It’s tough to know how to talk about a life-threatening illness, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.
When Chiara Riga was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer at 27, she was absolutely stunned. As her feelings morphed into a form of acceptance, Riga tried to live her life according to some semblance of normal — aside from the fact that she was undergoing intensive cancer treatment, barely mustering the energy to get through the day, and managing side effects like painful mouth sores. In retrospect, she realizes that attempting to move on as though nothing had changed didn’t work at all. In fact, it psychologically backfired.
When she was diagnosed, Riga was told she would have another 10 to 15 years if she was lucky and that only 26 percent of women with her diagnosis live past five years. “The biggest emotional struggle has been watching all of my friends and peers go on with their lives — buy homes, have babies, get married — and I feel like I can’t do those things,” says Riga. “Terminal cancer is always going to be something that’s separating me from others.”
September will mark three years since Riga was diagnosed. “There are a lot of people who were there at the beginning, wearing pink, bringing me pink things, who I now haven’t heard from in over a year,” she says. “It doesn’t end when it’s no longer [fresh] news because this is going to be my life. It feels like everyone thinks that I’ve got it settled because I’ve been [navigating] this for so long, when in reality [my life with metastatic cancer] is constantly changing, and still checking in and still making an effort — even however many years in — is still really important.”
It’s common to receive a scary diagnosis. In 2023, roughly 2 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the US and an estimated 600,000 people will die of the disease. Hundreds of thousands of Americans also face life-threatening diagnoses related to advanced lung, heart, kidney, or liver disease, stroke, and other neurological diseases.
And yet, talking about these diagnoses in a compassionate, supportive, understanding way often presents challenges for everyone involved — both the people who have been diagnosed and those who love them. While their heart may be in the right place, people learning of a loved one’s diagnosis, often due to a feeling of helplessness, offer words that are anything but helpful. “Sometimes I’ll hear patients say, ‘My loved one, my partner, or my family member was so well-intended in telling me what they think I should be doing or why I got cancer, but it wasn’t helpful to me,’” says Valentina Ogaryan, a clinical psychologist at the Simms/Mann Center for Integrative Oncology at the University of California Los Angeles. Meanwhile, people who’ve received a life-threatening diagnosis are facing a bevy of complex emotions and may not know how to ask for what they need — or even know precisely what they need (or want) just yet.
There are ways to thoughtfully discuss and respond to such a diagnosis, whether you’re looking for support from loved ones after receiving news about your own health or you want to be there for someone you care for. Here’s some guidance.
How to talk about a scary diagnosis with friends and family
Who you share information about your diagnosis with as well as the best time to bring it up with them will depend on your individual needs and what feels right to you.
“You need to do what you feel comfortable with at your own pace,” says Meredith Cammarata, an oncology social worker at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “You don’t necessarily have to immediately start telling everyone if you don’t want to. This is your own life, your own business, your own personal circumstances. It’s okay to pick and choose who you want to tell and who you don’t want to tell.”
In doing so, you can create a support team with whom you feel able to be vulnerable. Conversely, you may also feel alone and isolated because you don’t have people in your life you feel you can rely on or trust with this poignant news, says Cammarata. If that’s the case, it can be helpful to reach out to other people navigating the same diagnosis in your medical community or connect with a mental health professional, she says.
For example, Riga says the “single most helpful thing” for her mental health was making connections within the cancer community, like meeting a mentor with whom she has become close friends through an organization called After Breast Cancer Diagnosis (ABCD) and working with a psycho-oncologist. She also volunteers and advocates with b-present, an organization that provides resources for those supporting adolescents and young adults navigating cancer.
Amri Kibbler, a 48-year-old from Putnam Valley, New York, who was diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer in December 2020, felt that connecting with people in support groups who were in a similar situation “age- and responsibility-wise” was “priceless.” “Community, as a cancer patient and survivor, really makes you feel less alone and makes you feel less afraid,” she says.
