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Because we don’t have high-speed rail, the major downside of rail travel is speed. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, flying — even with all the time you have to spend getting to airports far outside the city center — is much faster. It’ll take you a couple days to get from Chicago to any West Coast city via train, and even regional travel such as Chicago to Minneapolis takes about 8 hours — a trip that would take between 2-3 hours in many European or Asian countries.

How to take the train

If you have the time, there are many reasons worth looking into taking the train for long-distance trips. On the train, you don’t have to worry about driving your car or paying for gas or stopping for food. In sleeper trains, meals are included with the price; in coach you have access to a cafe car with limited food offerings — I usually choose to bring my own food.

Trains in coach are often cheaper than air travel, particularly during times of high demand. I couldn’t have afforded to fly to Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, and LA during this summer of high prices — and I did this all using the $499 USA Rail Pass, which allows you to take 10 trips of any length (as long as you don’t transfer trains) in a 30 day period. I would’ve been able to travel to New York, San Diego, and any of the cities along those routes at no extra cost. If you’re transporting a lot of luggage, it’s also a potentially budget-friendly option. Last year, I had to figure out how to get my bike from Chicago to San Francisco, and I was able to take it on the California Zephyr for only $20. You also get two 50-pound suitcases for free.

There are downsides to coach. It has no showers and the bathrooms aren’t great, although in certain models of car the bathrooms are more spacious and give you more room. The only food offered is for purchase in the cafe car and has limited selection, so I’d recommend bringing your own food. But coach is, unfortunately, probably the only truly affordable way to take the long-distance train.

If you have the money, there are multiple types of sleeper cars, the most common of which are roomettes — the cheaper option with your own space and shared restroom and shower — and bedrooms, which are larger and have their own bathroom and shower. Roomettes start at just under $700 per person for the long-haul (2-day) trains, while bedrooms will run you over $1,000. There are also accessible bedrooms and family bedrooms. Traveling with kids can obviously be a barrier in terms of time and cost, but for those who can afford it, it’s easier for families to travel in roomettes or sleeper cars for long-haul trains, and kids under 2 travel for free. A friend with a baby recently booked a Chicago-Seattle roomette for his family around Christmas and said that even with the cost, it was cheaper than flying that season.

A final thing to watch out for is the train might make you or your traveling companions motion sick. After I finished my journey, I got land-sickness for a couple of nights after being on the train for so long — I’d wake up and feel like I was still on the train, which was somewhat unpleasant. In general, if you’re traveling in coach you’ll want to pack a blanket and pillow, and whether you’re in coach or sleeper I’d recommend motion sickness medicine and slip-on shoes to walk around the train.

People and places

The best things about the train are the scenery and the people. There’s no better way to see the scope of America. One of the most incredible experiences of my life was waking up in the middle of Glacier National Park in Montana; I saw the sun rise and set on Mount Shasta, the Great Plains, the deserts of Arizona and Utah, and the mountains towering over California’s Inland Empire cities. The scenery in Colorado, Washington, and Montana is the most spectacular, but I also loved the quiet beauty of Mississippi’s wetlands and Wisconsin’s lakes. Slow travel is an almost meditative experience, with nowhere to go or be except to watch the world pass by.

The train is one of the few places in American public life where people really want to talk to each other. It’s also one of the few places where you meet people with a diversity of life experiences (excepting public transit, though most people on the subway and bus don’t want to talk). People who take the train, particularly in coach, are pretty representative of the US.

I had incredible conversations on the train, from learning about the Great Migration and Chicago’s transformation over the last 50 years from a couple who’d experienced it, to hearing about flooding and community in Louisiana from the mostly local passengers and crew on the train to New Orleans, to discussing moving to California by train with a young couple and their kids. Meeting such a diverse group of people and traveling through less-traveled areas of the US was also a sobering experience — the train stops not only in big cities, but in small towns with high poverty and infrastructure in ruins, and regional passengers are often from areas that the United States’ vast wealth has left behind.

Be sure to spend time in the observation car and talk to people — I also talked to people in the coach car, but the observation car is specifically set up for being social.

The train isn’t viable for every journey, but it is a wonderful way to see and learn about all sides of America: the good and the bad, the strange and the beautiful. Long-distance rail may change the way you see the country — I know it did for me.

