<![CDATA[The Dad Briefs]]>https://dadbriefs.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwUq!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa369951e-f8b8-4f85-943e-ac4610ed3904_150x150.jpegThe Dad Briefshttps://dadbriefs.comSubstackSun, 19 Jul 2026 10:22:12 GMT<![CDATA[They Are Killing US. Here's What We Can Do About It.]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/they-are-killing-us-heres-what-wehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/they-are-killing-us-heres-what-weTue, 14 Jul 2026 16:05:38 GMTYesterday morning, a federal immigration agent shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero at the corner of Hill and Pool streets in Biddeford, Maine. He was 26, a father, from Colombia. Immigrant advocates say he was authorized to work in the United States. He was not even the target of the operation. Sen. Angus King’s office confirmed that with DHS itself, as reported by News Center Maine. A neighbor who heard the shots told the CBC he watched the wounded man pulled from his car, heard him say “I tried to stop.” The agents wore no body cameras. The Maine Attorney General is investigating and the agent is on leave.

Aftermath of a shooting involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Biddeford, Maine
A makeshift memorial, a day after ICE agents fatally shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine, July 14, 2026. Photo by CJ Gunther/ Reuters

Six days before this, an ICE officer in Houston’s Magnolia Park shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three, while he drove his construction crew to a job site. ICE says he tried to ram an officer. The men in his van dispute that account through their attorney. The Harris County medical examiner ruled it a homicide and the county DA has opened an investigation. Those officers wore no body cameras either. The Associated Press called it at least the eighth death in this administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. Biddeford makes at least nine, by Al Jazeera’s count. NBC News, counting the injured alongside the dead, documented 14 people shot by immigration agents between September 2025 and February 2026 alone.

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And that is only the streets. Inside detention, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights documented 52 deaths in ICE custody in the administration’s first 500 days. Their June report, “Dying in Detention,” found the mortality rate has more than doubled, a roughly 140 percent year-over-year increase, the highest level in over a decade even after accounting for the surge in the detained population. Seven people died by apparent suicide in the first year. In 2024, there was one.

Not one agent has been criminally charged in any of these deaths. Capital & Main, which identified several of the shooters through public records, confirmed in March that none had faced charges.

People are dying three ways: shot by agents during street operations, dead in detention from what medical experts describe as delayed or inadequate care, and killed in the chaos surrounding raids. Each category has names. Each category has a paper trail. And each category has a government account that keeps collapsing when evidence surfaces.

Consider Marimar Martinez, a Chicago schoolteacher and US citizen. A Border Patrol agent shot her five times in October 2025 after DHS claimed she rammed his vehicle. Federal prosecutors charged her, then dropped the case in November. When a judge ordered the evidence released in February, bodycam footage showed the agent swerving into her car after another agent said “it’s time to get aggressive.” The government had called her a domestic terrorist. The video defines her as a person driving away. In Minneapolis this January, agents shot and killed two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in separate incidents days apart. In the Marquette Law School poll taken immediately after, 62 percent of Americans said the Good shooting was not justified.

Congress built this

The July 2025 reconciliation law handed ICE roughly $75 billion in new funding, which NPR notes made it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country and doubled its ranks within months. That was part of $170 billion overall for immigration and border enforcement, including $45 billion for detention, a 265 percent annual increase. Then, this June, Congress used reconciliation a second time to add about $70 billion more for ICE and Border Patrol, with no new accountability measures attached, bypassing the appropriations process where oversight strings normally get tied.

The money bought exactly what you would expect. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News the day of the Houston shooting and boasted that ICE had arrested over 10,000 people in five days, a record. “We turned the heat up after we got the reconciliation bill,” he said.

And we must dismantle the “worst of the worst” talking point. Leaked ICE data analyzed by the libertarian Cato Institute shows 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year had no criminal conviction at all. Only 5 percent had a violent conviction. The American Immigration Council found that during the winter enforcement peak, two out of three street arrests were of people with no criminal record. Their data. Their arrests.

Let me take the strongest counterargument seriously, because you will hear it. A majority of Americans still support deporting people convicted of serious crimes, and the Marquette poll found 56 percent favor deporting people here illegally in the abstract. That position is legitimate and deserves a straight answer. The answer is that this is not that. When the same poll asks about people with jobs, years of residence, and no criminal record, support collapses to 44 percent. When Marist asked in late January whether ICE’s actions have gone too far, 65 percent said yes, up from 54 percent last June, and 59 percent called the protests against ICE legitimate. Americans watched Renee Good die and did the math themselves.

The agency doing this is 23 years old. ICE was created in 2003. The country functioned before it existed, with immigration enforcement housed in a civil framework under the INS. Abolition is not lawlessness. It is the position that a young, uniquely unaccountable agency should be dismantled and its legitimate functions rebuilt under real judicial oversight, without mass detention. Warren, Booker, and Gillibrand said versions of this in 2018. Today, 42 percent of Americans support abolishing ICE per Civiqs tracking, up from 24 percent a year ago. Still a minority. A minority that grew 18 points in one year of watching this agency work.

But you did not open this to read a policy history. You opened this because you want to do something. Here is the full menu, every item lawful, every organization vetted.

Protect yourself and your family

Know your rights, physically, on paper. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center prints red cards in over a dozen languages stating your constitutional rights. Order them. Keep them in your wallet, your car, your kid’s backpack. The core rights: you do not have to open your door unless agents have a judicial warrant signed by a judge. An ICE administrative warrant (Form I-200 or I-205) does not authorize entry. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to refuse to sign anything. You have the right to a lawyer.

Save this number: 1-844-363-1423. That is United We Dream’s MigraWatch hotline for reporting and verifying ICE activity.

Make a family preparedness plan. Emergency contacts, caregiver authorization for children, copies of documents with a trusted person. The ILRC publishes a family preparedness plan template, and the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights resources cover what to do during an encounter.

Protect your neighbors

Join or start a rapid response network. These are trained volunteer networks that verify reported ICE activity before publicizing it, document operations on video, and connect families to lawyers. Verification is the discipline that separates these networks from panic machines. Rumors hurt the community; confirmed documentation builds cases. Find your local network through United We Dream or your state immigrant coalition.

Record, from a distance. You have a First Amendment right to film officers in public. You do not have a right to physically interfere, block vehicles, or ignore lawful dispersal orders, and doing so can get you arrested and can get the person being detained hurt. Stand back, film steadily, capture badge numbers if visible, note the time and location, and get the footage to a legal organization rather than posting it raw. Remember what footage did in the Martinez case. Remember that the agents in Biddeford and Houston wore no cameras. Yours may be the only record.

Fund freedom directly. Bond funds get people out of detention while their cases proceed. The National Bail Fund Network coordinates immigration bond funds nationally. RAICES provides legal services and bond assistance. Accompaniment programs send volunteers to court hearings and ICE check-ins so no one walks in alone.

Pressure the system

Go after the contracts. ICE’s reach depends on local cooperation: 287(g) agreements that deputize local officers, and county detention bed contracts. In most states, these can be ended by county boards and sheriffs who answer to voters. Detention Watch Network tracks the contracts.

A word to my Florida readers, because I am one of you. Our state mandates 287(g) participation and bans sanctuary policies outright. The county commission route is closed here. But look at what pressure and litigation just accomplished: the Everglades detention camp is done. The ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and Americans for Immigrant Justice sued over access to counsel and won a preliminary injunction, and DeSantis has now announced the facility’s closure, with the environmental case by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe still moving through the courts. Constraint is real here. Helplessness is a choice. Plug into the Florida Immigrant Coalition, WeCount!, and Americans for Immigrant Justice, and remember which legislators built this machine when you vote.

Call Congress with a specific ask. Not “do something.” Ask your representative to oppose ICE enforcement and detention line items in the next DHS funding fight, to demand oversight hearings on the 52 deaths in custody documented by Human Rights Watch, and to co-sponsor legislation restructuring interior enforcement. Congress just funded these agencies through 2029 with almost no strings. The clawback fight starts now, and it starts with constituents. Specific, local, tied to a vote. That is what moves offices.

Support the litigation. The ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the National Immigration Project, Al Otro Lado, and the National Immigrant Justice Center are challenging courthouse arrests, denial of counsel, racial profiling in stops, and detention conditions right now. Donations fund discovery. Witnesses win cases. If you documented an operation, these organizations want to hear from you.

Show up. Lawful protest works and it is protected. More than a hundred people marched in Houston on Saturday. Biddeford filled its streets within hours yesterday. Learn your local rules, keep your distance from operations, and bring your phone charged.

A note on keeping this real and verifiable

Do not amplify unverified raid videos. Confirm the date, location, and source before you share anything. Old footage recirculated as new hands the government its easiest rebuttal. Never post identifying information about vulnerable people. And do not doxx agents. Beyond the legal risk, it hands them the victim narrative and it has never freed a single person from detention.

The precise truth is damning enough. At least nine dead in enforcement operations, fourteen shot in five months. Fifty-two dead in custody. Zero charges. Seventy-three percent of detainees with no criminal conviction, by the government’s own leaked data.

Print the red card. Save the hotline. Pick one organization from this piece and give it money or hours this week. Then send this to one person who keeps saying they wish they could do something.

They can. So can you.

Sources

Here they are with active links throughout:

Organizations and resources

News reporting and primary documents

]]><![CDATA[The Champagne in the Cabinet]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-champagne-in-the-cabinethttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-champagne-in-the-cabinetSun, 12 Jul 2026 22:02:47 GMTEvery Cuban-American family I knew growing up in South Florida kept a bottle of champagne waiting for the day Fidel Castro died. Nobody talked about it as a celebration of a death. It was a celebration of an end to suffering, of the day the waiting could finally stop.

Senator Lindsey Graham has died, unexpectedly. With all politically attuned eyes on Mitch McConnell’s health, his death felt like some kind of mortal bait-and-switch. And within hours, my feeds filled with creators I respect reacting in ways that ranged from somber restraint to open glee. Some of the same people who had jokes ready for McConnell went quiet. Some found new jokes fast.

Which raises a question: should we celebrate the death of our perceived enemies?

I have three thoughts, and they don’t fully agree with each other. I’d love to know what you think.

Not a good look

Dancing on graves in public never ages well. When we do it, we believe it’s about the person who’s gone. In reality it functions as a reveal of our own character.

That’s my instinct, anyway. But I typed that and immediately thought about the champagne. Nobody looks at an exile family toasting the end of the man who took their country and thinks, what a character flaw. So the rule I just stated can’t be the whole rule.

The self-censor

I have the mind of a comedian. I see the funny in everything, including things I have no business finding funny, and some days it takes strength to rein it in.

So I recognize what a lot of social media posts actually are. People aren’t issuing moral verdicts on a life. They’re sharing the thing that popped into their head that they thought was funny or clever, without much consideration of anything else. I know because I had three of those thoughts before I finished reading the headline. I just didn’t post them.

I’m not sure the difference between them and me is virtue. It might just be brand discipline. That’s an uncomfortable admission, and I’m leaving it in.

A language of the unheard

Dr. King, arguing for nonviolence in “The Other America”, said that a riot is the language of the unheard. I want to be careful here, because that line gets stretched to cover everything, and a snarky post is obviously nothing like a riot. I’m borrowing only the logic.

When people erupt in ways that look counterproductive from the outside, the eruption usually has a history. Some of what looks like verbal violence, or mocking an otherwise somber occasion, is an emotional release with a load of pain behind it. I don’t know what a stranger is releasing when they post the joke I would have judged. Graham’s record touched real lives in ways I can’t inventory from my kitchen counter. So even when I think a reaction is in poor taste, I don’t stand between a person and their catharsis.

What I’ll do

My first instinct says restraint reveals character. My third says withholding judgment reveals character too. Both can’t govern every case, and I think the champagne is what separates them.

The champagne was never about mocking a dead man. It was about the living, about a community marking the end of something that had been done to them. Mockery points at the deceased and asks the room to laugh. Release points at a wound and lets it finally close. From the outside, the two can look identical. From the inside they are not.

I may yet post a joke or two, and I certainly won’t be scolding anyone who does the same. But every time I feel that flash of glee or grief at someone’s passing, 'I’ll ask what the feeling is actually about. If the answer is a wound, I’ll honor it. If the answer is an audience, I’ll sit still.

I’m curious to know your thoughts.

]]><![CDATA[The Standard Cannot Be “Better Than Susan Collins”]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-standard-cannot-be-better-thanhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-standard-cannot-be-better-thanMon, 06 Jul 2026 20:26:26 GMTOn Monday, Politico published an account from Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Graham Platner on and off from 2019 to 2021. She alleges that in late 2021 he entered her home uninvited while intoxicated and forced her to have sex as she repeatedly told him to stop.

Politico interviewed her three times over two weeks. Reporters also spoke with a man she confided in during the years after the alleged assault, and reviewed emails between Racicot and her therapist, along with messages in which she warned an acquaintance about Platner years before he ever ran for office.

My thoughts are with the survivors, and with every person who understands what it costs to make their pain public. Speaking out in these circumstances means risking scrutiny, retaliation, disbelief, and being turned into a talking point by people who have no interest in your humanity. If that is you, and you are reading this, I see you. This piece is written with you in mind.

Platner denies the allegation. He calls it “categorically untrue,” and his campaign says the encounter was consensual. His campaign also says the story was coordinated by out-of-state operatives, and points to its timing, one week before Maine’s ballot deadline. You should read the reporting yourself. The account, the corroboration, and the denial.

Racicot spoke to The New York Times last month. She described Platner’s behavior then as reckless and unsettling, and said nothing about an assault. According to the Politico reporting, she came forward with the full account only after watching the conversation around that Times story collapse into a debate about another accuser’s Republican ties instead of what the accuser actually said. She watched a survivor get turned into a talking point. Then she stepped forward anyway.

Graham Platner should suspend his campaign.