Once you’re clear on the people you can really rely on, you may begin to ask for what you need. Cammarata adds, “It’s also normal, however, to feel like you don’t know what you need.”
For this reason, Cammarata says you may find it helpful to say, “I’ve been diagnosed with X and I’m not exactly sure what I need, but I will reach out to you when I need it,” or, depending on preference, “I’d appreciate it if you’d check in on me because I’m not someone who is comfortable reaching out to someone else for support.”
Talk to your doctor and care team about how you can anticipate engaging with your caregivers and loved ones, suggests Cammarata. Questions might include:
- Will treatment require a ride from a family member or friend?
- What side effects might I experience?
- Am I going to be able to drive?
- Am I going to be able to do the cooking?
- Am I going to be able to take my kids to school or sporting events?
You may be someone who can care for yourself physically and take yourself to and from treatments or procedures but who is seeking emotional connection and would like to discuss the diagnosis with family and friends. Or you may need them to show up to handle logistics and not want to discuss what’s going on emotionally. Either way, speaking with your treatment team can help you get clear on which types of support you need most.
At times, you might set definitive boundaries. In 2021, Sacramento, California-based nursing student Rachel Thomas, now 32, was diagnosed with gestational trophoblastic neoplasia, a disease that occurs in early pregnancy, in which cells that would typically develop into the placenta turn into an abnormal — and in some cases cancerous — mass. She recalls being direct with friends and family from the get-go that she didn’t want them to share their hot takes on her diagnosis and treatment.
“I was pretty clear that I didn’t want opinions,” she recalls. “I said, ‘If you don’t have hard data for me, I just don’t have faith in it.’ I think it was a good choice for me, and they respected it.”
What to say — and not say — to a loved one who has received a scary diagnosis
While learning that someone you love is facing a life-threatening diagnosis is no doubt frightening, showing support involves managing your own feelings as opposed to expecting them to. “Check in with yourself, and check in with your own emotions,” says Cammarata, who adds that it’s normal to feel helpless when you’re in this position. “It’s hard to tolerate feeling helpless, and instinctually, it makes people feel like they need to just do something quickly.” Instead, become aware of your own feelings, pause, shore up empathy, and then see how you might be able to be helpful to your loved one, she suggests.
It may be helpful to bear in mind that once patients receive a cancer diagnosis, they can experience an abrupt shift in their sense of self and identity, says Ogaryan. Facing one’s mortality and contending with potential existential distress can be overwhelming, and it can have different implications for the various roles in their lives, she notes. You can be helpful by “being a sounding board, a listening ear, responding compassionately, and giving permission for [your] loved one to share any/all of the emotions and feelings that may arise.”
By making a concerted effort to tune into and follow your loved one’s cues — a valuable step Cammarata recommends taking ongoingly — you’ll note that there are times in which they want to open up and other moments in which they’d prefer not to discuss their experience at all.
“The best thing,” according to Riga, is when her friends ask, “Do you want a solution, or do you just want to vent?” “I think most people want to fix it, but you literally can’t,” she says. “Don’t try to make me feel better. Just validating that what I’m going through sucks is the most important.”
If sharing about their diagnosis seems like the last thing your loved one wants to do, you might say, “I’m here to listen if and when you want to talk,” suggests Cammarata, who adds, “Be mindful that they might not want [their diagnosis] to be a topic of every discussion. They might say, ‘Let’s talk about the news or celebrity gossip.’ They might want to change the topic, and that’s okay, too. It might be a nice reprieve.”
There will be moments in which you may not know what to say at all. When that happens, it is best to admit that, points out Meredith Diamond, a 30-year-old in California who was diagnosed in April with stage 4 nodular sclerosis Hodgkin lymphoma. “I was grateful when people reached out and said, ‘I don’t even know what to say,’ because that feels more appropriate than when people start saying how sorry they are,” she says.
That said, some moments call for simply being present in silence, holding space, and reflectively sitting side by side — something Thomas wishes her loved ones would have done more often.
