Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision, reproductive rights are heading to ballots in states across the country this fall. Are states the right venue for this and other issues?
This episode’s guest, U.S. Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton says yes, and makes the case that state courts and constitutions are more democratic than their counterparts at the federal level.
Irene Shashar, Holocaust Survivor
Irene Shashar walked hand in hand with her mother through the streets of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, surrounded by three‑meter‑high walls with electric wires, lifeless bodies, and German soldiers — their mission was to look for food to bring back and share with her father.
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” a crowd shouted in Polish when they saw Irene (then named Ruth) and her mother returning from their errand. Her mother pulled her quickly by the arm, and they ran up the stairs. When they reached the top, they saw that the kitchen floor was no longer white — it was covered with her father’s blood after a German soldier shot him in the neck.
“My mommy… she threw herself on top of him and let out a scream that could be heard on the other side of the globe. There was my father, lifeless, white shirt, suspenders, navy‑blue pants, lying on the kitchen floor,” recalls Shashar, a Holocaust survivor.
wenty percent of the world’s population has never heard of the Holocaust; 48% do not recognize its historical accuracy, and 4% claim it was a myth. Distortion and minimization continue to grow steadily, according to the Anti‑Defamation League’s 2025 survey.
There are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors who can testify to future generations. Many of the few who remain are those who survived as children, like Shashar — the last generation of Jews born before the founding of the State of Israel.
After the war, Shashar was orphaned in Paris and arrived in Peru, where — she says — life smiled at her for the first time. “I went from one country to another… I thank Peru for welcoming me. It wasn’t easy,” she said from her home in Israel, where she later became the youngest professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Shashar explains that her dream had always been to reach Israel someday, after living as a wanderer and immigrant during the early years of her life because of World War II.
Not only are there conspiracy theories that deny the Holocaust, but also attempts to minimize or deny that it was a crime against humanity — evidence that antisemitism remains very much alive worldwide.
Ofer Laszewicki, a Spanish‑Israeli journalist and descendant of Holocaust survivors, is an example of this phenomenon. He grew up without cousins, uncles, or any relatives on his mother’s side, leaving a deep void in his life.
That absence led him to investigate his family’s past in Lublin, Poland. Laszewicki was in Lipowa Square, where the Nazis established their first small concentration site in 1939 to detain local Jews.
“I go there, and there’s only a tiny plaque… I was just going to take photos when a woman with a murderous look approaches me… she looks me in the eyes and says in English: ‘Lublin is very Jewish, Hitler was right, f*** you,’” Laszewicki testified, explaining that the woman said this while mimicking a beheading gesture with her hand.
This happened in February.
In the United States, antisemitism increased by approximately 360% in the months following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, according to the Anti‑Defamation League (ADL).
Especially on university campuses.
In response, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights met on February 19 to investigate allegations of antisemitic incidents reported by students and faculty and to evaluate whether these institutions have violated federal civil rights protections.
“I believed I could bring my full Jewish identity into this space and still feel welcome, and on my first day of classes, that belief was shattered. That morning I woke up and discovered that my mezuzah had been ripped off my doorframe,” testified Sarah Silverman, a Harvard student.
Courts and institutions in the country have openly stated that Zionism and anti‑Zionism are purely political perspectives or positions. Therefore, they would be considered protected speech under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, even if such speech creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.
“Title VI is a law against discrimination, not a general law against hostility, and the essence of discrimination is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic (race, color, or origin). People treat each other badly in many ways,” said Ben Idelson, a professor at Harvard University.
Carly Gammill, director of legal policy at StandWithUs — an international, nonpartisan organization dedicated to education about Israel — explained:
“Zionism is not a partisan platform. It is not a public‑policy preference. For the vast majority of Jews around the world, Zionism is a central component of their Jewish identity: an ancestral connection to the land of Israel, historically known as Zion, regardless of government policies or actions. In fact, those who organize anti‑Zionist campaigns on campuses know this perfectly well.”
Shashar has made her life a mission: to remain silent no more and continue sharing her testimony. She has been invited to the March of the Living in Poland and to speak before the United Nations. She explains that arriving in Israel was a crucial moment in her life.
