I asked him what his favorite food was, and before I could even finish the sentence, he was already somewhere else … back in his grandmother’s kitchen, back in the smell of whatever was on the stove, back in the story that made him who he is.

Jamaican food. His grandmother, born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica, an amazing cook. The food that resonates with him most, he said, is the food tied to his family.

I told him what I believe: all the best food stories, just like all the best human stories, involve immigrants of some kind.

He didn’t miss a beat. “That’s exactly right.”

That’s how this conversation started. And it tells you something about Wes Moore before he ever gets to the harder stuff.

He is the 63rd Governor of Maryland. The first Black governor in the state’s 246-year history. Only the third Black governor ever elected in the United States. A Rhodes Scholar. A captain in the 82nd Airborne who served in Afghanistan and earned a Bronze Star. A bestselling author. Former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, which distributed over $600 million toward lifting families out of poverty during his tenure.

He is also a man who lost his father when he was three years old.

I asked him how the experience of losing his father so young and being raised by his mother informs how he raises his son today.

He paused. Not long. But you could feel the weight of the question landing somewhere real.

He told me he has two kids. A daughter who’s 15. A son who’s 12. He loves them both endlessly, he said. But he knows there is a unique role he is playing for his son — and he knows it specifically because of what was absent when he was coming up.

His mother was amazing, he said. There were just certain nuances of being a man that she couldn’t quite teach him. Not because she wasn’t extraordinary. Because she wasn’t a man.

“The same thing about my daughter,” he said. “There are just certain nuances I can’t teach her because I don’t know it.”

It was one of the more honest things I’ve heard a father say in a long time. Not performative. Not political. Just true.

He said what his mother gave him — what she could give him, what she refused to stop giving him — was presence.

“Just being a good parent. Just being present for them.”

I’ve been thinking about that word ever since. Presence. We talk about fatherhood in terms of lessons and discipline and modeling. And those things matter. But Moore kept coming back to something simpler and harder than all of it.

Just being there.

He grew up without it. He knows exactly what the absence feels like. And he has built his parenting — and, in a meaningful way, his governing — around filling that space.

His son James recited the Pledge of Allegiance at his father’s inauguration.

I don’t think that’s a small thing. I think that’s a man who has spent his whole life thinking about what it means to show up, and finding a way to put his kid at the center of the moment that defined his career.

There’s a book Moore wrote called The Other Wes Moore. Two boys. Same name. Same city. Same circumstances — Black, fatherless, raised by single mothers in the Bronx and Baltimore, same era, same streets. One became the Governor of Maryland. The other is serving a life sentence in prison for felony murder.

He wrote: “The chilling truth is that Wes’s story could have been mine; the tragedy is that my story could have been his.”

When I listen to him talk about his son, about presence, about the particular weight a father carries for a boy who is watching him — I hear that book underneath every word.

He knows what the fork in the road looks like. He’s studied it. He’s lived it. And now he’s governing a state with 6 million people, a significant number of them young men, and he carries that knowledge into the work every single day.

We shifted to the political. Not because I wanted to pull him away from the personal — I didn’t — but because with this Governor, the two are not separate things.

He is the Vice Chair of the National Governors Association. I asked him about the role governors should play in unwinding what we’re seeing from Washington right now.

He was clear-eyed about the limits. Governors can’t stop wars. Can’t bring gas prices down. Can’t unilaterally reverse tariffs that are driving up the cost of everything from groceries to hardware.

“I wish we could. But no governor has that ability or authority.”

What governors can do, he said, is work in their lane — and work hard in it.

In Maryland, that has meant a middle-class tax cut, because the middle class, he said, actually needed the relief.

It has meant going after grocery chains that are using your phone data to price-gouge you at the register. Maryland became the first state in the country to make price manipulation by supermarkets illegal.

It has meant working with private sector partners to expand access to generic prescription drugs — bringing down costs for people who are getting squeezed on every side.

I brought up what Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York with public-private bodegas as a model for keeping pressure on prices at the neighborhood level. Moore was measured but clear.

“We have got to make sure these prices are getting lowered. And we’ve got to be creative on it.”

He’s right. And the creative part is what distinguishes the governors and mayors who are actually governing from the ones who are waiting for Washington to fix things that Washington has broken.

He put it plainly: there are people right now who think the pain people are feeling is a hoax.

“For people who are in our communities, it’s not a hoax for them. This is real.”

I’ve talked to a lot of elected officials. Most of them speak in a register that keeps you at a distance — careful, managed, calibrated.

Wes Moore does not speak that way.

He speaks the way a man speaks when he has already done the hardest accounting of his own life and arrived somewhere on the other side of it. The story is already out there, in his own words, in his own book. He has already told you how close he came to being the other Wes Moore.

What’s left is just the work.

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, he said something that I keep turning over.

He said that what all of our kids require is what his mother gave him: presence.

Not a title. Not a curriculum. Not a policy.

Presence.

I think about that in the context of my own kids. My own blended family. The particular weight of raising sons in a moment when the definition of manhood is being contested from about fifteen directions at once — some of them useful, most of them not.

I think about the other Wes Moore, 12 years old in the same city, without anyone to anchor him to a different version of himself.

And I think about what it means that the man who escaped that fate is now the governor of the state where it happened — and that he starts every conversation about policy with the same place he starts every conversation about parenting.

Presence. Just being there. Refusing to stop showing up.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it.

Whether you’re raising a son, running a state, or trying to make democracy work in a moment when it’s under real pressure — the answer is the same.

You show up. You stay. You don’t look away.

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.

One origin story puts it in Sioux City, Iowa, 1930, where a cook named Joe added tomato sauce to a loose meat sandwich and accidentally invented an American institution. Another plants it squarely in Key West, Florida. But the most documented story leads somewhere else.

A bar owner named José Abeal y Otero opened his place in Havana between 1917 and 1919. Ernest Hemingway loved it. When his friend Joe Russell opened a bar in Key West, Hemingway pushed him to rename it Sloppy Joe’s, after the Havana original. The Florida bar adopted the name, and eventually gave it to the sandwich.

So the dish most associated with American school cafeterias and Tuesday nights may have been born in Cuba, carried across water by a Spanish barman and a novelist who couldn’t stay out of Havana.

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That tracks. American food has always traveled. The same country that tells immigrants they don’t belong keeps adopting their cooking, setting it on a bun, and calling it a classic.

This week I made Sloppy Joes for our boys.

Nobody complained.

Sweet & Savory Sloppy Joes

Messy, savory, and worth every napkin.

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

• 0.5 white onion, diced

• 1 green bell pepper, diced

• 1 pounds lean ground beef

• 1 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 teaspoons minced garlic

• 15 ounces tomato sauce (15 oz can)

• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire or steak sauce

• 2 teaspoons yellow mustard

• 1 tablespoons brown sugar

• 0.5 teaspoons salt

• 0.3 teaspoons black pepper

• 4 hamburger buns, toasted and buttered as desired

Steps

1. Make the sauce: In a bowl, combine Worcestershire, yellow mustard, brown sugar, and tomato sauce. Set aside.

2. Brown the beef: Heat olive oil in a large skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the ground beef and cook about 5 minutes, breaking it up as it browns. Season with salt and black pepper.

3. Add the vegetables: Add the diced peppers and onion to the skillet. Cook another 5 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and the beef is browned.

4. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes.

5. Simmer: Pour in the sauce and bring to a light boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes or until thickened to your liking. Add a splash of water if needed for a thinner consistency.

6. Serve: Serve on buns, toasted and buttered as desired. Enjoy.

Full recipe below

In 1926, a man named Julius Freed opened a small orange juice stand on South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. He wasn’t selling much — about $20 worth of drinks a day. Orange juice, it turns out, is acidic. People weren’t lining up for the stomach discomfort.

Three years later, his friend and real estate broker Bill Hamlin came up with a recipe for a drink that his stomach liked a bit better. At Hamlin’s suggestion, Freed jazzed up the drink with a formula of egg whites, non-dairy powder, vanilla, and a few other secret ingredients. The result was something frothy, creamy, and smooth. Sales jumped to $100 a day. By 1929, the small kiosk was reportedly serving up to 5,000 glasses a day.

The name came from the customers themselves. People would roll up to the stand and shout, “Give me an orange, Julius!” It stuck.

Here’s an Orange Julius Fact Sheet for kids.

Orange Julius became a franchise. It landed at state fairs, then county fairs, then shopping malls — which is where most of us under 50 first encountered it. For a whole generation, it was the reward at the end of a trip to the mall with your parents. Creamsicle in a cup. Cold, smooth, vaguely magical.

Dairy Queen acquired Orange Julius in 1987, and it has lived as a branded menu item under that umbrella ever since. You can still order one. It’s fine. But it tastes more like an orange sherbet milkshake than it does the drink I remember standing in line for while my mom looked at shoes.

So I made my own.

The original formula used egg whites to get that frothy texture. This version skips the egg whites and uses sweetened condensed milk instead, which handles both the creaminess and the sweetness in one shot. Clear vanilla extract does quiet, important work here. Fresh-squeezed orange juice — three oranges — brings the brightness that the mall version lost somewhere along the way.

Blend it until it’s completely smooth and what you get is something sharp and creamy at the same time. It tastes like the late 80s. Parachute pants. Members Only jackets. The food court at Broward Mall.

One good drink.

The Citrus Maximus (copycat Orange Julius)

Makes 1 serving

Ingredients

• 3 oranges, juiced, plus a thin orange wheel for garnish

• 1 cup ice

• 2 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk

• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

Combine the orange juice, ice, sweetened condensed milk, and vanilla in a blender. Blend on high until smooth and creamy. Pour into a glass. Garnish with the orange wheel.

Enjoy!

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.

The answer, it turned out, was a small aircraft charter company in Cartersville, Georgia.

Phoenix Air Group had been quietly developing an Aeromedical Biological Containment System—a self-contained, two-compartment isolation tent fitted inside a modified Gulfstream jet—in partnership with the CDC and the Department of Defense, starting in 2008. When federal funding lapsed in 2010, the government paid Phoenix Air $10 a year to store the system on a shelf. “We just put everything on a shelf,” said Dent Thompson, Phoenix Air’s vice president and chief operations officer, “because we knew eventually there would be an epidemic.”

On July 31, 2014, the State Department called. Phoenix Air pulled the system off the shelf. Within days they were under contract, and between August 2014 and May 2015, Phoenix Air made over 40 flights from West Africa to specialty treatment hospitals in Europe and the United States, saving many lives and assuring medical professionals working in Africa of a “lifeboat” home for treatment should they contract a deadly disease.

What made people go

The logistics of the 2014 response were complicated. Getting NGOs and humanitarian organizations to surge personnel into an active Ebola zone required overcoming a very human question: if something goes wrong, will I be taken care of? The State Department and USAID understood that question wasn’t rhetorical. They built an answer to it.

In addition to the Phoenix Air contract, the Department of State entered into a formal commercial agreement providing the capability to evacuate up to four patients requiring biocontainment per week—available on a reimbursable basis to international organizations, partner foreign governments, and private voluntary organizations registered with and approved by USAID. A signed binding agreement with the State Department was required before the service could be made available. In other words, if your organization wanted access to the medevac system, you signed a contract. The promise was in writing.

On the ground in Liberia, the United States built a high-quality 25-bed hospital in Monrovia—the Monrovia Medical Unit—staffed by licensed physicians and other healthcare professionals from the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, with priority care given to Liberian and international healthcare workers and the international UN and NGO staff supporting those efforts.

And when the government’s capacity had gaps, private philanthropy filled them. Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, pledged $100 million through Vulcan Inc.’s Paul G. Allen Ebola Program. At a time when medical workers were reluctant to travel to West Africa because there was no guarantee of evacuation if they got sick, Allen put up nearly $10 million to build two portable medevac units and to underwrite a fund to cover evacuation costs not covered by insurance. The existence of the fund provided peace of mind for volunteers.

Through a partnership with the U.S. Department of State and MRIGlobal, two first-of-their-kind biocontainment units were developed, large enough for four patients each, along with a medical crew, loadable onto a 747 without requiring decontamination of the entire aircraft.

This wasn’t improvised goodwill. It was a deliberate architecture. Government contracts, private philanthropy, signed binding agreements, dedicated aircraft, and a field hospital with licensed physicians. People built it carefully, over years, precisely so that when the question came again: will you come get me? The answer would be yes, without hesitation.

What’s left of it

Paul Allen died in October 2018. Vulcan Inc. has since wound down its philanthropic operations.

USAID, the main implementing agency for global health efforts, was dissolved in July 2025, with remaining programs moved to the State Department. Of the 770 global health awards identified, 80% were listed as terminated, totaling $12.7 billion in unobligated funding.

USAID contract workers had handled setting up clinics, importing ambulances, contacting people with suspected cases, and staffing isolation facilities. But the Trump administration canceled thousands of foreign aid work contracts as it dismantled USAID.