“It’s helpful to be in the moment with the person,” acknowledges Ogaryan.
Concrete actions are also appreciated. You might note that you’re going to the grocery store and ask if you can pick anything up for your loved one, suggests Cammarata. You might get them a gift card to a store or a restaurant that serves an extensive menu.
Kibbler agrees that useful gifts — such as cute hats, ginger candies to ease nausea that may result from chemotherapy, a cozy sweatshirt to lounge around in, even links to meditations, sound baths, or personalized playlists and photos of the people who care about them — are valued.
However, it’s possible that your loved one might not be able to eat those baked treats or be able to use certain gifts, so when in doubt, ask them, “How can I support you?” or “What do you need right now?” suggests Thomas. “People often hesitate to put that burden on somebody, to tell them what they need,” she says. “But I personally would have preferred to say, ‘This is what I need today’ or ‘Thank you so much for offering to buy us dinner. I’m really in the mood for In-N-Out.’”
Continuing to show up and check in over time is also a must. “In the beginning, there tend to be a lot of check-ins, a lot of ‘how can I help,’ a plethora of support — sometimes so much support, some patients don’t know what to do with it all,” says Cammarata. “And then, treatment goes on. It’s the third month, it’s the sixth month, it’s a year and a half. Patients start to feel isolated because the amount of check-ins slowly starts to decrease.” For that reason, she emphasizes the impact of even a quick text like, “Checking in, how are you doing this week?”
Kibbler wishes she had received more texts like these. “I wished that people had reached out more,” she says. “Any little message of support always made a big difference in my day and how I was feeling. It’s just a very lonely experience. You see the world going on around you [and] remember being sick. You really appreciate any kind of connection with other people that are taking the time to think of you in any which way.”
Avoid platitudes such as, “You’re a warrior,” “F*ck cancer, let’s win the battle,” or “Believe in the power of positive thinking,” all of which make it seem as though attitude is the sole determinant of the disease’s outcome, says Cammarata. And while some people do find strength in these words, they can also exacerbate anxiety and existential distress, she notes. “When you say ‘Be brave, be strong, think positively,’ it unintentionally tells someone how they should cope and how they should feel, and it takes away from that person’s ability to truly describe their own feelings and their own individual experience. Oftentimes I see it leading to patients feeling invalidated and isolated.”
Along the same lines, steer clear of starting a sentence with “at least” (e.g. “at least they caught it when they did,” “at least you don’t need chemotherapy,” or “at least you already have children, a thriving career, a partner, have traveled the world,” etc.), which minimizes your loved one’s experience.
Instead, you might aim to validate that experience, offering words of support that mirror the following examples Thomas wishes she had heard more often from people in her circle:
- “Thank you for sharing with me.”
- “Thank you for trusting me with your story.”
- “I hear you.”
- “That sounds hard.”
Diamond says you’ll also do well to avoid “over-dramatic” statements, such as, “Why does this have to happen to you?” or “This isn’t fair,” “This is the worst thing that could happen.” She explains that these statements feel like people are just trying to say what they think she wants to hear, when in fact all they do is ignite additional anxiety.
Steer clear of telling stories about other people who have dealt with a similar diagnosis, adds Diamond. To her, this has felt overwhelming and as though people want to share their own stories, which only served to further complicate or even minimize her own. “Everyone has their own experience,” she says. “And sometimes, [it] felt like they were telling me how they thought my journey [should] be.” Peppering in other traumatic stories (even when the outcome is a positive one) typically only results in increasing anxiety rather than alleviating it.
Talking about a life-threatening diagnosis presents challenges for everyone involved — especially the person diagnosed. Thoughtfulness is key. Riga recalls casually telling a friend that she had a scan scheduled weeks in advance. “Just before, I got a text [that said] ‘Hey, I’m thinking of you. Don’t feel like you have to share the results, but I just want you to know that I’m wishing [you] the best.’ It’s so simple. It’s the little things, remembering, showing that you care.”
Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the author of I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, a Movement. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, New York magazine, and Vogue, among others. Jessica’s second book is due out next year.
There are some terrible things that even this Supreme Court isn’t willing to do.
When you cover this Supreme Court for a living, it is tempting to fall into despair.
The Court has spent the last few years relitigating long-settled fights over abortion and affirmative action. It consistently rules that the rights of LGBTQ Americans, women using birth control, and even people who don’t want to catch a deadly disease must give way to the whims of the Christian Right.
Under its three-year-old Republican supermajority, the Court took a decidedly post-legal turn. It routinely relies on fabricated legal rules, such as the so-called major questions doctrine, to veto liberal policies like President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program or to undermine environmental protections.
Its guns decision in New York State Rifle v. Bruen (2022) is an incompetent train wreck, which has baffled lower court judges and produced appalling results — including an appeals court decision holding that a law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order” is unconstitutional.
And yet, despite all of this, I am far more optimistic about the future of the United States than I was a year ago, and a big reason why is the Supreme Court’s behavior over the last several months.
When the Court opened its latest term last October, my level of alarm was about a 13 out of 10. The GOP-appointed justices had just completed an orgy of conservative grudge settling, including its decision overruling Roe v. Wade. Worse, the Court planned to hear new cases that could legalize racial gerrymandering, gut Medicaid, and potentially even destroy US democracy altogether.
A little less than a year later, my level of alarm is down to a nine. The Court’s last term gave anyone to the left of Brett Kavanaugh no shortage of outrages, but it left Medicaid intact. It shut down an argument that many of Donald Trump’s nativist appointees to the lower courts used to seize control of federal immigration policy. And, on the crucial issue of voting rights, the Court handed down two decisions that give real hope that, no matter how else these justices might interfere with federal policymaking, they will preserve the people’s right to elect officials that the justices themselves do not want to see in office.
I want to be precise about the argument that I’m making. If you are angry at the Supreme Court, you are right to be angry. Many of this Court’s decisions are completely lawless — such as the Court’s recent decision in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), which ignored a federal law that unambiguously authorized Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. They demand anger. And that anger isn’t just righteous, it is useful.
But I also want to counsel against despair — that is, I want to counsel against the absence of hope.
The Court’s GOP-appointed majority is starting to draw some fences around the conservative legal project. The Court appears unwilling to attack entrenched parts of the American welfare state. It smacked down a Trump judge who attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. It has rejected legal arguments that would devastate the US economy or threaten its national security.
And, most importantly, the Court is now signaling that it may preserve America’s ability to hold free and fair elections (or, at least, to hold elections that are as free and fair as possible in a nation with an Electoral College and a malapportioned Senate).
If it holds to that, there’s a very real chance that liberals and centrists can defeat this increasingly unpopular Court the old-fashioned way — by consistently electing presidents and senators who will fill the Court with justices who will relegate the works of Samuel Alito to the anti-canon.
The Supreme Court still appears to have some commitment to democracy
A year ago, the Supreme Court appeared to be waging a war on the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law that banned race discrimination in elections, and at least four justices seemed eager to give state lawmakers unprecedented new authority to rig elections.
Today, the picture is different. The Court surprised pretty much everyone who pays attention to voting rights litigation when, in Allen v. Milligan (2023), it struck down a racial gerrymander that benefits Republicans in the state of Alabama. Even more significantly, Milligan relied on a provision of the Voting Rights Act, known as the “results test,” which Chief Justice John Roberts has crusaded against for nearly his entire career.
This provision, which provides a state election law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” is invalid, even if the law was not enacted with racist intent, was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. Reagan did so, moreover, over the objection of a conservative faction within his own Justice Department — and one of the most important players in this faction was a young John Roberts.
As voting rights journalist Ari Berman has written, “Roberts wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing an effects test.” He “drafted talking points, speeches and op-eds for” senior Justice Department officials opposing the amendment, and “prepared administration officials for their testimony before the Senate; attended weekly strategy sessions; and worked closely with like-minded senators on Capitol Hill.”