The lower court found that these factors were met in Merrill, although Alabama makes a plausible argument in its brief that Black voters in Alabama may not live sufficiently close together to justify a second majority-Black district.

But Alabama’s brief does not so much seek a narrow decision holding that it complied with Gingles, as it asks the Court to overrule Gingles and replace it with a new rule that would make it virtually impossible for voting rights plaintiffs to challenge any racial gerrymander. Under Alabama’s proposed test, a map may be struck down only if its configuration “can be explained only by racial discrimination.”

But that is not what Gingles held, and it is not what the text of the Voting Rights Act provides — the Act provides that any state 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 illegal, even if the law was not motivated by racist intent.

But, given this Court’s long record of hostility to voting rights plaintiffs, there is a very real risk that its Republican-appointed majority will accept Alabama’s proposal to effectively legalize most racial gerrymanders.

  1. The end of affirmative action in university admissions

As a general rule, race-conscious policies are not allowed. The Constitution places strict limits on the government’s ability to consider race, and federal anti-discrimination laws impose similar restrictions on private universities.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), however, the Court held that universities may take limited account of race when deciding which students to admit, because ignoring racial diversity would lead to an inferior educational experience for all students. “Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals,’” the Court explained in Grutter.

Nevertheless, two closely related cases — Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — are widely expected to overrule Grutter and forbid universities from considering race even if that will lead to worse outcomes for all of the university’s students.

Affirmative action has already had one close call before the Supreme Court and survived. In Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in Grutter, surprised most Court observers by voting to weaken Grutter, but not to overrule it altogether.

But Grutter was decided by just one vote, and Kennedy and liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have since been replaced by archconservative justices appointed by Trump. So the likelihood that Grutter will survive contact with the current Court is quite small.

  1. Gutting protections for Medicaid patients

Current Medicaid law offers states a bargain. The federal government picks up a significant share of the cost of providing health care to poor people. In return, states and health providers that participate in state Medicaid programs must comply with certain rules intended to protect patients the federal government is helping pay for. State Medicaid plans, for example, must provide coverage to certain individuals, including children and pregnant patients who meet certain income criteria.

That brings us to Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana v. Talevski, a lawsuit that could render much of this bargain unenforceable.

Under current law, the rules governing when individual plaintiffs may sue to enforce federal Medicaid law are quite complicated, but such suits are allowed when states and health providers violate at least some of Medicaid’s requirements. The defendants in Talevski ask the Court to overrule longstanding precedents that permit these suits. If this position prevails, many of these rules could cease to function in Republican presidential administrations, as the federal government would become the only body capable of enforcing them.

Even in Democratic administrations, moreover, the government would likely struggle to keep Medicaid operating as it currently does, because the federal government only has limited resources to police violations of federal Medicaid law. And the ordinary remedy when a state does not comply with the conditions attached to a federal grant is to cut off those funds — something that a pro-Medicaid administration would be reluctant to do because it would mean punishing low-income patients for the sins of a state or health provider.

In a post-Talevski world, in other words, the only way to enforce Medicaid law may be to cut off federal health care funds to the states — which would lead to even more people losing health coverage.

It’s worth noting the immediate stakes in Talevski as well. The plaintiff alleges that her husband, who had dementia, experienced horrid abuse while he was living in a nursing home. Among other things, she claims that the home violated a federal law that prohibited this home from giving her husband “powerful and unnecessary psychotropic medications for purposes of chemical restraint.”

Now, however, the Supreme Court could render this federal law and many others a virtual nullity. And even if the Court finds a middle ground that only neutralizes some of these lawsuits, that would still mean many Americans would be helpless if they are denied care, or given care that falls far below the standard set by federal law.

  1. Who is in charge of ICE?

Federal law provides that the secretary of Homeland Security — currently Alejandro Mayorkas — “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Under this authority, Mayorkas issued a memo instructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to prioritize enforcement efforts against removable immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being” — and, implicitly, to give a lower priority to enforcement against other immigrants.

Nevertheless, Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee with a history of handing down legally dubious orders undercutting the Biden administration’s immigration policies, declared this memo unlawful. Tipton’s order is at odds with the text of federal law, with Supreme Court decisions giving immigration officials broad authority to decide when to enforce the law, and with the basic liberal democratic notion that law enforcement must be under the command and control of political officials who are themselves accountable to someone who is elected.