“Little by little, I began to feel like I belonged, like an integral part. And when David, my son, was born,” she said, pointing to the cover of her book, I Defeated Hitler, which shows a family photo with her children and grandchildren. “That’s when I became 100% Israeli,” she said with a smile that reflected victory and peace.
Danna Matheus is a senior Journalism student at the University of Maryland, with an interest in covering vulnerable communities worldwide and social justice. Matheus completed this piece as a media fellow with Fuente Latina.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were students of history, and it taught them a singular lesson: power corrupts, and unchecked power can destroy a republic.
They designed our experiment with overlapping safeguards to ensure that no single faction, branch, or man could hold the nation hostage. What remained unresolved was agency: who, exactly, can determine when to trigger those safeguards? History has since exposed this as the system's deepest vulnerability.
The Constitution assigns Congress the power of impeachment but says nothing about the political will required to use it. It grants the cabinet the authority to remove an incapacitated president but assumes that cabinet members will prioritize constitutional duty over personal loyalty. It tasks Congress with checking executive overreach, yet it cannot compel a partisan legislature to act.
In each case, accountability mechanisms exist. The decision about when to use it was delegated to individuals in a political system. The Founders hoped this system would produce honorable leaders, though they could not guarantee it. Nearly two and a half centuries later, we are forced to confront the consequences when it fails to do so.
Impeachment has become a partisan exercise. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 for genuine incapacity, remains a theoretical option no cabinet has ever invoked, regardless of circumstances.
Congress is the branch the Founders designed to be the most powerful and responsive to the people. Yet it has retreated into near-total dysfunction, unable to check the executive even when majorities of its members privately believe it should.
One need look no further than April 7 for a clarifying illustration of how completely those safeguards have collapsed. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that "a whole civilization (Iran) will die tonight, never to be brought back again," coupled with vows to destroy every bridge and power plant in the country.
Legal experts quickly warned that threatened strikes on civilian infrastructure could be war crimes. Congressional Democrats demanded that Republicans invoke the 25th Amendment or call Congress back for impeachment. Neither happened. Congressional Republicans stayed mostly silent. The cabinet did not meet. Congress remained on vacation. The guardrails, in other words, held as well as they ever did now—not at all.
Article II of the Constitution states the president "shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" is intentionally vague. The Founders knew future abuses might take unexpected forms.
They did not anticipate the Senate trial becoming a foregone conclusion before the first witness was called. Now, acquittal or conviction is predetermined by the party that holds the chamber. When a remedy exists only on paper and cannot be applied, it is not a remedy; it is theater.
The 25th Amendment presents a different, but equally sobering, dilemma. Section 4 allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare a president unable to discharge his duties. It has never been used. Not once.
The issue is not that modern presidents have never shown troubling behavior. Instead, cabinet members are political appointees loyal to the person who selected them, not to an abstract constitutional duty.
The question is not if April 7 alone warranted action but whether any situation today would prompt the Cabinet to act.
And then there is Congress, or rather, the hollow shell where Congress used to be. The body the Founders envisioned as the most muscular branch of government was also the branch closest to the people. It has spent decades ceding authority to the executive. At the same time, it has become too partisan to use the powers it keeps.
The Founders feared factionalism above almost everything else. George Washington devoted much of his Farewell Address to warning against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party."
James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, acknowledged the danger of faction. He believed the constitutional structure would contain it. He was right about the danger, and wrong about the cure. The constitutional structure did not contain faction. Faction consumed it.
None of this means the republic is doomed. But we must be honest about the distance between the Founders’ safeguards and today’s political culture. Impeachment is a high bar. The 25th Amendment is even higher. Yet a system that refuses even to ask whether those bars have been reached has forgotten how to protect itself.
One check remains—the voters. Whether that is enough is the defining question of our time.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, located within the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service is a co-host of the second annual Gaza Lecture Series.
WASHINGTON – One by one, students inside the intimate lounge of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies on Wednesday called their family and friends across the Middle East.
The dozen students and faculty members watched TV screens tuned to Al Jazeera’s Arabic broadcast. The footage showed images of Israel’s strikes on Lebanon earlier that day.
