an abortion, said at least five times that “we need to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade” but dodged clarifying what she meant by that in practice.
Some Democratic political strategists say this waffling is simply necessary to get through November, to avoid Republicans spreading the lie that third-trimester abortions will become more common if Biden is reelected. Recently the Republican National Committee claimed in a press release that Biden supports “abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth and after.”
The GOP also tried to attack Democrats in Virginia for supporting abortion “up until birth” in the recent 2023 election cycle, but voters didn’t seem to buy it. While Americans do tend to be more uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions, they also seem to understand they are extremely rare, and are typically associated with fetal anomalies, threats to a mother’s life, and barriers to care that delay access to the procedure.
Abortion rights groups still plan to push for more than Roe
As of now, the two major bills to codify abortion rights on the federal level are the Women’s Health Protection Act and the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, which would legalize abortion before fetal viability and permit so-called conscience protections for health care providers who oppose abortion.
When I asked a dozen abortion rights groups if they’d support codifying reproductive rights in legislation if the proposed federal bill did not go as far as the Women’s Health Protection Act, most organizations demurred or declined to answer directly. Only Catholics for Choice offered a clear affirmative statement that they’d be willing to consider any bill that allows a pregnant person to choose abortion. “This is not a time to make good legislation the enemy of the perfect,” president Jamie Manson told me.
A spokesperson for Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, one of the lead sponsors of the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, told Vox that he remains focused on passing his bill to codify “the essential holdings of Roe and related cases to protect reproductive freedom and access to contraception.” In a press interview following Biden’s Virginia campaign event, Kaine stressed his bill is the only bipartisan one pending in Congress now to restore Roe as a statutory protection.
Despite his campaign mantra to restore Roe, the Biden campaign declined to comment on whether the president would sign the Reproductive Freedom for All Act if it passed Congress.
Democratic Sen. Tina Smith suggested lawmakers would be open to different pieces of legislation to protect abortion rights. “Our goal is to restore women’s reproductive freedoms,” she told me. “If that’s the Women’s Health Protection Act or something else remains to be seen, but that’s where I stand.”
Record arms exports are a sign of America’s commitment to Europe — and its foreign policy failures during the war in Ukraine.
US foreign military sales recently reached a record high, largely driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The 2023 fiscal year, ending October 1, saw $80.9 billion in US government arms transfers, foreign defense services, and security cooperation — a figure up more than 55 percent from $51.9 billion in 2022. Direct commercial sales by US arms manufacturers to other countries also rose from $153.6 billion to $157.5 billion over the previous fiscal year. (The US government approves both types of sales but is only directly involved in negotiations for the former, making that a stronger indicator of US foreign policy priorities.)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25263410/GaAyA_foreign_military_transfers_hit_record_levels_in_2023.png){kind=spacer}
Nicole Narea/Vox
US officials have indicated that they intend to starve the Russian arms export industry, encouraging their allies in Europe and globally to buy American weapons instead.
“We see that because Russia’s defense industry is denied the resources that come from exports, that helps to contribute to Russian strategic failure on the battlefield,” Mira Resnick, who runs the State Department’s Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers, told Politico.
The military transfers also serve the purpose of signaling the Biden administration’s commitment to its European partners. Some European allies are buying US weapons in preparation for a feared broader war in Europe against Russia; the European Union approved $50 billion in funding for Ukraine Thursday.
Recent large-scale Russian investments in its army and weapons industry have fueled those fears. And Europe is worried that it may not be able to rely exclusively on the US for protection: US aid for Ukraine has run out, and a deal to secure additional funding in exchange for border security measures has stalled in the Senate following former President Donald Trump’s meddling.
But the increase in US arms sales is not necessarily a testament to the success of Biden’s foreign policy, said Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program.
“This really reflects just a degree of insecurity in Europe and anxieties about the war in Ukraine,” he said. “I’m not sure that the acceleration of arms transfers is really a cure.”
Every one of these foreign military transfers goes through a detailed agency review process that involves evaluating whether it serves a partner country’s legitimate self-defense, and most major sales have to be approved by Congress with rare exceptions for emergencies.
These deals are often completed over multiple years. The $80.9 billion figure encompasses deals that were actually implemented over the last fiscal year, but the US has also announced some major deals with European allies that may not yet count towards that total: Ukraine’s neighbor Poland, for example, struck a series of deals amounting to more than $45 billion, per congressional disclosures.
There’s a question whether those deals will actually be implemented going forward. Poland’s annual military budget is just $16 billion, and it also made a big purchase from South Korea last year, so “they’ll either need to jack up their military budget dramatically, or spread out payment over many years, or scale back their ambitions,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
While Poland made the largest commitment in the last fiscal year, the US also made sales agreements with other European countries, including ones valued at about $11.4 billion with Germany and $6.3 billion with the Czech Republic, as well as smaller deals with Norway and Bulgaria.
These massive deals will help reduce European reliance on Russian arms. But they should also be raising concern about how well the US is reassuring its allies and what it’s doing to decrease the demand for these weapons in the first place, Yousif said. In that sense, the increased military transfers reflect Europe’s uncertainty about the US’s commitments to its allies in an unstable world, as well as the US’s explicit attempts to placate them.
How the war in Gaza is impacting weapons sales
Israel’s war in Gaza wasn’t a factor in the 2023 increase in sales, since the war started after the fiscal year ended. Much of what’s being transferred to Israel now is part of sales that Congress was notified of in previous years, but the fulfillment of those orders has been accelerated since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Yousif said. In other words, those sales were already tallied up in previous years’ totals. But there are some new sales: Biden twice circumvented Congress to make emergency weapons sales to Israel in December, totaling over $250 million.
Much like the Ukraine war, Israel’s war in Gaza could become a major driver of arms transfers going forward as regional tensions escalate and US allies work to ensure their militaries are well supplied for any potential conflict. Arms deals could also be a part of any normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia — an agreement the US had made great efforts to broker before the outbreak of the war.
“Next year could be the ‘year of the Middle East’ as regional tensions sparked by the Gaza war and the Biden administration’s desire to cozy up to Saudi Arabia to persuade it to join the Abraham Accords could spur large new sales,” Hartung said.
Regardless of what happens with other partners in the Middle East, arms transfers to Israel appear likely to continue. That’s despite the fact that continued sales to Israel “violate the spirit and letter of US law as well as stated Biden administration policy, and they make a mockery of the administration’s claims to support a ‘rules-based international order,’” Hartung said.
Some foreign affairs experts have argued that existing US laws meant to safeguard human rights, including the “Leahy Law,” should have long restricted the flow of such assistance to Israel due to the high death toll in its conflict. Unlike with respect to Ukraine, whose use of controversial weapons like cluster munitions and landmines has led to restrictions on US aid, that law has not been adequately enforced against Israel, they say.
But the Biden administration has maintained that it is abiding by the law and is on track to make 2024 another strong year for weapons sales.