The infrastructure that answered the question in 2014—the contracts, the medevac system, the field hospital, the coordinating agency—no longer exists in the same form. Some of it is gone entirely. Some of it is being rebuilt from scratch, in real time, as the current outbreak grows.

Which brings us to the policy that emerged this week.

The broken contract

The White House has directed that Americans who get sick during Ebola outbreak response will not be brought back to the United States. They will be sent to a new quarantine and treatment facility being stood up in Kenya. No one with Ebola comes home. Period.

The facility in Kenya has no track record. No established clinical staff. No approved treatment protocol for this strain. It is being built in weeks.

Dr. Craig Spencer, who contracted Ebola in 2014 while working in Guinea, was evacuated to Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and survived, has written directly about what this policy means for the people who would follow in his footsteps. The treatment he received, at one of the country’s premier biocontainment facilities, is precisely what the Americans we send now will not receive.

We have more than a dozen hospitals in this country specifically equipped and staffed to treat Ebola. They exist because we built them after 2014, because we understood that being prepared is the only thing that keeps an outbreak from becoming a catastrophe.

We are not using them.

The human math

In 2014, we learned something important: fear, when it becomes policy, makes outbreaks worse. Stigma, travel bans, and panic didn’t stop Ebola. Responders did. And responders went because the answer to their question was yes.

To Dent Thompson at Phoenix Air, the principle was simple: “To me, this is no different from a soldier being shot in Afghanistan. The U.S. government is going to get that soldier and bring him home and put him in a medical facility.”

That principle, that we don’t leave our people behind when we’re the ones who asked them to go, is not complicated. Most people, regardless of where they fall on anything else, understand it immediately. It’s the deal.

The people considering deployment right now are doing the same math every responder does. Risk on one side. Trust on the other. The question isn’t whether they’re brave enough. It’s whether we’ve given them any reason to believe the answer is still yes.

Right now, we haven’t.

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.

Makes 8 Servings

Ingredients

• 6 cups corn flake cereal

• 3 cups whole milk

• 2 cups heavy cream

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin (about 1½ packages)

• 2 cups fresh berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, or a mix)

Directions

1. Toast the cereal: Heat oven to 300°F. Spread 6 cups Corn Flakes on a baking sheet and bake until toasty, about 12 minutes.

2. Steep the milk: While still warm, transfer toasted cereal to a large bowl. Add milk and cream, stir to combine, and let steep for 30-45 minutes. Do not steep longer or the dessert will become too starchy.

3. Make the base: Strain the steeped mixture into a saucepan, pressing firmly to extract all liquid. Discard the soggy cereal. Add salt and brown sugar, then heat just until the milk is hot enough to dissolve the sugar — watch carefully and stir gently.

4. Bloom the gelatin: Ladle ¼ cup of the warm milk mixture into a small bowl and whisk in powdered gelatin. Set aside for 5 minutes, then whisk the soaked gelatin back into the remaining milk mixture until fully combined.

5. Set the panna cottas: Divide the mixture evenly among 8 ramekins or silicone molds. Refrigerate until set, at least 2 hours. If using ramekins, cover and hold until ready to serve. If using molds, freeze for 1 hour, pop out onto wax paper (not parchment), then refrigerate until ready to serve.

6. Serve: Serve cold panna cottas in their ramekins or turned out onto plates. Top each generously with fresh berries just before serving.

Click HERE for the panna cotta recipe.

The raw milk discussion is everywhere right now.

In my social media feed, being celebrated at the White House, there’s a bill moving through Congress that would let it cross state lines for the first time in decades, and if your algorithm looks anything like mine, at least one wellness influencer has told you it changed their life.

I looked into the science, the politics, the influencers, and the money. I conclude that what’s being said the loudest paints an incomplete picture especially if you have kids.

A Legitimate Concern

First, I want to be fair to the people drawn to this conversation, because the instinct underneath it is real.

Many of us have lost trust in industrialized food systems. We’ve watched regulatory agencies get cozy with the industries they’re supposed to police. We’ve been told things were safe that weren’t. We should also acknowledge that a small, local, direct-from-farmer relationship is a different risk calculus than what the influencer moment is actually promoting. There’s something genuinely appealing about food that is simple and direct, about a farm you can see, or an animal (or herd) you can verify.

That impulse to turn away from industrialized systems is reasonable. But a reasonable instinct can still lead you to an unreasonable conclusion.

The Voices Leading the Charge

Paul Saladino, who goes by “Carnivore MD” online, has nearly 3 million Instagram followers and has been one of the loudest voices for raw milk in the MAHA ecosystem. In May 2024, he posted a video on his X account advocating that parents feed their infants raw dairy. It got 90,000 views before he deleted it after significant backlash. Other videos on his account showed an actual infant drinking raw milk from a bucket. [1]

This is a person with a medical degree (though his California license was listed as “delinquent” as of 2022 for nonpayment of fees [2]), promoting something the American Academy of Pediatrics explicitly warns against. And he was doing it while partnering with Raw Farm, one of the largest raw milk producers in the country, in part to co-create a smoothie sold at Erewhon. [2]

And he’s not alone.

Gwyneth Paltrow has said publicly that she puts Raw Farm cream in her coffee every morning. [3] “Ballerina Farm” influencer Hannah Neeleman (nearly 20 million followers across Instagram and TikTok) has documented producing raw milk at home and promoted its supposed beauty benefits, with her farm gearing up for commercial dairy production. [3] Former U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a photo of raw milk on Instagram captioned “Make America Healthy Again” while she was in office. [4]

At the White House celebration for the MAHA Report release, Saladino filmed himself in a room of podcasters, boasting that he had packed his own raw milk and raw meat lunch — holding up a flask for the camera. [5]

This is what the raw milk moment looks like.

And the financial incentives underneath it are substantial. As one researcher studying the movement put it, “the contemporary wellness industry is massive, and there are huge sums of money to be made.” Influencers promoting raw milk are often directly profiting from product partnerships, supplements, and audience growth built on that content. [4]

Raw Milk Risks are Well-documented

The invention of pasteurization wasn’t aimed at fixing something inherently wrong with milk. It was a response to what industrialized production did to the conditions under which milk was made. Ironically, the movement now pushing raw milk into wider distribution is accelerating the conditions that made pasteurization a necessary safeguard.

University of Wisconsin food scientist John Lucey, who has spent his career working with dairy farmers, explains why: no matter how much care a farmer puts in, farms are places where bacteria reside, and the risk can’t be reduced to zero. Pasteurization, he says, “remains our gold standard.” [13]

Unpasteurized, raw milk can carry Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, and Campylobacter. These are not hypothetical or rare risks. The CDC tracks raw milk outbreaks every year. People become hospitalized. Some die. And the populations most vulnerable are exactly who you’d expect: young children, pregnant women, elderly people, and anyone with a compromised immune system. [6]

The CDC estimates that raw milk is approximately 840 times more likely to cause illness per serving than pasteurized milk. [7] That statistic lives as an unmentioned footnote while the influencer content gets millions of views.

The claimed benefits: better enzymes, better probiotics, relief for the lactose intolerant, have been studied extensively. The scientific consensus is clear: pasteurization’s adverse impact on nutritional value is minimal, and there is no peer-reviewed evidence supporting these claimed health benefits of raw milk. What pasteurization does, reliably and demonstrably, is kill the pathogens that can put your family in the hospital. [8]

The American Society for Microbiology has noted that several raw milk health claims have been “demystified or outright refuted” by scientific studies. In contrast, the risks — including from pathogens like Campylobacter and Listeria, which account for nearly 13% of contamination found in raw milk globally — remain well-documented and serious. [6]

Further, the H5N1 Bird flu has been spreading through U.S. dairy cattle since early 2024 and has been detected in raw milk samples. As of yet, there are no confirmed human cases of infection from drinking raw milk, but researchers studying the virus are not relaxed about the possibility.

Pasteurization destroys H5N1. Raw milk removes that protection at a moment when public health experts are monitoring this virus for pandemic potential. [6]

Raw Farm, the same brand that Saladino and Paltrow were publicly promoting, halted distribution of its products after its milk tested positive for H5N1. [3] More recently, the FDA linked an ongoing E. coli outbreak to Raw Farm’s cheddar products. The company refused a voluntary recall, saying its own tests came back clean. As of this spring, the FDA has still not issued a mandatory recall, and Democratic lawmakers have publicly asked whether the brand’s political connections to the Kennedy operation are influencing that restraint. [9]

A Political Rise

RFK Jr. has made raw milk a cultural signifier for the MAHA movement. He’s said he drinks only raw milk. He celebrated the release of the MAHA Report by doing shots of it at the White House with a prominent health influencer. He has called FDA regulations on raw milk part of the agency’s “war on public health.” [10]

Interestingly, the MAHA Report that his commission produced doesn’t mention raw milk once. And Kennedy, as HHS Secretary, hasn’t changed a single federal policy around it. The FDA’s official warnings remain unchanged. The interstate sales ban, in place since 1987, is still law. [11]

What has changed is the political energy, which has put wind in the sails of H.R. 7880, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2026, introduced in March by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME). The bill would end the federal prohibition on transporting raw milk across state lines between states where it’s already legal to sell. It carries genuine bipartisan support and more legislative momentum than any previous version. [12]

If it passes, raw milk becomes more available and more widely distributed — further from the small, local, farm-direct model that even raw milk’s own advocates cite as essential to doing it safely. More product. More distribution. More influencers. Less accountability. [12]

The Raw Truth

I can see why people are drawn to this conversation. The distrust of industrial food systems is real and sometimes earned. The desire to feel connected to what you’re feeding your family is understandable and commendable.

The discussion about raw milk, however, is getting hijacked by people with financial stakes in what we put on our table.

Pasteurization is not a corporate conspiracy. It is one of the most consequential public health interventions in human history. Before it was standard, raw milk killed people with regularity. It was a documented vector for tuberculosis, typhoid, and scarlet fever. We figured that out, we fixed it, and now a wellness industrial complex is asking you to unlearn it in exchange for a vibe and a White House photo op. [8]

As a parent, I try to view institutions critically. I like to peel back the layers of what I’m being told. I recognize salesmanship and emotional reframing when it tries to keep me away from data.

The science on raw milk is not ambiguous. The risks are real, the benefits are unproven, and the people promoting it most loudly have money on the line.

Talk to your pediatrician. Talk to a local farmer. Read the research. And when the next influencer shows up in your feed holding a glass of raw milk with that warm, trustworthy smile — ask yourself, and them, where’s the science?

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

Sources

[1] CBS News — “Influencers promote raw milk despite FDA health warnings as bird flu spreads in dairy cows” (May 2024) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bird-flu-raw-milk-influencers-fda-warning/

[2] Wikipedia — Paul Saladino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Saladino

[3] Business of Fashion — “Raw Milk: The Influencer Wellness Fad With a Side of Bird Flu” (December 2024) https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/raw-milk-the-influence-wellness-fad-with-a-side-of-bird-flu/

[4] Dazed — “Why are right-wing influencers drinking raw milk?” (December 2024) https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/65608/1/why-are-right-wing-influencers-drinking-raw-milk-unpasteurised-rfk-jr

[5] Rolling Stone — “Why Are Health Influencers Drinking Raw Milk and Honey Shots at the White House?” (May 2025) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/raw-milk-honey-maha-report-white-house-influencers-1235349031/

[6] American Society for Microbiology — “Raw Milk Microbiology: Unfiltered and Unfriendly” (May 2025) https://asm.org/articles/2025/may/raw-milk-microbiology-unfiltered-and-unfriendly

[7] Real Raw Milk Facts — “Raw Milk State Laws and Regulations” https://realrawmilkfacts.com/raw-milk-regulations

[8] Sentient Media — “RFK Jr.’s Stance on Raw Milk, UPFs, Oils & Organic Food” (February 2025) https://sentientmedia.org/rfks-raw-milk-upfs-oils-organic-food/

[9] E&E News / Politico — “RFK Jr.-Favored Farm Linked to E. coli Outbreak Resists Voluntary Recall” (April 2026) https://www.eenews.net/articles/rfk-jr-favored-farm-linked-to-e-coli-outbreak-resists-voluntary-recall/

[10] Dairy Herd — “RFK Jr.: Friend or Foe to the Dairy Industry?” (February 2025) https://www.dairyherd.com/news/policy/rfk-jr-friend-or-foe-dairy-industry

[11] NBC News — “Raw Milk Advocates Wonder: Where Is Kennedy?” (June 2025) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/raw-milk-kennedy-rcna213568

[12] Food Safety News — “Bill to Lift Ban on Transporting Raw Milk Is Back” (March 2026) https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/03/bill-to-lift-ban-on-transporting-raw-milk-is-back/

[13] Takeaways from AP’s report on the push for raw milk intensifying https://apnews.com/article/raw-milk-pasteurization-state-law-takeaways-b387602e8ce5101858a5c4b0de5b4613

A full list of actions to take, with links, is below.

