Legislators in 19 states are considering changes to state courts that would diminish the role or independence of the judiciary by giving political players more control over judicial selection, judicial decision-making or judicial administration. The roster of such bills was compiled by the progressive Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which opposes all such efforts.
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President Donald Trump walks off of Air Force One at Newark Liberty International Airport on Aug. 7, 2026, in Newark, New Jersey.
(Eric Lee/Getty Images/TCA)
Donald Trump’s Third World presidency
Aug 15, 2026
In October 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan asked voters a very important question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
It was during the only televised debate he had against incumbent President Jimmy Carter, whose presidency had been marred by one crisis after another, from record-high inflation and rising unemployment, to soaring gas prices and the Iran hostage crisis.
Reagan knew the answer to his question was a resounding “no,” and asking it helped propel him to a landslide victory. It also became a regularly-invoked rhetorical feature of presidential campaigns going forward.
No one knows the cautionary tale of Carter’s presidency more than our current president, who has repeatedly used it as a stand-in for presidential failure and American weakness. Although Carter’s legacy greatly improved in the years since leaving office, he ended his only term with a bleak 34% approval rating.
Donald Trump currently sits at an abysmal 32%, according to Quinnipiac’s latest polling, and likely for many of the same reasons Carter finished where he did, ironically — high inflation, rising gas prices, and a foreign policy crisis in Iran.
So, the question of whether voters are better off than they were two years ago isn’t hard to answer for most — in January of this year just 28% said they were better off than they were a year ago, and in July that number had dropped to 19%.
And it’s no wonder — when you move beyond the economic numbers, which are bad enough, the picture of Trump’s America gets worse and worse with every peak behind the MAGA curtain.
In fact, it can feel at times like America has become a Third World country.
Case in point, the U.S. is in the midst of a measles outbreak, with more cases than it’s seen in more than three decades, thanks to the administration’s vaccine misinformation. We are now at risk of losing our official measles elimination status, which we’ve held for more than a quarter century.
We’re also facing no fewer than 11 foodborne illness outbreaks, including two separate cyclospora outbreaks, as well as outbreaks of listeria, salmonella and E. coli, all since Trump downsized oversight agencies, dropped food-facility inspections, and stripped back mandatory reporting requirements at the federal Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network.
Trump’s dumb war in Iran has depleted American munitions significantly — up to 80% in some categories — straining stockpiles and raising readiness concerns. And there are new reports of sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed to the North Arabian Sea since November, desperately jumping overboard amidst poor conditions — from clogged toilets to mildewed showers, food supply problems to mental health concerns.
This is America — the superpower? Where college grads can’t find work, where housing is unaffordable for 75% of the population, where families must choose between paying rent or paying doctors bills? Where you can be shot dead for peacefully protesting? Where your government is shuttering important health agencies while spewing junk science about autism and Tylenol? Where our allies are skeptical of us and our enemies no longer seem to fear us?
While Trump fiddles with reflecting pools, golden statues and ballrooms, it feels like America is burning, becoming less and less formidable and functional with every passing day.
And Republicans are asking for two more years of control of it all. Who could possibly want more of this?
Upon the occasion of Carter’s 100th birthday in October 2024, Trump did what Trump does — and insulted him. But only to insult former President Joe Biden worse, saying Carter was happy because he “is considered a brilliant president by comparison.”
Just think what they’ll say about Trump — overseeing all of this chaos, destruction, corruption and incompetence. “Are you better off?” Are you kidding?
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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President Trump has moved the GOP left on abortion right, trade and industrial policy over his two terms.
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
The GOP isn’t always the best party for conservatives
Aug 14, 2026
I often get asked for my advice on how to vote. I’m the first to concede these requests come from a very niche slice of the electorate — that tiny remnant of people who know who I am, value my opinion and share my exasperation with both parties.
I am going to answer the question. But first let me explain why I don’t like it.
I think too many pundits on the left and right fall into the habit of confusing or conflating the fortunes of a party with that of their philosophy. Many come by this tendency honestly. As the parties have polarized ideologically, it’s a natural assumption to think that the GOP and Democrats are the sole vessels for conservatism and progressivism, respectively.
