Category: Uncategorized

Florence Corcoran, an employee of South Central Bell Telephone Company, was eight months into a high-risk pregnancy when her obstetrician recommended she spend the final month on bed rest in the hospital, for close monitoring. Despite the recommendation, her health insurer determined that it would only cover partial-day at-home nursing care.

While a nurse was off duty, her fetus went into distress and died.

Corcoran sued her insurer, UnitedHealthcare. Because of a little-known law called the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA, she was unable to recover any money from her insurer due to their wrongful denial. She would see no legal justice following this avoidable tragedy.

Facing health insurance hurdles is an all-too-common American experience. But while courtroom dramas would have many Americans believe that patients can sue to recover money damages when they face wrongful denials, for most people who have employer-sponsored insurance, that is far from the truth. Corcoran’s case was decided in 1992 – and the situation is only worse today.

I’m a political scientist studying health insurance barriers and the politics of efforts to reform America’s health care system. In my book, “Coverage Denied: How Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States,” I traced how health insurance obstacles can upend patients’ health and economic lives.

ERISA magnifies those barriers by limiting patients’ legal ability to hold health insurers accountable – instead giving them a free pass to keep denying coverage without facing real consequences.

Healthcare rationing by inconvenience

Health insurance hurdles, such as prior authorization and claim denials, are widespread in U.S. healthcare, and the problem is growing.

Americans who have health insurance say prior authorization is the healthcare system’s biggest burden, causing administrative headaches while care is kept out of reach. Claim denials hit hard too.

Between 2016 and 2023, claim denials increased from 9% to 12%. In a nationwide survey I conducted in 2024, I found that 36% of Americans experience at least one coverage denial – though usually, it’s several.

The denial rate is even higher among people on employer-sponsored insurance, the type of insurance to which ERISA applies.

Denials can be appealed, but doing so demands a level of health insurance literacy and bureaucratic know-how that most people lack. My research shows that less affluent people are less likely to appeal denials in the first place, and sicker patients and those from historically marginalized groups are less likely to prevail even if they do appeal.

Such hurdles effectively create a dynamic that I call “rationing by inconvenience,” with red tape impeding meaningful access to care. This drives both health and economic inequities.

When healthcare is kept out of reach, less affluent and Black and Hispanic patients are more likely to postpone care they need, often to the detriment of their health. And they may delay non-medical spending, too, due to unexpected healthcare costs.

ERISA’s unintended effects

The sweeping impact of coverage barriers makes it especially important for patients to be able to take effective legal action against insurers. But ERISA strictly limits legal leverage for most people who get health insurance through their employer.

ERISA was crafted in response to widespread public concern about the mismanagement of private pensions, such as with the infamous sudden closure of Studebaker’s factory in South Bend, Indiana in 1963, which left thousands of autoworkers without their pension benefits. By establishing minimum federal standards and regulations for private benefit plans, the law aimed to protect workers’ pensions from fraud and mismanagement.

But shortly before Congress voted on the legislation, it added text related to “employee welfare benefit plans,” which include health benefits. It seems that lawmakers failed to appreciate that pensions and health benefits might demand different approaches to enforcement.

Unlike with other insurance plans, patients with ERISA-governed plans can’t sue an insurer for money damages – to reflect pain and suffering or lost income – when an insurer wrongly denies their care. They can only sue to get the specific treatment covered.

The law mainly affects one type of employer health insurance, called self-insured plans, in which the employer pays employees’ medical claims itself rather than buying coverage through an insurer. When ERISA was enacted in 1974, no more than 6% of workers who got health insurance through an employer were covered by a self-funded plan.

Today, 67% of people insured through an employer – roughly 100 million Americans – are in these plans, making the law’s defects especially salient.

Driving health inequity

ERISA’s constraints on patient protections have far-reaching effects. For one thing, lawyers prefer not to take on cases that don’t involve money, making it hard for patients to sue even for the limited benefits to which they would be entitled.

What’s more, even if patients are able to sue an insurer, the harms they experienced from wrongful coverage denials still wouldn’t be fully addressed – or in some cases, addressed at all.

For a worker suing an employer over a wrongly withheld pension, which ERISA was originally enacted to address, receiving that retained money would restore their loss. But that’s not the case for a worker who sues an insurer that denies coverage for their health condition.

Imagine a patient denied coverage for cancer treatment, for example. Even if a court reverses the decision, the patient’s condition may have worsened to the point where the treatment is no longer clinically indicated or as effective.

Florence Corcoran experienced this in the extreme: When she lost her fetus at eight months, the only relief to which she was entitled under ERISA was the inpatient monitoring that she no longer required after her pregnancy’s tragic conclusion.

ERISA’s poor design thus creates a destructive feedback loop that limits Americans’ access to healthcare and promotes health and economic disparities. By disincentivizing lawsuits, ERISA makes it virtually costless for insurers to deny coverage for patients’ prescribed healthcare.

A block on health reform

In many cases, individual states can pass their own laws to get around congressional gridlock relating to health policy. But ERISA explicitly overrides state laws that relate to self-insured health plans – including consumer protection laws that could potentially protect patients. In doing so, ERISA blocks states from enacting comprehensive health insurance reforms, including those promoting health insurance equity.

Lawmakers have raised this issue over the years, but Congress has not made serious attempts to reform these provisions since the late 1990s’ unsuccessful efforts toward a patients’ bill of rights. Later healthcare measures, including the Affordable Care Act, have focused on increasing the number of people who have health insurance and largely steered clear of efforts to reduce barriers for the tens of millions enrolled in these plans.

In my view, that is especially unfortunate because at the state level, there is bipartisan appetite to address ongoing health insurance barriers, such as by reforming prior authorization.

For example, California’s prior authorization reform bill, SB 1120, passed in 2024 unanimously. The problem is that ERISA prevents laws like SB 1120 from addressing health insurance barriers within the majority of employer-sponsored insurance plans.

Congress could move toward overhauling this outdated law – for example, by allowing states to seek waivers from ERISA’s constraints. Without such action, insurers will continue to face relatively little legal risk when they wrongly deny coverage, and patients will continue to bear most of the consequences.

Miranda Yaver does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In Watson v. RNC, decided June 29, 2026, liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices joined a noteworthy cross-ideological majority to uphold state grace periods for mail-in ballots. The decision, which went against President Donald Trump’s policy preferences, preserved the status quo, allowing states to accept and count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after.

The case revolved around the meaning of “election day,” which federal law states is the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The statute does not say anything about casting or counting ballots on or by Election Day.