“Watching our homeland on fire, the community that forms is so critical,” said Natalie El-Eid, a postdoctoral fellow at the Contemporary Arab Studies Center. “One of the things about [the center] is it has many people connected to the region, but everything that happens impacts us, not just intellectually but personally.”
As war in the Middle East dominated the news, the group gathered to listen to Duke University professor Frances Hasso lecture. She described her book about the historical implications of Zionism in light of recent events in Gaza and Iran. Her lecture marked the end of the second year of Georgetown’s Gaza Lecture Series, put on by the faculty of six Georgetown programs.
The Gaza Lecture Series at Georgetown gained national attention when the university’s then-interim president, Robert Groves, cited the lectures in his July 2025 testimony before Congress. Groves praised both the Gaza Lecture Series and the Center for Jewish Civilization's events as successful efforts to “promote dialogue and foster peaceful engagement.”
But divisions remain on campus. Naama Ben-Dor, president emeritus of the Georgetown Israel Alliance, said in a statement that while the current environment on campus is less tense than it was before the November Gaza ceasefire, hostility toward Zionists is still prevalent.
“The lack of Israeli representation within the academic landscape at Georgetown has contributed to a highly skewed understanding of the current conflict and an antagonistic depiction of Israelis and individuals who support Israel’s right to exist,” Ben-Dor wrote.
Beyond Georgetown, universities across the country have been working to strike a balance of views after the Trump administration sued and threatened many of them, accusing them of permitting antisemitism on campuses. Many universities allowed pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 during Israel’s war in Gaza following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The federal government investigated over 60 universities, not including Georgetown, and cut funding for many.
Georgetown has been careful to offer perspectives from various sides of the conflict. The Center for Jewish Civilization hosted a range of high-profile speakers to explore the Israeli perspective on the conflict and the increasing antisemitism around the world.
On March 19, the Jewish Civilization Center held a lecture with Professor Steven Cook, an expert on U.S.-Middle East politics, titled “Iran, The United States, and Israel: Conflict and Consequences.” He explored the impact of the US/Israel war with Iran.
Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and a main organizer of the Gaza Lecture Series, said the political polarization that followed Oct. 7, 2023, encouraged him to open up spaces of conversation and education.
“We quickly realized that we had a responsibility as academic centers to respond to global crises that people were talking about, that people were debating,” said Hashemi, who is an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics in the School of Foreign Service.
Director of the Center for Jewish Civilization since 2023, Jonathon Lincoln is a professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, which contains both the Center for Arab Studies and the Center for Jewish Civilization.
“The fact is that students are enrolling in our courses in ever greater numbers,” he said in a statement. “This shows a strong desire for knowledge and an academic approach to these complicated issues from our student body.”
Lincoln said he has no issue with speakers coming to campus for the lecture series. The two centers have held their own events and speakers since Oct. 7, 2023.
“What concerns me is when some academic centers and departments at the University, especially those that don’t teach courses on or have expertise in subjects like Judaism and the Holocaust, try to examine these topics at an hour-long event solely in light of the current conflict in Gaza,” Lincoln said
Hasso said in her 2022 book, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction and Death in Modern Palestine, that she looks at Israel’s attack on Gaza, which cost tens of thousands of lives. She “uses a historical lens to address the puzzle why did Israel do it?”
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed over 70,000 people since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people. In September, the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory classified Israel’s attacks as genocide.
“There is no accountability. There has been no accountability for Israel,” Hasso said. “It will not be forgotten, okay? This will not be forgotten.”
After a referendum supported by 762 of 1,447 undergraduate voters last April, Georgetown students called on the university to divest from the companies arming Israel and to end ties to Israeli institutions.
Georgetown has approximately 7,200 undergraduate students eligible to vote. University administrators ultimately refused to implement the referendum.
Both the centers at Georgetown plan to continue hosting lectures and events as the conflicts continue abroad. In October, Lincoln’s Center and the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative hosted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Nasser al-Kidwa, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs with the Palestinian National Authority. The event featured both Palestinian and Israeli voices together, according to Lincoln.
“We created the space for students with diverse views on the subject to listen to these former officials talk about the need and possibility for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, even as the horrors of the war continued to rage in Gaza and elsewhere,” Lincoln said.
Jacques Abou-Rizk is a graduate student journalist at Northwestern Medill.