Add in the very human tendency to favor the politicians who return your phone calls and seek your approval, and that rooting interest can get even more intense.
One problem with this approach — and there are many — is that what is best for the GOP in an election year is not necessarily what is best for conservatism in the long run. The same goes for the Democrats and progressivism.
For instance, on many issues — abortion, trade, industrial policy, etc. — President Trump has moved the GOP leftward over his two terms. But just try telling most Republicans in 2016, 2020 or 2024 that a Republican victory would be bad for conservatism.
President Obama wanted a very progressive agenda, and he got some of it. He also cost his party roughly a thousand elected offices across his two terms, and left behind a political climate that made the Trump presidency possible (and which erased many of Obama’s executive orders). President Biden left his cause and his party in an even uglier ditch.
The point isn’t about political point-scoring. It’s simply to note that ideological and intellectual progress — however you define progress — doesn’t move in lockstep with electoral success or failure. In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and moved rightward on welfare reform. This was a victory for conservatism and a political loss for Republicans, because his triangulation got Clinton reelected.
Single-issue activists often understand this logic better than generic ideologues or partisans do. The last thing abortion rights activists want is for antiabortion Democrats to become a major faction, just as antiabortion advocates don’t want Republicans who support abortion rights to gain political traction. But the same activists would love to see the other party move in their direction — because the goal isn’t to use the issue of abortion as a wedge issue or for fundraising, but to forge a bipartisan consensus.
That’s how I think about the proper goal of the “conservative movement” — to move America’s center of gravity rightward, not just the GOP’s. Put simply, conservatives should celebrate when conservative Democrats are nominated, even if that’s bad for Republicans electorally.
I also believe that candidates who discredit or deform conservatism by claiming to be conservative should lose.
Which brings me to my advice. I think that voters should be more interested in rewarding good behavior and good character than in ideological or partisan purity. That doesn’t mean ideology and partisanship are irrelevant. I think these things can be balanced.
Take the Senate race in Texas. Democrat James Talarico is ideologically not my cup of tea, and he is quite far to the left for Texas. But his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is in my view a corrupt gargoyle simply unfit for any office. I’m not here to debate that opinion, because the people seeking my advice generally share it.
So, if you’re a conservative who thinks Talarico is too left-wing and Paxton is bat-winged, don’t vote for either of them.
But you should still vote.
You can leave the Senate line blank while voting for other Republicans on the ballot (you can also select Libertarian candidate Ted Brown). Sending the message that your problem is Paxton, not Republicans, is one that Republicans and conservatives need to hear.
If I were a progressive, I would have the same approach toward candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America who will hurt either the party or the cause. Vote for all the other Democrats, just not the radicals who spout the sort of nonsense that turns off more mainstream voters than they attract.
One reason our politics are such a mess is that fringe candidates know they can count on the reflexive support of their parties — and their pundits! — the moment they get the nomination. Strategically voting to end that dynamic is not inconsistent with the best interests of your ideological cause or your party, because those interests are often in tension in an election year.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Voters wait in line outside the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center to cast their ballots in Houston, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. A recent state investigation confirmed that some registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens by a federal system had already provided proof of citizenship.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Texas Confirms Some Flagged As Potential Noncitizens on Voter Rolls Had Provided DPS Proof of Citizenship
Aug 14, 2026
Election officials across the state should immediately reinstate some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens through a federal program, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told county officials Wednesday.
Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had reviewed Texas Department of Public Safety records confirming the citizenship of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, as well as election officials who heard them. The voters were flagged after the state checked its voter roll through a federal program called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify the citizenship of people registered to vote.
Adkins said the state is still working through the data and that she couldn’t yet say how many of the 2,724 people had provided proof of citizenship to DPS and should thus be reinstated if they were already removed from the voter roll. She characterized SAVE as having “some inaccurate information” but added that “most of the data that we got out of SAVE was consistent with what DPS had.”
According to election officials, the secretary of state’s office said it plans in the coming days to send voter registrars additional information from DPS showing some of the flagged registered voters had in fact provided proof of citizenship to DPS while registering to vote or obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.
There isn’t yet an exact number of how many U.S. citizens’ registrations were actually canceled or how many were canceled in total by counties after being flagged by SAVE, said Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.