So, when Roberts wrote the Court’s 5-4 decision in Milligan, he didn’t simply hand down a surprising victory for voting rights after years of Supreme Court decisions that seemed intended to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. He also abandoned a 40-year-old grudge against laws that protect racial minorities from discrimination that might be unintentional — a grudge that he still held onto as recently as a 2015 oral argument.
If Roberts intended to send a message to liberals that he is willing to call a truce on voting rights, in other words, he picked an unusually powerful way to make that statement.
Similar things can be said about Moore v. Harper (2023), in which the Supreme Court rejected a legal argument, known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” (ISLD), that could have fundamentally destroyed the United States’ ability to hold competitive elections for the presidency and for control of Congress.
Under the strongest version of the ISLD, each state’s legislative body has virtually unlimited power to make laws governing federal elections. No state governor may veto such a law, and no state court may strike such a law down. Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislature could pass a law giving all of that state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, and there would be no recourse.
Meanwhile, weaker versions of this theory would strip state courts of their ability to strike down such laws or otherwise enforce provisions in their state constitutions that preserve voting rights and that protect against gerrymandering.
One might think that merely describing this argument would be enough to refute it. But, before Moore reached the Court, five sitting justices had all endorsed some version of the ISLD — although, in fairness, Chief Justice Roberts repudiated that support in 2020. And Barrett, the Court’s newest Republican appointee, had not expressed a view on the ISLD. So it appeared that the fate of American democracy would turn on whether Barrett was willing to break with her party.
Instead, the Court handed down a surprisingly fulsome rejection of the ISLD that reaffirmed previous decisions repudiating this theory, and which concluded that the US Constitution “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.” This decision was joined by Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Milligan and Moore are only two data points suggesting that this Court will respect democracy (a third is the Court’s decision not to overthrow the 2020 election and award a second term to Trump). But they are significant not just because they rejected attacks on voting rights, but because several key justices seemed to retreat from more hardline positions that they have staked out in the past.
It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the Court will hold to the line that it seemed to draw in Milligan and Moore. But both cases are hopeful signs that the justices will respect free elections.
The Court is leaving entrenched parts of the American welfare state intact
One of the most alarming Supreme Court decisions from before Republicans gained a supermajority on the Court was NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), where the Court allowed Republican states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, and four GOP-appointed justices tried to repeal Obamacare in its entirety.
Since NFIB, however, there have been two other attempts to nuke Obamacare that made it to the Supreme Court — King v. Burwell (2015) and California v. Texas (2021). And, with each new lawsuit, fewer and fewer justices voted against the law, even though the Court moved sharply to the right between NFIB and Texas.
One important thing that changed between NFIB and King is that the Affordable Care Act became fully operational. Although Obamacare became law in 2010, most of its important provisions — including the Medicaid expansion and the provisions providing subsidized health insurance to middle-income earners — did not take effect until 2014.
That means that, when the Court nearly repealed the law in 2012, it was targeting a largely hypothetical new policy that few Americans actually benefited from. By the time King and Texas arrived on the Court’s docket, by contrast, the justices were being asked to take health coverage away from millions of Americans who already had it. Even some of the justices who dissented in NFIB weren’t willing to do that.
Something similar happened in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), a June Supreme Court decision that could have eviscerated the entire Medicaid program. Instead, a 7-2 Court voted to leave Medicaid intact.
Medicaid is a “conditional grant” program, meaning that the federal government offers each state a significant chunk of money to fund health coverage for low-income patients, but the states must agree to a long list of rules governing how this money should be spent.
All 50 states voluntarily accept at least some Medicaid funds, so all 50 states must comply with the conditions attached to those funds. Those conditions range from broad requirements that state Medicaid programs must cover certain individuals, such as low-income pregnant patients and children, to granular rules governing how Medicaid-funded facilities must operate. In Talevski, for example, the plaintiffs accused a Medicaid-funded nursing home of violating a law forbidding it from using psychotropic drugs “for purposes of discipline or convenience and not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms.”