Platner won his primary in June with more than 70 percent of the vote. He beat a sitting governor. A lot of good people in Maine put their hope in him because he talked like someone who understood their lives. That hope was real, but it’s no longer the question.

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If Platner withdraws by 5:00pm on July 13th, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the ballot. Mainers would still have a nominee. They would still have a race. What they would no longer have is a choice between their values and their vote.

You have read here my Susan Collins accountability series for months. I have written about her healthcare votes, her ICE funding votes, her procedural cover for a bill that hurt Maine families. I want that seat flipped as much as anyone writing about politics right now. And the standard still cannot be “better than Susan Collins.” The question is simpler and harder: can this person be trusted with power?

Because here is what authoritarianism actually is — it is domination. It is control, silence, coercion. It is power protecting itself, without conscience. And we cannot build an anti-authoritarian movement by asking women, survivors, and marginalized people to absorb harm in the name of winning.

Our values are foundational. They do not crumble when struck by power. Either accountability applies when it is politically inconvenient, or it was never a value. It was a weapon we pointed at our enemies.

Survivors are not collateral damage in anyone’s fight for political power. Bodily autonomy means freedom from interpersonal violence and freedom from political violence, and those are the same fight. Harm cannot be excused because the polling looks good. Voters deserve a candidate they can organize for without compromising their morals. No exceptions. We cannot ask people to knock doors for bodily autonomy, gender justice, and freedom from state violence while telling survivors that accountability is optional if the accused is on our side.

And to the argument that saying this out loud “helps the right”: ignoring harm helps the right. It proves their favorite claim, that everyone’s values are disposable when power is on the line. The most powerful thing Maine Democrats can do this week is prove that claim wrong.

There is still time for Mainers to choose a leader who can stand against violence in public policy and in personal conduct. There is still time to hold the line and hold the seat. Those were never in conflict.

Pretending they are is a choice.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

]]><![CDATA[American Berry Trifle]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/american-berry-triflehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/american-berry-trifleFri, 03 Jul 2026 15:43:21 GMTFor every generation that experienced the darkest chapters of America, many believed it was the end of our grand experiment.

In 1861, eleven states walked out, and the country went to war with itself. The question on the table was whether the experiment would exist at all. It was the closest we have ever come to the end.

In 1932, a quarter of the country was out of work. Banks failed by the thousands, breadlines wrapped around city blocks, and serious people asked out loud whether democracy could survive an economic collapse. In much of the world that year, it didn’t.

In 1968, we watched the country come apart on live television. Dr. King in April. Bobby Kennedy in June. More than a hundred cities burning, a war losing its last defenders, a convention in Chicago that turned into a street fight.

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The people living through those years had no way of knowing what came next. Emancipation and reunion. The New Deal and the broadest middle class in human history. Civil rights victories that took root and held.

Each of those endings was a beginning. And now is again our time to plant that flag of hope. We are doing the work, and our greatest era is just ahead of us.

This country was made in layers. One generation’s work, then another’s, pressed on top of struggle, holding together sometimes despite itself. Nothing about that process is smooth.

I believe our greatest era lies ahead, given what I see. The volunteers. The poll workers. The teachers three weeks into summer break who are already planning for fall. The neighbors who show up for one another without being asked, in driveways, at school pickup lines, and in church parking lots all over this country.

We are powerful, and we are here.

So this weekend, make something sweet. Feed the people you love.

We will overcome. And we will be overjoyed.

Happy Fourth of July.

American Berry Trifle

INGREDIENTS:

  • 2 pints strawberries, hulled and halved

  • 2 pints blueberries

  • 2 cups blackberries

  • 1/2 cup sugar

  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

  • 1 pound cream cheese, at room temperature

  • 1 pint heavy cream

  • 2 angel food cakes, cut into 1-inch cubes (You can use a premade cake or make it yourself — I make mine from 2 “Duncan Hines Perfectly Moist Angel Food Cake” mix boxes, using two 9x5-inch loaf pans)

DIRECTIONS:

  1. Bake the angel food cakes per instructions and allow to cool completely.

  2. Cut the cakes into 1-inch slices, then cut the slices into 1-inch cubes.

  3. Add sugar and cream cheese to a stand mixer (or a large mixing bowl if using a hand mixer). Beat on medium speed until smooth and light.

  4. Add the cream and beat on high speed until smooth and the consistency of whipped cream.

  5. Arrange half of the cake cubes at the bottom of a 10-13-cup trifle bowl. Sprinkle evenly with a layer of blueberries and blackberries, reserving some for the top.

  6. Dollop half of the cream mixture over the blueberries/blackberries and gently spread to create an even surface. Sprinkle that layer with strawberries, again reserving some for the top.

  7. Layer the remaining cake cubes on top of the strawberries, then dollop the remaining cream mixture over the cubes and gently spread to create an even surface at or near the top of the bowl.

  8. Finish with the remaining blueberries, strawberries and blackberries, arranging them in a decorative pattern. Cover and refrigerate 1 hour.

  9. Enjoy!

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

]]><![CDATA[Candidate Profile: Who Is Abdul El-Sayed, and What Does He Want?]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/candidate-profile-who-is-abdul-elhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/candidate-profile-who-is-abdul-elThu, 02 Jul 2026 13:56:15 GMTMichigan’s open Senate seat is one of the races that decides who runs the chamber. Gary Peters is retiring, the state is a genuine battleground, and the ultimate job in November is to beat the MAGA nominee, Mike Rogers. You cannot do that job well without understanding the three Democrats in the running.

I wrote about Haley Stevens through the lens of her record against Trump. Abdul El-Sayed requires a different lens, because he does not have a congressional record to run on. He has a life, a set of convictions, and a movement, and those are the things worth understanding about him.

So this one is less about a voting scorecard and more about the man. Where he came from, where he stands, who is behind him, and what he would actually do with the seat.

El-Sayed enters race for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat • Michigan Advance

His origin story

El-Sayed, 41, is a doctor and an epidemiologist, the son of an Egyptian immigrant father, raised in part by a stepmother whose family has farmed in Gratiot County since the 1800s. That combination, an immigrant’s son and a rural Michigan family, is a big part of how he talks about the state.

He went to the University of Michigan, captained the lacrosse team, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He won a Rhodes Scholarship, earned a doctorate in public health at Oxford, and took his medical degree at Columbia, where he taught epidemiology and published more than a hundred papers. He is a practicing Muslim.

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At 30, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan made him the youngest big-city health director in the country and handed him a department that had been hollowed out during the bankruptcy. He helped rebuild it, restarting lead testing in schools after Flint and putting glasses on kids who needed them.

He ran for governor in 2018, lost the primary to Gretchen Whitmer, and spent the next years as a CNN commentator, a podcast host, and the author of two books. In 2023 he took over Wayne County’s health department, where his campaign says he canceled up to $700 million in medical debt for around 300,000 residents. He resigned in April 2025 to run for Senate. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist, and their two daughters.

Where he stands among the field

Three Democrats are running, and they sit in three different places.

Stevens is the establishment candidate, backed by Chuck Schumer and Debbie Stabenow, running on a record of getting bills done. Mallory McMorrow casts herself as the next-generation reformer who wants new leadership. El-Sayed is the clear progressive, the candidate of the Bernie Sanders wing, running the same insurgent lane that just swept House primaries in New York and elsewhere this spring. The Intercept framed the race as competing futures for the Democratic Party, and El-Sayed is the future its left is betting on.

He rejects the old left-versus-right map. His own framing is the people who have been locked out against the people doing the locking out. And he draws the line most sharply on money: he takes no corporate PAC dollars, a pledge he has made the center of his identity.

What he’s for

Healthcare as a right. Medicare for All is his signature. He is a doctor who wrote a book on it, and he frames single-payer as the thing that ends the medical debt he spent his last job canceling.

The cost of living. His core line is that it should not be this hard to get by in the richest country on earth. Rent, groceries, childcare, prescriptions. He ties every one of them back to who holds the power.

Taking on the billionaires. He wants to tax extreme wealth, break up monopolies, ban stock buybacks, and overturn Citizens United. This is the oligarchy argument, and it is the through-line of his whole campaign.

Money out of politics. No corporate PAC money, no AIPAC money. He argues you cannot fight concentrated power while taking its checks.

Immigration and ICE. He supports abolishing and replacing ICE, while still backing border security through other means. He has been the loudest voice in the race against the raids and the deaths in custody.

Workers and unions. He backs the PRO Act, has walked picket lines, and says his family’s story would not be possible without the auto industry. The UAW agrees.

Climate and your electric bill. He wants clean air and water treated as a right, and he has a plan to keep AI data centers from driving up utility rates, an issue landing hard across Michigan right now.

Reproductive rights and public health. He is firmly pro-choice, and as an epidemiologist he has been one of the sharpest critics of RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines and research.

Gaza

El-Sayed calls the war in Gaza a genocide, supports an arms embargo, and argues that unconditional military aid should end. He is not out on a limb in saying the word.

In September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the most authoritative UN finding so far. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars had already reached the same conclusion. Two honest caveats belong here. The International Court of Justice, the world court, has not issued a final ruling, and South Africa’s case is still pending. And Israel rejects the charge entirely, calling it a distortion.

On the politics, he is where the party’s voters have gone. Pew found that 80% of Democrats now view Israel unfavorably, up from 69% a year earlier. His stance is also why AIPAC-aligned money has flooded the race trying to stop him. It is his strongest tie to the base, and, in a general election, his most contested question.

Who is with him

Bernie Sanders endorsed him within hours of his launch. The UAW backed him, calling him someone the union can trust. Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen are on board, along with the Working Families Party, National Nurses United, and MoveOn. In late June, Indivisible’s chapters endorsed him with 80% of the member vote, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action gave him its first Senate endorsement ever.

He funds the rest on small-dollar donations, telling Newsweek he was raising more than $24,000 a day without a dime of corporate PAC money. And he is riding real momentum, especially among younger voters. The energy behind him is the same energy that powered the party’s insurgent wing to victory this spring, a generation frustrated with the status quo and hungry for Democrats who fight.

Criticisms

Politico reported in May that he has called himself a physician despite never holding a medical license, with his clinical time amounting to a short hospital rotation. His campaign says he earned the title of doctor twice over and calls it his origin story. His degrees are real, and the public-health record behind them is documented.

And in April he held two campus rallies with streamer Hasan Piker, drawing condemnation from Jewish groups and rival campaigns, especially so soon after a synagogue attack near Detroit. He defended the appearances and rejected what he called platform policing. The controversy coincided with his rise from third place to the front of the field, and Piker later endorsed him.

What is at stake

Whoever wins in August likely faces Mike Rogers, the Trump-endorsed Republican who lost the 2024 race to Elissa Slotkin by a third of a point. National Republicans have already reserved tens of millions to hold the seat, and control of the Senate may run through it.

El-Sayed’s electability argument is straightforward. He says he brings back the young, working-class, Arab, and Muslim voters who drifted away in 2024, and that turnout, not triangulation, is how the seat stays blue. The polling on that is genuinely mixed. Some surveys show him running slightly behind his rivals against Rogers, and his own camp’s polling shows him strongest. It is an open question, and an honest profile leaves it open.

Where do you stand?

My goal with this series is simple. I want you walking into the booth in August (or mailing in your ballot anytime now!) as an informed voter, because the ultimate job in November is to beat Mike Rogers and the authoritarianism he would carry to Washington. You cannot do that job well without knowing the people asking for your vote.

As a dad, I’m aligned with a lot of what El-Sayed stands for: especially the cost of keeping my kids healthy and whether this country still works for families who are not already at the top.

So tell me. Where does El-Sayed land for you, and which of the issues above is actually driving your decision? If you live in Michigan, I especially want to hear it. Leave it in the comments.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

Sources

  • “’I’ve been Abdul my whole life’: El-Sayed talks run for U.S. Senate,” WDET, September 17, 2025 — https://wdet.org/2025/09/17/ive-been-abdul-my-whole-life-el-sayed-talks-run-for-u-s-senate/

  • “Former Michigan health officer Abdul El-Sayed enters Democratic US Senate race,” Michigan Public / AP, April 17, 2025 — https://www.michiganpublic.org/politics-government/2025-04-17/former-michigan-health-officer-abdul-el-sayed-enters-democratic-us-senate-race

  • “The Progressives Propelling Abdul El-Sayed Forward in Michigan,” The American Prospect, May 13, 2026 — https://prospect.org/2026/05/13/progressives-propelling-abdul-el-sayed-forward-michigan-congress-senate/

  • “In Michigan Senate Race, Competing Futures for the Democratic Party,” The Intercept, April 9, 2026 — https://theintercept.com/2026/04/09/michigan-senate-abdul-el-sayed-mallory-mcmorrow-hasan-piker/

  • “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds,” OHCHR, September 16, 2025 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds

  • “US views of Israel, Netanyahu more negative in 2026, especially among young adults,” Pew Research Center, April 7, 2026 — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-views-of-israel-netanyahu-continue-to-rise-among-americans-especially-young-people/

  • “AIPAC using ‘loophole’ to back Stevens in Michigan Dem Senate primary,” Detroit News, May 27, 2026 — https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/27/aipac-loophole-back-haley-stevens-michigan-democratic-senate-primary/90251902007/

  • “UAW endorses Abdul El-Sayed in major boost for Michigan Senate bid,” Detroit Metro Times, June 2026 — https://www.metrotimes.com/news/uaw-endorses-abdul-el-sayed-in-major-boost-for-michigan-senate-bid/

  • “Abdul El-Sayed nabs endorsement from Chris Van Hollen in Michigan Senate race,” The Hill — https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5940973-chris-van-hollen-bernie-sanders-abdul-el-sayed-endorsement/

  • “Abdul El-Sayed nets U.S. Senate endorsement from national, statewide Indivisible branches,” Michigan Advance, June 30, 2026 — https://michiganadvance.com/2026/06/30/abdul-el-sayed-nets-u-s-senate-endorsement-from-national-statewide-indivisible-branches/

  • “Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Senate Candidate Backed by Pro-Palestine Jewish Group,” The Intercept, June 29, 2026 — https://theintercept.com/2026/06/29/abdul-el-sayed-jewish-voice-peace-senate/

  • “Bernie Sanders-Backed Abdul El-Sayed Rakes in Over $24K Per Day While Swearing Off PAC Money,” Newsweek, July 2025 — https://www.newsweek.com/michigan-senate-race-election-abdul-el-sayed-fundraising-2096219

  • “Politico: Abdul El-Sayed Says He’s a Physician But Has No Experience As a Licensed Medical Doctor,” Deadline Detroit (relaying Politico, May 12, 2026) — https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/34569/politico_abdul_el-sayed_says_he_s_a_physician_but_has_no_experience_as_a_licensed_medical_doctor

  • “Political commentator Hasan Piker explains endorsement of El-Sayed for US Senate,” WDET, June 24, 2026 — https://wdet.org/2026/06/24/political-commentator-hasan-piker-explains-endorsement-of-el-sayed-for-us-senate/

  • “The Senate: The Race for the Majority,” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Center for Politics — https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/the-senate-the-race-for-the-majority-is-not-a-toss-up-but-the-races-that-will-decide-it-are/

]]><![CDATA[Whose Bacon Are They Saving? ]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/whose-bacon-are-they-savinghttps://dadbriefs.com/p/whose-bacon-are-they-savingWed, 01 Jul 2026 15:49:09 GMT

Actions you can take are at the bottom of this article!