The US Department of Homeland Security on a window in which is reflected a crowd of protesters. Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A view of the Department of Homeland Security Immigration Field Office, in Philadelphia, in June 2018.

In July, the Supreme Court announced that it would nonetheless permit Tipton’s order to remain in effect while the justices consider the case.

If the Court acts as it did in another recent immigration case, it’s likely a majority of justices will eventually reverse Tipton and restore Mayorkas’s lawful authority over immigration enforcement. But a decision in this case, United States v. Texas, may not come until late June of 2023.

In other words, Tipton is still likely to unlawfully wield many of the powers of the Secretary of Homeland Security for nearly a year.

  1. New limits on the federal government’s power to fight water pollution

The Clean Water Act is not the most precisely drafted statute. It prohibits anyone from discharging a wide range of pollutants into the “waters of the United States,” but does not define what this term means.

While there is broad consensus that oceans, rivers, and lakes qualify, what of creeks or human-made drainage ditches that empty into major waterways? What of wetlands that border a river or lake, or that might be connected to one via creeks or drainage ditches? The Clean Water Act has long been understood to cover at least some of these relatively minor bodies of water, because of the reality that toxic chemicals dumped into a wetland miles away from a navigable waterway do not become less toxic simply because they take some time to make their way into that waterway.

Sackett v. EPA involves a difficult question of whether a wetland, which drains into a tributary, which itself drains into a creek, which in turn empties into a lake, is subject to the Clean Water Act. And it is likely that this Supreme Court will use Sackett to significantly reduce that act’s scope.

The last time the Supreme Court considered which waters constitute “waters of the United States,” in Rapanos v. United States (2006), the Court’s conservative bloc split on how best to define that term, and the Court as a whole split 4-1-4 on how to resolve the case — there was no majority opinion.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion for the four most conservative justices, claiming that the phrase “does not include channels through which water flows intermittently or ephemerally, or channels that periodically provide drainage for rainfall.” Scalia added that wetlands are only subject to the act if they have a “continuous surface connection” with a “relatively permanent body of water” that makes it “difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.”

Justice Kennedy applied a different test, arguing that wetlands can qualify as “waters of the United States” if they “significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other covered waters more readily understood as ‘navigable.’” The federal appeals court that heard Sackett determined that it should apply Kennedy’s test, rather than Scalia’s.

Since Rapanos, however, both Scalia and Kennedy have been replaced by more conservative Trump appointees — as was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined a more liberal dissent in Rapanos. It is fairly likely, in other words, that whatever emerges from this Court in Sackett will be at least as restrictive as the test Scalia announced in Rapanos.

  1. The fight over whether religious conservatives have a constitutional right to discriminate

Religious conservatives have twice sought a sweeping decision from the Supreme Court, holding that they have a constitutional right to discriminate against LGBTQ people. They’ve thus far had mixed success. While the Court has twice ruled in favor of conservative litigants claiming a right to discriminate, it has done so on narrow grounds.

One problem with these litigants’ previous lawsuits is that they presented difficult line-drawing problems. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the plaintiffs’ lawyers tried to reframe a baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex couple as an “artist” who was dragooned into producing a work of art celebrating a marriage he rejects on religious grounds.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court dodged this question, with Justice Elena Kagan noting that this same argument that “artists” have a right to discriminate could permit discrimination by hairstylists, makeup artists, jewelers, and, indeed, pretty much anyone whose job requires a degree of creativity.

Which brings us to 303 Creative v. Elenis, the case currently before the Supreme Court. Unlike a baker, who can only make a tenuous claim that they are engaged in First Amendment protected speech when they bake a wedding cake, 303 Creative involves someone who wishes to design wedding websites — but only for straight couples.

While the exact details of 303 Creative’s website design process might affect how this case should be decided, generally, a website is a medium that uses words to convey meaning, and thus the plaintiffs in 303 Creative present a much stronger case that their business is engaged in First Amendment protected speech than the plaintiffs in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Moreover, the current Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed majority, rarely rules against religious conservatives — even when they present much weaker arguments than the ones presented by the 303 Creative plaintiffs. So it’s not hard to guess who will prevail in this case.