A behavioral pattern runs through this administration, one that markets a bizarro version of reality to an audience of its admirers. Since day one, it’s been easy to spot and verify.

On January 21, 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer stood at a White House podium and declared Trump’s inauguration crowd “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period.” DC Metro ridership that day was 570,557. Obama’s 2009 inauguration drew 1.1 million trips on the same system. Independent crowd scientist Keith Still estimated the 2017 crowd at 300,000 to 600,000 — roughly one-third of Obama’s 1.1 to 1.8 million. Aerial photographs confirmed it. The claim was not subjective. It was false.

That was the opening act.

Then we heard that reporters are the “Enemy of the State.” But in reality, they are a structural requirement of democracy.

A 2006 UNESCO paper by Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris found that press freedom was “the most consistent predictor of democracy” across all measured indicators, stronger even than national wealth. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked the U.S. 57th out of 180 countries on its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, down from 55th the year before, and dropped the U.S. to 64th on its 2026 index — the lowest ranking the United States has ever received. The Committee to Protect Journalists declared in April 2025 that press freedom is “no longer a given in the United States.” In the same period, the White House barred the Associated Press from press events for refusing to use the term “Gulf of America,” the State Department restricted press access, the Pentagon required Secretary Hegseth’s pre-approval for even unclassified reporting, and the administration sued the BBC for $10 billion. None of that is compatible with a free press. None of it is compatible with democracy.

The SAVE Act Is Not About Saving Anything

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H.R. 22) requires every American to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in person to register to vote or update a registration for federal elections. Acceptable documents include a U.S. passport, a certified birth certificate, or a Certificate of Naturalization. There is no REAL ID card in any state that currently indicates citizenship — states issue REAL IDs to lawful non-citizens — so that option is functionally unavailable. The bill eliminates online and mail registration. It ends voter registration drives. It creates criminal penalties for election officials who register an applicant without the required documents.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates 21.3 million U.S. citizens of voting age — about 9% — do not have ready access to documentary proof of citizenship. The Center for American Progress estimates 69 million American women who have changed their last name after marriage do not have a birth certificate matching their current legal name. The Bipartisan Policy Center studied Kansas’s version of this law (2011–2018) and found it blocked roughly 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens from registering while documented non-citizen registration was approximately 0.002% of the total voter rolls. A federal court struck down the Kansas law. The Supreme Court, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), held that states cannot impose documentary-citizenship requirements for federal voter registration forms, raising significant constitutional questions about this bill’s federal mandate.

The House passed the bill twice — April 2025 and February 2026. As of late May 2026, the bill remains stalled in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. The advocacy work is ongoing and it matters.

The $1.776 Billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund”

In January 2025, Donald Trump, along with Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, filed suit against the IRS in the Southern District of Florida. The suit arose from the leak of Trump’s tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn. A federal judge was preparing to question whether the case presented a genuine legal controversy. Before she could rule, Trump’s lawyers withdrew the suit — in exchange for a $1.776 billion settlement funded by the U.S. Treasury’s Judgment Fund, a formal apology from the IRS, and a bar on the IRS pursuing current tax claims against Trump, his family, or his businesses.

The number $1.776 billion is a reference to 1776. It has no actuarial basis. Reason magazine noted it “fits a pattern of fanciful figures.”

The fund is administered by five commissioners appointed by the Attorney General (Todd Blanche), serving at the President’s pleasure, with no judicial oversight, no specified criteria, and no cap on individual awards. Claims are evaluated case by case. Stated purpose: redress for people who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” motivated by “improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”

Pardoned Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio told PBS NewsHour he expects “somewhere in the mid-tens of millions of dollars” from the fund. Two Capitol Police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 sued to block it, calling it “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.” Ninety-three House Democrats filed a motion citing “glaring constitutional defects.” Republican senators including Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune went on record opposing it in May 2026, with Tillis calling it “a payout pot for punks.” Their revolt delayed a $72 billion reconciliation package.

Why the Names Work for Authoritarianism

Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works (2018), identifies propaganda that “twists the language of democratic ideals against itself” as a core pillar of authoritarian politics. UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff documented in Don’t Think of an Elephant! (2004) that Orwellian policy naming — “Clear Skies,” “Healthy Forests,” “No Child Left Behind” — is deliberate strategy: “the use of Orwellian language — language that means the opposite of what it says.”

The names are a feature, not a bug, of a totalitarian toolkit.

The current pattern includes: the SAVE Act (blocks citizens, not non-citizens, from voting), DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency has been estimated by the Partnership for Public Service to have cost taxpayers $135 billion in productivity losses, paid leave, and rehiring in FY2025 alone, against DOGE’s own claimed savings of $160 billion), and the Anti-Weaponization Fund (settled a presidential lawsuit against the IRS with taxpayer money, with no judicial oversight, now expected to pay pardoned insurrectionists).

What We Do About It

Democracy does not run on its own. It runs on participation. Here is the full list of actions available to every citizen right now.

Register and Verify

• Confirm your voter registration is current at vote.org or your state election website.

• Check your registration status after any move, name change, or extended absence — registration can be purged.

• If the SAVE Act passes, gather and secure your documentary proof of citizenship now: passport, certified birth certificate, naturalization certificate. Help family members do the same.

Vote and Help Others Vote

• Vote in every election — federal, state, local, and primary. School board and county commission races shape voting infrastructure.

• Volunteer as a poll worker. Understaffed precincts create the conditions for suppression.

• Offer rides to the polls on Election Day. Transportation is a documented barrier.

• Host a voter registration drive or help staff one through organizations like vote.org, the League of Women Voters, or your local chapter of the NAACP.

Know Your Rights

• Read the Brennan Center’s Voters’ Guide at brennancenter.org.

• Understand your state’s ID requirements before Election Day.

• Know the ACLU’s voter protection hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683). Save it in your phone before November.

• Report voter intimidation or suppression to your state attorney general’s office, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, and the ACLU.

Track the Legislation

• Monitor the SAVE Act’s progress at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7296

• Sign up for alerts from the Brennan Center (brennancenter.org), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (naacpldf.org), and Protect Democracy (protectdemocracy.org).

• Contact your U.S. senators — both of them, regardless of party — and state your position on the SAVE Act by name.

Support the Free Press

• Subscribe to local and independent news outlets. Ad revenue and subscriptions are how journalism stays funded.

• Share credible reporting. Disinformation spreads faster when reliable information doesn’t.

• Do not amplify stories you haven’t verified. Slow down.

Engage Locally

• Attend city council, school board, and county commission meetings. These bodies control polling locations, election budgets, and local law enforcement priorities.

• Run for local office, or recruit someone who should.

• Join or support local chapters of the League of Women Voters, NAACP, ACLU, or Common Cause.

Support Election Defense Organizations

• Brennan Center for Justice — brennancenter.org

• NAACP Legal Defense Fund — naacpldf.org

• Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Election Protection) — lawyerscommittee.org

• Common Cause — commoncause.org

• Protect Democracy — protectdemocracy.org

• States United Democracy Center — statesuniteddemocracy.org

• All Voting Is Local — allvotingislocal.org

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (digital rights/election security) — eff.org

Talk to People

• Have a kitchen table conversation. Not the argument — the conversation. The research is detailed: peer-to-peer civic engagement changes minds and increases turnout more reliably than media alone.

• Share this article. Share the video. Point people to dadbriefs.com for the full breakdown.

The SAVE Act has been stalled, not stopped. The anti-weaponization fund has Republican opposition, not a court order. The pardoned defendants are in public life, running for office, marching on the Capitol, and claiming taxpayer money as compensation for what they did.

Democracy doesn’t need spectators. It needs participants.

Be kind, and wash your behind.

Mangoes are good for almost any application. They work in savory dishes, fruit salads, salsas, and smoothies. The one thing a mango is not particularly useful for is running a democracy.

How to Cut a Mango

Start by identifying the thinner profile of the fruit. The pit runs lengthwise through the center and is wider than you think, so you’ll want to cut slightly off-center, all the way down. Do the same on the other side. You now have two halves and a pit surrounded by fruit you’re going to eat over the sink like a reasonable adult.

For a handheld treat, score the inside of each half in a grid pattern, as deep as you can go without poking through the skin. Then push the skin side inward, and the flesh fans out. This is the hedgehog method, and it is deeply satisfying.

For chunks to use in a puree or salad, skip the grid. Instead, cut each half into strips, then cut the strips across or twice more without cutting through the skin. Lay the skin as flat as you can on your cutting board and slice away from you, keeping your fingers clear. You’ll get clean pieces with minimal waste.

Some people recommend peeling the whole mango before cutting. Those people also enjoy handling a large, slippery, golden missile over their kitchen floor.

There is no right answer here.

The Recipe

The base formula for a mango martini is equal parts mango puree, vodka, and triple sec.

My version adjusts the quantities slightly and replaces triple sec with watermelon liqueur and a squeeze of lemon. A Luxardo cherry is the garnish, like a prize at the bottom of the martini glass.

I call this drink the Mango Mussolini. In honor of no one in particular.

Tyranny is a sober subject, but tonight we drink. That hits the spot. That is the taste of sweet resistance.

Be kind, and wash your behind.

Mango Musolini Martini

Ingredients:

2.5 oz Vodka

2 oz Mango purée

1 oz Watermelon liqueur

0.5 oz Fresh lemon or lime juice

Ice for shaking

Optional: lemon or lime wheel and merichino cherry for garnish.

Directions:

1. Combine: Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and add the vodka, mango purée, watermelon liqueur, and lemon juice.

2. Shake: Shake vigorously for about 15 to 20 seconds until the outside of the shaker is frosty.

3. Serve: Strain the cocktail into a chilled martini glass and garnish as desired.

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.

The technique of soaking old bread in an egg-and-milk mixture to revive it dates back to medieval Europe, making this one of the oldest recipes in Western cooking. In France, pain perdu can even be served as a dessert, topped with ice cream and caramel sauce, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the French take their stale bread. The American version picked up cinnamon and maple syrup along the way, but the soul of the dish is the same: don't waste the bread.

You can use your favorite bread, but I die for the buttery, eggy goodness of a rich brioche loaf.

And you can add commonly used ingredients like vanilla, cinnamon, or nutmeg — but I love making a simple custard that allows the brioche flavor to shine through. The added salt (optional) really punches it, too!

Ingredients

• 1 loaf brioche bread, sliced into 6 one-and-a-half-inch slices and left out overnight to become stale

• 1 cup half-and-half or milk

• 3 eggs

• 2 tablespoons honey, warmed in the microwave (about 10 seconds)

• 1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)

• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon or nutmeg (optional)

• Butter or neutral oil for cooking

• Maple syrup, powdered sugar and fresh fruit for serving (optional)

Instructions

1. The night before: Slice the bread and leave out uncovered to become stale.

2. In the morning: In a mixing bowl, whisk together the half-and-half (or milk), eggs, honey, and salt (and spices, optional). Pour the custard mixture into a shallow dish or pie pan and set aside.

3. Preheat a skillet over medium heat, or a griddle to 300°F.

4. Dip each slice of bread into the custard mixture and allow it to soak for 30 seconds to one minute on each side. (The whole idea of using stale bread is that it soaks up the custard without going mushy.)

5. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in the skillet or on the griddle. Place slices onto the cooking surface and cook until golden brown, approximately 2 minutes per side. Remove from the pan and plate as desired.

6. Serve immediately with fresh fruit, powdered sugar, and/or real maple syrup. Enjoy!

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.

Full recipe below.

This is part of a series profiling candidates who I believe deserve your attention, because the fight against authoritarianism in America doesn’t end at the White House. It runs through Congress — both chambers. And if we’re serious about winning that fight, we have to be serious about who we’re sending there.

There’s a moment that tells you almost everything you need to know about Mary Peltola.

In 1996, she was twenty-two years old and running for a state house seat in the Bethel region of Alaska. She lost — by fifty-six votes — to an incumbent named Ivan Ivan. She went back to work. Not back to campaign strategy sessions or donor calls. Back to the Kuskokwim River, to the work of feeding communities and fighting for salmon runs, and getting her community to speak with one voice to the federal government about the resources that kept them alive.

She’d run again. And again. And eventually, she won.

That’s the shape of her political life. Earned steadily over time.

Who Mary Is

Mary Sattler Peltola was born in Anchorage on August 31, 1973, the same calendar date on which she would later learn, 49 years later, that she had won the congressional special election to represent Alaska in the U.S. House. Turning 49 as the congresswoman-elect of the 49th state.

She is Yup’ik Alaska Native on her mother’s side. Her Yup’ik name is Akalleq — it means “the one who rolled.” Her mother, Elizabeth “LizAnn” Piicigaq Williams, is from Kwethluk, a village on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Her father, Ward Sattler, was a Nebraska-born man who moved north to teach school, became a bush pilot, and along the way made friends with Alaska’s longtime Republican congressman, Don Young. As a child, Mary traveled to Young’s campaign events with her father. Decades later, she would win his seat.