“Counties are following appropriate list maintenance procedures under Texas law, and will ensure eligible voters whose registrations were cancelled are reinstated, and that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls,” Miles said in an emailed statement.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the audio recording of the meeting with election officials, Adkins told election officials that once they receive the new information and review it, the state believes reinstating voters who had provided proof is “a very important thing to do to make sure that these individuals are not further impacted now that we have more information at our disposal.”
The state used a federal tool to flag potential noncitizens on the voter rolls
Texas officials last fall sent counties information on the 2,724 potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE, something the Trump administration has vigorously urged all states to do since it overhauled SAVE shortly after Trump came back into office last January.
Counties mailed notices asking those registrants to provide documented proof of citizenship.
Some voters responded to the letters from voter registrars and confirmed they were U.S. citizens, although a total number of how many is not yet available. The registrations of voters who did not respond to notices within 30 days were canceled. It isn’t clear how many were confirmed to be noncitizens. In some counties, officials said some people on the list had submitted an application to their local county voter registrar that accurately noted they were not U.S. citizens but were nonetheless added to the voter roll in error by county officials, and those have since been removed.
Under state law, if a voter’s registration is canceled for failing to respond to a request for proof of citizenship, their registration can be immediately reinstated by providing proof of U.S. citizenship to an elections office or at a polling location. The new information by DPS would immediately trigger the reinstatement without requiring further action from the voter.
Through their investigations, election officials also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through DPS. The agency requires proof of citizenship or proof of lawful presence, such as a work visa or green card, to obtain a state driver’s license or state ID, and keeps copies of such documentation on file.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office in December told Votebeat and the Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS’ records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate. That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.
Votebeat reported that the secretary of state’s office later asked DPS to check the list of 2,724 potential noncitizens flagged by the SAVE program against its records to verify whether any of them had already provided proof of citizenship. Email communications between secretary of state and DPS officials obtained by Votebeat via a public records request show the secretary of state’s office made the request on May 4, with DPS completing its review June 16.
Election officials in multiple states have raised questions about SAVE’s accuracy
Experts and election officials have raised concerns about the SAVE program’s accuracy, and officials in multiple states have said it incorrectly flagged at least some citizens.
In April, former Secretary of State Jane Nelson sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raising concerns about the accuracy of the SAVE program after county election officials found citizens had been wrongly flagged as noncitizens. Adkins in May also told county officials that her office had found “discrepancies” with the data, though she stressed that it was generally fairly accurate.
States’ use of the revamped SAVE tool is currently in limbo in the wake of multiple court rulings. In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights. That ruling prompted the Trump administration to pause certain features in the SAVE system to comply. However, last month a different federal judge ordered Homeland Security to restore access to the revamped system for four states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana — due to an earlier settlement agreement.
The rulings also do not prevent Texas or other states that previously used the revamped program from continuing to investigate the status of any potential noncitizens it flagged on the voter roll.
The Trump administration has focused intently on searching for noncitizen voters. The Department of Justice asked all 50 states to turn over their voter rolls, seeking discrepancies and ineligible voters, and sued 30 states that declined to do so. Federal judges have so far ruled against the department in 18 of those cases.
Texas, though, is among the states that voluntarily agreed to share its unredacted list of more than 18 million registered voters, including personal information such as dates of birth, driver license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
In April, at least three Texas counties received subpoenas from DOJ seeking individuals’ voter registration information and voting history.
Texas Confirms Some Flagged As Potential Noncitizens on Voter Rolls Had Provided DPS Proof of Citizenship was originally published by Votebeat Texas and is republished with permission.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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Rural hospital labor and delivery closures are creating maternity care deserts—and costing communities physicians, jobs, families, and economic investment.
Maskot/Getty Images
No Doctor, No Delivery, No Future
Aug 13, 2026
Today, less than half of rural hospitals in the U.S. still offer labor and delivery services, and since 2020, 139 of them have stopped delivering babies altogether. That's usually treated as public health statistic. It's also an economic one. Each closure doesn't just push expectant mothers into longer drives to the hospital, it pushes out physicians, jobs, young families, and the investment that follows them. So, what happens to a town after it loses its only labor and delivery unit?