Many of these conditions, moreover, are enforced almost entirely through private lawsuits. In 2015, however, three current members of the Court (Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Alito) signed onto an opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, which argued that “the modern jurisprudence permitting intended beneficiaries [of federal programs] to sue does not generally apply” to conditional grant programs like Medicaid.
Had Scalia’s position prevailed in Talevski, it would have gutted the entire Medicaid program, leaving Medicaid beneficiaries almost entirely helpless if a state denied them legally mandated coverage.
Yet, when confronted with a case that could destroy a program that millions of Americans already depend upon for health care, even most of the Court’s Republican appointees blinked. Again, the decision in Talevski, which rejected Scalia’s argument and left the status quo in place, was 7-2 — with only Thomas and Alito in dissent.
Compare that decision with Nebraska, the case striking down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Although the Education Department announced that program in August of 2022, it never took effect because Biden-skeptical judges raced to enjoin it. And the Court’s GOP-appointed majority had no problem with halting a government program that did not yet have any beneficiaries.
Once welfare state programs take full effect, however, several key justices appear much more reluctant to disturb them.
The Court is unlikely to let judges ban abortion outright
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the decision overruling Roe, the five Republican appointees in the majority pledged to stay out of national abortion policy. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito wrote, promising that henceforth, the question of whether abortions would remain legal would rest with elected legislatures.
This was obviously a terrible blow to abortion rights. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court abandoned its historical posture of protecting those rights, and instead adopted a new position of neutrality to abortion. Henceforth, there would be no constitutional safeguards if lawmakers chose to ban the procedure. This has had disastrous consequences for pregnant people in states where lawmakers did just that.
But there is a third posture that the courts could take toward abortion: It could be banned nationally by judicial decree. Last April, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a longtime Christian Right activist who Trump put on the federal bench, tried to take the courts down this third path. In a decision that took extraordinary liberties with the law, Kacsmaryk attempted to ban mifepristone, a medication used in about half of all abortions in the United States. Mifepristone has been legal in the US since 2000.
In any event, the Supreme Court stepped in fairly quickly, in Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, to block Kacsmaryk’s decision before it could take effect. Only two justices — again, Thomas and Alito — publicly dissented from the Court’s decision to keep mifepristone legal.
This case will need to go up to the justices again. On Wednesday, a far-right panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down its own decision attempting to significantly restrict mifepristone. But the Danco Laboratories decision is a hopeful sign that the justices will not allow rogue judges to ban abortion outright, or to ban medications and other items used in abortions.
The Supreme Court is not controlled by people who want to harm the United States
In 2008, as a collapsing US housing market threatened to throw the globe into a second Great Depression, Congress created an agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversaw hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions intended to stabilize the housing market and prevent the terrible 2008 recession from becoming something much worse.
In Collins v. Yellen (2021), several investors made a nauseatingly complex, but audacious legal argument. They asked the Court to cancel about $124 billion worth of these transactions. And they raised legal arguments that, if taken seriously, would have invalidated every single action taken by the FHFA in its 13 years of existence. It is far from clear how on earth a court is supposed to unravel hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions that have already taken place, and the turmoil caused by any attempt to do so could itself have triggered an economic depression.
But that didn’t happen. Collins rejected its plaintiffs’ call for a $124 billion bonfire. Only Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the plaintiffs and the lower court judges who’d sided with them, and flirted with an economic depression.
And there are other signs (including the Talevski decision) that the current Court, for all of its willingness to bend the law to implement Republican Party policies, is not willing to endanger important American institutions.
In Austin v. US Navy SEALs 1-26, for example, a small group of judges (in the Fifth Circuit, naturally) determined that religious conservatives serving in the US Navy could defy an order to take the Covid vaccine — and could even be deployed against the judgment of military commanders. The implications of these lower court decisions were breathtaking, as they implied that servicemembers who claimed certain religious beliefs did not need to follow orders.
As Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a brief opinion explaining why these judges erred, the lower court that countermanded the military’s orders to its own personnel “in effect inserted itself into the Navy’s chain of command, overriding military commanders’ professional military judgments.”
One of the major narratives that is likely to emerge from the Supreme Court’s upcoming term, which will begin in October, is that the justices appear poised to reverse several more Fifth Circuit decisions that threaten the stability of the United States and its government. Among other things, the Supreme Court will review a Fifth Circuit decision that declared an entire agency — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — unconstitutional. It will also review a Fifth Circuit decision gutting the federal government’s power to enforce securities law.
In both these and other cases arising out of the ultra-reactionary Fifth Circuit, the justices are likely to reverse. If nothing else, the Court’s upcoming term will test (and, most likely, confirm) the thesis that the Supreme Court is not dominated by nihilists who wish to sow chaos for its own sake.
So what does all of this mean?
Again, I want to be clear that no one should be Pollyannaish about this Court. I began this piece by saying that my level of alarm surrounding the Court has moved from a 13 out of 10 to a nine. A nine is still very bad.
The Supreme Court’s descent into partisanship, moreover, is just one symptom of a much larger cancer within American democracy. A former president, the same president who appointed a third of the Supreme Court, has now been indicted twice for attempting to overthrow an election. Many of that former president’s supporters violently attacked the US Capitol in a failed effort to extend his time in office.
But, despite all of these signs that US democracy faces greater challenges today than it has faced since 1965, when the passage of the Voting Rights Act transformed the United States from something more like an apartheid regime into a liberal democracy, the United States is still in the phase in its democratic decline when that decline can be reversed at the ballot box.
This is why Moore and Milligan are such hopeful signs. They suggest that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority is not attempting to consolidate power by shutting down the franchise. And they tell us that the best reaction to this Court is not despair over what it has done, but sustained outrage and political organizing — until the rest of the government overflows with officials who will do everything in their power to undermine this Court’s worst decisions.
Meanwhile, the Court’s decisions in cases like Talevski, Collins, Texas, and SEALs all suggest that this Supreme Court will not do so much damage to US institutions that this damage cannot be reversed by a better Supreme Court, or by a Congress that rejects this Court’s values. Roe may be dead, but a Congress with solid Democratic majorities can pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and give back what this Supreme Court has taken from American women.
There are also early signs that the Court’s partisan behavior is triggering a democratic backlash. The Court’s more unpopular than it has ever been since several pollsters started measuring approval of the justices. Pro-abortion ballot initiatives consistently prevail, even in red states. Republicans had a surprisingly weak election performance in 2022, something that can likely be attributed, at least in part, to the Court’s decision in Dobbs.
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The strongest case for optimism about the Supreme Court, in other words, boils down to eight words: We can beat them at the ballot box.
And then we will replace them.
The storm should hit Mexico Sunday and could cause historic rainfall in the Southwest.
In a summer of extreme weather events, Hurricane Hilary is yet another atypical occurrence — a tropical storm headed for the West Coast of the United States.
What it will likely mean for Southern California and the southwest is potential heavy flooding — and even flash flooding — with up to seven inches of rain forecast in some areas and tropical storm force winds up to 73 mph as it moves over land.
Though California has had hurricanes before, it’s extremely rare because cold water flows from Alaska typically make the Pacific coast an unsuitable environment for them, which rely on water surface temperatures higher than 26 Celsius to form and grow powerful. Hilary, a Category 4 storm as of Saturday afternoon, is expected to make landfall on Sunday morning, likely in northern Mexico around Baja California, according to the National Hurricane Center.
While people on the southeastern coast — particularly in Florida up through the Carolinas, and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico — are likely well-versed in hurricane preparation, and live in states with storm-hardened infrastructure, that’s not so for Southern California and parts of the southwest where the hurricane is expected to hit. Though Hilary is expected to weaken as it heads northward and makes landfall, it could still bring several inches of rain — as many as ten inches are forecast in some parts — and heavy winds.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a press release Friday outlining the government’s preparation for the storm and urging Southern Californians to prepare themselves for “the wettest tropical cyclone in state history and the first-ever Tropical Storm Watch issued for California.” According to Axios, 43 million people in California and Mexico are under tropical storm warnings, and 27 million under flash flood warnings, in an area stretching all the way to Idaho.