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She grew up across a handful of small Yup’ik communities: Kwethluk, Tuntutuliak, Platinum, and Bethel. Villages measured in hundreds, not thousands. Places where the power goes out. Places where subsistence fishing isn’t a lifestyle, but rather an alignment between a community and its survival.

She is Orthodox Christian, a faith that arrived in Yup’ik communities through 18th-century Russian contact and has remained woven into village life ever since. She speaks English, Yup’ik, and some Russian — a layered inheritance that she carries without making a production of it. She serves on the board of Russian Orthodox Sacred Sites in Alaska. She is a mother of seven: four biological children and three stepchildren.

She started fishing at six. Her father registered a boat in her name when she was twelve. By fourteen, she was captaining that boat on the Kuskokwim.

She describes the river as “the center of my universe.” She can point from a moving skiff to the bank where her great-grandparents lived, and across the water to where her mother was born during berry-picking season.

Through Ups and Downs

Before she made national news, Peltola built something quieter.

After that 56-vote loss in 1996, she ran again and won a seat in the Alaska state legislature, where she served for a decade — becoming the first Alaska Native woman to chair the House Finance Committee. She worked across the aisle constantly, in a body where Republicans held the majority. She left the legislature in 2009 and spent years working in tribal resource management, eventually becoming Executive Director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. The job was to coordinate 118 sovereign tribal governments around a shared resource crisis: the collapsing salmon runs that fed their communities.

You don’t do that job by being ideologically rigid. You do it by understanding that the people on both sides of the table want the same thing — fish in the river, food on the table, a future that looks like the past — and that your job is to make the political system serve that shared interest, not the other way around.

That experience is the key to understanding everything that came next.

In June 2022, longtime Republican congressman Don Young died in office. Alaska held a special election. Peltola entered the race. She won and became the first Democrat to hold Alaska’s single congressional seat in nearly fifty years, and the first Alaska Native ever elected to Congress. She beat Sarah Palin. Twice. (They are, by all accounts, genuinely friendly. They’ve been photographed on a trampoline together. Alaska contains multitudes.)

She won in a Republican state because she ran on something that cuts across party lines: that your representative should be working for you. That food security is a dignity issue. That the people who fish and farm and hunt and teach should have a seat at the table where decisions get made.

She lost her re-election bid in November 2024 by fewer than 7,000 votes in one of the most Republican states in the country, in a national environment that swung hard against Democrats.

Forty-seven days later, she announced she was running for the U.S. Senate.

So, Why the Senate, and Why Now?

Alaska has two Senate seats. Both are currently held by Republicans: Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan. Sullivan’s seat is on the ballot in 2026. Peltola is running for it.

The conventional framing is: this is a long shot. Alaska is a red state. Democrats don’t win statewide there.

Except: Peltola already has won statewide there. She held a congressional seat covering the entire state for two years. She came within 7,000 votes of holding it again in a brutal environment for her party. She has crossover appeal with rural Republicans, Alaska Native voters, and independents that no other Democrat in the state can match. She is, arguably, the only Democrat in America who could win a Senate seat in Alaska.

And Alaska matters.

Control of the Senate is the hinge of everything right now. If Democrats can flip it — and flipping Alaska is one path to doing that — the ability to confirm judges, pass legislation, hold investigations, and function as a meaningful check on executive power comes back into play.

This Matters Beyond Alaska

We are in a moment where the structures of democratic governance are being tested in ways that require a serious, sustained response. The response doesn’t happen through protest alone, or through outrage, or through waiting for the courts to save us. It happens through elections. It happens through Congress. It happens through electing people who understand that their job is to represent their constituents and not to serve as a rubber stamp for whoever holds the executive.

Peltola is one of those people. Her entire biography is an argument against the idea that you have to choose between your community and your country — between local knowledge and national responsibility.

She knows what the Kuskokwim looks like in every season. She knows what it means when the salmon don’t come back. She lost her first race by 56 votes and went back to work. She lost her husband while she was in office and kept going. She lost her House seat and announced a Senate run seven weeks later.

Mary is real, seasoned, and shaped by something greater than ambition.

The fight for democratic governance in America runs through Congress. And it runs, maybe surprisingly, through Alaska.

Pay attention to this race.

Follow Mary’s Campaign

Mary Peltola for U.S. Senate: marypeltola.com Donate: marypeltola.com/donate Instagram & Threads: @marypeltola | Bluesky: @marypeltola | Facebook: @marypeltolaAK | TikTok: @mary_peltola | X: @MaryPeltola | Substack:

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Sources: Wikipedia; Britannica; NPR / Alaska Public Media; KYUK Bethel; Anchorage Daily News; GovTrack; Congress.gov; Ballotpedia; NTSB final report on the crash of Eugene Peltola Jr. (July 2023); Hopium Chronicles (Simon Rosenberg interview, March 2026).

And now, in the Kitchen Counter Civics tradition — a recipe worth making while you think about all of this.

Honey Soy Scallion Baked Salmon

Prep time: 10 minutes (plus marinating) | Cook time: 10–12 minutes | Serves: 2 | Calories: ~237 per serving

Ingredients

• 2 serving pieces of salmon

• ¼ cup finely chopped scallions

• ⅓ cup soy sauce or tamari

• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar

• ½ to 1 tablespoon honey

• 1 clove garlic, minced

• ½ teaspoon grated ginger

• 2 tablespoons neutral oil (or more sesame oil)

• 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

• 4 thin slices of lime

Optional toppings:

• ½ teaspoon black or tri-color sesame seeds, or everything-but-the-bagel seasoning

Instructions

1. Combine scallions and all ingredients except the lime slices in a large bowl. Mix well. Add the salmon and make sure it’s fully coated. Marinate for at least 10 minutes, or up to 12 hours in the refrigerator.

2. Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a sheet pan with parchment. Add the salmon, spoon some of the remaining marinade over the top, and discard the rest. Sprinkle with sesame seeds or EBTB seasoning if you like and lay the lime slices on top of the filets. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. (If you’re using farmed salmon, add a few extra minutes.)

3. Serve over white jasmine rice and/or seasonal roasted vegetables. Enjoy!

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.

The full recipe and actions you can take are below.

There’s a dish going viral right now called Filthy Cabbage. I made it and it’s incredibly good!

But it’s not the filthiest cabbage in the land.

That distinction belongs to a one-page document, quietly tucked behind a hyperlink on the Department of Justice website, that the acting Attorney General of the United States signed this week on your behalf. You didn’t authorize it. Nobody asked you. But it seeks to bind you, and every American after you, forever.

Let’s talk about what happened, and then let’s eat.

The Deal

On Monday, the Trump administration announced a settlement resolving a $10 billion lawsuit that Donald Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization had filed against the IRS. The suit stemmed from the unauthorized leak of Trump’s tax returns by a former IRS contractor. Instead of a direct payout to the president, the settlement created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” drawn from the Justice Department’s judgment fund, meaning taxpayer money, to compensate people who claim they were unfairly investigated or prosecuted by the federal government.

The fund is expected to benefit Trump’s political allies, including participants in the January 6th Capitol riot. Disbursements will be handled in near-total secrecy, with only a quarterly confidential report provided to the attorney general. Claims stop being processed no later than December 1, 2028, just weeks before Trump is scheduled to leave office.

That alone drew immediate condemnation. Senator Chuck Schumer called it a “get-out-of-jail-free card.” The top lawyer at the Treasury Department resigned the day the deal was announced.

The Quiet Page

The following day, a one-page addendum appeared, buried in a hyperlink with no announcement, no press conference, no explanation. It was signed not by the IRS commissioner but by Todd Blanche, acting attorney general, and former personal criminal defense attorney for Donald Trump.

Liz Oyer, who served as Pardon Attorney for the Department of Justice, reviewed the document and described it plainly: it signs away all claims against Donald Trump on behalf of the United States government.

It states that the federal government is now, in its own words, “forever barred and precluded” from auditing, investigating, or suing Donald Trump, his family members, his businesses, affiliated trusts, and related entities for any tax returns filed before the date of the agreement. The ongoing IRS audit that experts estimated could cost Trump more than $100 million is effectively finished. The right to collect taxes he may owe, gone. The right to reclaim money that may have been improperly taken from the public, surrendered. The right to pursue legal recourse of any kind against Trump or his associates for past tax matters, waived.

And it applies to every administration that follows, not just this one.

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president, and executive branch officials from ordering the IRS to start or stop specific audits. The statute carves out a narrow exception for the attorney general. Critics, including Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, argue that even that carve-out does not cover what Blanche signed. Brandon DeBot of NYU’s Tax Law Center called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Representative Richard Neal called it corruption directly.

The Absurd Audacity

A president sued a federal agency he controls. His own Justice Department settled that lawsuit on terms that personally benefit him, his family, and his political allies. A secret addendum was hidden from public view until the day after the announcement. And the whole arrangement was structured to move fast, avoid judicial review, and outlast his time in office.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and Senate majority leader, said he was “not a big fan” of the fund and saw no “purpose” to it. Senator Chris Van Hollen told Blanche directly, in a Senate hearing, “You are acting today like the president’s personal attorney, and that’s the whole problem.”

Blanche’s response was to remind the senator of his title.

The people who are supposed to be watching this, asking hard questions, slowing it down, are either complicit, reluctant, or simply outpaced by the speed at which it’s all moving. That’s the design.

The Recipe

Filthy Cabbage is a one-pot meal that costs very little and feeds a lot of people. Ground beef, cabbage, peppers, a gravy built from what’s already in the pan. It’s the kind of food that doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. That’s more than we can say for this week’s news.

FILTHY CABBAGE

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

• 2 lbs ground beef (80/20 preferred)

• 1 head cabbage, chopped into bite-sized pieces

• 1 white onion, diced

• 1 red bell pepper, diced

• 1 yellow bell pepper, diced

• 3 tbsp all-purpose flour

• 3 tbsp tomato paste

• 2 tbsp garlic, minced

• 2 cups beef broth

• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

• 1 tbsp white sugar or honey

• 1 tbsp smoked paprika

• 1 tsp salt, plus more to taste

• 1 tsp black pepper

Instructions

1. Brown the ground beef in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Do not drain the fat.

2. Push the beef to the sides of the pot. Add the tomato paste and cook for 2 minutes. Add the onions and peppers and cook for another 2 minutes.

3. Add the flour and mix thoroughly. Add the sugar/honey, paprika, salt, beef broth, and Worcestershire sauce. Add the garlic and simmer for 5 minutes.

4. Add the chopped cabbage in batches if needed. Stir until fully coated in the gravy. Cover and reduce heat to medium-low.

5. Simmer covered for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the cabbage reaches your preferred texture.

6. If the sauce is too loose, cook uncovered for a few minutes. Serve hot with rice, or on its own.

What You Can Do

Call your members of Congress. House and Senate. Tell them this settlement is unacceptable and you expect them to say so by name. Senator Thune has already broken from the administration on this, which means the silence of other Republicans is a choice, not an inevitability.

Watch for legal challenges. Multiple legal experts have said the agreement may be unenforceable, and challenges are expected. Pay attention to who brings them and when.

Keep sharing. The fact that the addendum was buried in a hyperlink with no announcement tells you exactly how much confidence this administration has in public approval of what it did. Sunlight is the only pressure available right now that doesn’t require an institution willing to apply it.

Be kind, 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. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

On May 7, the Tennessee legislature passed a new congressional map. It carved up the 9th Congressional District, anchored in Memphis, and split its predominantly Black voters into three rural, white, Republican-leaning districts stretching hundreds of miles east. The state’s only majority-Black congressional district was gone.

Five days later, Speaker Cameron Sexton stripped all 24 House Democrats of their committee assignments.

Because every Black member of the Tennessee House caucuses as a Democrat, the result was complete: every Black state representative was removed from every committee at once. Roughly 1.7 million Tennesseans now have legislators who can vote on the floor but cannot shape legislation in committee, where bills are written, amended, and killed before most people know they exist.

These two actions are connected. They are also worth understanding with precision, because the full story is more damning than the version circulating online.On May 7, the Tennessee legislature passed a new congressional map. It carved up the 9th Congressional District, anchored in Memphis, and split its predominantly Black voters into three rural, white, Republican-leaning districts stretching hundreds of miles east. The state’s only majority-Black congressional district was gone.

The Race to be Partisan

Most of the outrage online calls this partisan gerrymandering. Republicans, to their credit in one narrow sense, said the quiet part out loud: Sen. John Stevens described the new map as “Tennessee’s attempt to maximize our partisan advantage.”

That framing is understandable. It is also a legal trap.

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts have no authority to strike down partisan gerrymanders. The majority held that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of federal courts. In plain terms: if Republicans draw a map to crush Democrats, and do nothing else, federal judges cannot touch it. The Court acknowledged that extreme partisan gerrymandering may be “unjust” and “incompatible with democratic principles,” but held that the Constitution does not provide a judicial remedy. Rucho closed the federal courthouse door on partisan claims.

It left open the door on racial ones.