The House of Representatives passed a bill this spring called the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026. Tucked inside it is a provision called the Save Our Bacon Act. It has nothing to do with saving bacon.

What it would do is let the biggest meat companies in the country ignore state laws about how farm animals are raised. The main target is California Proposition 12, a law that requires pork, eggs, and veal sold in the state to come only from animals given enough room to stand up, lie down, and turn around. For breeding pigs, that means no more gestation crates, the metal stalls barely wider than the animal locked inside them.

California voters approved Prop 12 at the ballot box. Roughly sixty-three percent said yes. The pork industry sued to overturn it, fought all the way up, and in 2023 the Supreme Court upheld it. Having lost with the voters and lost in court, the industry’s allies went looking for the last door left open. They asked Congress to do what the judges would not.

This wasn’t the first try. The same idea has traveled under other names before, the King Amendment and the EATS Act among them, and each version died after bipartisan pushback. Save Our Bacon is the latest coat of paint on an old car.

Who and what it protects

They sell this act like it is a lifeline for small farmers. The small farmers say the opposite.

Ask a hog farmer like Russ Kremer in Missouri, who says the share of farms qualifying for the higher standard has climbed from under ten percent to around forty, with young farmers entering the business and conservative bankers backing the barns. Ask a Pennsylvania farmer named Brent Hershey, who converted his operation, watched his herd get healthier, and now calls the split inside his own industry a civil war in the pig business.

The farmers on his side of that war did the slow, expensive work of meeting the new standard. They built the barns. They earned the market. This bill would devalue every dollar of that investment and hand the advantage back to the largest producers, several of them owned by foreign conglomerates. As one rancher put it plainly, the legislation would pull the rug out from family farms that played by the rules. The people it claims to save are the people it leaves behind.

Bigger than bacon

The reach does not stop at pork. Lawyers at Harvard Law School read the language and found it vague enough to put more than six hundred state and local laws into question. Not every one of them would fall. The trouble is that no farmer, regulator, or shopper would know which ones survive until courts spend years untangling it.

Inside that fog are rules states use to fight animal disease outbreaks like bird flu, food safety standards families count on without thinking about them, and even longstanding bans on horse slaughter. A bill marketed as a fix for one California pork rule turns out to reach into the parts of the food system most of us assume are settled.

An unlikely coalition of resistance

Spend ten minutes on this issue, and you find the strangest table in American politics.

Animal welfare groups oppose the bill. So do independent farmers. So do conservative voices like Tomi Lahren (god help us), along with libertarians and a wing of the MAHA movement that sees it as exactly the kind of corporate carve-out it organized to stop. And then there are everyday voters, the people who actually passed these laws. Polls have long shown that around eighty percent of Americans, nearly even across both parties, want laws like Prop 12 in their own states.

This is one of those rare fights where the line does not run left against right. It runs corporation against citizen.

The pressure is working

The provision cleared the House inside the larger Farm Bill. Then something shifted. As the Senate wrote its own version, the Agricultural Act of 2026, the committee left the Save Our Bacon language out. One of the provision’s own Senate sponsors backed away from it. Sponsors do not abandon their own bills by accident. They do it when enough farmers, voters, and unlikely allies make enough noise that a quiet giveaway stops being quiet.

It is also far from dead. The language can be added back during the Senate’s markup in the weeks ahead, or slipped in later when the House and Senate sit down to reconcile their two bills into one. A provision that is out today can be back tomorrow.

The win is both real and fragile at the same time, and the only thing that keeps it real is steady attention.

What you can do

Stand against the giant meat companies who wrote this bill for their own benefit. The only bacon they are saving is their own profits.

GO TO https://act.link/gi-hllsw782 RIGHT NOW and add your name to the growing list of people supporting American family farmers who have already invested in a better system.

Be kind, feed your mind, and wash your behind.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

Sources

The legislation and the law

Legal and policy analysis

Reporting and commentary

Advocacy organizations

]]><![CDATA[Candidate Profile: Haley Stevens — Picking Fights with Trump]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/midterm-candidate-profile-haley-stevenshttps://dadbriefs.com/p/midterm-candidate-profile-haley-stevensTue, 30 Jun 2026 19:31:06 GMTMichigan has two elections coming that matter well beyond Michigan. In August, Democrats choose a nominee for the U.S. Senate. In November, that nominee meets a MAGA Republican in a race that could decide which party runs the chamber. Gary Peters is retiring, the seat is open, and the road to a Senate majority runs straight through this state.

The Dad Briefs is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a look at one of the Democrats in that primary, Haley Stevens. I’m holding her to a single question here: what has she actually done about Donald Trump’s second term? I’ll take a look at the other candidates later; For now, here is her record, on the merits.

And if you are a Michigan voter, I’d love to know what you think.

Background

Stevens, 42, has represented Michigan’s 11th district, the Oakland County suburbs north of Detroit, since 2019. Before Congress she worked at the Treasury Department as chief of staff to President Obama’s auto rescue task force, the team that steered GM and Chrysler through bankruptcy. She ran a digital manufacturing institute, then flipped a Republican-held House seat in the 2018 midterms.

Haley Stevens announces run for US Senate, becoming the 3rd Democrat seeking to replace Gary Peters • Michigan Advance
Haley Stevens, US Congresswoman from Michigan, 11th District.

In Congress, she is a manufacturing and auto-industry specialist who sits on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and the panel on competition with China. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking, a Vanderbilt and University of Virginia project, rated her the most effective Michigan Democrat in the House last Congress. That is the frame she runs on: a workhorse who moves bills.

The question is what she has done with that skill since January 2025. The answer is a string of bills and resolutions aimed directly at this administration. Here are five.

Blocking troops on American streets

In June 2025, Trump sent active-duty Marines and roughly 2,000 federalized National Guard troops into Los Angeles during protests over ICE raids, over the objection of the governor and local leaders. Stevens responded with the Stop Trump’s Abuse of Power Act, and she is the lead author.

The bill is narrow and direct. It would make it illegal for a president to deploy active-duty forces, or federalize the National Guard, into a state in response to peaceful protest without a request from that state’s governor. The Hill reported it first. When Trump later threatened to send troops to Chicago, Stevens and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi tried to force the same rule into law by attaching it as an amendment to the NDAA, the must-pass defense bill. Republican leaders kept it out, and the guardrail never made the final version. Her line: “We are a nation of laws and it’s about time the President begins to follow them.”

An independent prosecutor for ICE

After two U.S. citizens were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis and a detainee died in custody at a facility in Baldwin, Michigan, Stevens introduced the Hold ICE Accountable Act in March 2026.

The bill would create an independent special prosecutor, modeled on the post-Watergate ethics law, to investigate unlawful conduct by ICE and DHS personnel. The prosecutor would operate outside Trump’s Justice Department, and the bill would strip qualified immunity from indicted officers. Stevens framed it plainly: this is “about accountability for an agency that hasn’t had any.”

Impeaching RFK Jr

In December 2025, Stevens introduced articles of impeachment against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The articles cite his cuts to lifesaving medical research, his restrictions on vaccine access, and his record of spreading conspiracies about vaccines and autism.

This one is worth being straight about. It is a long shot, and it drew friction inside her own party, with House leadership declining to back it. Stevens went ahead anyway. The group Stand Up for Science endorsed the articles, and so did ten Nobel laureates, including chemistry and medicine winners like Jack Szostak, Craig Mello, and Roger Kornberg. “RFK Jr. has got to go,” she said. “I cannot and I will not stand by while one man dismantles decades of medical progress.”

Keeping Musk’s team out of your data

When the administration handed Elon Musk’s DOGE operation access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, the systems that hold Social Security numbers, bank accounts, and tax data for millions of Americans, Stevens used her old Treasury experience to write the response.

The Taxpayer Data Protection Act, which she introduced with Rep. Sean Casten, would bar unauthorized people from those systems and require security clearances, ethics screening, and criminal penalties for violations. More than 140 Democrats signed on. Her argument: an “unelected billionaire with zero government experience should not have access to Americans’ most private data.”

Impeaching Kristi Noem

Stevens also called for the impeachment of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and cosponsored the resolution to do it, citing ICE killings, warrantless home entries, and stonewalling of Congress.

Of her five fights, this is the one with the broadest backing. The Noem resolution drew more than 187 Democratic cosponsors, over three-quarters of the caucus, which you can verify on Congress.gov.

On balance

None of these five initiatives became law. The House is run by Republicans, and bills like these do not get floor votes there. Critics, including some Democrats, call that performative. The fairer read is that Congress is a team sport, and a member in the minority has limited tools, and these are the tools: bills, resolutions, and the public record they create.

Stevens is also a center-left member who takes corporate PAC money, and she has drawn fair criticism for it. AIPAC has significantly backed her campaigns. NBC News reported that she kept $50,000 in PAC contributions tied to Musk’s SpaceX even while building a campaign around opposing him. That is a real tension, and you are entitled to weigh it. I’m not here to tell you she is flawless. I’m here to show you what she has done.

What is on the other side of November

Whoever wins the August primary likely faces Mike Rogers, the former congressman and House Intelligence Committee chair who narrowly lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin and is running again with Trump’s endorsement. Rogers has aligned himself fully with Trump, backs the tariffs that Stevens warns could “crash the auto industry,” and opposed extending the health-insurance subsidies that millions rely on.

That is the choice the fall sets up. A senator who spent this term writing bills to limit Trump’s power, against one who spent it promising to expand it.

Bottom line

I want my kids to grow up understanding that holding the powerful accountable is not somebody else’s job. It is the job. When a president puts soldiers on American streets that did not ask for them, or hands a billionaire the keys to your private data, the question is not whether you find it upsetting. The question is who picks up a pen and tries to stop it.

On this term’s record, Haley Stevens has picked up the pen several times. If you live in Michigan, you get to decide what that is worth.

And I’d like to know what you think.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

Sources

]]><![CDATA[On Transgender Youth in Sports]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/on-transgender-youth-in-sportshttps://dadbriefs.com/p/on-transgender-youth-in-sportsTue, 30 Jun 2026 16:46:08 GMTBecky Pepper-Jackson runs cross-country and track in Bridgeport, West Virginia. This past May, she won a girls’ state championship in the shot put. She has identified as a girl since the third grade. She is, by every account I can find, the only openly transgender student athlete in her entire state.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that her state can keep her off the team.

The Dad Briefs is a reader-supported. If this resonates and you want more delivered to you, please subscribe.

The decision came in two consolidated cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the Idaho case brought by Lindsay Hecox. The vote was 6 to 3. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. States, the Court held, may bar transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports.

You will see this headline everywhere today. It is true. It is also incomplete, and it will cost many a needed clarity.

Two questions, two different answers

Every challenge to these sports bans rested on two separate legal arguments. The first was Title IX, the 1972 law banning sex discrimination in schools that take federal money. The second was the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the constitutional promise that government will treat people equally under the law.

The Court answered those two questions differently.

On Title IX, the justices were unanimous. All nine of them, including the three dissenters, agreed that these state bans do not violate Title IX. Kavanaugh grounded that in a 1974 amendment and the regulations that have long allowed schools to field separate teams by sex.

On the Constitution, the Court divided 6 to 3 along familiar lines. The majority held that sorting teams by what it called biological sex is a reasonable sex-based classification, and leaned on last year’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti to get there. Kavanaugh wrote that asking judges to weigh each transgender athlete’s individual advantage would be, in his words, “an almost impossible task for a judge to perform on an equitable basis.”

The gap between those two answers is the part worth understanding. It comes down to what the Court chose not to decide.

Talking About Transgender Youth Participation in Sports - Movement Advancement Project

The door left open

The Court did not ban transgender girls from sports. It ruled that states may ban them without violating Title IX or the Constitution.

Twenty-one states, including California and New York, currently let transgender girls compete on girls’ teams. The Court left every one of those policies standing. It declined to decide whether inclusive policies violate anyone’s rights. That question is still open.

The unanimous Title IX holding is why this matters. Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center put it plainly: Title IX does not require states to exclude transgender athletes. A state that includes them is following federal law. A state that bans them is also following federal law. The Court handed the decision back to the states and, for now, left both choices on the table.

That has a direct consequence. The federal government has been arguing it can pull funding from schools that include transgender athletes. This ruling does not hand it that power. As Patel noted, the administration cannot rewrite civil rights law on its own.

Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, still called the day a “devastating setback” for Title IX, and she is right about the harm. The line that held is narrow. It is also real, and people defending inclusive policies in their own states will be standing on it tomorrow.