California has already had an extremely wet year, though that’s unrelated to Hilary’s development and unusual path. Thirty-one atmospheric rivers hit California last winter and this spring, many of them quite strong. California’s atmospheric rivers provide much of the state’s precipitation, both as rain and as snowfall, which accumulates in high elevations as snowpack and melts in the warmer months.
But this year’s atmospheric rivers were severe in both intensity and duration, erasing some drought restrictions, but also causing devastating flooding and record-breaking snowfall.
They were also concentrated in California’s Central Coast and in Southern California, where Hilary is expected to hit, too. “That’s where we’re really seeing a lot of our larger anomalies in terms of overall precipitation,” Chad Hecht, a research and operations meteorologist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the LA Times in April. “This year, the Central Coast saw four strong atmospheric rivers, where it typically averages less than two.”
Though Hilary won’t have the power of many hurricanes on the East and Gulf Coasts like Ida in 2021 and Ian in 2022, it still has destructive potential. The amount of rainfall in typically arid locations will likely cause flash flooding, mudslides, and landslides — which could be especially dangerous with the addition of debris from recent forest fire seasons, Axios reports.
Hilary is unusual, but it doesn’t necessarily portend things to come
Although Hurricane Hilary’s path is strange, it’s not unprecedented, as Paul Miller, an assistant professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences told Vox in an interview.
“It’s certainly unusual,” Miller said. “There is historical precedent for it, though — it’s the kind of thing that has happened before. We can cite examples from our lifetime, but it is certainly unusual.”
Hurricane Nora impacted the American southwest from the Pacific Ocean in 1997, and Lester in 1992 before that. Still, Miller points out, “We’re looking at 25 years since the last time we can point to a similar case.”
Though many unusual or extreme climate events are linked to climate change, there isn’t much to directly connect Hilary’s growth and path to the phenomenon. Higher water surface temperatures could account for some of the storm’s strength, but “There’s nothing about what’s happening right now to make me think that climate change is so dramatic that Southern California is now in the crosshairs of tropical systems,” Miller said.
The Eastern Pacific has its own hurricane season.It’s longer than the Atlantic hurricane season, starting on March 15 and ending on November 30. As the New York Times reported Saturday, it’s been an active season in the Eastern Pacific, though none of the storms have come as far west as Hilary has. “We typically don’t talk about storms in the Eastern Pacific as much because they tend to be less impactful to land,” though that’s not always the case, Miller said. Storms like Hurricane Dora, for example, have tracked much further west, adding to the heavy winds which helped the deadly fire in Maui spread.
Hilary’s path has to do with two specific weather factors, Miller told Vox, including a heat dome over the central US. Though the warm temperatures and the heat dome Miller described didn’t cause Hilary to form — that happened thousands of miles away in the Eastern Pacific — it is helping determine Hilary’s path.
High-pressure air moves clockwise, Miller explained, acting like a conveyor belt bringing Hilary up the West Coast and in toward California and Nevada. A trough in a jet stream over California is also “grabbing Hilary and pulling it northward,” he said, as well as helping cause the storm’s precipitation.
Strong winds are another concern for those in and around the hurricane’s path. “Generally speaking, the strongest winds will cling to the right side of the hurricane,” Miller said. “So if this same storm was hitting [North Carolina’s] Outer Banks or something, the strongest winds would be over ocean,” instead of a populated area like San Diego.
As of Saturday afternoon, Hilary had yet to make landfall and was weakening as it headed northward — much as experts expected. But as with any major weather event, there are still unknowns, Miller said. “The biggest question from this point forward is going to be where it makes landfall.”