The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in the drawing of legislative districts. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, until recently, required that minority voters have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. These are the tools that remain available to challengers of the Tennessee map, and they are the tools the lawsuits are using.

Three suits are now pending. The NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed in Davidson County Chancery Court. The ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee filed in federal court. Both allege intentional racial discrimination and First Amendment retaliation. A third suit is in progress. The maps remain in effect while litigation proceeds.

The racial case against the Tennessee map is not abstract. Memphis is a majority-Black city. The 9th Congressional District was drawn around it, specifically because of that demographic reality, and had returned Black Democratic representation to Congress for decades. The new map splits those voters into three separate districts, each anchored in rural, white, Republican-leaning communities to which Memphis has no geographic, cultural, or political connection. The effect is to take a concentrated bloc of Black voters and render them a minority in three places rather than a majority in one.

Republicans have tried to insulate the map from racial challenge by building the partisan record themselves. If Stevens goes on the record calling it a partisan move, the argument runs, then the racial argument becomes harder to prove. Courts are required to ask whether race or partisanship was the predominant factor in drawing a district. Since Black voters in Memphis vote overwhelmingly Democratic, the two motivations are difficult to untangle. This is a known legal strategy. It has been deployed in redistricting fights in North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana.

It does not always work. In Allen v. Milligan (2023), the Supreme Court upheld Section 2’s application to Alabama’s congressional map, holding that a court-drawn map was needed to give Black voters a fair opportunity to elect a second representative. That ruling is now in tension with the Court’s 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly narrowed Section 2’s reach, making it harder for plaintiffs to prove that a map dilutes minority voting power. Callais is the ruling that opened the door for Tennessee’s special session. It had been handed down one day before Gov. Lee called the legislature back to work.

The lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s map will have to navigate a legal landscape that was reshaped to make challenges like this harder. That is part of what makes the timeline significant.

How We Got Here

Gov. Bill Lee called the special session on April 30, one day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The session came at the request of President Trump, as part of a coordinated multi-state push to redraw congressional maps before the 2026 midterms. Tennessee was the ninth state to act.

The coordination matters. This is not a state acting on its own political instincts. Across the country, Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere have moved to redraw maps mid-decade, between the normal redistricting cycles that follow each census. The goal, stated or implied, is to lock in Republican seats in the U.S. House before November 2026. Estimates suggest Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats nationally through this cycle of mid-decade maps, offsetting potential losses from policy backlash and establishing structural advantages that persist regardless of electoral conditions.

Before Tennessee Republicans could draw a single line, they first had to repeal a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting. They did so with no apparent hesitation. The law existed for a reason: to provide stability in the representative relationship between voters and their elected officials between census cycles. Its repeal was a precondition for the map, and the map was a precondition for the punishment.

The Protest, and the Punishment

During the May 7 vote, Black Democratic lawmakers linked arms at the front of the chamber. Activists in the gallery sounded air horns and chanted “Our house.” Rep. Justin Jones burned a photograph of a Confederate flag in the hallway. Sen. Charlane Oliver stood on her desk holding a banner: “No Jim Crow 2.0, Stop the TN Steal.”

Speaker Sexton’s response, five days later, cited “decorum violations”: linking arms, blocking aisles, distributing earplugs, using noisemakers. The letter called it a procedural matter. Every Democrat received one.

The procedural framing is worth examining. Sexton did not write that Democrats were being punished for opposing the redistricting, or for holding incorrect political views, or for representing constituencies that voted the wrong way. He wrote that they violated House decorum. This framing insulates the action from a First Amendment retaliation claim, at least on paper, by characterizing the punishment as a response to conduct rather than speech. It is the same logic that frames the redistricting as partisan rather than racial: if the official record says one thing, the legal argument runs through a different door.

What the official record cannot change is the sequence of events. Democrats protested a map drawn to eliminate Black political representation. Five days later, Republicans eliminated Black political representation from every committee in the state House.

The Pattern is Repeating

In April 2023, the Tennessee House expelled Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for protesting gun violence on the floor after the Covenant School shooting that killed six people, including three children. Both are Black. Rep. Gloria Johnson, who participated in the same protest, survived expulsion by a single vote. She is white. Jones and Pearson were reinstated by their local governments and returned to the chamber.

Sexton’s 2026 letter cited 2023 as precedent. The new action is broader in scope (the entire caucus rather than two members) but the logic is the same. Dissent gets punished. Black lawmakers bear the cost first and most severely. Johnson’s survival in 2023 was not incidental. The vote was 65-30 to expel Jones, 69-26 to expel Pearson, and 65-30 to retain Johnson. Those numbers did not reflect differences in conduct. They reflected differences in identity.

The 2026 action is harder to frame as targeted in the same way, because it sweeps in all 24 Democrats. But the effect remains racially specific, because the caucus and the Black caucus are the same body. A rule that applies equally to everyone can still fall unequally when the underlying demographics are what they are.

Tennessee Republicans hold a 75-24 supermajority. That margin is not incidental to how this power is used. A supermajority does not need opposition votes to pass legislation, does not need minority participation in committee to move bills, and does not face meaningful electoral risk from the districts it controls. What it retains is the ability to make the minority’s presence symbolic. The committee removals accomplish that.

What to Watch Next

Three lawsuits are pending. The courts will determine whether the maps stand. That process will take months, possibly years, and will move through a federal judiciary that the same political coalition has spent a decade reshaping. The Callais ruling that enabled the map came from a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees. The lower courts that will hear the initial challenges sit in a federal judiciary where Republican-appointed judges now hold a majority. This does not predetermine outcomes, but it shapes the terrain.

In the meantime, Tennessee Republicans dismantled the state’s only majority-Black congressional district at the president’s request, hours after a Supreme Court gave them the opening to do it. When the opposition protested, it lost its seats at every table where legislation is made. The stated reason was decorum. The mechanism was a supermajority that answers to no one in the room it just emptied.

The map and the punishment carry the same message. One targets Black voters in November. The other targets their representatives in May.

Stay vigilant. Keep receipts.

The Dad Briefs is produced independently, without party affiliation or partisan funding, and 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.

Be kind, and … you know.

The reaction has been a mix of genuine celebration and significant overclaiming. Both are understandable. Neither is complete.

What Mamdani inherited

The budget hole Mamdani faced when he took office on January 1st was real, well-documented, and not of his making. NYC Comptroller Mark Levine projected in January 2026 a $2.2 billion shortfall in FY2026 and a $10.4 billion gap in FY2027, calling it “the first time since the Great Recession that the City faces a budget shortfall of this magnitude this late in the fiscal year.” His predecessor Brad Lander had flagged in December 2025 that the Adams administration’s pattern of chronic underbudgeting — consistently failing to budget realistic costs for rental assistance, uniformed overtime, shelter, public assistance, special education, and MTA contributions — had left roughly $3.8 billion in unbudgeted FY2026 costs alone.

Critics on the center-right argue the deficit has multiple parents, including City Council-driven entitlement expansions and the state’s unfunded class-size mandate.

These basic, underlying numbers are not seriously disputed by any major independent watchdog.

How the gap was closed

The gap closure rests on four pillars.

The largest single contributor is approximately $8 billion in new state support over two fiscal years, secured through negotiations with Governor Kathy Hochul. The May 12th package alone included $352 million in direct state aid, $3.2 billion in state authorizations (including pension liability restructuring and class-size mandate flexibility), and $500 million in anticipated annual revenue from a new pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. This built on roughly $1.5 billion announced in February 2026, $1.2 billion in January for expanded city-funded childcare, and a state takeover of line-of-duty death benefits for first responders worth $202 million to the city annually.

The second pillar is $1.77 billion in agency-level savings identified by “Chief Savings Officers” Mamdani installed across city agencies, working on targets of 1.5 to 2.5 percent. The third is approximately $1.64 billion in FY2027 savings from restructuring pension contributions, effectively spreading current costs over a longer amortization period. And the fourth is new city-side revenue from reducing the Unincorporated Business Tax credit, projected to raise $68 million annually.

No property tax hike. Reserves intact. Comptroller Levine said it had “been a while since we’ve seen a mayor be this conservative on spending” — notable praise from a fellow Democrat.

The Albany relationship

New York City cannot raise personal income taxes, corporate taxes, or most major revenue tools without state legislative approval. Under former Governor Andrew Cuomo, the city was routinely on the losing end of revenue-sharing disputes, and similar progressive revenue proposals had failed in Albany for more than a decade.

Mamdani spent his first months in office both publicly pressuring Hochul through the credible threat of a 9.5% across-the-board property tax hike (widely understood as leverage, and dropped in the final budget) and quietly building the political relationship. He endorsed Hochul’s reelection bid in February 2026, clearing the Democratic gubernatorial primary field and giving himself meaningful leverage going into budget negotiations. NYC-DSA’s “Tax the Rich” campaign mobilized over 1,500 people at an Albany rally in spring 2026. The result was roughly $8 billion over two years and the first pied-à-terre tax in New York State history after more than a decade of failed attempts.

That is a real shift in a structural relationship that has constrained NYC mayors for generations. The mechanics of how it was achieved — political endorsement, public pressure, organized constituent mobilization — are as instructive as the dollar figures.

Falling short of the progressive panacea

Mamdani campaigned on approximately $9 billion in annual progressive revenue: a 2-percentage-point millionaire’s income surcharge projected to raise $4 billion per year, and a state corporate income tax hike to 11.5% projected to raise $5 billion per year. Both were rejected by Hochul, who was direct about it: she would not consider income taxes on NYC residents or corporate taxes on New York businesses. A third proposal — reducing the Pass-Through Entity Tax credit, projected at $1 billion per year — was also rejected in early May.

Of the roughly $9 billion in progressive revenue Mamdani ran on, approximately $568 million, combining the pied-à-terre tax and the UBT credit reduction, made it into this budget. About six cents on every promised dollar, and with important caveats on both.

The pied-à-terre tax is not yet law. As of May 13th, the state budget had not been adopted, and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told reporters she had not been briefed on the tax’s design — the rate structure, valuation methodology, and assessment mechanics remain unsettled. The city projects $500 million in annual receipts; Comptroller Levine’s office estimates realistic collections, accounting for behavioral changes, may land closer to $340 to $380 million.

The pension amortization strategy, which provides $1.64 billion in FY2027 relief, has drawn pointed criticism from Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein: “We’re basically asking people in the mid-2030s to solve the 2027 budget gap, and that’s simply not fair.” The Volcker Alliance notes that stretching pension payments creates debt more expensive than municipal bonds.

The budget as proposed projects approximately a $7 billion deficit in FY2028. Fiscal balance in year one does not mean the structural problem is solved.

Services protected and added

The services side of the budget is where Mamdani’s governing priorities show up most clearly. The executive budget baselined — meaning built into future budgets rather than treated as one-time expenditures — $31.7 million for the city’s library systems, $25 million for Fair Fares (the low-income MetroCard subsidy), $15 million for parks, $15 million for CUNY, and $10 million for cultural affairs. It committed $47.3 million annually for mental health access, $14.3 million for Right to Counsel in housing court, growing to $40 million baselined, and $34.9 million for pedestrian safety infrastructure.

On housing, the five-year capital plan was set at $117.1 billion, with $4 billion in new HPD capital funding for deeply affordable housing and $256 million to restore vacant NYCHA apartments, described by the administration as the largest capital commitment to NYCHA vacant-unit turnover in the city’s history.

One tension worth naming: the budget proposes $519 million in FY2027 savings from the CityFHEPS rental voucher program, framed by the administration as efficiency gains rather than benefit reductions. Housing advocates have protested and litigation is ongoing. That disagreement is real and unresolved.

The bottom line

Zohran Mamdani balanced New York City’s budget without raising property taxes, without slashing services, and without drawing down the city’s reserves. That is factually accurate and significant.

He also secured an $8 billion two-year state aid package and the first pied-à-terre tax in New York State history, demonstrating that the structural relationship between City Hall and Albany is not fixed. That matters for every mayor who comes after him.

The “tax the rich” agenda his campaign centered? Hochul blocked most of it. The structural gap returns in FY2028. Watchdogs are right to flag the reliance on pension amortization and one-time mechanisms. The pied-à-terre tax’s mechanics remain unsettled and dependent on a state budget that has not yet passed.

All of this is true at the same time. The work of civic literacy is holding the real wins and the real limits without needing one of them to disappear. That is what governing looks like in a city of this size and complexity — incremental, contested, structurally constrained, and worth paying close attention to.