The Constitution says the time, manner and place of elections will be managed by states. Thus, Mississippi’s Legislature passed a law in 2020 to count mail-in ballots if they are postmarked by and received within five days of Election Day. Thirteen other states and Washington also allow this grace period, which ranges from one day in Texas to 20 days in Washington. The Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, the Libertarian Party of Mississippi and several individuals challenged the Mississippi law, saying it violates federal law because it allows the state to count votes received after Election Day.

Advocates argue that these grace periods are important, in part because irregularities in the postal service can make it difficult for people who use mail-in voting to get their ballots to an election official by Election Day. These challenges are more acute for people with disabilities and people living in remote areas or abroad.

As a legal scholar with expertise in veterans affairs, I’ve paid close attention to how the Watson v. RNC case could impact active-duty military and veterans, given the latter’s higher rates of disability and rurality.

Background on the decision

This Supreme Court ruling stems from a pandemic-era law to make mail-in voting easier. Before 2020, Mississippi required mail ballots to be received by 5 p.m. on the day prior to the election.

The pandemic changed voting behavior, with mail-in voting rates higher than they were pre-pandemic. Since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, after these laws were passed, the president’s critique of mail-in voting has often hinged on false election fraud claims. This helped make mail-in voting a partisan issue.

In the oral arguments, conservative Supreme Court justices asked about the possibility of grace periods making an election’s outcome uncertain for weeks or months. They also expressed concern that a person could potentially cast a ballot and then recall it after Election Day, which goes against the federal law’s purpose.

Liberal justices were concerned that reading the statute as requiring votes to be received on or by Election Day could undermine states’ efforts to expand voting access through early voting.

Interestingly, the decision did not turn on the issue of early voting; rather, the history and impact of active-duty military voting was central.

The conservative justices split on how to interpret the statute – how to interpret historical voting practices and previous court decisions. Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals. Barrett penned the opinion, saying that “election day” means the day by which someone chooses a candidate, not the day the ballots are received.

Importantly, the majority was concerned about preserving the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. This 1986 law, passed under Ronald Reagan, is the culmination of numerous efforts to ensure that active-duty military would be able to vote in federal elections.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act clarifies that states can establish their own procedures for counting ballots. The majority in Watson v. RNC explained that this provision of the 1986 law would make no sense if states could not count ballots received after Election Day.

As a practical matter, if states were not allowed to count ballots received after Election Day, many active-duty military and their dependents would be disenfranchised. That’s because the main reason active-duty military votes are not counted is late-arriving mail.

Mail-in voting and the military

Mail-in voting was first implemented to extend voting rights to active-duty soldiers during the Civil War. Soldiers submitted ballots to be counted and recorded by commanding officers, and their votes played an important role in the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.

The conservative justices split on how to interpret this history, since Civil War soldiers’ votes had to be received by Election Day. But Barrett’s opinion says that this practice tells us little about whether federal law required it.

Today, active-duty military and their families frequently go to great lengths to ensure they cast a ballot. In federal elections, they are voting for their commander in chief and members of Congress who control their budget. Many see it as a civic duty much like their military service. This sense of duty to vote remains even after active-duty military transition to veteran status.

For military stationed outside their home states or outside the country, mail-in voting is a necessity. Since 1942, Congress has passed laws to ensure that overseas military and their dependents are able to vote in federal elections. Current law protecting overseas voters requires that citizens abroad, including military, be sent their absentee ballots at least 45 days prior to the election.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has filed more than 30 lawsuits since 2000 against states and territories – including Vermont, Alabama and Guam – to ensure states properly mail and count absentee ballots of active-duty military and other Americans overseas.

In 2014, for example, a case against West Virginia ended in a judicial order that the state would count any ballots “executed” by Election Day but received up to 13 days later. Watson v. RNC reinforces these decisions designed to protect the voting rights of overseas military personnel.

Veterans’ voting rights

Veterans vote in higher proportion than the civilian population. Despite long-standing bipartisan support for veterans benefits, such as healthcare, their voting access has been controversial.

At the turn of the 20th century, Democrats tried to restrict voting rights for veterans because of their tendency to elect Republicans.

Historically, poor and disabled veterans have faced the biggest hurdles. For example, in the 1860s, Ohio state legislators passed a law so veterans in an Ohio residential facility would not count as Ohio citizens and, thus, would not be able to vote for congressional candidates.

Veterans often come from and return to rural areas, and many have disabilities, meaning they greatly benefit from mail-in voting policies because it is more difficult for them to show up in person to a polling location. Policies that make it harder for them to vote illustrate the negative impacts on Americans who also live in rural areas or are disabled, transient or otherwise unable to get to polling booths.

For these reasons, bipartisan veterans groups are actively engaged in protecting voting rights, and many have already spoken out in favor of the majority’s decision, which will help active-duty military and veterans be confident that their votes will be counted.

Jamie Rowen receives funding from National Science Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, many people in the U.S. are deeply concerned about the country’s future.

A recent poll by Elon University found that 69% of respondents “believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would feel more disappointment than pride about modern American democracy.” Confidence in public institutions is historically low, and the most recent Harvard Youth Poll indicates that just a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel hopeful about the future of America.”

Many are also afraid. For the 10th consecutive year, Americans reported corrupt government officials to be their single greatest fear, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, ranking above financial collapse or a loved one becoming seriously ill.

“Americans have come to see threats as not just the possibility of attack by a foreign adversary. The potential for political violence at home is part of it, along with polarization, corruption and a sense of cultural dysfunction,” pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in The New York Times. “Americans increasingly view the survival of the country as being at stake.”

How are people in the U.S. to make sense of these trends? As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, how faithful is the U.S. today to its founding principles? I’m a political philosophy scholar who studies constitutional government. In my view, an especially helpful approach to answering such questions is to revisit the towering but neglected influence of the French philosopher Montesquieu on the founding of this country.

Montesquieu and the American founding

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was an 18th-century philosopher and aristocrat whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” caused a sensation when published in 1748. His ideas shaped the American founders. At the Constitutional Convention, only the Bible was quoted more often.

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

Montesquieu was especially celebrated for his account of how and why political power needs to be separated into branches. But behind this now familiar idea was another that is less remembered: Montesquieu’s theory of liberty inspired the founders’ own understandings of this core concept of American politics.

A theory of liberty

In “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu describes political liberty as a “tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.” To be free is to believe that one is secure. But to believe as much, “it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.”

Liberty cannot be a matter of “doing what one wants,” Montesquieu warns. What if what one person wants threatens others? Then one person’s freedom to act limits everyone else’s. No one can feel secure unless everyone lives under laws that regulate what each may do. Montesquieu understood liberty in terms of this confidence or “tranquility” because it amounts to being free from the arbitrary will of others.