The answer, it turns out, is a lot more than a longer drive to the hospital. More than a third of U.S. counties, 35.1 percent by the most recent national count, are now what researchers call maternity care deserts: places with no hospital or birth center offering obstetric care and no obstetric clinicians at all. Since the end of 2020, 139 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, and today less than half of rural hospitals nationwide still offer labor and delivery services.
A Closure Is Rarely Just One Loss
When Bonner General Health in Sandpoint, Idaho, ended labor and delivery services in 2023, the hospital cited a familiar mix of causes: fewer pediatricians, declining birth volume, and a legal climate that pushed physicians to leave the state. Residents were left with a drive of at least 46 miles to the nearest labor and delivery unit. In the years since, Idaho has lost roughly a third of its OB-GYNs statewide, a workforce departure that now makes it harder for other hospitals in the state to keep their own units open.
Missouri tells a slower version of the same story. The state has lost 11 hospital obstetric units since 2009, and hospital administrators there describe cross-subsidizing obstetric care with revenue from other departments because Medicaid, which finances most rural births, pays less than the actual cost of delivering a baby. One administrator put it bluntly: they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The Economics Are Real, Even If They're Uneven
Economists studying rural hospital closures generally don't all agree on the size of the local economic hit, and I think advocates should be upfront about that rather than overstate it. Some studies find no measurable effect on county income. Others, using longer national datasets, find real declines in employment, labor force size, and population after a closure. What is well documented is the workforce effect: one study found that a rural hospital closure was associated with an 8.3 percent drop in primary care physicians and a 4.8 percent drop in OB-GYNs practicing in the county afterward. That is not a rounding error. That is a community losing the people who would otherwise deliver its babies, staff its clinics, and spend paychecks at its businesses.
Nationally, the price tag is large. One peer-reviewed cost model put the societal cost of maternal morbidity for a single year of U.S. births at 32.3 billion dollars, and a separate analysis using value-of-statistical-life methods estimated the economic burden of maternal deaths at 27.4 billion dollars over just three years. These are not abstractions. They are the dollar value of a health system that keeps failing mothers in the same places, over and over.
A Federal Program Working Against Itself
Washington's current response is genuinely two-handed. The 2025 budget law that cut projected federal Medicaid spending by an estimated 911 billion dollars over ten years also created the 50 billion dollar Rural Health Transformation Program to help rural systems absorb the impact. States are now spending that money on exactly the kind of workforce and telehealth investments this problem needs. But the fund is explicitly a response to cuts made in the same bill, not new money layered on top of stable funding, and children's health advocates have warned it may not fully offset the coverage losses in states that expanded Medicaid. Whether this program nets out positive for rural obstetric access is, honestly, an open question, and it deserves to be tracked as closely as the closures themselves.
What Would Actually Help
Three changes would matter more than most of the current conversation acknowledges. First, raise Medicaid obstetric reimbursement, or take the value-based payment model CMS is already piloting in 15 states and make it available nationally, since reimbursement below the cost of care is the single most cited reason hospitals give for closing their obstetric units. Second, track obstetric unit closures as their own category, separate from overall hospital closures, since a hospital can quietly drop labor and delivery while staying open for everything else. Third, target new rural health funding specifically at the racial gap in maternal mortality, since Black mothers still die at more than three times the rate of White mothers, a gap that has not narrowed even as the national rate has fluctuated year to year.
None of this is a purely medical problem and treating it as one is part of why it hasn't been solved. It is a hospital financing problem, a workforce problem, and a rural economic development problem wearing a stethoscope. Communities don't just lose a delivery room when the obstetric unit closes. They lose the nurses, the anesthesiologists, and, eventually, the young families who decide it isn't worth staying somewhere, they can't safely have a baby.
Manisha Kaliaperumal is a sophomore at Creighton University studying Economics on the Pre-Medicine track. She is passionate about pursuing a career in medicine, with a particular interest in rural healthcare and maternal medicine. Her interests center on improving access to quality care and supporting the health and well-being of mothers and families in underserved communities.
Disclosure: The author researched and wrote this piece as a Health Economics intern at Aaliyah in Action, a nonprofit that provides bereavement support to families experiencing pregnancy and infant loss. The analysis, framing, and opinions above are the author's own.
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