Sources

NYC Mayor’s Office

• “Mayor Mamdani Details ‘Adams Budget Crisis’” (January 30, 2026) https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details--adams-budget-crisis-

• “Mayor Mamdani, Governor Hochul Announce State’s First Pied-à-Terre Tax” (April 15, 2026) https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani--governor-hochul-announce-state-s-first-pied-a-ter

• “Mayor Zohran Mamdani Releases $124.7 Billion Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2027” (May 12, 2026) https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-zohran-mamdani-releases--124-7-billion-executive-budget-fo

NYC Comptroller — Mark Levine

• “Comptroller Levine Projects $2.2 Billion Budget Shortfall in Fiscal Year 2026 and $10.4 Billion in Fiscal Year 2027” (January 2026) https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-levine-projects-2-2-billion-budget-shortfall-in-fiscal-year-2026-and-10-4-billion-in-fiscal-year-2027/

• A Stronger Fiscal Framework for New York City https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/a-stronger-fiscal-framework-for-new-york-city/

NYC Comptroller — Brad Lander

• Annual Report on the State of the City’s Economy and Finances (December 2025) https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nyc-comptroller-lander-releases-annual-report-warning-of-fiscal-challenges-amid-federal-cuts-and-adams-administrations-shortsighted-planning/

• Measuring New York City’s Budgetary Cushion: How Much is Needed to Weather the Next Fiscal Storm? https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/measuring-new-york-citys-budgetary-cushion-how-much-is-needed-to-weather-the-next-fiscal-storm/

NYC Independent Budget Office

• Background Paper: New York State Financial Emergency Act for the City of New York (November 2007) https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/FEAPaper.pdf

News Reporting

• “Mamdani proposes $124.7B executive budget — without raiding reserves” (May 12, 2026) https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/05/mamdani-proposes-1247b-executive-budget-no-gap/413486/

• “Mamdani Plugs $12 Billion Budget Hole With Hochul Assist” (May 12, 2026) https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/05/12/124-billion-mamdani-budget-leaves-city-reserves-intact/

• “As Mamdani Pulls Budget Rabbit From Hat, Watchdogs Fret Over ‘One-Shots’” (May 12, 2026) https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/05/12/as-mamdani-pulls-budget-rabbit-from-hat-watchdogs-fret-over-one-shots/

• “Mayor Mamdani says he has balanced NYC’s budget, will not raise property taxes” (May 12, 2026) https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-budget-zohran-mamdani-property-taxes/

• “Mamdani, Hochul announce $4 billion in budget assistance for NYC” (May 12, 2026) https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/zohran-mamdani-nyc-budget-deficit-fix/6500886/

• “City comptroller looks at Mayor Mamdani’s budget proposal” (May 12, 2026) https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2026/05/12/city-comptroller-looks-at-mayor-mamdani-s-budget-proposal

• “Mamdani Declares Victory As Hochul Helps City Close Budget Gap” (May 12, 2026) https://nysfocus.com/2026/05/12/mamdani-hochul-nyc-budget-deal

• “Mamdani Announces Balanced Budget Without Cuts” (May 12, 2026) https://prospect.org/2026/05/12/mamdani-announces-balanced-budget-without-cuts/

• “What everyone is missing about Mamdani’s plan to tax Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse” (May 7, 2026) https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/07/business/zohran-mamdani-ken-griffin-taxes

• “Mayor Mamdani and New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Where Is City Council Speaker Julie Menin?” (March 2026) https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-julie-menin-kathy-hochul-nyc-tax-rich

• “In unusual alliance, Mamdani and Menin press Hochul to reduce a tax credit benefitting millionaires” (April 29, 2026) https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/unusual-alliance-mamdani-menin-press-184729783.html

• “Tax the rich or cut spending? Hochul and Mamdani spar over budgets” (May 6, 2026) https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/tax-the-rich-or-cut-spending-hochul-and-mamdani-spar-over-budgets/

• “54% of New Yorkers back Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ plan as Hochul draws the line on new income taxes” https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/new-york-hochul-mamdani-tax-the-rich-poll

• “Mamdani and Hochul propose a NYC wealth tax” https://www.readtangle.com/nyc-wealth-tax-proposal/

• “’Beyond insane’: O’Leary blasts Mamdani’s tax-the-rich plan” (May 2026) https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/beyond-insane-o-leary-blasts-132000329.html

Empire Center for Public Policy

• “Parsing the Impact of Mamdani’s Tax Hike Plans” https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/parsing-the-impact-of-mamdanis-tax-hike-plans/

• “Fiscal Policy, 30 Years After the Crisis” https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/fiscal-policy-30-years-after-the-crisis/

Cato Institute

• “Mamdani’s Wishful Thinking on Tax Revenues” https://www.cato.org/blog/mamdanis-wishful-thinking-tax-revenues

Step Two Policy Project

• “New York City’s Budget Deficit” https://www.steptwopolicy.org/post/new-york-city-s-budget-deficit https://steptwopolicyproject.substack.com/p/new-york-citys-budget-deficit

The Dad Briefs is produced independently, without party affiliation or partisan funding, and 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.

Be kind, and … you know.

Two Full Recipes at the bottom of this article.

Forty percent of high school students in the United States reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year. That number has held even as public awareness of youth mental health has grown into something approaching a national conversation. More teens are talking about it. More adults are using the language. The crisis still deepens.

The environment these kids are growing up in has never been more complicated, and the hazards are accelerating faster than any support system has been built to handle.

Social Media

Roughly half of teens now say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% just three years ago. The research linking heavy platform use to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation in adolescents has grown substantial enough that multiple countries are legislating restrictions on teen access.

A narrative review of studies published between 2016 and 2024 identified consistent patterns: psychological harm from addictive use, the documented fear of missing out, cybervictimization, and a contagion phenomenon around self-harm content that platforms have been slow to address. The U.S. Surgeon General has named social media a major threat to teen mental health. Teens who scroll more than three hours daily double their risk of depression or anxiety.

Cyberbullying

Lifetime cyberbullying victimization among young people rose from 33.6% to 58.2% between 2016 and 2025. Nearly a third of teens experienced it in the 30 days prior to being surveyed. Unlike traditional bullying, it doesn’t stop at the school door. It follows kids home, into their bedrooms, onto the screens they look at before sleep. Teens who are bullied online are roughly twice as likely to develop anxiety and depression.

The same platforms also serve as vectors for predatory adults. The former Surgeon General’s advisory documented that social media is used by adults seeking to exploit children, financially extort them through threats of intimate image distribution, and sell illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Nearly six in ten adolescent girls report being contacted by a stranger online in ways that made them uncomfortable.

Gun Violence Anxiety

School shooting drills are now a standard feature of American childhood. The United States has had nearly 60 times as many school shootings as comparable nations combined. This is not abstract for kids. Longitudinal research shows that ongoing worry about school gun violence is directly associated with rising rates of anxiety and panic disorder in adolescents. The worry itself — independent of direct exposure — is a clinical stressor. Kids are carrying it every day.

Climate Distress

A 2021 Lancet study of 10,000 young people ages 16 to 25 across 10 countries found that nearly 60% described themselves as very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45% said those feelings were already affecting their daily functioning. A 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surveyed nearly 3,000 young Americans ages 16 to 24 and found that approximately 20% are afraid to have children, worrying about bringing a new generation into a destabilizing world. That number climbed above 30% among those who had personally experienced a severe weather event.

AI Chatbots

This is the one that should reframe the entire conversation about school counseling.

A JAMA Network Open study published in late 2025 found that 13.1% of U.S. youth, representing approximately 5.4 million individuals, used generative AI for mental health advice. Nearly two-thirds engaged at least monthly. The researchers identified why: AI is free, immediate, and feels private. It doesn’t require an appointment. It doesn’t have 408 other kids on its caseload. For youth who can’t access traditional counseling, it is filling the vacuum.

The problem is that it isn’t equipped to do that.

A Common Sense Media assessment conducted alongside Stanford Medicine’s Brainstorm Lab found that major AI platforms — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, and others — consistently fail to recognize and appropriately respond to the mental health conditions that affect young people. The American Psychological Association has stated plainly that engagement with AI chatbots for mental health purposes can have unintended effects and cause harm. A UCSF pediatrician studying adolescent digital media use described the situation as one in which kids are still “guinea pigs” — the technology is new, best practices for youth don’t exist yet, and adolescence is precisely the developmental period when brains are most shaped by their experiences.

Nearly a third of teens now report finding AI conversations as satisfying or more satisfying than human connection. Forty-two percent of adolescents using chatbots use them for companionship. One in five report using them for something they describe as a romantic relationship. Researchers who have looked at these numbers warn that some adolescents are struggling to distinguish between AI and genuine human presence — and that confusion is not benign.

The counselor who isn’t in the building anymore

Schools are legally required to provide mental health support. The professional standard, set by the American School Counselor Association, is one counselor for every 250 students. The national average is one per 408. Fewer than half of all school districts in the country meet the recommended ratio. In under-resourced schools, it is often considerably worse. And right now, as federal funding for public education faces significant cuts, mental health and student support positions are among the first to be eliminated. Schools that once had a counselor are sharing one across multiple campuses.

This matters because a counselor isn’t just a resource. A counselor is a relationship. It is a trained adult who builds trust with a student over time, who remembers what was said in October when something different comes up in March, who notices the shift in posture or the change in tone before it becomes a crisis. That kind of attentiveness cannot be replicated by a platform. It cannot be automated. There is no app that does what a present, well-trained human being does for a kid who is struggling.

Cutting mental health resources from schools doesn’t make the problems go away. It guarantees that kids face them alone, or with a chatbot, or not at all. The 40% of high school students who reported persistent sadness last year didn’t become that statistic in a vacuum. They grew up in a world of accelerating digital hazards, climate anxiety, gun violence anxiety, and relentless social comparison, and they are being asked to navigate it with shrinking institutional support.

Well-funded public schools are the infrastructure through which we keep faith with kids. Mental health support is part of that infrastructure. It is not a program. It is not an add-on. It is the difference between a child who has a trusted adult in their corner and a child who is figuring it out alone.

The scrambled eggs analogy holds. You have to be there. No shortcut produces the same result.

Resources that can help

Advocacy

• We Believe — Fighting for strong, well-funded public schools for every child

• American School Counselor Association — Research and advocacy on counselor ratios and school mental health

• Mental Health America — Policy and advocacy on mental health access

Research & Data

• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Social Media and Youth Mental Health — The foundational federal assessment

• Common Sense Media: AI Chatbots and Teen Mental Health (2025) — The Stanford Medicine-partnered risk assessment

• Pew Research Center: Teens, Social Media, and Mental Health (2025) — Current survey data on teen attitudes

• JAMA Network Open: Generative AI for Mental Health Advice Among Youth (2025) — The 5.4 million figure and usage data

• Cyberbullying Research Center — Data and resources on cyberbullying trends

Support

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — Call or text 988, 24/7

• JED Foundation — Mental health and suicide prevention for teens and young adults

• Child Mind Institute — Evidence-based resources for parents and educators

• NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) — Education, advocacy, and support

• Sandy Hook Promise — School safety and mental health programs

Climate & Political Anxiety

• Climate Mental Health Network — Resources for young people experiencing climate distress

• Hopeful Futures Campaign — Advocating for school-based mental health support

The Recipes

This is the most straightforwardly delicious breakfast I know how to make.

I serve mine over toasted 5-grain bread, often with smashed avocado (one avocado, a teaspoon of lime juice, salt, and pepper) topped with chopped chives, and cherry tomatoes or strawberries on the side. Make it your way.

Bacon Jam

Ingredients

• 1 lb bacon, cut into ½-inch pieces

• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

• 3 cloves garlic, minced

• ⅓ cup apple cider vinegar

• ½ cup dark brown sugar, packed

• ⅓ cup maple syrup

• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper (or more to taste)

• 1 tsp black pepper

Instructions

Add the bacon to a 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Cook until crispy, about 20 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the cooked bacon to a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Drain the remaining bacon fat from the pan, then add back 1 tablespoon into the pan.

Reduce the heat to medium-low, and add the onion to the pan. Sauté for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic and cook for a couple of minutes more, until fragrant.

Add the apple cider vinegar and cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid is reduced by half. Add the brown sugar, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, stirring to incorporate. Return the cooked bacon to the pan. Continue stirring until a jam-like consistency is reached, another 5 minutes.

Turn off the heat and take note that the jam is very hot and sticky. Allow to cool for a couple of minutes, and be careful if serving immediately. Enjoy!

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Warm before serving.

Soft Scrambled Eggs

Ingredients

• 3 eggs, whisked

• 2 tablespoons heavy cream

• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Over medium-low heat, pour the cream into a medium nonstick frying pan. Allow the cream to bubble up and just start to caramelize (about 2 minutes).

Pour eggs into the pan. Using a silicon spatula, stir the eggs constantly in a tight circular motion to keep the eggs creamy and prevent large curds from forming. When the eggs are almost cooked to your desired consistency, remove them from the heat and continue stirring until they are fully cooked.

Add salt and pepper to taste, if desired.

Serve immediately.

The jam can be made days in advance. The eggs cannot. Both require you to be present.

Kitchen Counter Civics is a series of The Dad Briefs pairing recipes with civic and political commentary. Be kind, and … you know.

Note: Actions you can take, with links, are below. And please join me in donating to candidates who will fight back against gerrymandering. CLICK HERE.

Think about the last time you voted. You did what citizens in a democracy do. You trusted that the act of casting that ballot meant something, that it would be counted, that it would matter.