The dissenters view

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, something justices do only when they want the country to hear it. She agreed the Title IX claim failed. She broke hard with the majority on the Constitution.

Her objection was about process as much as outcome. The majority, she wrote, settled a hard question without letting the facts develop, denying Becky Pepper-Jackson the chance to prove that a girl who never went through male puberty raises none of the competitive concerns the law claims to address. “Unjustified sex-based discrimination inflicts injury to personal dignity,” Sotomayor wrote, “regardless of the number of individuals affected.” She closed with a line worth sitting with. “Sports, of course, are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to object that the majority reached further than it had to when it declared that the word sex in Title IX cannot mean anything beyond birth sex. Title IX, she wrote, “makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose.”

The majority, for its part, did not write cruelly. Kavanaugh wrote that no athlete on either side “deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” and that a transgender athlete’s “desire to compete warrants respect.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, was blunter. “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls,” he wrote, “even if they believe that they are.”

This is about our kids

I think of Becky Pepper-Jackson, and to Lindsay Hecox, and Rebekah Bruesehoff (who I had the pleasure of meeting at a Supreme Court rally last January), because the law reads clean as an abstraction yet hard as a fact about kids.

Strip away this case and you have a high schooler who is good at shot put, or field hockey, on a team, doing the ordinary work of growing up next to other kids. That is the thing at stake.

At a Senate hearing in late 2024, the head of the NCAA was asked how many of the roughly 510,000 college athletes in America are transgender. His answer was fewer than ten. The effort spent reaching the people inside that number has been enormous. The number itself has stayed very small.

I have written before that when we slow down and picture a specific kid, not a debate, not a headline, just a kid, the questions get simpler. They did not get simpler at the Court today. They are still simple at the kitchen table, where a parent looks at the child in front of them and decides whether that child deserves to belong.

Twenty-seven states will now keep their bans. Twenty-one will keep their doors open. The Court told us where the line sits. It did not tell us which side to stand on.

That part is still ours.

Sources

The ruling itself

  • The slip opinion, West Virginia v. B.P.J., No. 24-43, consolidated with Little v. Hecox, No. 24-38, 609 U.S. ___ (U.S. Supreme Court, June 30, 2026). Majority opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett; concurrences by Thomas and Gorsuch; Sotomayor concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, joined by Kagan and Jackson; Jackson filing separately.

Reporting on the decision

  • NBC Washington and the Associated Press, “Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender athletes in girls and women’s sports,” June 30, 2026. Source for the 6-3 constitutional holding alongside the unanimous Title IX finding.

  • The Hill on the ruling, “Supreme Court upholds transgender athlete bans in schools,” June 30, 2026. Source for the 6-3 ideological split and Kavanaugh’s controlling passage.

  • Fox News sports desk, “Supreme Court upholds West Virginia, Idaho transgender sports bans 6-3,” June 30, 2026. Source for the opinion lineup and state attorney general statements.

  • CBS News coverage, “Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports,” June 30, 2026.

  • Forbes legal coverage, “Supreme Court Upholds Bans On Transgender Women In Sports,” June 30, 2026.

  • Bloomberg Law analysis, “Supreme Court Lets States Ban Trans Athletes in Female Teams,” June 30, 2026.

Reaction from advocates

  • National Women’s Law Center, statement of Fatima Goss Graves and Shiwali Patel, June 30, 2026. Source for the “devastating setback” framing and the point that Title IX does not require excluding transgender athletes. (Add direct press-release link.)

  • Human Rights Campaign press release, statement of Kelley Robinson, June 30, 2026. Notes the ruling is not a nationwide ban and that the Court declined to set a level of scrutiny.

  • GLAD Law statement, “States May Ban Transgender Girls from Girls’ Sports; Inclusive Policies Remain Legal,” statement of Jennifer Levi, June 30, 2026.

  • American Civil Liberties Union, statement of Joshua Block, June 30, 2026. The ACLU represented both plaintiffs. (Add direct press-release link.)

  • Lambda Legal, statement of Sasha Buchert, June 30, 2026. (Add direct press-release link.)

  • The Trevor Project, statement of Jaymes Black, June 30, 2026. (Add direct press-release link.)

Context and data

  • U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, hearing testimony of NCAA President Charlie Baker, December 2024. Source for “fewer than 10” transgender athletes among roughly 510,000 in the NCAA.

  • Movement Advancement Project, tracking of state laws restricting transgender athletic participation. Source for the count of states with bans and states with inclusive policies.

]]><![CDATA[We're Still Here]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/were-still-herehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/were-still-hereSun, 28 Jun 2026 21:23:09 GMTCarla and I have difficulty picking a movie to watch; we have such different tastes. She has no interest in science fiction, or aliens, or space movies. (She’s never seen Star Wars!) But she loves true crime, spy thrillers, and anything with Jason Statham or Denzel Washington. I mean, who can blame her?

On a couple of occasions, we’ve picked films from Brazil, which I love because she can feel comfortable listening in her first language. I stay focused on the subtitles, learning a little more Portuguese, and realizing that our worlds aren’t so different.

Recently, we watched Ainda Estou Aqui, or I’m Still Here.

Ainda Estou Aqui (2024) - IMDb

It is the first Brazilian film to win an Academy Award, which it did in 2025 for Best International Feature. Fernanda Torres won a Golden Globe for her leading role.

FILM PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD

It tells the true story of Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, was a former congressman whose seat was stripped after Brazil’s 1964 military coup. He kept living his life in Rio, working as an engineer, quietly helping people the regime wanted to disappear. In January 1971, men claiming to be officials took him from his home in front of his family. He was tortured and killed within days. His body was never returned. Eunice was held for nearly two weeks, then released into a silence the state expected her to accept.

She did not accept it. She went to law school in her late forties, became a fierce advocate for Indigenous land rights, and spent twenty-five years forcing her own government to admit, on paper, that it had killed her husband.

Here is some background on what kind of government that was:

A 1964 coup removed the elected Brazilian president, João Goulart. The United States backed that overthrow. Through a contingency plan called Operation Brother Sam, the Johnson administration positioned a naval task force off the Brazilian coast, fuel and ammunition ready, to support the generals if they needed it. They did not. The coup succeeded on its own, and Washington recognized the new regime almost immediately.

What followed got worse over time. In December 1968, the regime handed itself Institutional Act Number Five, which erased the last legal limits on its power. Brazilians call the era that followed the anos de chumbo, the years of lead. The state ran torture centers like the DOI-CODI, the same apparatus that killed Rubens Paiva.

Brazil’s National Truth Commission, which reported in 2014, put numbers to the damage. It documented 434 people killed or forcibly disappeared, 191 killed outright and the rest vanished without a trace. It found that more than eight thousand Indigenous people died as a direct result of state action, and judged the real Indigenous toll to be far higher. It named 377 agents as responsible. More than twenty thousand people were tortured.

Not one of those agents has ever gone to prison. A 1979 amnesty law, passed by the dictatorship on its way out the door, still shields them. That is the part to sit with. Brazil wrote down exactly what happened, then arranged to punish no one for it.

Brazil was not alone. Across the Southern Cone, the “disappeared” became a method. Take a person, hold them in secret, leave no body. The family cannot mourn, cannot bury anyone, cannot prove a crime occurred.

In Argentina’s Dirty War, the junta perfected it. Soldiers drugged prisoners and threw them from planes into the ocean, the death flights. They stole babies born to women in captivity and gave them to other families to raise. Human rights groups count as many as thirty thousand people who vanished this way. The grandmothers and mothers of those children still march in the Plaza de Mayo, decades on, holding photographs of faces the state tried to erase. In Chile, official truth commissions later counted tens of thousands tortured under Pinochet. The absence was the point. It was designed to make grief impossible and accountability harder.

In the film, there is one scene that washed over me.

It is 1996. Eunice has finally won the death certificate she spent decades chasing. Reporters surround her at the courthouse. One of them asks, “After the return of democracy, doesn’t the government have more urgent issues than fixing the past?”

“No,” she says.

“I think it’s absolutely necessary to compensate the families and do the most important thing, clarify and judge all crimes committed during the dictatorship. Otherwise, they will continue to be committed with impunity.”

END OF PLOT SPOILERS

It would be comforting to think every Brazilian agrees with her. They do not. Former president Jair Bolsonaro called a torturer a hero, the colonel who ran one of the regime’s most notorious interrogation centers. He has said the dictatorship’s error was torturing when it should have killed. Forty years after the generals left, Brazil still struggles to look its own history in the eye, because powerful people would rather it didn’t.

As I watched the film’s third act, the familiarity of this washed over me.

Most of the deepest problems in the United States come from a past we never finished. Our history books say we ended slavery, but we let racism get woven into our institutions, through redlining, through housing, through a justice system that still sorts people by color, and then we act surprised when the pattern repeats. We allowed the South to raise statues to men who took up arms against the United States, most of them put up not in mourning but during Jim Crow and again as a backlash to the civil rights movement.

Germany did the opposite. After the war, it did not build monuments to its worst people. It honored its victims instead, turned camps into places of memory, and set small brass stones into its sidewalks so that you cannot walk through a German city without reading the name of someone the state murdered. No reckoning is perfect, but we can see what a functional one looks like when a country decides to grow up.

We are not doing that. We are going the other way.

Right now in America, agents are taking people off the street and out of their homes for what they said. A lawful permanent resident named Mahmoud Khalil was held for months without a criminal charge, on a government theory a federal judge found likely unconstitutional and far too vague to justify locking a man away. He missed the birth of his first child while he sat in a detention center in Louisiana.

He is not the only one. Mohsen Mahdawi, another Columbia green-card holder, was arrested at his citizenship interview, handcuffed by masked agents as he signed the paperwork to pledge allegiance to the Constitution. The judge who ordered him released compared the moment to the McCarthy era. Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts, was taken off a Somerville sidewalk by plainclothes agents and flown to that same Louisiana facility, held six weeks over an op-ed she co-wrote in her student paper. A federal judge in Boston later ruled that the policy of arresting scholars like her violated the First Amendment.

These are not isolated mistakes. By the government’s own count, more than a thousand students have had visas revoked or legal status terminated, and the Secretary of State has said he signs the revocations daily. The mechanism is older than this administration, and Eunice Paiva would have recognized it from fifty years and a continent away. You make a person disappear from their ordinary life, and you dare the rest of us to look away.

So no, we have no more important thing to do. There is no version of a healthy USA that is built on top of graves that we pretend aren’t there.

If we want to still be here, in any sense worth the words, we reckon honestly with what is happening right now, while it is happening. And we vote for the people who understand that accountability is an absolute priority.

Carla still won’t watch Star Wars.

That’s fine.

She already knows the work we rebels must do.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way.

Sources

]]><![CDATA[Keep Them at the Table]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/keep-them-at-the-tablehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/keep-them-at-the-tableFri, 26 Jun 2026 17:05:23 GMTThe message opened with, “I know I am just a stranger …”

It came from a couple who had just gotten married recently. Both of them had lost their fathers. One died ten years ago, the other three years back. Their mothers walked them down the aisle. They made sure their dads were in the room anyway. A locket pinned to a dress. And a pocket watch that had belonged to one of their fathers, the watch part taken out, a photo of the other’s dad set in its place.

They wanted to know if I’d share the kind of words a father gives a child on a wedding day. The ones their dads would have said. They signed off, “Thanks for being a good dad.”

I read it a few times.

I write about civics most days, with a recipe alongside—policy, power, who’s lying, and who’s paying for it. But the name on the masthead is The Dad Briefs, and every so often somebody takes that literally and asks me to be one. They didn’t want my take on anything. They wanted what they couldn’t get from the people who were supposed to give it, because those people are gone.

I won’t pretend the words I send can stand in for the ones they lost. But the ask itself was the highest honor a dad can get, and I wasn’t about to ignore it.

Here is most of what I wrote back:

Hi,

I read your message a few times. Congratulations to you both. June 6th is yours now. (It’s also my youngest son’s birthday.)

I’m sorry your dads couldn’t be in the room with you. I don’t believe they missed it, though. Your moms walked you down the aisle, and your fathers came too, in the locket on the dress and in that pocket watch housing, a place where time used to tick, now stilled with a father’s memory. I’ve rarely heard of anything more beautiful.

Be proud. Just of who you are. Together.

A marriage isn’t built on one big “I do.” It gets built on a thousand small ones, on ordinary days when no one is watching and nothing feels particularly important. Keep choosing each other on those days most of all.

Be gentle with each other when things are hard. Be the first to apologize. Don’t keep score. Let the small stuff stay small.

You’ve had practice at loving each other through loss. Hold onto that. It’s a big deal.

Carry your dads forward now. You two are their keepers. Tell their stories, cook their food, laugh their laughs. Keep them at the table.

Welcome to married life. Your fathers would be proud of the people you’ve become.

For what it’s worth, so am I.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

]]><![CDATA[Brain Food, for Thought]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/brain-food-for-thoughthttps://dadbriefs.com/p/brain-food-for-thoughtMon, 22 Jun 2026 20:13:14 GMTCollards and Swiss chard, wilted down in olive oil with shallot and garlic, simmered in vegetable stock, finished with apple cider vinegar. Cheesy grits underneath.

How much hot sauce on your greens or seasoning in your grits? That’s your call. It’s your kitchen, your table.

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center followed nearly a thousand older adults for five years and found that one serving of leafy greens a day was associated with cognitive function equivalent to being eleven years younger. The nutrients doing the work are vitamin K, lutein, folate, and beta-carotene. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, conducted at a research university.

This is what science produces. The internet. Google, which started as an NSF grant at Stanford. The MRI. PCR tests. CRISPR. The Doppler radar in your weather app. The algorithm that matches kidney donors with recipients. The three-point seatbelt. Narcan. Ozempic. All of it rooted in publicly funded university research that nobody notices until someone tries to take it away.

Right now, somebody is trying to take that away.