When Montesquieu stresses freedom from fear of other citizens, he doesn’t just mean private individuals. He especially means those acting in a public capacity, like “magistrates” or “rulers.” If public officials’ behavior doesn’t conform to predictable norms set by law, if agents of the government can summarily arrest people, seize their property or revoke their citizenship – say, by denaturalizing and deporting them without due process – it becomes impossible to feel secure.

Even if such actions aren’t directed against me or those like me, such lawlessness is still threatening because it’s unpredictable. I might support the government’s moves against other groups in the moment, but what’s to stop the government from suddenly turning on me when the political winds change?

To prevent public officials from simply doing what they want, Montesquieu famously called for the separation of political power into branches headed by different citizens.

But, he explains, it is not enough that people live under free institutions. They must also believe those institutions to be in the service of their freedom. Liberty, then, is as much a matter of opinion as of fact.

The tyranny of opinion

Montesquieu shows in “The Spirit of the Laws” how the fundamental laws of a country can permit a free way of life even as the country’s cultural norms prevent it. A country might have a free constitution while its citizens believe they hold moral obligations inconsistent with it.

For example, today, Americans might believe that the demands of racial equity or of evangelical Christianity are so pressing that executive power would be justified in ignoring the legislature or the judiciary to serve them.

“In these instances,” Montesquieu writes, “the Constitution will be free by right and not in fact.” The people – or some of them – will experience the law as a hindrance to what they believe they ought or ought not to do.

In such cases, there arises what Montesquieu calls a tyranny “of opinion.” The laws that would otherwise free people from fear of one another and of the government instead inspire a fear all their own. The laws might prevent what some people believe is morally right, or command – in the name of protecting others’ rights or the common good – what others regard as unjust or unholy.

That misalignment between constitutional law and cultural norms makes people feel insecure. It makes the Constitution seem opposed to their will and sense of duty. It can then seem appealing for a leader to promise, in the name of freedom, to ignore the law.

A bracing reminder

In recent years, figures across the political spectrum have called for radical constitutional change – or for ignoring the Constitution outright. There are calls not only to pack the Supreme Court or to ignore its decisions, but also to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College.

From Montesquieu’s perspective, polarization worsens this appetite for disregarding constitutional norms. Each party champions a cultural agenda from which supporters of the other party recoil. Whenever either party is in office, even when it respects constitutional law, its rule can feel to the other side much like the tyranny of opinion Montesquieu describes. The other side’s policies can seem to violate deeply held values, whether it’s banning transgender girls from competing in girls sports or declining to deport immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally.

According to Montesquieu, liberty depends on the kind of civic culture the U.S. seems at risk of losing. No institutions, however well designed, can preserve liberty if citizens believe their preferred cultural norms are so obligatory that political power is needed to enforce them, opposition be damned.

A culture more tolerant of moral disagreements and less quick to reach for political power to force others to accept what they find morally wrong would help ease the distrust many Americans feel toward the government and one another. Until then, Americans will continue drifting away from the liberty that the U.S. was founded to secure.

Robert A. Ballingall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Let’s say you drive over a pothole in front of your house in Denver and call the city. They come fix it within a few days. Problem solved.

Now let’s say the problem is the sidewalk in front of your house. You call the city again.

Until recently, city staff would have pointed you to their “Homeowner’s Do-It Yourself Guide for Hazardous Sidewalks,” where it clearly states that “sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.” This online document then suggests that if you need to remove a tripping hazard from your sidewalk, you could rent a “Masonry Rotary Grinder” from your local rental center.

Be sure to also get yourself some eye protection.

In most U.S. cities, a pothole is treated as a public problem, but a broken sidewalk – even one that blocks access – is treated as the homeowner’s problem.

It is not this way everywhere. In some older U.S. cities such as Boston and Washington, sidewalks have long been a public responsibility – the same as streets, water lines and sewers. But cities that grew up in a different era – or cities eager to offload maintenance and legal responsibility – treated sidewalks not as fundamental infrastructure but as an amenity tied to adjacent property.

More than three-quarters of the 30 most-populous U.S. cities take that same approach.

But not Denver – at least, not anymore. In 2022, the city changed its rules, not because city leaders suddenly changed course, but because advocates such as Jill Locantore and the Denver Streets Partnership got tired of waiting, organized and took the issue to the ballot. Denver allows citizens to initiate legislation, and the measure won handily, making sidewalks a public responsibility.

Denver’s sidewalk data

Denver ended up with a citywide sidewalk program funded through a fee on property owners, typically $150 per household per year, and managed by the city. Instead of trying to get individual homeowners to fix bad sidewalks one segment at a time, Denver now has a system – and funding it can bond against – to repair, build and maintain sidewalks as a connected public network.

Los Angeles underscores the contradiction. The law there still says adjacent property owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance; yet, the city also runs a public repair program for larger sidewalk projects after years of ADA litigation made clear that this is not just a private matter.

But most cities don’t even know which sidewalks need fixing.

When I first took my job at the University of Colorado Denver in 2009, I taught an Introduction to GIS course, where students learned how to use digital maps to understand real-world problems. In prepping for that class, I dug into the city’s data and came away impressed by the fact that they had a sidewalk layer, basically a digital map of the city’s sidewalks. However, unlike nearly every other GIS dataset the city provided, the sidewalk one hadn’t been updated since 2004. The logic seemed to be that not seeing the problem protects you from liability. But sticking your head in the sand is not much of a long-term strategy.

Sidewalk safety, a tale of two cities

There is no such hesitancy with cities collecting roadway data. In one study, my colleagues and I interviewed staff from 16 U.S. cities about the information they track on their roads. One city told us that they had “no gaps in data and don’t need anything else.” Most others likely would’ve agreed with that sentiment.

We then asked the same questions about their sidewalk data. The tone of the responses shifted quickly. Audible frustration and an early disclaimer of “it’s complicated” were common. They told us that sidewalks just weren’t given the same priority as roads.

Why would they be? Or better yet, why should they be?

One reason is road safety.

Hoboken, New Jersey, has become the U.S. poster child for safe streets. Experts point to the success of interventions like curb extensions, high-visibility crosswalks, protected bike lanes and lowering the citywide speed limit.

But before all of that, Hoboken undertook a systematic effort to catalog its sidewalks and their condition. The city runs an annual sidewalk inspection program where trained volunteers walk the sidewalks and record problems. Hoboken also developed a smartphone app so the inventory could be digitized instantly, including not just sidewalk defects but also things like burned-out pedestrian lights and damaged pedestrian signals.

Hoboken remains one of the many cities that put the onus to fix sidewalks onto adjacent property owners. But you can probably get away with that when your nickname is the “Mile Square City” and your median income is more than twice the national average.

But nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality? In a city of nearly 60,000 residents and a daytime population of over 90,000? Hoboken must be doing something right, and focusing on sidewalks first may be part of it.

Springfield, Ohio, also has nearly 60,000 residents. Yet the city suffered more than 50 road fatalities over the past nine years. The list of contributing factors is long, but sidewalks matter.

In fact, in Springfield’s 2024 community survey, residents cited the condition of sidewalks and streets as the city’s worst problem. Over 90% of residents said they were dissatisfied with them.

To its credit, Springfield is looking to fix its sidewalks. And to be fair, doing so is much harder when your city is spread across 26 square miles (67 square kilometers) of land instead of one.

But giving property owners just 30 days to fix their own sidewalks? And adding the repair costs to their property tax bill if they don’t? There has to be a better way. I’m guessing that the residents along the 22 streets that recently received such notices would agree.

I live in Denver. The sidewalk in front of my house had some lips and dips that could’ve compelled me to rent heavy equipment and get to work. But the city came out and replaced it. Without my even asking.

So if you want to take a lesson from Denver, making sidewalks a public responsibility is possible. It can even be popular. And if you want to take a lesson from Hoboken and make your city safer, start with the humble sidewalk. Figure out where they are, and where they are not. Where they need to be repaired, and where they need to be replaced.

In other words, sidewalks come first.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Wes Marshall, PhD, PE, receives funding from entities such as the Colorado Department of Transportation and the University Transportation Center program.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the Supreme Court term that began in October 2025, the justices delivered major decisions in cases ranging from voting rights to citizenship to presidential power. The Conversation’s Politics and Legal Affairs Editor, Naomi Schalit, spoke with Dickinson College President John Jones, a former federal judge, about the court’s session.

They focused on two recent decisions: birthright citizenship, which the justices affirmed, and a Mississippi state law that allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received up to five days later and still be counted, which national and state Republican parties challenged and lost.

Schalit: Two of the court’s conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the three liberals in saying that the Mississippi mail-in ballots law did not violate federal law and could stand. What do you make of this ruling?

Jones: The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is really emblematic of an emerging pragmatic conservatism that she and the chief justice are showing, which is heartening to see, regardless of whether you agree with their judicial philosophy. Justice Barrett properly cast the question not as one of constitutional import but merely as an interpretation of Congress’ laws that mandate that federal elections be held on the same day. Notably those laws are silent on the issue of when ballots must be received, which has been left to individual states to regulate.

Justice Barrett actually sounded kind of sharp, almost scolding, in the opinion in her criticism of the assertions made by the plaintiffs and some of the justices in the minority. Is that tone typical?

I perceive an increase in what I would characterize as sort of judicial invective among the members of this court. I don’t love that, but sometimes you have to get your elbows up to make a strong point when you’re on an appellate court.

I suspect one of her problems was the sheer illogic of the dissent’s parade of possible horribles if you allow ballots to be counted after Election Day, which really flies in the face of the increasing adoption of mail-in voting. To have the dissenters hearken back to the 19th century and discourse about voting customs then was inapt, and the justice called them on it. She recognized that in the real world today, there are mechanisms that allow for the orderly counting of ballots after Election Day.

Justice Barrett wrote: “Notably plaintiffs admit that they cannot precisely tie this historical practice to the text of the election day statutes. That is a delicately put understatement.”

These types of suits, such as this one brought by the Republican National Committee, plainly intend to promote voter suppression. This traditionally helps Republican candidates. I don’t think the majority was blind to that purpose. Perhaps the justice’s visceral reaction was triggered by that attempted charade.

This lawsuit is really a smaller version of what the president is trying to do with the SAVE Act, which is to cut off mail-in voting, absentee voting and any counting after the election. This is based on a canard – that allowing ballots to be counted after Election Day necessarily triggers rampant fraud.

In effect, the dissenters are parroting what the current administration is saying in support of the SAVE Act, and we know that there is no empirical evidence to support those contentions. Adopting the Republican National Committee’s position would necessarily disenfranchise voters in the military and law-abiding citizens who are permitted to vote absentee or by mail and have their ballots postmarked at or prior to Election Day. That’s simply not consistent with how we view the franchise of voting in a democracy.

Birthright citizenship – the constitutional principle that almost anyone born in the U.S. gets citizenship – has broad support among Americans. The Supreme Court’s ruling strongly affirmed that right, Yet four justices did not vote to affirm birthright citizenship as a right ensured by the 14th Amendment, and some say that was alarming and points to a future of further challenges. What are your thoughts?

It ended up being a closer decision than I would have thought. But I don’t share the alarm. The only path for those who want to restrict birthright citizenship henceforth is a constitutional amendment, which is highly unlikely to pass. So I’m not unduly concerned by the margin. I think the majority, through the chief justice, spoke clearly and appropriately about the 14th Amendment.

The president has said in response to the ruling, “I’ll just get Congress to change things.”

He’s wrong.

That assumes that Congress can overwrite a constitutional right in the 14th Amendment that’s now clearly established by precedent. They cannot do so. The only way to change the court’s ruling is either to have a subsequent court reverse it or through the amendment process.

Good luck with either. For now, the door is closed.

As a former federal judge, what is it like to deal with such heavily politicized cases? Does it change how judges deal with them? Did you see methods of dealing with politically oriented cases at the court that looked different than how they might deal with cases that were not political in origin?

No, I don’t. In the end the court did its job, agree or not with the decisions.

They’re in a highly polarized environment, and so it’s easy for a jaded public to feel that everything they do is akin to the actions of politicians in black robes. I don’t adhere to that view, even though I may not agree with everything that the court has done.

One of the notions the court debunked is that it’s fully in the tank with the president, and that he just can run the table in these cases at will. That clearly was not the case, even though, of course, several of the opinions tilted in favor of the strong unitary executive theory. That doesn’t mean that I am in accord with everything the court held.

If you go back several years to the immunity case opinion by the chief justice – which gave ex-presidents absolute immunity for official actions they took while president – and then you look at, for example, this term’s Slaughter decision that allowed the president to fire an independent agency commissioner, both of those cases assume that the president is a rational actor. But there’s some inconsistency between those opinions and the Lisa Cook case, where the justices said the president couldn’t simply fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Clearly, the Lisa Cook result seems in tension with the Slaughter holding. The Cook holding is built on a nod to history, tradition and independence of the Fed, but you could say that about a number of different agencies.

I think, clearly, what Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts feared, and why the Lisa Cook case came down the way it did, unlike the other executive power cases, is that we have a president who just might wreak havoc on the financial system of the United States if he were given the unfettered power to pack the Fed.

So much for the assumption of the rationale actor! But to be sure, for your readers and viewers, those cases are facially hard to reconcile beyond the court engaging in pure pragmatism.