Expert witnesses testify on the issues facing federal benefits programs run by states at a House Government Operations hearing on Wednesday, April 15, 2026.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, introduced a bill Wednesday morning that would create a permanent U.S. Treasury Inspector General position for fraud accountability as part of a broader effort to crack down on the misuse of federal benefits.
The bill would offer an alternative, bipartisan way to prevent federal benefits fraud, after several months of politically charged congressional hearings.
The bill, titled the “Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act,” was introduced at a House Subcommittee on Government Operations hearing. This hearing follows larger, committee-wide hearings investigating the misuse of federal funds in Minnesota after a scandal involving Somali immigrants, which broke late last year. However, Sessions stressed that his bill addresses a nationwide problem that isn’t limited to immigration.
“While we are fresh off the heels of the full committee’s investigation and hearings into fraud, this isn’t about one state,” he said. “This is not about Minnesota, it is not about any one particular area.”
In 2025, the government estimated nearly $29 billion in improper Medicaid payments, but it was unclear how much of that was fraud rather than paperwork errors and administrative mistakes. For similar reasons, the government does not have clear estimates of fraud in other benefit programs.
But Rep. Emily Randall, D-W.A., worried that the crackdown on fraud could result in eligible people receiving delayed or missing benefits.
“I had a sister with really complex disabilities who relied on Washington State's Medicaid program, and I can think of a number of times where my mom didn't submit paperwork in time,” she said. “Maybe Olivia was in the hospital, or had any number of health complications that meant her stack of paperwork kept getting bigger and bigger. Those improper payments sometimes are just a struggling family trying to keep their kid or family member alive and healthy.”
Subcommittee member Rep. Eleanor Norton, D-D.C., criticized President Trump for contributing to the fraud problem by firing or demoting over 20 inspectors general since the beginning of his term.
“Inspectors general are a key part of detecting and preventing fraud,” she said.
The bill focused on the many issues plaguing Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families disbursements at the state level. For instance, states often do not share eligibility data across assistance programs or with the federal government. States also use outdated user interface systems to track eligibility.
To combat this, the bill would make the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee's operations a permanent part of the Treasury. The committee was created in 2020 to track how states were spending pandemic relief funds, but Sessions’ bill would expand its responsibilities to all federal awards over $50,000.
Sessions’ legislation marks a shift away from previous fraud accountability efforts focused on immigration. Last month, an executive order created a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud led by Vice President J.D. Vance. The order blamed many of the benefits issues on “lax immigration policy and immigration fraud.” Soon after, the House passed “Deporting Fraudsters Act,” which would make benefits fraud a deportable offense. While Sessions voted for the Deporting Fraudsters Act, he said his new bill would be a separate, preventive effort.
“What we're trying to do is to take the mechanisms of data and information and make them permanent,” Sessions said. “[The Deporting Fraudsters Act] deals with when you're caught, and you've committed fraud, that you can be deported.”
O.J. Oleka, a witness from the State Financial Officers Foundation, suggested an “instant verification system” that would cross-check applicants’ income, residency, and citizenship status before payments are issued. However, experts said this would not be feasible, at least for Medicaid, given the current distribution of those funds.
“It’s completely infeasible to implement,” Andy Schneider, a Georgetown professor who has written extensively on Medicaid policy, said in an interview. “The data systems are not in place, and the effect of a rule like that would be to disenfranchise millions of Americans from access to health insurance coverage.”
The bill would add the responsibility of negotiating data-sharing agreements with states to the Treasury Secretary’s role. However, this raised concerns about privacy, especially in the current political climate.
“When it comes to providing information to the federal government, in an ideal world, you would want sharing of information to make systems flow better,” said Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, in an interview.
Non-citizens do not qualify for many benefits, and those who do use benefits do so at lower rates than citizens. Unfortunately, she said, many immigrants fear that if they provide their personal information to states, the federal government will use that information for immigration enforcement.
“Because of the use of federal agencies basically using information from different agencies for the purposes of immigration enforcement, that is now putting a lot of states and local governments in an awkward position with their communities,” she said.
Naisha Roy is a graduate journalism student at Northwestern University reporting on the immigration beat on Capitol Hill.