Both Sides of Their Mouths

The people leading the demolition of American higher education built their careers on it.

JD Vance: Yale Law School. Yale Law Journal. Mentored by Yale professor Amy Chua, who helped him write Hillbilly Elegy. He now calls universities “the enemy.”

Ron DeSantis: Yale undergraduate, Harvard Law. Those credentials appeared on every campaign document he ever produced. His governorship banned majors in critical race theory, gender studies, queer theory, and intersectionality, engineered a hostile takeover of New College of Florida, and drove over 1,800 faculty out of the University of Florida in a single year.

Tom Cotton: Harvard, twice, magna cum laude. Called for defunding curricula tied to the 1619 Project and wanted the National Guard deployed to Columbia.

Josh Hawley: Stanford with highest honors, Yale Law, Yale Law Journal articles editor, Yale Federalist Society president, clerked for Chief Justice Roberts. Now supports dismantling the Department of Education.

Ted Cruz: Princeton, Harvard Law. He called universities "the most totalitarian institutions in America.

Elise Stefanik: Harvard. She toppled three university presidents in a December 2023 congressional hearing, then published a book this spring calling Harvard “the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education” and calling to cut off its federal funding. Harvard, whose name she has attached to her identity for her entire public career.

Christopher Rufo engineered the anti-DEI campaign behind Trump’s executive orders, the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, and the New College takeover. His official bio lists a master’s from “Harvard University.” It’s from Harvard Extension School, an open-enrollment online program whose credits Harvard College does not accept. Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild called it “weasel words to try to attach himself to Ivy status and prestige.”

Historian Jeremi Suri put it plainly in 2021: “It is impossible to imagine their careers without the prestige and networks of elite universities.” They used those doors. Now they’re trying to close them.

Details of the Demolition

On April 24, 2026, the White House dismissed the entire 22-member National Science Board by email. “Terminated, effective immediately.” The NSB was established by Congress in 1950. It oversees the National Science Foundation, which has produced or seeded nearly every foundational technology Americans depend on today. Thirteen former NSF directors and board chairs, from both parties, wrote to demand restoration of leadership. Their letter noted that for the first time in history, China is investing more in research and development than the United States. The letter has not been answered.

The Dad Briefs is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The FY2027 budget proposes cutting NSF by more than half. Congress rejected the same proposal last year. It’s back.

At NIH, 777 grants worth $1.9 billion were terminated. A peer-reviewed analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine found 383 clinical trials affecting more than 74,000 enrolled patients had been interrupted mid-study. Among the research frozen in the Harvard funding dispute, later ruled unlawfully blocked by a federal court: tuberculosis, ALS, NASA astronaut radiation exposure, and a model to help VA emergency physicians decide whether to hospitalize suicidal veterans.

They want to eliminate the program that has helped millions of poor kids become the first in their family to go to college. They’ve already started.

The GSA proposed requiring every university to certify compliance with the administration’s anti-DEI orders, with personal criminal liability under the False Claims Act for whoever signs.

The American Council on Education’s Jon Fansmith noted: “They’re saying we won’t just deny you the ability to participate in federal programs. We’re going to go after your CEO or CFO or general counsel personally.”

The Yale Study

The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education released a serious report this spring, and it’s worth using honestly. Public confidence in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024. The committee found that colleges bear real responsibility: tuition too high, admissions too opaque, speech culture too chilled. They were right.

The report also found that community colleges are the most trusted part of higher education. Public universities rank above private ones. No sector faces more skepticism than the Ivy League.

The institutions under the most sustained political attack right now — TRIO programs, public HBCUs, minority-serving institutions, community college pipelines — are the ones Americans trust most. The demolition crew isn’t targeting the institutions that earned the public’s frustration. They’re targeting the ones that serve the public that doesn’t have another option.

It’s extraction over reform.

Food for Thought

The greens wilt fast — a few minutes in a hot Dutch oven with olive oil, shallot, and garlic, then simmered in vegetable stock until tender. Vinegar at the end lifts the whole thing. The grits take ten minutes, finished with milk and sharp cheddar. Hot sauce on the table. Everyone seasons their own bowl.

The cook made something nourishing. The family decides the rest.

The government has no business walking into your kitchen and telling you how to season your grits. It has no business walking into a classroom, a research lab, or a university and dictating which ideas are permitted, which studies can be funded, which histories can be taught.

Colleges aren’t perfect. But the solution to an imperfect institution is to make it better, not to hand the wrecking ball to people cashing in on degrees they spent their whole careers borrowing credibility from.

Stock the pantry. Don’t lock the cupboard.

Eat your greens.

Greens and Grits

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

FOR THE GRITS

  • 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

  • 1 cup quick-cooking (5-min) grits

  • ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

  • ½ cup whole milk

  • ½ cup shredded Cheddar cheese (3 ounces)

  • Salt, to taste

FOR THE GREENS

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil

  • 1 shallot, minced

  • 2 garlic cloves, minced

  • Pinch of red-pepper flakes

  • 1 bunch collard greens (12½ ounces), stems removed, leaves cut into 1-inch pieces

  • 1 bunch Swiss chard (10 ounces), leaves and stems cut into 1-inch pieces

  • Salt and black pepper, to taste

  • 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock

  • 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

  • Hot sauce, to serve

Directions:

  1. Make the grits: In a medium saucepan, heat the vegetable stock and 2 cups water over medium-high until boiling. Once boiling, slowly pour in the grits while whisking to reduce lumps. Once the grits come to a boil, reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook, whisking frequently, until thickened, 5 to 8 minutes.

  2. Remove the pan from the stove. Season the grits with the pepper, then stir in the milk and cheese until the cheese melts. Season to taste with salt. Set aside and cover to keep warm.

  3. Meanwhile, make the greens: Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot over medium-high. Add the shallot and garlic, and cook, stirring often, until softened, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the red-pepper flakes, collards, and chard. Toss to combine until wilted, 3 to 5 minutes. Season with salt, add the vegetable stock, and bring to a simmer.

  4. Reduce the heat to maintain a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the greens are very tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the vinegar, and season again to taste with salt and pepper. Divide the grits among plates and top with the greens and a dash of hot sauce.

Kitchen Counter Civics is a series where I cook something and break down complex issues. Both of these activities are better when you take your time.

Sources:

Morris MC et al., “Nutrients and bioactives in green leafy vegetables and cognitive decline,” Neurology 2018

Patel VR, Liu M, Jena AB, “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health,” JAMA Internal Medicine, Nov. 2025

Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, April 2026

NSF Impacts (nsf.gov/impacts)

Association of American Universities briefing on NIH grant terminations

NPR, Reuters, Higher Ed Dive, Inside Higher Ed.

]]><![CDATA[A Dad with No Chill ]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/a-dad-with-no-chillhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/a-dad-with-no-chillSun, 21 Jun 2026 20:13:47 GMTHappy Father’s Day to all of you.

This morning I read the Sunday paper cover to cover, and now I’m full of perspective.

I find myself thinking about how I grew up, in a deeply unstable family.

My dad was a brilliant journalist. At 28, he became the youngest newspaper editor in the US. He was also a violent alcoholic and drug addict who never resolved his childhood traumas. He wanted very badly to be a good man and a loving father. And he was, some of the time.

But it was my mom who was the consistent force in our lives. She protected us. She saw us through the ups and the downs. To this day, when I ask her about it, she says she has no idea how we survived it all.

The Dad Briefs is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When it comes to being a dad or a mom, perspective can be a tall order.

Seems like we’re always dealing with the day-to-day, the immediacy of things. Underneath all of that, there’s a worry about how the world is going to shape our kids.

I think we’re at our best when we let go of that and watch our kids shape their own worlds.

My oldest is starting college in the fall. So this summer is a season of letting go. Carla went through that same letting go with her oldest years ago. The tears still flow over it from time to time.

So yeah. When it comes to our kids, we usually have very little perspective. No chill whatsoever.

You will never convince me that I’ve done enough as a dad.

But in those moments when I do have a little perspective ... it’s not really about me anyway, is it?

So, give yourself grace, dads (and moms).

You’re doing OK.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom.

]]><![CDATA[The Cynicism of Truth]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-cynicism-of-truthhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-cynicism-of-truthFri, 19 Jun 2026 16:49:00 GMTSomeone replied to one of my posts with a version of a comment I have seen making the rounds all month:

Juneteenth is the biggest victory of the Republican party. The Republicans beat the racist Democrats who wanted to own people, but the Republicans refused. The Democrats still want to control you today, and celebrating Juneteenth is a great reminder. Thank you, Republican Party, from the Black community and all communities.

Bless your heart.

Oscar Wilde gave us the line in Lady Windermere’s Fan. A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I think about that line when these comments arrive, because they run on a kind of cynicism of truth. They take real facts, strip the values out of them, and hand you back the empty labels.

In the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Republican Party was the party of emancipation, and the Democratic Party was the party of the slaveholding South. For generations after, Black Americans voted Republican, because Republicans had ended slavery and written Black citizenship into the Constitution.

The Dad Briefs is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

These party labels remain, but the values that underpin them have shifted.

Consider what geologists call the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal: about 780,000 years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field flipped, and north became south. It did not happen in a morning. It unfolded over a span long enough that you only see it when you stand back far enough. Political parties move the same way. The name on the door stays the same while the house behind it gets rebuilt room by room.

Follow the two parties from the Civil War to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and you watch the values trade places. The historian Heather Cox Richardson traces this arc in To Make Men Free, her history of the Republican Party.

It started to turn in 1936, when Black voters began moving to the Democratic Party after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It broke open in the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is said to have told an aide that he had just lost the South for a generation. He was right.

That same year, Republican Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act as federal overreach. According to Britannica, he lost the election to Johnson in a landslide and still carried his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South, the first crack in a region that had been Democratic since the Civil War.

What followed has a name. Historians call it the Southern Strategy. Richard Nixon and his strategist Kevin Phillips sharpened an appeal to white Southern resentment of civil rights, and over the following decades the South moved from the solid Democratic South to a solid Republican one. The scholarly consensus is that racial conservatism sat at the center of that realignment, though historians still debate the finer points.

The people who built the strategy did not hide what it was. Kevin Phillips, the man who helped design it, grew disaffected and left the Republican Party to become an independent and one of its sharper critics. Lee Atwater, who went on to chair the Republican National Committee, described in a 1981 interview how the party had learned to trade open racial slurs for abstract language about busing, states’ rights, and taxes, language that did its work without ever naming race. Before he died of a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater apologized in public for the politics he had practiced.

Strom Thurmond tells the shortest version of the whole story. He ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist Dixiecrat against his own Democratic Party. In 1964, he switched to the Republican Party and stayed there for the rest of his long career. The man did not change his views. He changed his label.

So here is the thing worth noticing. When you praise the Republican Party of Lincoln’s day, you are praising a party that used the power of the federal government to end slavery, extend citizenship, and protect the right to vote. You are praising the values of liberalism.

Ain’t that something.

Take it from this independent. I care less about which team gets the trophy than about what we can agree the trophy was for.

I want the commenter above to live a rich, free, and fulfilling life. That is the same wish the people who ended slavery had for the people they freed. It is the wish I have for my sons, and the one I have for you.

Look up the Solid South. Look up the Southern Strategy. Take the deeper dive.

And bless the freedom you have to do it.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

]]><![CDATA[What Are We Going to Do About Susan Collins? ]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/what-are-we-going-to-do-about-susanhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/what-are-we-going-to-do-about-susanThu, 18 Jun 2026 18:56:45 GMTA few weeks ago, I published a piece asking a straightforward question about Graham Platner, the Democrat running against Susan Collins in Maine’s 2026 Senate race.

The responses came fast.

“He’s not perfect, but he’s better than Susan Collins.”

Susan Collins and Graham Platner spar over Iraq War claims

I hear that. Further, I want to meditate on the second half of that sentence for a moment — because “better than Collins” has become a kind of shorthand that lets her off the hook. And Susan Collins has been off the hook for a long time.

She has served in the United States Senate since 1997. That is 29 years. When she took her seat, a dozen eggs cost 99 cents, a gallon of gas ran about $1.24, and the median home price in Maine hovered around $87,000. Netflix was mailing DVDs. Titanic was number one at the box office. AOL had just launched instant messenger.

That was the world Susan Collins entered as a United States Senator.

Here is the world she has helped shape since:

The Brand and the Record

Collins has built her reputation on a single word: bipartisan. It appears more than 2,600 times on her official Senate website. She is routinely cited in Washington as one of the most independent Republicans in the chamber. The Lugar Center has ranked her among the most bipartisan senators for years running.

The numbers from the 119th Congress tell a more complicated story.

If these stories resonate with you, I’d love to deliver them directly to your email inbox and ask that you support my work at any level you can, free or paid. Thank you.

According to CQ Roll Call’s 2025 Vote Studies, Collins supported Donald Trump’s position 94.6 percent of the time last year. That is not a figure from a Democratic opposition research shop. CQ Roll Call is one of the most respected nonpartisan trackers in Washington. PolitiFact rated the “95 percent” characterization “Mostly True” in June 2026.

To be precise: she ranks as the third-least-Trump-aligned Republican in the Senate, behind only Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski. In a body where most Republicans vote with Trump virtually every time, that distinction is real. But “least aligned” in that context still means voting with him roughly 19 out of every 20 times.

The honest question is not whether she breaks with Trump. She does, occasionally. The question is when, and whether it changes anything.

The Pattern

Collins has a consistent pattern in the 119th Congress. She registers concern. She announces opposition. She votes no — after the outcome is already determined, or after providing the procedural vote that made the outcome possible.

The clearest example: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

On June 28, 2025, Collins voted yes on the motion to proceed — the procedural step that brought the bill to the Senate floor for a final vote. That motion passed 51 to 49. Her vote was part of the majority that cleared the path. Three days later, on July 1, she voted no on final passage. The bill passed anyway, 51 to 50, on Vice President Vance’s tie-breaking vote.