In the end, there remain some really stark philosophical divides on the court. When it convenes in October, we’re likely in for another wild ride.

Anything else you want to say about this session?

The decision in the Mississippi voting case was heartening to me because it truly recognizes the real world, and not the hyperbolic and unfounded speculation in which the dissenters engaged.

In addition, I loved Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion in the birthright citizenship case. He nailed it, and it’s one of those decisions that makes you prouder of the country and the traditions that we stand for, including the rule of law. As a former judge who enjoyed turning a phrase, I love great judicial poetry. The chief justice did a terrific job.

John E. Jones III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness.

What happens to these spaces when adults are given permission to inspect a child’s body to determine their gender?

The Supreme Court rulings on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. decided that transgender girls cannot play sports that align with their gender identity. Not only does this ruling essentially prohibit transgender kids from participating in most youth sports – codifying the exclusion this vulnerable population already experiences – it also puts all children at risk of the harmful consequences of body surveillance.

I am a social work scholar who studies LGBTQ+ belonging and organizational climate. I’m also a former NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete, and I know firsthand what it’s like to have uninvited scrutiny of your body because strangers doubt your gender.

Based on my research and experience, when policies allow for the bodily surveillance of children, all children are at risk of losing the benefits of youth sports – not just transgender children.

Youth sports as developmental spaces

School sports are not just about competition. They can provide children an important developmental space.

Youth sports can help children improve their sense of competence and confidence. They offer opportunities to practice life skills, such as setting goals, solving problems and thinking positively. Sports can also help protect against depression and stress by bringing supportive adults and positive role models into children’s lives.

However, when youth sports environments become overly stressful, unfair or humiliating, they can also serve as grounds for potentially harmful experiences. For example, coaches and parents can negatively affect a child’s body image by repeatedly criticizing their weight. Teammates and peers can also pressure each other in destructive ways.

The developmental value of youth sports depends on the environment it creates. It stands to follow that ensuring youth sports spaces have as many positive influences as possible is in the best interest of all children.

Research suggests that policies legalizing bodily surveillance are not a positive influence for any child in youth sports.

Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm

Bodily surveillance plays out in significant ways for all children in youth sports, not just transgender youth. Policies that legalize bodily surveillance for youth open the door to causing harm in unsuspecting children.

Researchers define bodily surveillance as “viewing the body as an outside observer” through active judgments of a person’s physicality, superficial appearance or perceived gender presentation. While bodily surveillance claims to regulate women’s sports in the name of fairness, experts contest the scientific basis of these claims.

Women’s sports have been the site of bodily surveillance for decades, and the cisgender women involved in those sports are all too aware of the ways their bodies are judged through the lens of sexism. Often, how their bodies are judged are influenced by a definition of femininity based primarily on white bodies.

Bodily surveillance can involve assessing how tall is too tall for someone to be a girl? How strong is too strong? How fast is too fast? Who decides when a child exceeds that threshold, and what happens to that child if they do?

Children who compete at the top of their division or class will have to contend with invasive procedures. To evaluate claims of unfair advantages, strangers may request hormone or genetic testing to look for common biological variations that cisgender children and their parents may not even be aware of. Testing may also include genital or pelvic inspection to look for the presence or absence of a penis, or even transvaginal ultrasounds to detect the presence of ovaries.

Strangers are already policing children’s bodies

Bodily scrutiny is not restricted to just transgender children – it already affects cisgender children, too.

In 2022, a high school athlete in Utah was secretly investigated after she defeated other children in a sports competition. Parents of the second- and third-place finishers raised a complaint that led the high school athletics association to analyze her school records back to kindergarten to determine the child’s gender, without consulting her parents. This is a strong example of how people can initiate investigations simply because the child does not look “feminine enough.” In this case the child in question was indeed a cisgender girl.

In 2023, two adults harassed a 9-year-old child at an elementary school track meet. The adults, claiming the girl was transgender, stopped the entire event and demanded she show “certification of her sex.” This was also a cisgender female child.

Strong, athletic women are often subject to suspicion because of their so-called “masculine traits.” As a taller-than-average person who was assigned female at birth, I personally experienced countless moments of bodily scrutiny during my time as a NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete. These experiences made me want to shrink out of public view and did not give me confidence in my athletic performance. Moreover, the effects of this scrutity bled into my personal life, significantly affecting my self-esteem and self-perception throughout my young adulthood.

Imagine if that scrutiny happened when I was much younger, when I did not yet possess the emotional maturity or life experiences to cope with it. Research shows that such bodily scrutiny is already damaging transgender youth and that bodily shame can significantly affect young people’s mental health, leading to disordered eating and other physical and psychological harm.

When societies give formal permission to scrutinize a child’s body and question whether they belong in a sport, it opens the door to potential harm against all children. Children’s bodies, regardless of their gender identity, become open for people to inspect, create rumors about or render public judgment against them, often without any recourse for the children experiencing harm.

Children who had previously never faced the harms of bodily surveillance may soon be subject to its violence because of this law.

Inclusivity benefits all children

Just as all children can potentially suffer from bodily surveillance regardless of their gender identity, embracing inclusivity can improve the well-being of all children.

Research shows that LGBTQ+-inclusive environments can help all children succeed in school. A 2012 study of nearly 16,000 students in 45 schools found that the presence of a gay-straight alliance reduced truancy, smoking, drinking and suicide attempts. A 2020 study of over 895,000 children found that those in LGBTQ+-inclusive environments reported doing better in school, lower substance use and better mental health.

On the other hand, a 2024 study found that anti-LGBTQ+ language in youth sports negatively affected the self-esteem of all children, including those who do not identify as LGBTQ+.

Youth sports, just like schools and churches, are not just places where children compete, learn facts or practice their faith. These community institutions are places where children build the confidence, relationships and sense of belonging that can shape their adult lives and the impact they’ll have on their family and community in the future.

The scope of sex-based bodily surveillance by necessity extends beyond transgender students, and the effects of this surveillance negatively affects all children involved in youth sports, regardless of identity.

Megan Gandy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Data center projects continue to generate controversy around the country. In part, that’s because a variety of different groups have competing interests – some in favor of them, some opposed and others with no direct view on data centers themselves, but with concerns that relate to aspects of data center operations and effects.

As a scholar of environmental justice and urban land use, I’ve seen these various conflicting forces at work in Michigan. More than 30 large and small data center projects have been proposed in the state in the past two years alone, including one by the university where I work.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is enthusiastic about bringing technology companies to the state, even posing with tech company CEOs in photo ops at the sites of proposed data centers.

But not everyone is as excited. In just one example of the opposition these projects can face, the local water company where I live, the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority, told the state it would not supply water for cooling a data center that the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory had proposed within its service area.