A more uncertain question is whether the Court will hand down a sweeping decision giving many religious conservatives a broad right to discriminate, or whether the Court’s decision will be more limited to the facts of this particular case.

  1. When can states pass laws that impact other states?

As a general rule, states may ban certain products within their borders, and different states can have different rules about which products are banned. Currently, recreational marijuana is legal in Virginia, but illegal just across the border in North Carolina. As a constitutional matter, that’s perfectly fine.

In 2018, California’s voters enacted Proposition 12, which bans the sale of pork produced from hogs confined in a manner that the state law considers to be inhumane. On the surface, this is no different from North Carolina’s marijuana ban. California voters wished to prohibit a certain product from being sold within their state, and they did so.

Nevertheless, in National Pork Producers v. Ross, trade organizations representing the pork industry, allege that Prop 12 violates constitutional safeguards against state laws that burden commerce in other states. The idea is that pork producers in other states will have to either produce all pork in compliance with California’s standards, even if that pork will never enter California, or they will incur significant expense from segregating pork that is destined for the California market from the rest of their operation.

Under existing precedents, a state law’s impact on other state markets needs to be pretty extreme before it becomes unconstitutional. Indeed, a right-leaning appeals court panel rejected the pork producers’ argument, explaining that “laws that increase compliance costs, without more, do not constitute a significant burden on interstate commerce.”

Should the Supreme Court disturb that holding, it could have sweeping implications not just for pork producers and consumers, but for many state laws that impose restrictions on commercial products that go beyond restrictions in other states.

As legal scholars Heather Gerken and James Dawson explained in a 2015 article, states frequently enact such laws. For example, Vermont “required food producers that use genetic modification to disclose this fact on the label of any food sold in that state, even if the producer has no facilities in Vermont. Minnesota has prohibited the purchase of electricity that was generated at new coal-fired power plants, even if those power plants are located outside Minnesota,” they wrote.

One surprising development in this case is that the Biden administration weighed in on the pork producers’ side — although they argue for a narrow ruling that California’s pork law is unconstitutional because it “is aimed at ‘cruelty’ to animals that occurs entirely outside California and has no impact within California.” It’s possible that this is an effort to convince the Supreme Court not to hand down a more consequential decision.

  1. A truly massive case about the legacy of cultural genocide against Native Americans

Finally, the Court will hear a case questioning several foundational principles of US law related to American Indians, and targeting a landmark law enacted in response to many decades of attacks on Indigenous culture.

Since the Washington administration, the Constitution has been understood to give the federal government authority over relations with American Indians. (Federal law and legal opinions often use the word “Indian” to refer to Indigenous nations and their citizens; this piece includes quotes using that terminology.)

For much of its history, the United States used this authority to, as one federal judge described it, “‘Christianize’ the supposedly heathen Native peoples.” Beginning in the 1800s, for example, the federal government forcibly removed many American Indian children from their homes and enrolled them in boarding schools intended to eradicate their connection to their culture.

Bettmann Collection via Getty Images
A group of Native Americans sits on the steps of the US Capitol in protest of discriminatory laws and inaction from Congress on July 17, 1978.

To prevent this and similar attacks on tribal culture, Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978. Among other things, this law says if a state court determines that a child who is either “a member of an Indian tribe” or “is eligible for membership in an Indian tribe and is the biological child of a member of an Indian tribe” must be removed from their home, that the child should be placed with an American Indian family — and, if possible, a member of the child’s extended family or, at least, their own tribe.

The plaintiffs in Haaland v. Brackeen include non-Native American families who have adopted Native American children, and three red states that do not wish to comply with the ICWA’s requirements. They raise several constitutional challenges to the ICWA — challenges that call for a fundamental rethinking of the federal government’s relationship with tribes and with the states, and that could even potentially undercut the government’s ability to regulate the national economy.

All of these claims are at odds with existing law. Again, the ICWA was enacted in 1978, so it’s existed for more than four decades without falling to a constitutional challenge. But the Court’s current majority often treats following established precedents as merely optional, so there’s no guarantee that the ICWA will survive past the end of the Supreme Court’s term next summer.

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