She called the bill’s Medicaid cuts harmful. She said they were “not sufficient” protections for Maine’s rural hospitals. She was right about that. And she voted to open the door anyway.

This is the pattern. Not secret collaboration. Not cynical theater, exactly. Something more structurally frustrating: independence calibrated to be visible without being decisive.

What It Costs Maine

The One Big Beautiful Bill is not an abstraction for Maine families.

Approximately 400,000 Mainers — nearly a third of the state’s population — rely on Medicaid and MaineCare. That includes roughly 190,000 children, and about 75 percent of Maine nursing home residents. Maine’s own Department of Health and Human Services estimates the law will cost the state $5 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade.

Four rural Maine hospitals have been identified as at risk of closure: Northern Light A.R. Gould in Presque Isle, Maine Coast Memorial in Ellsworth, Cary Medical Center in Caribou, and Calais Community Hospital. About 40 percent of Maine hospitals were already operating at a loss before these cuts.

More than 176,000 Mainers rely on SNAP. By 2028, Maine is projected to absorb $60 million per year in new food assistance costs, shifted from the federal government to the state. Between July 2025 and March 2026, more than 4,000 Maine children were dropped from SNAP rolls entirely, according to Maine DHHS data compiled by the Maine Center for Economic Policy.

A gallon of milk in Maine costs about $4.49 today. Eggs run between $2.39 and $3.03 depending on where you shop. Gas sits around $4.32. The median home price has climbed from roughly $87,000 in the late 1990s to more than $407,000 today.

These are not national statistics. These are Maine numbers. And they exist inside a policy environment that Collins has helped build over nearly three decades.

The Kavanaugh Question

No accounting of Susan Collins’s Senate tenure is complete without Brett Kavanaugh.

In 2018, Collins delivered a 44-minute floor speech defending Kavanaugh’s nomination in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. She voted to confirm him. She had previously voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch in 2017. Both times, she told constituents and reporters that she believed Roe v. Wade was settled precedent, that the nominees had assured her they respected established law.

In 2022, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe.

Collins said the ruling was “inconsistent” with what the justices had told her in private meetings. She called it “a sudden and radical jolt to the country.”

That may be true. It is also true that her votes made the majority possible. The consequences — for Maine women, for women across the country — are not abstract. They are ongoing.

What She Has Delivered

A fair accounting requires saying this plainly: Collins has delivered for Maine in ways that matter.

She has consistently fought for federal funding for Maine’s fishing industry, its rural healthcare infrastructure, and its military installations. She secured a $50 billion rural hospital relief fund in the OBBBA negotiations — less than she requested, and less than advocates say is needed, but a real concession extracted from a bill she ultimately opposed. She voted against Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. She voted for a Democratic-led extension of ACA premium tax credits in December 2025, though the effort failed and the credits expired anyway.

They are also insufficient for a senator with 29 years of seniority, a seat on the Appropriations Committee, and the kind of institutional leverage that comes from being one of the last remaining Republican moderates in a closely divided Senate.

When your leverage is highest, the votes that matter most are the ones you cast — not the amendments you propose that get blocked, and not the final passage votes you cast after the procedural gate is already open.

Wider Implications

Maine is one state. But what happens in Maine’s Senate race in 2026 has implications well beyond its borders.

Democrats need to flip four seats to retake the Senate majority. Maine is their single best opportunity. A Collins loss does not just change one vote. It changes committee chairmanships, floor schedules, confirmation processes, and the basic architecture of what legislation can move.

That is the context in which “he’s not perfect, but he’s better than Collins” deserves to be heard. Not as a reluctant settling, but as a recognition that representation is structural. Who holds the seat shapes what is possible — not just for Maine, but for the country.

Who Is Paying to Define This Race

AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — bundled more than $538,000 from 315 individual donors for Collins in a recent filing period alone, according to the Bangor Daily News. Over the course of her career, cumulative AIPAC contributions to Collins total approximately $647,000, per OpenSecrets. In 2025, AIPAC-bundled money accounted for nearly 20 percent of everything she raised — more than she brought in from small donors.

Graham Platner does not take AIPAC money. His campaign has been explicit: no corporate PACs, no super PACs, no bundled special interest money.

Republican-aligned groups have already reserved roughly $99 million in advertising in this race, compared with about $44 million on the Democratic side, according to AdImpact. Pine Tree Results PAC — a Maine-focused outside group supporting Collins — has reserved $23.8 million in ads on her behalf. Two of its largest contributions came from Delaware-incorporated nonprofits with no public presence, no disclosed staff, and no identifiable donor base. A federal watchdog group has filed a complaint alleging what it describes as an illegal straw donor scheme.

The ads from these groups are not about policy. They are exclusively focused on personal attacks against Platner.

That is worth keeping in mind when you see what is coming at him between now and Election Day. The money attacking Graham Platner cannot tell you what Susan Collins has done for Maine families over 29 years, because that record does not make the case they need to make.

So they are going after the man instead.

What You Can Do

If you are a Mainer, vote. November determines it all, and turnout in Maine’s smaller communities has consistently shaped statewide outcomes. If you have neighbors, family members, or coworkers who are not yet planning to vote, that conversation matters more than almost anything else.

Senator Collins has offices in Washington, Portland, and Bangor. Her staff answers the phones. Constituent calls are logged.

Call her Washington office: (202) 224-2523

You do not need a script. You can say: “I’m a constituent. I’m concerned about Medicaid cuts and what they mean for Maine families. I want Senator Collins to know that her procedural vote on June 28th mattered, and her constituents are watching.”

That is enough.

This series will continue. There is more to cover — on tariffs, on environmental rollbacks, on what 29 years in the Senate looks like when you trace it across the lives of the people you were sent to represent.

The question I asked a few weeks ago still stands.

What are we going to do about Susan Collins?

That answer belongs to Maine. But the rest of us have a stake in it too.

Sources: CQ Roll Call Vote Studies Feb. 2026 | Senate.gov Roll Call Vote #329, June 28 2025 | Maine DHHS | MECEP/Maine DHHS SNAP data | Bangor Daily News | Zeteo | Read Sludge

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

]]><![CDATA[A Prideful Point of Inclusion]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/a-prideful-point-of-inclusionhttps://dadbriefs.com/p/a-prideful-point-of-inclusionWed, 17 Jun 2026 20:03:16 GMTWe are on summer break. My sons, two pools, several theme parks, and a daily schedule that alternates sunscreen, snacks, and figuring out where someone’s left sandal went.

Somewhere between the towels and the third coat of SPF, I found myself thinking about one of the first lessons I ever taught these boys.

It is a short one. You don’t leave people out. You don’t pile on when someone is getting picked on. And you notice when a classmate looks like they could use a friend.

None of that is complicated. Most parents I know teach some version of it before their kids can ride a bike.

I want to be specific about what it means this month, in June, with Pride flags on porches and the school year just behind us.

LGBTQ+ kids are more likely to be the ones left out. They are more likely to be picked on. And they want the same thing every kid wants, which is to walk into a building and feel safe inside it.

Those numbers are not mine. They come from Glisten’s 2025 survey of LGBTQ+ students. Two in three said they felt unsafe at school at some point because of who they are. Only one in three said they look forward to going.

Read those two findings next to each other and sit with them for a second. A third of these kids look forward to school. The rest are doing quiet math about which hallway to take and which bathroom to skip, in a year when they hear their own identities argued about on the news.

This is a big part of why I keep speaking up for public education.

A public school is one of the few rooms left where children from every kind of family end up in the same place. Different incomes, different beliefs, different households, same homeroom. My kids sit beside children whose lives look nothing like ours, and that is the point.

When a school becomes a place where every kid feels seen and supported, the results show up in the data. The CDC has spent years on school connectedness research, a student’s sense that the adults and peers around them care. Kids who feel that connection earn higher grades, miss fewer days, and are more likely to finish high school. The same agency notes that LGBTQ+ students are among those least likely to feel it.

Glisten’s findings arrive at the same spot from the other direction. LGBTQ+ students with supportive teachers, inclusive lessons, and clear anti-bullying policies report a stronger sense of belonging, higher GPAs, and fewer days missed out of fear.

Belonging is a condition for learning. A kid who spends the day managing threat is not free to spend it on fractions.

Which brings me back to the pool, and to the boys negotiating whose turn it is to retrieve virgin daiquiris from the poolside bar.

The work of belonging does not start with a school board meeting, though those matter. It starts at kitchen tables and in car rides. It starts with the small conversations, the offhand questions, the way we answer when a child asks about a classmate with two moms or a friend who goes by a different name this year.

That is where children learn who counts. So this month, pay attention to those conversations.

Because that’s where inclusion gets built.

Be kind, feed your mind, and wash your behind.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

]]><![CDATA[The Company They Keep]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-company-they-keephttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-company-they-keepMon, 15 Jun 2026 17:10:51 GMTHe has done this before.

Following a fight in 2025, heavyweight MMA fighter Josh Hokit said the identical disgusting remarks about Michelle Obama that he said last night on the White House lawn. After a UFC bout in January 2026, he said the same thing about Brittney Griner. [I’m not repeating the remarks here.]

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Patterns of behavior reveal character. Hokit has revealed his, in public, on microphones, for years.

He was not originally on the card for UFC Freedom 250. He was added at the president’s personal request, who wanted to see Derrick Lewis fight. That addition put a man with a well-documented pattern of racist and misogynistic remarks about Black women on the largest stage of his career, inside an arena built on the South Lawn of the White House.

The president, too, has a pattern.

Donald Trump spent years promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. On the first day of his second term in office, he sought to end recognition of transgender and nonbinary people under federal law. In February 2026, he posted a video to Truth Social depicting the Obamas as apes. He deleted it. Nonetheless, the pattern accumulates.

UFC announces tickets, fan fest plans for White House card

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken just before the event found that only 16% of Americans felt it was appropriate to hold UFC fights at the White House. Forty-six percent said it was not. Even among Republicans, support reached only 31%.

The whole event was grossly wrong and out of touch.

The people sitting ringside at the event included the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the FBI Director, the Defense Secretary, the Speaker of the House, and an assortment of tech billionaires and celebrities.

Joe Rogan held the microphone. When Hokit finished, Rogan said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit,” and the broadcast moved on.

Nobody corrected Hokit.

Dana White, President of the UFC, eventually texted TIME magazine that he was “completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families.” Robert Griffin III called it a disgrace, and noted that it takes a particular smallness to use your biggest moment to attack a woman by questioning her womanhood, especially given the history of deploying that specific weapon against Black women. Jemele Hill, Don Lemon, and others said what needed to be said.

I did not watch the event, but having perfect context is not the problem here. I don’t care about Josh Hokit, but I do care about our character, and the questions we each need to answer:

What conversations do you permit around you? What do you feel an obligation to address? What does your silence say to everyone watching?

I know my answer. In the presence of racism, of misogyny, of transphobia, of the particular cruelty of using a person’s identity as a punchline, I do not stay quiet. Not because I am looking for a fight. Because silence, in those moments, is its own position.

The people at that event won’t spend a moment looking at their own silence. They just don’t care about the company they keep.

But we do. Because our character matters to us.

And that’s worth fighting for.

]]><![CDATA[The Arc de Trump: A Field Guide to Resisting the Proposed Washington Arch ]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-arc-de-trump-a-field-guide-tohttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-arc-de-trump-a-field-guide-toTue, 09 Jun 2026 13:01:20 GMT

Note: Instructions for entering a substantive public comment are below.

Washington, D.C. has many monuments. The Lincoln Memorial. The Washington Monument. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Jefferson Memorial. Congress has authorized each one, debated them publicly, designed them with restraint, and built them to honor something larger than the person who ordered it.

Donald Trump wants to add one more. He would like it to be the biggest.

"Arc de Trump" receives preliminary design approval from arts commission - CBS News

The proposal is a 250-foot gilded arch — taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial — at Memorial Circle, the traffic roundabout on the Virginia side of Arlington Memorial Bridge. The design includes a winged figure holding a torch, two gilded eagles, and inscriptions in gold reading “One Nation Under God” and “Liberty and Justice for All.”

When asked who the arch was for, Trump pointed at himself: “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”

The National Park Service is currently accepting public comments on the project. The deadline is June 15, 2026 — this Monday.

Your comment becomes part of a federal record that the agency must take into account. Here is what you need to know, and how to make your comment count.

The Origin Story

This project goes by several names. The White House calls it the “Independence Arch.” The official NPS review documents call it the “Triumphal Arch.” The press has taken to calling it the “Arc de Trump,” after a CBS correspondent floated the nickname and it stuck.

The idea was seeded in April 2025 by architecture critic Catesby Leigh in an essay for the Claremont Institute arguing Washington is “the only major Western capital without a monumental arch.” Leigh originally envisioned something modest — around 60 feet. Harrison Design architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau posted a rendering in September 2025. By October 15, Trump was showing 3-D models on his Oval Office desk. After Trump chose the largest option, Leigh himself turned critic, telling the New York Times the result is “way too big for that site.”

The administration’s historical rationale is that Washington has wanted an arch for 200 years. A Congressional Research Service review found no evidence that any previous president sought to build one, and that the 1901 McMillan Plan — which Trump’s team has cited — specifically rejected freestanding triumphal arches in favor of memorial temples. The administration’s legal hook is a 1924–25 authorization for a pair of slender 166-foot columns at the site, never built, meant to symbolize North and South. Historians note those columns were designed to frame the Lincoln Memorial view — not block it.

The NPS Has Jurisdiction

The site — Memorial Circle, Columbia Island, Lady Bird Johnson Park — is federal parkland managed by the National Park Service within the George Washington Memorial Parkway. That triggers Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires any federal agency undertaking a project to assess its effects on properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places and to give the public a meaningful opportunity to comment before a final decision is made.