So the University of Michigan proposed a different site in the next town over, Superior Township. That town manages its own water but gets its supply by buying it from both the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority and Ann Arbor township.

A look at some of the forces at play around these projects reveals the deep issues they raise. The fights about data centers can often take the form of collisions between companies and community members. But they also reflect conflict about social values, democratic systems and capitalist interests.

Tech companies

Tech companies have an obvious desire to store and process ever more data. And many key aspects of society rely on the data centers that have been built over the decades, serving websites, handling online purchases and delivering emails, text messages and alert notices.

The latest push is related to the anticipated demand for artificial intelligence systems in the business world and in people’s lives – and the resulting increased demand for computing capacity to process all those requests and filter through all the available information to provide responses.

The corporate pressures to grow, to continue increasing profits for shareholders and to squeeze more revenue from workers and assets keep these tech companies seeking more land on which to build more data centers. And the Michigan Legislature has openly courted tech companies, passing laws that exempt data center operators from sales and use taxes they would otherwise have to pay.

Electricity companies

Many power companies are regulated by state or local governments and are not allowed to make profits off maintaining existing service or selling electricity. Their profits come from building new power plants, new transformers and substations, and new power lines – and passing those costs along to customers, with a markup for profit.

A data center can require significant investment in power generation and transmission – a data center proposed by Google in Van Buren Township, Michigan, for example, would require “2.7 gigawatts of electricity – a massive amount of power equivalent to the demand of about 2 million homes,” according to a local news report.

So a power company is likely to be eager to capitalize on the opportunity for a new major customer and may be willing to endure some amount of public backlash.

Power companies that operate in small geographic areas are highly dependent on the success of the municipalities from which they draw their customers and in which they build their infrastructure. In these situations, they have a vested interest in local economic growth, specifically the movement to the area of companies that supply jobs and, therefore, workers. This drives them to get involved in local political decision-making by lobbying for zoning changes to enable data centers.

Larger utility companies that operate regionally or across entire states are less tied to the economic success of a specific municipality within their service area. But they are also able to target their influence at state lawmakers. For example, DTE Energy assured state lawmakers that the proposed data center in Van Buren Township would not raise customers’ power rates.

Community leaders

Community leaders and elected officials are often interested in the jobs that tech companies promise will come with the data centers, so they tend to support approval of permits, zoning amendments or other legal changes.

Although data centers don’t really create very many jobs, they do have the potential to contribute to local property taxes, which can appeal to small towns without many other options.

Cities and towns are always on the hunt for growth opportunities, seeking additional tax revenue. That can lead them to feel pressure to build new roads, modify their land-use ordinances and approve requests from companies wishing to build within their boundaries.

My research has found that this pressure exists even in shrinking or small cities. This pressure has increased as cities have sought to reduce taxes on residents. The solution they see to getting fewer dollars out of existing residents is to bring in more businesses, more industry and more new residents. That makes them interested in welcoming data centers.

However, not every community leader is on board with data centers. Some oppose them but feel hamstrung or powerless to stop or slow their progress, as occurred in Ypsilanti Township and in nearby Saline Township as well.

Everyday people

In many communities, everyday people concerned with noise, land use, water use and power use oppose the data centers.

They are also concerned about the costs data centers may impose on utility ratepayers, taxpayers and those who must experience the environmental effects. People’s power, exercised through democratic processes such as public hearings, ordinance revisions and elections, can be overwhelmed by the tech companies and aligned groups.

But voters do have power. In June 2026, Utah voters unseated a longtime legislative leader, state Senate President Stuart Adams, who had helped get approval for a massive data center in the northwestern part of the state.

Whether a data center moves forward in a municipality ends up being a matter of how public officials sort through the motivations and sociopolitical power of all these players.

Lauren Mullenbach does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Twenty-five years ago, I attended a Fourth of July parade in Boston that has stuck with me.

The head drummer of the colonial fife and drum band was a Black man in a Revolutionary War costume, his dreadlocks peeking from under a powdered wig. As the parade stopped to lay a wreath at the Granary Burying Ground where founding fathers John Hancock and Samuel Adams are buried, a man placed a small stone on the memorial, a Jewish tradition of remembrance. A woman in a colorful sari marched alongside the parade as it continued toward the State House.

To me, then in the early stages of my career as an immigration scholar, the scene told a story of migration and incorporation: Africans forcibly brought here on slave ships in the 17th and 18th centuries, Eastern European Jews arriving in the 19th century, Asian immigrants in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I’m a sociologist who has studied immigration and civic engagement for more than 25 years, including citizenship acquisition, voter turnout and community engagement. In quantifying immigrants’ likelihood of becoming citizens and voting, I’ve come to see that healthy communities and strong societies require more than formal membership and turning out at the polls every few years; they require connecting with neighbors, feeling a sense of responsibility for one another and seeing each other as part of a shared democratic system.

Public celebrations – such as parades, festivals and even road races – can help with this. They play a critical role in society, incorporating the newest Americans into the community and creating a greater sense of belonging for everyone.

Building connection across differences

My recent book, “Beyond White Picket Fences: Evolution of an American Town,” documents how immigrant and ethnic groups have reshaped the historically white, Christian town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, over the past 100 years. Through nearly 100 in-depth interviews, participant observations and archival work – examining more than 20,000 articles, letters to the editor, advertisements and obituaries from the local newspaper throughout the 20th century – I came to see the role that public celebrations play in connecting people.

In an interview for my book, a lifelong Wellesley resident who identifies as Irish and Italian American recounted how her daughters – through Chinese families they danced alongside at a small local dance studio – ended up performing in the Chinese Language School’s Lunar New Year program.

Another community event, the Dreidel Dash, is a 5K begun by the local synagogue that lets Jewish residents take pride in their traditions while offering others a chance to learn. The race starts at the synagogue, where temple members can show newcomers around and explain why they eat food like latkes and jelly-filled donuts at Hanukkah. An Irish Catholic runner who won shabbat candles for finishing first in his division later told me he hadn’t known anything about shabbat beforehand. He learned something about Jewish culture because of his participation in a 5K.

These types of communal celebrations have been associated with feelings of empowerment, a sense of group belonging and collective action. French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence” in the early 20th century to describe the connection, excitement and unity of shared experience, a joy only possible in community.

During my research, I found a social media response to an article reporting on Wellesley’s 2024 Lunar New Year’s Celebration that illustrated Durkheim’s sentiment: “Happy New Year to all!! What a great way to celebrate the Chinese heritage and share the ancient yet lively culture with our communities!!! Sharing helps understanding, sharing STOPS AAPI HATE!!!” AAPI stands for Asian American and Pacific Islander, an umbrella term for Americans with roots in parts of Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Creating new narratives

Public celebrations also help communities reshape how they think about themselves and how those outside their community think about them.