Now I want you to think about what happened in Louisiana two weeks ago, and Virginia last Friday, and ask yourself whether that trust is still warranted.

Before You Vote

Before you ever set foot in a polling place, your vote can be made nearly meaningless. That’s what gerrymandering does. Politicians draw district lines to guarantee their own reelection, packing opposition voters into a handful of districts or spreading them thin across many, until the math ensures the outcome before a single ballot is cast.

As of April 29th, the last significant legal guardrail against the most discriminatory version of this practice was effectively dismantled by the United States Supreme Court.

In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6 to 3, the Court’s conservative majority rewrote Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the provision that for forty years allowed plaintiffs to challenge maps that diluted the voting power of racial minorities, even without proving deliberate intent. Under the new standard, you must prove the mapmakers meant to discriminate. In the modern era of data-driven, plausibly-deniable “partisan” mapmaking, that is close to impossible.

The ink was barely dry when three states acted on it.

Tennessee Republicans called a special legislative session and, in four days, eliminated the state’s only majority-Black congressional district. Memphis, a city of 600,000 people, was cracked into three pieces, each stitched to rural Republican territory stretching hundreds of miles east. The bill’s sponsor said openly they did it to, quote, “maximize partisan advantage.” They were not embarrassed by this. They no longer had reason to be. Every congressional district in Tennessee now leans Trump +20% or greater.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new map that splits Tampa across three districts, eliminates two Democratic incumbents’ seats, and dilutes the Puerto Rican vote in the Orlando area. The map was released to Fox News before members of his own legislature had seen it.

North Carolina Republicans passed a new map targeting Representative Don Davis, an African American whose district has had Black representation for more than thirty years.

Texas did this last August, gaining five Republican seats through special sessions while the DOJ provided legal cover.

In each case, before a single voter in those states shows up this November, the outcome of multiple congressional races has already been decided, drawn into the map itself. That is not democracy. That is the simulation of democracy.

While You’re Voting

Here is the sentence I still find difficult to believe is true: on May 7th, the governor of Louisiana suspended an election that was already in progress.

Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order halting the state’s May 16th congressional primary after the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling gave him the opening to redraw Louisiana’s maps. The problem, the moral problem, is that the election had already begun. More than one hundred thousand Louisiana voters had cast early ballots. Forty-two thousand absentee ballots were in the mail.

Those votes were not counted. Those voters were not notified in advance. An election was stopped in the middle of its own execution, by executive order, because a governor decided the map needed to change.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting when the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of fast-tracking Louisiana’s compliance, said the order “spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” The majority did not appear troubled by this. Justice Alito called Justice Jackson’s concerns “baseless and insulting.”

One hundred thousand people voted in Louisiana. Their votes were nullified before the polls even officially opened.

After You’ve Voted

Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled 4 to 3 that a redistricting referendum Virginians voted on April 21st is null and void.

Three million people voted. Fifty-two percent said yes. The court threw it out.

The legal reasoning involves a procedural question about when exactly Virginia’s constitution considers an election to have begun, and whether Democrats passed the redistricting amendment during the required “intervening election” period rather than before it. Reasonable people can debate the legal merits. The three dissenters on the court, including Chief Justice Cleo Powell, believed the majority had stretched the definition of “election” beyond any prior precedent.

What is not debatable is the result: an election was held, votes were cast, a majority was recorded, and the outcome was nullified by a court whose majority was appointed under Republican governors.

Governor Abigail Spanberger called it “disappointing.” Attorney General Jay Jones said the court had “put politics over the rule of law.” Senator Mark Warner said: “Virginia’s effort was a response to that national power grab, not the cause of it.”

The Re-collapse of Reconstruction

The Democratic-drawn Virginia map was a partisan gerrymander. So was California’s Proposition 50, which voters approved in November 2025. These were maps designed to maximize Democratic advantage. Democrats drew them in explicit response to what Republicans were doing in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida.

It’s important to look at how Democrats fought back.

California put Prop 50 to a statewide vote. Sixty-four percent of California voters approved it. Virginia Democrats passed their amendment and brought it to a referendum. Voters ratified it, 52 to 48.

In Missouri, when Republicans cracked Kansas City’s majority-Black 5th District, a citizen coalition called People Not Politicians gathered three hundred and five thousand signatures in ninety days, nearly triple the required amount, to force the question to voters on the November ballot. In Utah, voters passed an independent redistricting commission in 2018, Republicans tried to gut it, and state courts said the legislature cannot override a citizen initiative.

Every Democratic response to this wave of Republican mapmaking ran through the will of the people.

Every Republican move went in the opposite direction. Trump called Governor Lee personally. Lee called a special session. The Tennessee legislature repealed its own fifty-six year prohibition on mid-decade redistricting and finished the job in four days. The Florida map went to Fox News before it went to legislators. Louisiana’s governor stopped an election by executive order. Alabama is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate a congressional map a federal court already found racially discriminatory.

None of these maps went to voters.

One side keeps trying to let voters decide. The other side keeps trying to decide for them.

Senator Raphael Warnock, speaking from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, put the historical weight of this plainly: “They said we’re going to allow partisan politicians to gerrymander you, so that even when you show up, your voice won’t have as much impact because we’ll play with the lines. That isn’t a new method. That’s an old method. That’s a Jim Crow method.”

State Senator London Lamar of Memphis, speaking on the floor as her city was being carved up: “You cannot take a majority-Black city, fracture its voting power, and then tell us race has nothing to do with it. Racism does not become less racist because it’s called partisan.”

Sherrilyn Ifill, one of the foremost voting rights scholars in the country, drew the line from Callais back to the collapse of Reconstruction: eight Black members of Congress in the 1870s. Zero by 1900.

The tools change. The project doesn’t.

The House Math

Cook Political Report, one of the most reliable nonpartisan election analysts in the country, projects that Republicans will net six to seven U.S. House seats from mid-decade redistricting alone, before a single vote is cast this November.

Democrats need a net pickup of three seats to flip the House.

If Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina succeed in eliminating their remaining majority-minority districts, that Republican advantage could reach twelve to fourteen additional seats.

This is not a footnote. This is the mechanism by which a House majority may be determined before the election begins, through a combination of maps, court rulings, and stopped elections that most Americans have not been following closely enough.

What’s Left (to do)?

What voting rights are left after these twelve days? Formally, the right to vote still exists. What has been systematically removed is the meaningful ability of that right to produce representative outcomes, through maps that decide the results before you arrive, elections suspended while you’re participating, and referendums voided after you’ve already been counted.

And what’s left, politically, to do about it?

More than you might think. Here is where to focus:

Missouri: The People Not Politicians referendum is still alive. Whether Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certifies enough signatures to put the anti-gerrymander question to voters in November is still being litigated. Watch this. Talk about it locally. Push your media to cover it.

Florida: A lawsuit challenging the DeSantis map under Florida’s own Fair Districts Amendment was filed May 4th. This case will likely reach the Florida Supreme Court before November. Democracy Docket is tracking this AND MORE in real time.

Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina: The NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund are in state and federal court. Donate directly. Register voters in the cracked districts. The communities whose representation was just erased are still there.

Congress: The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore Section 2 to its pre-Callais standard. It has been introduced and blocked repeatedly. Call your senators, including Republican senators in states where redistricting reform passed with bipartisan support. The Redistricting Reform Act, introduced by Representatives Lofgren and Padilla, would ban mid-decade redistricting nationally. It would make what Tennessee did in four days illegal everywhere. It has not received a committee hearing.

I think a lot about what I’m handing to our kids. The systems. The structures. The values. The assumption that our voice counts, that participation matters, that the rules apply to everyone.

What I watched over the last twelve days is a challenge to that assumption at every level: before the vote, during the vote, and after the vote. Votes cast and then stopped. Elections held and then voided. Rights that existed last month that do not function the same way this month.

Democracy isn’t a promise. It’s a practice. And right now, the practice is under the most serious structural threat of my adult lifetime.

This is a kitchen table conversation. I hope you’re having it.

Sources for this piece include the Virginia Mercury, Cardinal News, ABC News, NBC News, NPR, the Tennessee Lookout, the Nashville Banner, the Center for American Progress, FairVote, Democracy Docket, Bolts Magazine, and Cook Political Report. The Dad Briefs is produced independently, without party affiliation or partisan funding.

Full recipe is below.

The U.S. Senate has one unbroken tradition. Of course, it’s not bipartisanship, fiscal responsibility, or reading the bills before voting on them.

It’s soup.

Senate Bean Soup.

Sometime in the early 1900s, someone decided that navy bean soup would appear on the Senate dining room menu every single day, without exception. Through recesses, through wars, through government shutdowns that left federal workers without paychecks, through every variety of dysfunction that building has managed to produce, the soup got made. With one exception: a single day during World War II when food rationing made it unavailable. That’s it. One day in over a century.

The origin story is, appropriately, disputed. One account credits Idaho Senator Fred Dubois, who reportedly pushed for the soup to be a permanent fixture. Another points to Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson, who expressed his fondness for it around 1903. A third version says it was House Speaker Joe Cannon who showed up to the dining room, found the soup missing from the menu, and had strong feelings about that. The details shift depending on the source. What doesn’t shift is the soup.

The recipe itself is almost aggressively simple. Navy beans. A smoked ham hock. An onion. Butter. That’s the whole list. No stock or aromatics (unless you want them, as I do), no technique that requires a culinary degree. Just humble ingredients given enough time to become something worth returning to every single day.

It seems an institution with a well-earned reputation for gridlock can at leastt commit to something simple and follow through on it every day for over a century. The question the Partnership for Public Service is now asking Americans is what else we decide deserves that kind of commitment.

Their campaign, running through May 18, invites the public to weigh in on exactly that. Not what government is. What you want it to be. Three prompts, open to anyone, and the results will inform real policy conversations tied to America’s 250th anniversary this July.

Government would work better if…

A government that meets my needs is…

It’s 2050 and the government finally…

Visit 250.ourpublicservice.org/yourgov and add your voice before May 18.

Then make the soup.

U.S. Senate Bean Soup

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

• 14 oz dried navy beans (great northern beans work as a substitute)

• ¾ lb smoked ham hock (or ham bone with some meat on it)

• 1 ¾ quarts cold water (or chicken or veggie stock)

• ½ tsp baking soda (optional, but recommended)

• 1 large yellow onion, diced

• 1 tablespoon butter (or vegetable oil)

• Kosher salt and fresh black pepper, to taste

• Optionally, I add chopped celery (1 stalk), carrots (2 med), and garlic (2 cloves).

• Chives or parsley for garnish, also optional

Directions

1. Rinse the dried beans under cold water and remove any debris. Place them in a large Dutch oven or heavy pot along with the ham hock and 2 quarts of cold water. If using baking soda, add it now — it helps soften the beans from the inside out and means you can skip an overnight soak.

2. Bring the pot just to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer. Cover with the lid slightly ajar and cook for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally, until the beans are completely soft and the soup is thick and creamy. If the liquid gets low before the beans are done, add more water and keep going.

   Note: You can also make this in a pressure cooker in about 45 minutes.

3. While the soup finishes, melt the butter/oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the diced onion and cook, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent but not browned, about 5 to 8 minutes. (If adding the other veggies/aromatics, add the celery and carrots at the same time as the onion, then the garlic about 4 minutes in.) Stir the onions/mixture into the pot.

4. Remove the ham hock and let it cool slightly. Pull the meat from the bone (if any) into bite-sized pieces and return it to the soup. Discard the bone.

5. Bring the soup back to a gentle boil, then taste and season with salt and pepper. The ham hock carries a lot of salt on its own, so season gradually.

6. Garnish with chives or parsley if desired and serve hot. It’s great with crackers or crusty bread. Enjoy!

A note on the history: the Senate’s own website acknowledges that the origin story is more legend than documented fact, which I think actually makes it better. The institution kept making the soup long after anyone could agree on why they started. That’s either a lesson in commitment or a lesson in bureaucratic inertia, and I’ll let you decide which.

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.

Be kind, and … you know.

It was born in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1924, at a restaurant called Caesar’s, by an Italian immigrant named Caesar Cardini. He had crossed the border, opened a business, and created something so good that Americans drove into Mexico specifically to eat it. Eventually, the whole country claimed it as its own.

This origin story doesn’t usually make it onto the menu.

Right now, children in classrooms across this country are disappearing from their seats, not because they moved or because they’re sick, but because they’re afraid. Parents are afraid to drop them off. Teachers are watching the empty chairs where their students used to sit.

Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, clearly established that every child, regardless of immigration status, has the right to attend K-12 public school. That’s not an opinion. It’s the law. And well-organized, well-funded efforts are underway to dismantle it.

Every child deserves a seat in the classroom. To learn more and add your voice, visit nilc.org.

Now make the dressing.