The NPS completed its Assessment of Effects in June 2026. Its preliminary finding: adverse effect. The report concludes the arch “would alter, directly and indirectly, characteristics of those properties that qualify them for inclusion in the National Register,” diminishing their integrity of setting, design, feeling, and association. The affected properties include the Memorial Avenue Corridor Cultural Landscape, Arlington Memorial Bridge, Arlington House (the Robert E. Lee Memorial), Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial and its cultural landscape, the National Mall Historic District, and potentially the Pentagon. The Area of Potential Effects, per the NPS, covers “the landscapes and structures that form the ceremonial gateway” between Washington and Arlington.

Section 106 is a procedural requirement. An adverse-effect finding does not stop the project. What it does is create a record — and the stronger, more substantive the public comments in that record, the harder it is for the agency to dismiss objections and the more material there is for the courts to work with.

Criticisms, in Detail

Trump's arch gets overwhelmingly negative public feedback but appears poised to move forward | CNN Politics

The Sightline

Arlington Memorial Bridge was built deliberately low. The axis it sits on — from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, across the Potomac, directly to Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee — was designed as a symbol of post–Civil War reconciliation between North and South. The arch, placed directly on that axis at Memorial Circle, breaks that sightline permanently. Architectural historian Alison Hoagland told the Commission of Fine Arts that disrupting the view “would disrupt this reconciliation.” Architect and public historian Neil Flanagan described the Potomac as “the border between the North and South … It’s literally crossing the border and trying to heal those wounds.”

The Form

A triumphal arch is not a neutral architectural form. It originates in ancient Rome — the Arch of Titus (81 CE), the Arch of Septimius Severus (203 CE), the Arch of Constantine (312 CE) — built to commemorate military victories and glorify individual emperors. The Arc de Triomphe was ordered by Napoleon in 1806 after Austerlitz to glorify his army. Napoleon never lived to see it finished. Art historian Marisa Anne Bass has described the triumphal arch as a form that “emerged … in ancient Rome to make permanent the status of a conquering emperor as a godlike victor … the point was to commemorate an individual, not a nation.” Sue Mobley of Monument Lab called it “textbook Trump … It has to be the biggest. That’s the authoritarian impulse.”

The words inscribed on this arch — “Liberty and Justice for All,” “One Nation Under God” — are borrowed from democratic and civic tradition. The form they are stamped onto is the architecture of autocratic self-glorification.

The Process

The Commission of Fine Arts — whose members Trump replaced after firing the prior commissioners — approved the design on May 21, 2026. CFA Secretary Thomas Luebke read into the record that of roughly 600 written public comments received, 99.5 percent were in opposition. The National Capital Planning Commission voted 9-1 to advance the project on June 4 while flagging unresolved issues: pedestrian safety, flight-path interference at Reagan National Airport, view obstruction, the Height of Buildings Act, and missing detail on lighting, stormwater, and materials.

On funding: Trump initially claimed the arch was fully privately financed. The National Endowment for the Humanities FY2026 budget documents earmark $2 million in special-initiative funds for the arch and an additional $13 million in matching grants — $15 million in taxpayer money — while the NEH has not yet distributed $65 million Congress separately appropriated for state humanities councils, which are facing layoffs and frozen grants.

On legal authorization: Public Citizen filed suit in February 2026 (Lemmon v. Trump) on behalf of three Vietnam veterans and a retired architectural historian, arguing the project lacks the congressional authorization required by the Commemorative Works Act. The CRS agrees fresh congressional approval is required. The administration relies on the 1924–25 column authorization. Judge Tanya Chutkan declined a preliminary injunction but ordered the NPS to give 14 days’ notice before breaking ground.

On airspace: The FAA conducted a limited feasibility study and found no significant adverse effect, but explicitly noted the review was limited and that a full aeronautical study is required before construction can proceed. The site is less than two miles from Reagan National Airport, under the same north approach corridor as the fatal 2025 American Airlines–Black Hawk midair collision.

The Fight is On

The National Trust for Historic Preservation submitted formal objections documenting conflicts with the McMillan Plan and the Commemorative Works Act. The Society of Architectural Historians issued a detailed June 2 statement refuting the administration’s historical claims. The National Parks Conservation Association noted that Arlington conducts 27 to 30 funeral services every weekday and up to 10 on Saturdays — roughly 6,900 military burials a year — and that the landscape deserves protection.

The elder-led advocacy group Third Act organized a multi-day demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial through Memorial Day weekend under the banner “86 Trump’s Arch,” arguing that democracies do not build memorials to living presidents.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), whose district includes the site and whose family members are buried at Arlington, introduced the Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act with roughly 33 co-sponsors to bar federal funds for the arch without congressional approval.

How to File a Substantive Comment

A comment that engages the legal and factual framework becomes part of a record the agency must reckon with, and that litigants can cite. Here is how to make yours count.

Submit here:

These are the only two accepted submission methods. Your comment and identifying information will become part of the public administrative record.

What to say — substantive arguments that carry legal weight:

1. The sightline is irreplaceable. Name specific affected properties — the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Memorial Avenue Corridor Cultural Landscape, Arlington House — and explain in your own words how placing a 250-foot structure on the deliberate axis between them destroys the integrity of setting, feeling, and association that gives those properties their National Register significance. Cite the NPS’s own adverse-effect finding and argue that no mitigation in a Programmatic Agreement can restore a permanently obstructed view.

2. Demand real alternatives, not just mitigation. The Section 106 process requires the agency to explore alternatives that genuinely avoid or minimize adverse effects before accepting them. Argue that the Draft Programmatic Agreement is premature and that a legitimate “no-build” alternative and alternative siting locations must be analyzed before any decision document is signed.

3. Raise the NEPA question. Ask whether the NPS has prepared a full Environmental Impact Statement. A project of this scale, height, and documented public controversy warrants an EIS rather than a simpler categorical exclusion, and the Section 106 process must be completed before any NEPA decision document (a Finding of No Significant Impact or Record of Decision) is finalized.

4. Press the authorization gap. Cite the Commemorative Works Act and the CRS finding that no previous president sought to build an arch here, and argue that a 1924–25 column authorization for two 166-foot structures cannot lawfully cover a single 250-foot arch that is fundamentally different in scale, form, and purpose.

5. Name the concrete harms. Pedestrian and traffic safety at a high-speed traffic circle. FAA airspace risk at Reagan National, where the administration’s own feasibility study called itself a “limited review” and required a full aeronautical study before construction. The 1910 Height of Buildings Act, which caps most D.C. construction at 130 feet. Disruption to Arlington’s daily funeral services and the solemn character of the cemetery landscape. Stormwater, tree loss, and landscape disruption in Lady Bird Johnson Park.

6. Be personal if you have standing. If you have visited these sites, attended a funeral at Arlington, are a veteran or a Gold Star family member, or are a resident or commuter who depends on the Memorial Bridge corridor, say so. Particularized injury strengthens the administrative record and, if it comes to it, legal standing.

The comment period closes Monday night. The arch’s opponents have already put 99.5 percent of public comments on the record against it. Add yours, and make it one the agency has to think about.

The forms are open. The deadline is real.

Let’s write the record now.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

]]><![CDATA[But ... What Rights Have You Lost?]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/but-what-rights-did-you-losehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/but-what-rights-did-you-loseMon, 08 Jun 2026 19:55:43 GMT

Every time I post something critical of this administration, someone shows up in the comments with a question that sounds reasonable but rarely is:

What rights have YOU lost?

OK, it is a fair question.

I am a middle-aged white man living in South Florida. I have the privilege of getting to choose which policies touch my life and which ones I can ignore. I can scroll past the immigration news and feel nothing close to fear. I can walk into a federal building without wondering if I will walk back out. I can drive through my neighborhood without my skin triggering someone’s calculation about whether I belong here.

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My wife does not have that option. My stepsons do not have that option. They are brown-skinned. The world reads them differently than it reads me, and this administration has worked to widen that gap, not bridge it.

So when someone asks what rights have I lost, it implies how does this affect me personally? And the answer is: less than it should.

I believe the privilege I enjoy should be used to help others. I believe it is the work I owe all my kids, my family, and anyone else within earshot of these words.

The Trump Action Tracker, maintained by epidemiologist Christina Pagel using verified news sources, has documented 3,368 actions (as of June 8, 2026) by this administration since January 20, 2025 — spread across ten categories: undermining democracy, suppressing dissent, hollowing out federal institutions, controlling information, politicizing science and health, attacking education and culture, dismantling civil rights, corruption, aggressive foreign policy, and anti-immigration nationalism. I break down a handful of those actions below.

The Legal Challenges

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution contains 43 words that have governed American citizenship since 1868: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born here if neither parent is a citizen or permanent resident. Every federal court that has reviewed it has blocked it.

One judge, John Coughenour of Seattle, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 1, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, with most justices appearing skeptical of the administration’s position. A ruling is expected by summer.

But the fight is real, even if the challenge is a long shot. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to rewrite the foundational promise of American citizenship. If the order stands, a birth certificate in this country will no longer be enough. Parents will have to prove their own status every time a child is born. Some children, born on American soil, would be rendered stateless.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement set a reported daily arrest quota of 3,000 people and began arresting individuals at courthouses, at the very appointments they were legally required to attend. The Department of Justice later admitted in court that the memo used to justify those courthouse arrests “does not and has never applied” to them. In September 2025, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order allowing ICE to make stops based on “apparent race,” Spanish-language use, and what kind of work a person appears to do. Justice Sotomayor dissented directly: the ruling, she wrote, lets agents seize anyone who “looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”

That is a description of many people I care about.

The administration also reinstated a ban on transgender people serving in the military. On June 1, 2026, a federal appeals court ruled in a 2-1 decision that the ban is unconstitutional, finding it “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” Those are a federal court’s words, not mine. The ban technically remains in effect for new recruits while the administration seeks further review, but current service members named in the suit are protected for now. The fight continues.

Then there is what happened on April 29, 2026. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling along conservative lines, issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais and effectively finished what it started in 2013. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that prohibits congressional maps drawn to dilute the voting power of Black and brown communities, is now, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, “all but a dead letter.” The Brennan Center says the ruling makes challenging racial discrimination in redistricting “all but impossible.” The Campaign Legal Center called it a historic blow that clears the way for states to engage in vote dilution targeting Black and brown voters.

The ruling landed less than six weeks before a midterm election-year redistricting fight that the administration had already set in motion to protect Republican House majorities. In 2013, the Court removed the guardrail that had prevented discriminatory voting rules from taking effect. Now they have removed the mechanism that challenged them after the fact. The Voting Rights Act still exists on paper, but its teeth are gone.

And First Amendment protections have been tested in ways that should trouble anyone who believes in free expression. The administration has targeted law firms that represented its opponents, stripped security clearances, detained and sought to deport student protesters including a lawful permanent resident named Mahmoud Khalil, and what a Reuters investigation documented as a retribution campaign against at least 470 people, organizations, and institutions, running at an average of more than one target per day.

The Economy

On July 4, 2025, the President signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation cuts roughly $1.06 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces over ten years. KFF puts the Medicaid-only reduction at approximately $911 billion. The CBO projects the law will leave 10 million more people without insurance by 2034. When you add in the expiration of enhanced ACA premium subsidies that Congress allowed to lapse, independent researchers estimate the total newly uninsured could reach 14 to 17 million people.

Some of those cuts are already in effect. At the start of 2026, the enhanced federal funding that helped states cover Medicaid expansion costs was eliminated. States are now absorbing a larger share, and some are already reconsidering their expansion programs. Two rural hospitals, John Fitzgibbon Memorial in Missouri and Mizell Memorial in Alabama, filed for bankruptcy citing OBBBA cuts as contributing factors. By December 2026, states must conduct Medicaid eligibility redeterminations every six months rather than annually. Policy analysts describe this not as an administrative change but as a mechanism designed to remove people from coverage, including people who remain technically eligible but cannot navigate the paperwork.

The same bill cut at least $120 billion from SNAP, the food assistance program that serves 42 million Americans. The USDA estimated the law’s expanded work requirements will push 2.4 million people out of the program over the next decade. The CBO projects more than 2 million people will lose SNAP access in a typical month. And during last fall’s 43-day government shutdown, the administration suspended SNAP benefits entirely for the first time in the program’s history. The USDA website stated, plainly: “The well has run dry.” Two federal judges ruled the freeze unlawful. Benefits were eventually restored.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned more than $21 billion to more than 200 million consumers who were victimized by financial institutions, was effectively shut down. Staff were placed on leave, headquarters closed, contracts canceled. A court initially blocked the dismantling, but the appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed. The OBBBA then cut the agency’s funding authority in half.

Tariffs have raised the average household’s costs by somewhere between $1,000 and $1,700 per year, depending on which economic model you trust. Those costs fall hardest on working families who spend a higher share of their income on goods.

The Promise

The United States holds a premise: the idea that regardless of where you come from or what you look like, you belong here, you are seen here, and the government is working toward making sure you have a fair shot at what this country can offer.

Share

The administration eliminated all federal DEI offices on day one. It directed the Attorney General to investigate private-sector diversity programs and threatened organizations with the withdrawal of federal contracts and grants. A federal court found one enforcement provision to be “textbook viewpoint-based discrimination.” The corporate retreat was swift, with Target, Walmart, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Google among those rolling back diversity commitments.

Environmental justice offices and programs were shut down and grants funded under the Inflation Reduction Act were canceled. Communities of color, which according to Earthjustice already face 38 percent higher nitrogen dioxide exposure than white communities, lost the federal infrastructure built over decades to monitor and address that disparity.

The Department of Education is being dismantled. Staff were cut from roughly 4,000 to 2,000. Major programs including Title I funding for low-income schools and English-instruction support are being transferred to other agencies. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which oversees compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was gutted in October 2025. Congress has held funding levels steady for now, but the oversight capacity has been hollowed out.