Over the past two years, I’ve developed a course on what it means to be a citizen in America today, taught with a colleague at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky. In April 2026, that collaboration led me to Kentucky’s Hillbilly Days, a three-day festival of music, food and culture.

“Hillbilly” has long been a slur against the people of Appalachia, but these Kentuckians have reclaimed it: They mock the stereotype by blackening their teeth and wearing straw hats and overalls, while celebrating their culture of bluegrass, clog dancing and the hard labor of coal mining. The festival lets them tell their region’s story of hardship, resilience and community on their own terms.

My visit also allowed me to learn about the history of the term “redneck,” a term with complex and contested meaning. Often used as an insult against Appalachians and Americans from the rural South, more generally the term has various origins: Some trace it to the sunburned necks of farmers; others tie it to the red bandanas worn by coal miners during the early-20th-century coal strikes — among the largest labor uprisings in U.S. history.

Images from those strikes show miners of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds – white and Black, American- and foreign-born – wearing red bandanas. At Hillbilly Days, people today wear red bandanas to reclaim that history and show pride in who they are and where they are from.

At the same time, new groups are being woven into the American tapestry: Asian, Mexican and Middle Eastern food trucks line the event, speaking to how the country’s evolving demographics are even showing up in rural Appalachia.

Rethinking what it means to be American

I now know that scene in Boston 25 years ago wasn’t an outlier. National holidays have long offered the opportunity to rethink what it means to be an American.

My archival research has found the pattern stretching back a century: an Italian band playing a concert at a 1917 Fourth of July parade, Chinese American residents donning dragon costumes in a 1971 Veterans Day parade, and Polish Americans showcasing traditional folk dancing in a 2026 Memorial Day Parade.

In my analysis, such participation helped immigrants find their place in society and helped longer-settled Americans see them as part of the American experiment. From St. Patrick’s Day to Cinco de Mayo, diversified public celebrations are cause and consequence of a national transformation that other scholars have documented as well.

According to a new survey, 85% of likely voters think the U.S. is a nation founded on shared ideals rather than on the character of its Anglo-Saxon settlers, as President Donald Trump has claimed.

Historian Yuval Harari argues the need for a form of nationalism, not the nationalism of exclusion and hate, but one of care for all the tribes of a nation.

“Without a strong national community,” he explains, “democracy cannot survive.”

Likewise, research shows that humans need social connection, joy and a sense of belonging to thrive. Communal celebrations have the power to provide, at least in part, these key ingredients.

Catherine Simpson Bueker receives funding from The Russell Sage Foundation and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Supreme Court on June 30, 2026, declared that universal birthright citizenship is protected by the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, meaning that nearly all babies born in the United States automatically become American citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

The ruling rejects President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed the first day of his second administration, which sought to end birthright citizenship for the children of parents present in the country illegally and for tourists visiting only temporarily.

The high court ruled that “under the Constitution, they are citizens by birth.”

A close decision

The ruling was split 5-4 on the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, ruled against the Trump order on the grounds that it violates federal law – which Congress could alter – but not the Constitution itself, making the ruling 6-3 against Trump.

Supreme Court watchers, including myself, expected the three liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – to rule in favor of universal birthright citizenship, but imagined that the six conservatives would divide.

Two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the liberals to form a narrow majority.

Four of the justices appointed by Republican presidents see the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment as quite different, primarily recognizing the citizenship of former slaves and their descendants after the Civil War. But they don’t see it applying to anyone born in the United States regardless of parentage.

In their view, birthright citizenship was only promised to those whose parents were legal residents with sole allegiance to the United States. As they see it, the American people can expand federal law to grant citizenship to others if they choose, but the Constitution does not demand it.

The meaning of the Declaration

The timing of the landmark ruling is meaningful, coming a few days before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

As a longtime observer of the Supreme Court, I believe the best way to understand the dispute is that it reflects a deep conflict over how we see the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and how it frames the meaning of the Constitution.

Roberts concludes the ruling with the statement that “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community.”

This is a reference to a famous quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren dissenting in a 1958 ruling recognizing congressional power to strip a native-born American of their citizenship for voting in a foreign election. Warren, the chief justice who authored Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and many other landmark rulings expanding constitutional rights, wrote that “Citizenship is man’s basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”

In Warren’s – and Roberts’ – view, the Declaration of Independence established not only the importance of individual rights, but also the equality of all in holding those rights. Citizenship must be equal and open, defined as broadly as the Constitution allows, rather than narrow in its scope.

When the 14th Amendment expanded citizenship after the Civil War, it did so with universal language, addressing race but also something broader: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the majority’s view, this must be read broadly to achieve the declaration’s insistence on rights and equality.

The dissenters believe that the declaration did something else: It established a new sovereign people who control their own definition of citizenship. In this view, the Declaration of Independence established a distinct kind of equality — an equal share in control over the government through political representation and elections.

This view means that the current citizens must agree to offer an equal share in governance to any new members of society, but there is no such thing as citizenship without consent: No one can demand citizenship in a democracy by violating its laws.

Accepting or rejecting the British inheritance

On the second page of the ruling, Roberts explains that “the story of citizenship in the United States begins with the English common law.”

Going back to the landmark Calvin’s Case in 1608, the British rule was that anyone born in the dominion of the king was a natural born subject.

Roberts writes that “This view crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution, as ‘subjects’ of the sovereign became ‘citizens’ of the States.”

This British common law rule of broad citizenship shaped the discussion in the key case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898. As Roberts summarizes it, “What the Court held in Wong Kim Ark was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States.”

In the view of the dissenters, the problem is that subjects are not citizens. That means that being “under the jurisdiction” of the United States is very different from being under the jurisdiction of England or any other previous nation.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on the grounds that “the English principle was a rule of feudal servitude, not a rule of citizenship.”

Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his dissent, referring to the common law as “a medieval rule” and an “ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned.”

Alito insists that “the Declaration of Independence repudiated the foundation on which the British rule was based” because it “emphatically rejected the British theory of government.”

5-4 on the meaning of July 4

The Declaration of Independence established a new relationship between individuals and the government, moving from the government controlling the people to the people controlling the government. Subjects became citizens, and with it came the authority over who can become a new citizen.

In the now-controlling interpretation of the Constitution, the American people did just that through the 14th Amendment, expanding the nature of citizenship to a more universal and equal footing, in line with the new racial equality the amendment enshrines.

Birthright citizenship applies to all who are born here. That view is now the law of the land.