Caesar Salad Dressing

Makes about 1.25 cups

Ingredients

• 3 garlic cloves

• 3 to 5 anchovies (packed in oil), depending on taste

• 1 tsp capers (optional)

• 2 egg yolks

• 3 tbsp fresh lemon juice

• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard

• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

• ½ cup olive oil, plus more if needed

• ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese

• 1 tsp brown sugar (reserved if needed)

• Salt and fresh ground black pepper

Directions

1. Mince the garlic, anchovies, and capers finely. Using the side of your knife, mash them into a paste by pushing and pulling the mound across the cutting board.

2. Add the paste, egg yolks, lemon juice, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce to a medium bowl. Whisk until fully combined.

3. Continue whisking as you slowly stream in the olive oil. Add it in tiny drips, and you’ll notice the mixture lightening in color and thickening as you go.

4. When all the oil is incorporated, check the consistency. Too thick, whisk in a teaspoon of water. Too thin, keep streaming in a bit more oil.

5. Add the grated Parmesan and whisk to fully combine. Taste, then add the brown sugar to balance the acidity if needed. Season with salt and pepper.

6. Enjoy!

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.

Be kind, and … you know.

Justice Kagan read her dissent aloud from the bench. She has served on the Supreme Court for sixteen years. Justices do not routinely read dissents from the bench. When they do, it means something. She ended without the customary word “respectfully.” She wrote simply: “I dissent.”

She called the majority’s ruling “the latest chapter in the now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

That is where we are.

Louisiana v. Callais

To understand Callais, we need about five minutes of background:

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in direct response to the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from the democratic process. Section 2 serves as the law’s nationwide enforcement arm. It prohibits voting practices, including the drawing of district maps, that result in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race.

The key word is result. Not intent. Result.

Congress wrote that “results test” into the law in 1982, explicitly overriding an earlier Supreme Court ruling that had required proof of intentional discrimination. Congress understood something important: intent is easy to hide. Results are not.

For forty years, that results test worked. Civil rights organizations used it to challenge district maps that cracked Black and brown communities apart — spreading them thin across white-majority districts where their votes got consistently outvoted, and their voices got consistently ignored. When they won those cases, states drew majority-minority districts. Candidates of color won seats. Communities gained representation.

While Callais did not formally repeal Section 2, it did something more durable. It rewrote the rules of proof so that the cases plaintiffs have been winning for forty years now sit structurally nearly impossible to win.

The Louisiana Story

After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its congressional map. The state holds six congressional seats. Black residents make up roughly one-third of Louisiana’s population. The new map included one majority-Black district.

A federal judge ruled that the map likely violated Section 2. The Fifth Circuit agreed. Under court order, the Louisiana legislature drew a new map, SB 8, that included a second majority-Black district. In November 2024, voters elected Cleo Fields, a former congressman, to that seat. For the first time in modern history, Louisiana sent two Black members to the U.S. House.

Then a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” sued, arguing the new map itself constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A three-judge district court agreed.

The Supreme Court affirmed, 6–3.

The Court remanded the state to redraw its map. Early voting for the May 16 primary begins this weekend. Cleo Fields’s district may not survive the next election cycle.

The Technical Guts of the Decision

Alito’s majority opinion turns on a precise legal maneuver.

For forty years, the Gingles framework governed Section 2 redistricting cases with three preconditions a plaintiff had to meet to prove vote dilution. The majority did not formally overrule Gingles. It “updated” it. The majority tightened each precondition in ways that make plaintiffs’ burdens dramatically heavier.

Most critically, plaintiffs must now show that racially polarized voting “cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.” In the South, where race and party run deeply correlated, where Black voters vote overwhelmingly Democratic and white voters vote overwhelmingly Republican, proving this is nearly impossible. A state can simply claim its mapmakers drew lines for partisan reasons, not racial ones. Under Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which held that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering, no federal court can now check either claim.

Alito also requires plaintiffs to produce illustrative maps that satisfy every one of the state’s stated nonracial goals, including its partisan goals toward incumbent protection. Louisiana argued its map needed to shield House Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow. Any alternative map that disrupted those incumbents failed the threshold test.

The majority also effectively restores an intent standard on the “totality of circumstances” inquiry, demanding evidence of “present-day intentional racial discrimination.” Congress explicitly rejected this in 1982. The majority just brought it back.

Justice Kagan wrote 48 pages in dissent. Her core argument: “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” She accuses the majority of making changes that “eviscerate the law” while maintaining the fiction of preserving it.

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch in concurrence, pushed to go further. He argued that Section 2 “does not regulate districting at all.” The majority declined. The effect differs little.

The Long Arc of Breaking Down the VRA

Callais concludes a project more than a decade in the making.

In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system — the requirement that states with histories of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting rules. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “things have changed dramatically” in the South. Within hours of the ruling, Texas and North Carolina moved to enact new restrictions that had previously been blocked.

In 2019, Rucho v. Common Cause held that partisan gerrymandering falls outside federal court jurisdiction. States could draw maps to benefit their party, and federal courts could not stop them.

In 2021, Alito also wrote Brnovich v. DNC, which narrowed Section 2 as applied to voting procedures. Civil rights advocates recognized it immediately as the template for what was coming in redistricting cases.

In 2023, Allen v. Milligan appeared to reverse course. Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the liberals to require Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. It looked like a floor. Callais pulled that floor out.

Election law scholar Rick Hasen called Callais “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” ABC News described it as “Roberts’ signature achievement.” Ari Berman, who has covered voting rights for over a decade, traced Roberts’s effort back to his years as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department in the early 1980s, where he opposed the 1982 amendments that established the results test.

That project ran forty years. It concluded last Wednesday.

The Human Stakes

This abstract legal dispute asks a concrete question: who gets a voice?

When mapmakers crack Black or Latino voters across multiple white-majority districts, those communities consistently lose the everyday levers of representation: a member of Congress with a district office in their neighborhood. A state legislator who shows up at their school board meeting. A city council member who answers the phone about a flooded street.

Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter estimate the Callais framework could eventually let Republicans flip up to 19 majority-minority House seats currently held by Democrats. NPR’s analysis found that Republicans could redraw as many as 15 seats currently held by Black members of Congress into white-majority districts. ABC News reported that map changes previously triggering Section 2 scrutiny could affect up to a quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus and roughly a tenth of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Those are projections. What state legislatures actually do determines the pace and reach. But states have already shown their hand. Florida convened a special legislative session within hours of the ruling. Tennessee’s Senator Marsha Blackburn immediately pushed for new maps to target that state’s sole Democratic House member. Mississippi’s governor called lawmakers back to the capital.

The ruling reaches beyond Black voters. LatinoJustice PRLDEF and MALDEF warn that Section 2 enforcement built Latino gains in Texas, Florida, and Arizona over decades — and the ruling now exposes them. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund called the decision a deepening of “long-standing barriers to fair representation.” Native American voting advocates noted that communities used Section 2 as their primary tool to win state legislative representation in states like North Dakota. Those seats now sit structurally at risk.

Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local said it plainly: this ruling strips away “the right to be heard and for all of our votes to be counted equally.” Not in one state. Across the country.

What Remains

Section 2 is still on the books and available for future restorative federal legislation. Nine states — California, New York, Virginia, Connecticut, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Illinois — have enacted their own Voting Rights Acts. State courts, operating under state constitutions, now offer one of the most important remaining arenas for redistricting challenges.

Rep. Terri Sewell and Sen. Raphael Warnock reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in 2025. The bill would restore the preclearance requirement and codify the results test. It has not cleared the Senate filibuster. The current Congress has not improved its prospects.

Civil rights organizations now pivot to state-court litigation and intentional-discrimination claims; cases built around documented evidence of explicit racial intent, the kind of “smoking gun” evidence one attorney noted “people don’t do” anymore precisely because it is illegal.

Rick Hasen, who long resisted the idea, now calls for structural Supreme Court reform. The Brennan Center pushes for 18-year term limits, a binding ethics code, and transparency rules for the shadow docket. Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Ed Markey lead bills toward Court expansion.

None of these remedies moves fast. None is certain.

The Transformative Justice Coalition — whose founders have fought since before the original Voting Rights Act passed — said what needs saying: “We must speak with our vote in 2026.”

That is not a platitude. It is a precise observation. State legislators draw the maps. Voters elect the attorneys general who enforce discrimination law. In most states, voters elect state supreme court justices too. The ballot box is not a consolation prize. It now serves as the primary mechanism.

The Long View

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 grew from a moment that looked like total defeat. On March 7 of that year, state troopers beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on national television. That footage changed the political calculus. The law was passed within months.

The people who marched did not fight because they were winning. They fought because they knew what was right.

Louisiana v. Callais lands a serious blow against a law that itself represented a hard-won recovery from a century of state-sanctioned exclusion. It strips away a tool that communities of color have used for forty years to make their voices count.

This is not the end. The courts, the statehouses, the ballot, and the street all remain open.

The work is harder now.

It has been harder before.

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.

King Charles III arrived in Washington on April 28th as a guest, a ceremonial symbol of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, here to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence with warmth and pageantry and a state dinner. He was supposed to be decorative. He was supposed to behave.

Instead, he stood at the podium of a joint session of Congress, with JD Vance seated three feet behind him and Mike Johnson presiding over the chamber, and delivered thirty of the most pointed minutes in recent American political memory. Without ever raising his voice, without naming a name, and without breaking diplomatic decorum.

That is a skill. A particular kind of genius, in fact.

Here are ten things the King said that Congress, and the rest of us, needed to hear.

1. Executive power has limits. He cited the receipts.

Charles traced the principle of limited government all the way back to 1215 and the Magna Carta, noting that it “is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” He said this in the building where those checks and balances are supposed to live. He said it to the people elected to enforce them.

2. This democracy is not a one man show.

Standing before a Congress that has largely yielded its institutional authority to a singular executive will, Charles reminded the room of the animating principle of their own founding: governance happens “not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States.” He didn’t editorialize. He didn’t have to.

3. Ukraine deserves an unambiguous answer.

While this administration has muddied the waters around American support for Kyiv, the King was clear. He invoked the post-9/11 unity of NATO’s first Article 5 invocation, the shoulder-to-shoulder history of two World Wars, and then said plainly: “that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people.” This was a calm yet unyielding call to action.

4. NATO is a valuable alliance.

The Trump era has treated the Atlantic alliance like a protection racket: pay your share or we walk. Charles treated it like what it actually is: a foundational architecture of Western security built on shared values and mutual commitment. He called it part of Henry Kissinger’s vision of “an Atlantic partnership based on twin pillars: Europe and America,” and said that partnership is “more important today than it has ever been.” He then warned, with characteristic British understatement, against the “clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

5. Judges matter.

Among the shared values he named as the very foundation of democratic prosperity: “the rule of law, the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.” This, in a political moment defined by a president who has called federal judges “radical left lunatics,” defied court orders, and treated judicial review as an inconvenience. Charles didn’t comment on any of that. He simply named what a functioning democracy requires, and let the contrast do the work.

6. The environment is a national security issue.

The administration has systematically dismantled environmental protections, gutted the EPA, and opened protected federal lands to extraction. Charles stood before their Congress and said: “we ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems (in other words, nature’s own economy) provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.” He called nature “our most precious and irreplaceable asset.” He said our generation must decide how to address “the collapse of critical natural systems.” He said this to their faces.

7. Diversity is a source of strength.

The current administration has waged a systematic campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion across federal institutions, universities, and corporations. The King described what gives democratic nations their collective strength: “our vibrant, diverse and free societies.” He called the United States “the living mosaic” of its people, and said his deepest hope is that we continue “to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.” Different words. Same address.

8. Allies are not adversaries. Duh.

This administration has treated European partners with contempt, threatened trade wars against allies, and reserved its warmest diplomatic energy for autocrats. Charles came as a representative of the closest ally America has, and made the case for what that relationship is actually built on, not sentiment or nostalgia, but shared democratic values and interdependent security. He asked Congress to honor what eighty years of partnership has built, rather than discard it.

9. The Founding Fathers were “imaginative rebels with a cause.”

He said this with obvious warmth. He also said it in the same breath as invoking the principles they carried forward: common law, Magna Carta, the separation of powers, the rights of the individual against the overreach of the state. The implication was unmistakable: those principles are not decorations. They are the inheritance. They are what the rebellion was for.

10. The world is watching what America does, not what it says.

He closed by referencing President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that the world will little note what we say here, but will never forget what we do. Then he turned it directly on the nation: “America’s words carry weight and meaning, as they have since Independence. The actions of this great nation matter even more.”

King Charles III is a constitutional monarch. He is, by definition, bound to remain above politics. He came here as a symbol and left as something considerably more interesting: a mirror, held up at close range, reflecting back to a joint session of Congress exactly what they have been failing to protect.

He was gracious about it. He was even funny about it.

But he said it. Every word of it. In their house, at their podium, under their Statue of Freedom.

The question is whether anyone in that room was listening.

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.

Support all kids in sports, including trans kids.

@nationalwomenslawcenter #transrightsarehumanrights #supporttranskids