On March 1, 2025, an executive order declared English the official language of the United States and rescinded the 2000 requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to people with limited English proficiency. The administration directed agencies to minimize multilingual services, suspended the federal language-access website, and canceled translation contracts. There are roughly 25 to 28 million limited-English-proficient people in this country. The White House Spanish-language website was taken down January 21, 2025, the first day back in office. There was no announcement.

And voting. A repeated call to federalize elections. An executive order, and proposed legislation (the SAVE America Act) that attempted to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. A federal judge blocked that provision of the executive order permanently in October 2025, finding the president lacks authority over election rules. The companion SAVE America Act passed the House and so far has stalled in the Senate. The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million voting-age citizens do not have ready access to proof of citizenship. Those citizens are disproportionately younger, lower-income, people of color, and married women who changed their names.

The Answer

So what rights did I lose?

Honestly, fewer than I should have. Because I am white, because I speak English without an accent, because I hold a passport that no one is trying to re-litigate in federal court.

But my family members now live in a country where a federal agency can now stop them on the street based on how they look. Where the citizenship of children born here is pending a Supreme Court decision. Where the systems designed to ensure equal access to food, healthcare, housing, legal protection, and education are being stripped back, one executive order and one budget cut at a time.

The question is never really just about rights in the legal sense. It is about the promise. The promise that the country you are born into is working toward you, not against you. That the government sees you as a full person, not a problem to be managed.

That promise has always been imperfect. But it has also always been worth defending, and my job is to defend it loudly, with whatever reach I have. And that might cost me something.

But it might cost others everything.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

]]><![CDATA[The Birthday Cake That Goes Against the Rules]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/the-birthday-cake-that-goes-againsthttps://dadbriefs.com/p/the-birthday-cake-that-goes-againstSun, 07 Jun 2026 18:25:19 GMTFor my youngest son’s birthday, he requested a whipped cream cake with Italian buttercream frosting.

This cake is ultra-rich, and the process of making it goes against conventional methods — kinda like my youngest, who is creative and resourceful. Over the past few years we’ve settled on a different cake for each birthday, from Boston cream pie to German chocolate cake to this year’s vanilla-forward creation. It’s fun to look back at all of it.

I remember him as the most easy-going baby, who smiled at everyone and everything (especially his own farts, but that’s a story for another time).

In our family line, my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all had sons. No daughters. Between my two sons and three stepsons in our blended family, it’s all boys, all the time.

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But I relate most to my youngest, because I too was the youngest. I remember watching my brother go off to college — which is happening this year for him.

We youngests have always charted our own course, created our own energy, and taken advantage of every bit of parenting grace that comes with being the baby of the family.

We also struggle at times to make sense of things. We can feel excluded. It can be lonely being at the tail end of the hand-me-down chain.

But that’s where our identity and independence are forged. We find our own way forward.

We hope you enjoy this cake.

Recipe 1: Whipped Cream Cake

Adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Rose’s Heavenly Cakes

The genius of this cake is that there’s no butter added separately — the butterfat in the heavy cream does all that work. The result is a perfectly even, exceptionally moist and tender crumb. Bake it in a fluted tube pan for both structure and presentation.

Special Equipment: One 10-cup metal fluted tube pan is traditionally used for this cake; however, we used two 8-inch round cake pans to convert it into a birthday cake configuration.

Ingredients

  • 3 large eggs (150 g / ½ cup plus 1½ tablespoons)

  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (5 ml)

  • 2¼ cups bleached cake flour, sifted into the cup and leveled off (or bleached all-purpose flour / 225 g)

  • 2 teaspoons baking powder

  • ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt

  • 1½ cups heavy cream, cold (348 g / 357 ml) — see Baking Notes below

  • 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, preferably superfine (225 g)

Instructions

Preheat to 375°F.

Thirty minutes to one hour ahead, whisk the eggs and vanilla together in a measuring cup. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and set on the counter. Do not refrigerate. In a stand mixer bowl, measure out the cream. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt, then sift onto a sheet of parchment.

Make the Batter

  1. Attach the whisk beater and whip the cream, starting on low speed and gradually raising to medium-high as it thickens, until stiff peaks form.

  2. On medium-high speed, gradually beat the egg mixture into the whipped cream. The mixture will thicken to a mayonnaise-like consistency.

  3. Gradually beat in the sugar. It should take about 30 seconds to incorporate.

  4. Detach the bowl and whisk beater from the stand.

  5. Add half the flour mixture and fold in with the whisk attachment until most of it disappears.

  6. Add the remaining flour mixture and fold until all traces of flour have disappeared.

  7. Scrape the batter into the pan, prepared with nonstick spray. Run a small spatula or knife through the batter to release air bubbles, avoiding the bottom of the pan. Smooth the surface.

Bake

  1. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted between the tube and the side comes out completely clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center.

Cool and Unmold

  1. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Loosen the top edges with a small spatula, then invert onto a lightly sprayed wire rack. Cool completely before frosting.

Baking Notes

  • Do not chill the bowl and beaters before whipping the cream. If the whipped cream is too cold, the eggs won’t emulsify properly.

  • High-butterfat (40%) heavy cream produces the finest crumb. Organic Valley and Stonyfield are both good options and are widely available.

Recipe 2: Italian Buttercream

Rich, silky, and not overly sweet. This is a meringue-based buttercream — it takes a bit of technique, but the result is worth every step. It pairs beautifully with the whipped cream cake.

I made it with European butter that was darker yellow in color than most butters. Then I mixed it with a dab of blue dye to turn it a mellow green.

Makes approximately 2 pounds of frosting

Ingredients

  • ½ lb (226 g) sugar, divided

  • 2 oz (60 ml) water

  • 4 large egg whites

  • 1 lb (454 g) butter, cut into ½-inch chunks, softened to room temperature

  • 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Combine 6 oz (170 g) of the sugar with the water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once boiling, stop stirring and continue cooking to the soft ball stage — 238°F / 114°C.

  2. Meanwhile, place the egg whites in an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment.

  3. When the sugar syrup reaches approximately 230°F / 110°C, begin whipping the egg whites on medium speed until frothy. Gradually add the remaining sugar and whip to medium peaks.

  4. When the syrup reaches 238°F / 114°C, pour it into the meringue in a slow, steady stream down the side of the bowl while whipping on medium speed. Raise to high speed and whip until the meringue has cooled to room temperature.

  5. Add the butter in small batches, mixing until fully incorporated after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Blend in the vanilla.

The buttercream is ready to use. It can also be tightly covered and refrigerated for up to one week, or frozen for up to one month. Bring to room temperature and re-whip before using.

Along with these recipes, please accept our wish that every year moves you forward.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

]]><![CDATA[Graham Platner wants your vote. He also needs to be held accountable. ]]>https://dadbriefs.com/p/graham-platner-wants-your-vote-hehttps://dadbriefs.com/p/graham-platner-wants-your-vote-heSat, 06 Jun 2026 11:54:27 GMT
Maine Dem Graham Platner took lobbyist cash from firms he vows to fight | Fox News

One Senate seat in Maine could help determine whether Donald Trump operates with a check on his power for the next two years.

Susan Collins holds that seat. She has voted with Trump approximately 95% of the time in his second term, per CAP Action’s Trump Scorecard. She voted to confirm Pete Hegseth. She voted to confirm Kash Patel. She supported the procedural vote that advanced the One Big Beautiful Bill — the reconciliation package that cuts Medicaid and food assistance for millions of Americans. She is seeking a sixth term in a state Kamala Harris won by 7 points.

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The Democrat running against her is Graham Platner. He is a 41-year-old Marine and Army combat veteran with four combat tours, a Bronze Star, a 100% VA disability rating, and an oyster farm on Frenchman Bay. He is endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ro Khanna. He supports Medicare for All, lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap, and the PRO Act.

He is also, by the available evidence, a man with serious problems.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both reported in late May 2026 that Platner sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women during his marriage to schoolteacher Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023. His campaign confirmed it. The number of women involved ranges from six (the campaign’s figure) to as many as a dozen (per former political director Genevieve McDonald, who spoke to both outlets). Gertner discovered the messages in spring 2025 and alerted a campaign aide in August 2025 during internal opposition research.

Gertner has publicly defended him. In a video statement she called the coverage “shameful” and said “no marriage is perfect.” That is her right. It is also not the same thing as the behavior being acceptable.

After McDonald spoke to reporters, campaign strategist Morris Katz sent her a message — reviewed by the Bangor Daily News — warning that if the story ran, the campaign would say “on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.” The campaign has characterized a $15,000 payment offered to McDonald as standard severance. McDonald says it came with a nondisclosure agreement she refused to sign.

That is not how you treat someone who worked for you. That is how you try to bury a story.

On June 4, 2026, the New York Times published a separate piece based on interviews with 24 women who knew Platner. Six were former girlfriends. Three described toxic relationships — heavy drinking, infidelity, and behavior that was demeaning toward women. Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative operative who dated him from 2013 to 2015, told the Times he grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, yanked her from a cab by the wrist, and once twisted her arm behind her back and locked her in a room. She was explicit that he never hit her and it did not break her arm. She also said he referred to women as “hatchet wounds” and once said he would “rape” a home intruder “to show them that I’m dominant.”

Platner denies all of it. He has called the physical allegations “simply not true” and attributed them to someone “politically motivated.” Three other women, whose interviews were arranged by his campaign, described him as a caring partner.

To be precise: as of this writing, no woman has accused Graham Platner of sexual assault or sexual harassment on the record. That is a fact and it matters. What is on the record is a pattern of reported behavior toward women — confirmed extramarital sexting, a threatened campaign smear against a former staffer, and physical-intimidation allegations he denies — that would end most political careers and should at minimum end the notion that he gets our unconditional support.

There is also the tattoo.

Platner has a chest tattoo resembling a Nazi SS Totenkopf. He covered it up in October 2025 and told the press he got it while drunk in Croatia as a young Marine and did not know its meaning until recently. Fifield told the Times she heard him refer to it as “my Totenkopf” when they were dating between 2013 and 2015 — years before his stated discovery of its meaning. One of those accounts is not accurate.

And in 2025, CNN and the Washington Post reported old Reddit posts in which Platner, posting as “P-Hustle,” minimized military sexual assault and victim-blamed survivors. A sexual-assault survivor confronted him about those posts at a town hall in Bucksport. He apologized in a five-minute video. His 2023 Kik profile, featuring a shirtless towel selfie, was still active when reporters found it.

He says he is a changed man. He says he is working on himself. He says his marriage is real and his commitment to public service is genuine.

Maybe all of that is true. We do not have to take his word for it.

The Democratic Party response to all of this has been instructive.

Chuck Schumer met with Platner on June 2 and was asked five separate questions about him by reporters. He answered each one with the same sentence: “I met with Graham Platner today. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate.” When a reporter asked whether Governor Mills should re-enter the race, he said, “Any other subject you got?”

Fetterman calls Platner a 'creep' after reports of extramarital sexting | CNN Politics

John Fetterman refused to back Platner and compared the situation to disgraced former congressman Eric Swalwell. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna stayed in. Khanna headlined a Bar Harbor rally on June 5, called the behavior “wrong and toxic,” and cited redemption. Maggie Hassan called the allegations “serious” and deserving of “scrutiny” without calling for withdrawal. The Maine Democratic Party has not asked him to step down.

Nobody is stepping up because nobody wants to be the person who handed Susan Collins a sixth term.

That is the trap. And it is a real one.

Maine is the linchpin of the Democratic path to a Senate majority. Democrats currently hold 47 seats. They need 51 to govern without a vice presidential tiebreaker. Maine is the only Republican-held seat in a state Harris won. It is rated a toss-up. Every serious analysis of the 2026 map says Democrats’ road to the majority runs through Maine.

Polling has Platner ahead by somewhere between 4 and 9 points, depending on the survey and when it was taken. Those numbers have tightened since the stories broke. They also come with a significant caveat: Maine pollsters underestimated Collins by roughly 8 to 10 points in 2020, when she trailed Democrat Sara Gideon in every poll and won by 9. This race is not won. It may not be winnable with Platner at the top.

But here is what is also true: the Democratic withdrawal deadline under Maine law is July 13, with a replacement due by July 27. Nobody is executing that option.

Platner is not dropping out. The primary is June 9.

I am not asking anyone to love Graham Platner. I am not asking anyone to trust him. I am not asking anyone to set aside what has been reported or to pretend his behavior toward women was acceptable, because it was not.

I am asking people to think clearly about what the stakes are.

Susan Collins, with a sixth term and a Republican Senate majority, provides no meaningful check on this administration. She has demonstrated that with her voting record. A Democratic Senate with 51 seats — even a messy one, even one that includes an oyster farmer from Maine who sent explicit texts to a dozen women and has a covered-up tattoo and a contested account of his past — is a fundamentally different governing environment than the one we have now.

We do not get to choose between a perfect candidate and Susan Collins. We get to choose between Graham Platner and Susan Collins.

But here is what I want Platner to understand, if this reaches him or anyone around him.

We are not devotees. We are citizens. The moment you take office, you are accountable to us — not the other way around. You do not get our silence on your behavior in exchange for a Senate vote. You get our vote in exchange for a commitment to govern in our interests, and you keep it by doing exactly that, and you lose it the moment you betray it.

You say you are a changed man. We will hold you to that.

Every vote you cast will be public. Every position you take will be on the record. Every time you choose the donor over the constituent, the powerful over the vulnerable, the comfortable answer over the honest one, we will say so. Loudly and by name.

We cannot treat politics like religion. Devotion to a candidate is not a civic value. It is how we end up defending behavior we would never accept in our own lives, from people who have no particular reason to earn it.

The only thing worth being devoted to is accountability itself. The demand that the people we send to Washington answer to us, govern for us, and when they fail — as they will, because they are human — that we say so without flinching.

Platner is not owed our silence nor our devotion. Maine voters are not owed a perfect choice. What we are owed is a government that answers to the people it serves.

If we are going to place our faith somewhere, let it be there.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America. Be kind, feed your mind, and wash your behind.

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