In the other, now-dissenting view, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship only to those “who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”

Both sides agree, as Alito phrased it, that this may be “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court.”

Morgan Marietta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

A decades-old law limiting how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates was struck down by the Supreme Court on June 30, 2026. Citing First Amendment principles, the court held in NRSC v. FEC that the limit unduly prevented political parties from “freely” and “fully” advocating for their respective nominees. The case marks the Roberts court’s latest chapter in a 20-year trajectory toward a more deregulated campaign finance system.

While not the earth-shattering decision that was Citizens United, the 2010 ruling that struck down limits on corporate and union campaign spending as a violation of their free speech, NRSC v. FEC is still significant. And it has the potential to materially reshape the American political process.

Indeed, campaign finance regulation is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Some political theorists even contend that the private funding of campaigns is antithetical to core democratic principles of integrity, equality and responsiveness to voters.

Campaign spending: Freedom or corruption?

At a minimum, it is broadly agreed upon – and observed – that reining in money in politics is necessary to curb all-out corruption, where the wealthy are able to donate unlimited sums of money to politicians in exchange for favors.

The U.S. Supreme Court has historically upheld restrictions on political spending only if they furthered this anti-corruption goal – the idea being that fighting corruption is a compelling enough reason to limit political expression and association conducted via the dollar.

Modern-day discussion of U.S. campaign finance revolves around issues such as dark money, outside-group spending and corporate personhood. Political party spending, by contrast, receives comparatively little attention from scholars, activists and the media.

This asymmetry is not entirely without warrant. Political party spending used to dominate election cycles, with parties sometimes even outspending their own candidates.

In 2000, for example, the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined spent more money on television ads supporting Texas Gov. George Bush and Vice President Al Gore than the candidates’ own campaigns did.

Over the past two decades, however, political parties have played a waning role in elections. The advent of super PACs, political action committees that can receive and spend unlimited sums of money to support candidates, has led to a degree of outside-group spending – spending made without coordination with any candidate – that far surpasses that of political parties. Moreover, candidates’ growing reliance on small-dollar donations in the age of online fundraising has shifted their financial support base from their party to their individual followers.

Political party spending nonetheless remains consequential in U.S. elections. In the 2024 election cycle, for instance, political parties spent over US$2.6 billion to support federal candidates – a substantial amount, even if modest compared with the $5.5 billion spent by federal candidates themselves and the whopping $15.5 billion spent by PACs and super PACs.

The regulation of party spending is therefore a significant component of the U.S. campaign finance system. And its deregulation could unleash billions of dollars more in spending by parties in future elections.

Quid pro quo risk?

Federal campaign finance law regulates political parties in a variety of ways.

Individuals are limited in how much money they can donate annually to political parties – $10,000 to state and local party committees and $44,300 to national party committees, as of 2025. Political parties are further prohibited from accepting money from corporations and unions for party-building purposes, known as “soft money.”

Finally, prior to the NRSC v. FEC ruling, political parties were subject to limits on how much money they could spend to support a given candidate.

This last restriction has faced the most challenges in court. NRSC v. FEC is not the first time the Supreme Court considered the legality of party expenditure limits.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Supreme Court heard two such challenges, both brought by the Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee. In the first case, Colorado Republicans challenged a federal campaign finance provision that limited how much money political parties could independently spend to support candidates. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the limits as a violation of parties’ First Amendment speech rights.

The second challenge, meanwhile, targeted federal limits on party spending made directly in coordination with party nominees. The Supreme Court heard this case in 2001 and, in a perhaps surprising 5-4 decision, ultimately upheld the limits.

Why the different outcome? In the court’s view, with coordination came a real corruption risk.

Indeed, underlying the Supreme Court’s broader campaign finance doctrine is a long-standing – and controversial – assumption that political spending raises zero corruption concerns when made independent of any collaboration with a candidate. And when corruption is not a concern, the court believes limits on political spending are unjustified.

Using this logic, the Supreme Court identified coordinated party spending as a potential source of corrupt dealings. Specifically, the court found that donors could use political parties as “conduits” to funnel further money to candidates.

For instance, individuals can currently donate up to only $3,500 to a given federal candidate. Yet, they can donate $44,300 to a national party committee, which can then channel that money to the same federal candidate.

Back to the court

The difference between a $3,500 donation and a nearly $50,000 donation is, of course, stark.

In its latter Colorado Republicans opinion, the Supreme Court specifically noted concerning practices born out of this conduit system. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for instance, used to have exclusive clubs in which generous donors were invited to personally meet with Democratic senatorial candidates.

In the 25 years following this decision, coordinated party expenditure limits remained on the books, with the precise dollar amount changing each election cycle. For 2026, political parties could spend up to $65,300 in coordination with U.S. House candidates, or $130,600 in states with only one representative. The limit, meanwhile, varied for U.S. Senate candidates depending on state population, ranging from $130,600 for Wyoming to $4,071,800 for California.

Hanging on by a mere 5-4 Supreme Court majority, however, campaign finance experts knew the coordinated party expenditure limit rested on shaky ground. And in 2022, with an almost entirely different Supreme Court composition, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee sued the Federal Election Commission over its enforcement of the limit.

Money equals speech

The plaintiffs’ arguments were largely the same as the Colorado Republicans’ over two decades earlier, resting primarily in the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, as the plaintiffs explicitly noted in their briefs, the Supreme Court’s campaign finance doctrine had shifted remarkably under Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, moving toward a more libertarian, deregulatory jurisprudence. The plaintiffs thus asked the court to revisit its treatment of coordinated party expenditure limits.

The court answered in NRSC v. FEC, overturning its previous decision on the matter and ultimately striking down the coordinated party expenditure limit. The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, largely adopted the First Amendment argument that the limit impedes political parties’ ability to advocate for their candidates.

As for the government’s anti-corruption interest, the court was not convinced that limiting coordinated party expenditures was necessary to curb conduit corruption. Specifically, the court noted that existing disclosure laws and rules about earmarking donations already act as disincentives for donors hoping to use parties as a means to indirectly funnel money to candidates.

Many election law experts will likely argue that this decision will now result in increased circumvention of federal limits on individual contributions to candidates. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan contended that the decision will only further contribute to “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”

Still, not all experts see today’s outcome as a cause for concern. Numerous scholars have called for the bolstering of political party power in light of an increasingly polarized country, viewing parties as an antidote to ideological extremism fueled by outside-group spending. For those scholars, permitting unlimited coordinated expenditures by parties may help to realize that goal.

One thing is certain after the NRSC v. FEC decision: Political party spending is now unleashed. Parties will likely play a bigger role in future elections than they have in some time. Whether that is good for American democracy remains to be seen.

John J. Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation