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Americans don’t understand foreign aid. Instead of relying on misinformed citizens, we should demand better answers from national leaders who want to cut aid to our friends and allies and imperil American security.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Nasal congestion is far weirder than you might think. What Matthew Perry knew about comedy Capitalism has plans for menopause. What financial engineering does to hospitals

Persistent Foreign-Aid Myths

The Washington Post sent a reporter to a diner in Shreveport, Louisiana, last week to talk with voters in the district represented by the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. And wouldn’t you know it, they were very happy to see him become speaker, including one voter in the diner who—imagine the luck—just happened to be Mike Johnson’s mother. “God did this,” Jeanne Johnson said of her son’s ascension to the speakership.

I have my doubts about God’s participation in American elections, but she’s a proud mom, and understandably so. She told the reporter that Johnson “began leading as a child,” stepping up at a young age to help the family. That’s nice; my mom, God rest her soul, used to say nice things about me too.

The rest of the article included predictable discussions with the local burghers who hope we can finally overcome all this nastiness in our politics—there is no apparent awareness of how all that unpleasantness got started—and get to work and solve problems under the leadership of an obviously swell guy. (In fact, we are told he even calmed an angry voter at a town hall. Amazing.) Johnson, of course, also voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and has many views that would have been considered retrograde by most Americans even 30 years ago, but gosh darn it, people in Shreveport sure seem to like him.

I remain astonished that so much of the media remain committed to covering Donald Trump and sedition-adjacent extremists such as Johnson as if they are normal American politicians. But while Americans pretend that all is well, the rest of the world is busily going about its terrifying business, which is why one comment in the Post article jumped out at me.

“Politics here is personal,” according to Celeste Gauthier, 45. (The Post, for some reason, notes that Gauthier attended Middlebury College for a time—perhaps as a clumsy way of trying to tell us she’s not merely some rough local, and that she returned from Vermont to help run her family’s three restaurants.) She is concerned:

“People really do look at the funding we’re sending to Israel and Ukraine and say, ‘I can’t afford to go to Kroger,’” Gauthier said as she sat amid the lunchtime crowd, some of whom she said had stopped buying beverages because of the cost. “A lot of these customers know Mike Johnson and think we often get overlooked and maybe we won’t anymore,” she said.

I’m not sure what it means to be “overlooked” in a cherry-red district in a state where, as the Post notes, Republicans will control all three branches of state government once the conservative governor-elect is sworn in, but the comment about foreign aid is a classic expression of how little people understand about the subject.

Perhaps Gauthier or others believe that the new speaker—who has been opposed to sending aid to Ukraine—would redirect the money back to “overlooked” Louisianans, maybe as increased aid to the poor. He wouldn’t, of course, as he has already proposed huge cuts in social spending. As for Israel, evangelical Christians such as Johnson have a special interest in Israel for their own eschatological reasons, and Johnson has already decided to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—whose understanding of foreign policy is practically Churchillian compared with Johnson’s—is none too happy about that.

Let’s review some important realities.

First, foreign aid is about 1 percent of the U.S. budget, roughly $60 billion. Special appropriations to Ukraine have, over the course of 18 months, added up to about $75 billion, including both humanitarian aid and weapons. Israel—a far smaller country that has, over the past 70 years, cumulatively received more foreign aid from the United States than from any other country—usually gets about $3 billion, but Joe Biden now wants to add about $14 billion to that.

That’s a lot of money. To put it in perspective, however, Americans forked over about $181 billion annually on snacks, and $115 billion for beer last year. (They also shell out about $7 billion annually just for potato chips. The snack spending is increasing, perhaps because Americans now spend about $30 billion on legal marijuana every year.) Americans also ante up a few bucks here and there on legal sports gambling, and by “a few” I mean more than $220 billion over the past five years.

I know suds and weed and sports books and pretzels are more fun than helping Ukrainians stay alive. And I know, too, that supposedly small-government conservatives will answer: It’s none of your damn business what Americans are spending their money on.

They’re right—up to a point. But we are, in theory, adults who can establish sensible priorities. We pay taxes so that the federal government can do things that no other level of government can achieve, and national security is one of them. Right now, the Russian army—the greatest threat to NATO in Europe—is taking immense losses on a foreign battlefield for a total investment that (as of this moment) is less than one-tenth of the amount we spend on defense in a single year. This is the spending Mike Johnson is so worried about?

Of course, we might repeat one more time that much of the food and weapons and other goods America sends to places like Israel and Ukraine are actually made by Americans. And yet many Republican leaders (and their propaganda arm at Fox and other outlets) continue to talk about aid as if some State Department phantom in a trench coat meets the president of Ukraine or the prime minister of Israel in an alley and hands over a metal briefcase filled with neatly wrapped stacks of bills.

We need to stop asking people in diners about foreign aid. (Populists who demand that we rely on guidance from The People should remember that most Americans think foreign aid should be about 10 percent of the budget—a percentage those voters think would be a reduction but would actually be a massive increase.) Instead, put our national leaders on the spot to explain what they think foreign aid is, where it goes, and what it does, and then call them out, every time, when they spin fantasies about it. Otherwise, legislators such as Johnson will be able to sit back and let the folks at the pie counter believe that he’s going to round up $75 billion and send it back home.

That’s an old and dumb trope, but it works. If you’re a Republican in Congress, and if you can stay in Washington by convincing people at the diner that you’re going to take cash from Ukrainians (wherever they are) and give it back to the hardworking waitress pouring your coffee, then you do it—because in this new GOP, your continued presence in Washington is more important than anything, including the security of the United States.

Related:

Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine

Today’s News

Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza over the weekend. Tanks and troops continue to push deeper into the city. A trial began in Colorado over whether Donald Trump is ineligible to hold presidential office again under the Fourteenth Amendment. Russian protesters in the largely Muslim-populated area of Dagestan marched on an airport, surrounding a plane that had arrived from Tel Aviv, on Sunday; at least 10 people were injured.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: There’s a secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy, Rogé Karma writes. It’s made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

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P.S.

Back in February, I wrote that I was somewhat mystified when Nikki Haley entered the GOP primaries. I was never a fan of the South Carolina governor, because I reject any candidate who bent the knee to Donald Trump. I described her announcement of her candidacy as “vapid and weightless,” and I expected her campaign to be no better. I assumed that she would be gone early.

Was I wrong? Haley was strong in the GOP debates (such that they were without Trump) and is now surging ahead of the hapless Ron DeSantis as the most credible Trump alternative. My friend Michael Strain today even presented “The Case for Nikki Haley” in National Review, a magazine that up until now has been a DeSantis stronghold. I remain convinced that Haley cannot beat Trump, even if she would be more formidable against Biden than either Trump or DeSantis. But I was too quick off the blocks in my assumption that Haley was going to get bigfooted off the stage by other candidates. Of course, I also didn’t predict that Vivek Ramaswamy would be on that same stage and that he would claim the early prize for “most obnoxious GOPer not named Trump.” I’m a creative guy, but there are limits even to my imagination.

— Tom

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When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Diana Greene Foster made a painful prediction: She estimated that one in four women who wanted an abortion wouldn’t be able to get one. Foster, a demographer at UC San Francisco, told me that she’d based her expectation on her knowledge of how abortion rates decline when women lose insurance coverage or have to travel long distances after clinics close.

And she was well aware of what this statistic meant. She’d spent 10 years following 1,000 women recruited from clinic waiting rooms. Some got an abortion, but others were turned away. The “turnaways” were more likely to suffer serious health consequences, live in poverty, and stay in contact with violent partners. With nearly 1 million abortions performed in America each year, Foster worried that hundreds of thousands of women would be forced to continue unwanted pregnancies. “Having a baby before they’re ready kind of knocks people off their life course,” she told me.

But now, more than a year removed from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Foster has revised her estimate. After seeing early reports of women traveling across state lines and ordering pills online, she now estimates that about 5 percent of women who want an abortion cannot get one. Indeed, two recent reports show that although Dobbs upended abortion access in America, many women have nevertheless found ways to end their pregnancy. A study by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, signals that national abortion rates have not meaningfully fallen since 2020. Instead, they seem to have gone up a bit. A report released this week by the Society of Family Planning, another pro-abortion-rights group, shows that an increase in abortions in states that allow the procedure more than offset the post-Dobbs drop-off in states that closed down clinics.

[Read: The abortion backup plan that no one is talking about]

Some of this increase may be a result of trends that predate Dobbs: Abortion rates in the U.S. have been going up since 2017. But the reports suggest that the increase may also be due to travel by women who live in red states and the expanded access to abortion that many blue states enacted after the ruling. Still, it is not yet clear exactly how much each of these factors is contributing to the observed increase—and how many women who want an abortion are still unable to get one.

Alison Norris, a co-chair of the Society of Family Planning study, told me that she fears that the public will “become complacent” if they see the likely increase in abortion rates and believe that everyone has access. “Feeling like the problem isn’t really that big of a deal because the numbers seem to have returned to what they were pre-Dobbs is a misunderstanding of the data,” she said.

It seems illogical that more than a dozen states would ban abortion and national rates would hardly change. But even as red states have choked off access, blue states have widened it. And the data show that women have flooded the remaining clinics and ordered abortion pills from pharmacies that ship across the country. More than half of all abortions are done using medication, a pattern that began even before the Dobbs decision.

“It just doesn’t work to make abortion illegal,” Linda Prine, a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital, told me. “There may be some people who are having babies that they didn’t want to have, but when you shift resources all over the place, and all kinds of other avenues open up, there’s also people who are getting abortions that might not have gotten them otherwise.”

With mail-order abortion pills, “it’s this weird moment where abortion might, ironically, be more available than it’s ever been,” Rachel Rebouché, an expert in abortion law and the dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, told me.

The Guttmacher Institute sampled abortion clinics to estimate the change in abortion counts between the first halves of 2020 and 2023. Areas surrounding states with post-Roe bans saw their abortion numbers surge over that period of time. In Colorado, which is near South Dakota, a state with a ban, abortions increased by about 89 percent, compared with an 8 percent rise in the prior three-year period. New Mexico saw abortions climb by 220 percent. (For comparison, before Dobbs, the state recorded a 27 percent hike from 2017 to 2020.) Even states in solidly blue regions saw their abortion rates grow over the three-year interval from 2020 to 2023: Guttmacher estimates that California’s abortion clinics provided 16 percent more abortions, and New York’s about 18 percent more.

Some shifts predated the court’s intervention. After a decades-long decline, abortions began ticking upward around 2017. In 2020, they increased by 8 percent compared with 2017. The researchers I spoke with for this story told me that they couldn’t point to a decisive cause for the shift that started six years ago; they suggested rising child-care costs and Trump-era cuts to Medicaid coverage as possible factors. But the rise in abortion rates reflects a broader change: Women seem to want fewer children than they used to. Caitlin Myers, a professor at Middlebury College, told me that abortion rates might have increased even more if the Court hadn’t reversed Roe. “It looks like more people just want abortions than did a few years ago,” she said. “What we don’t know is, would they have gone up even more if there weren’t people trapped in Texas or Louisiana?”

One of the most significant factors in maintaining post-Roe abortion access dates from the latter half of 2021. As the coronavirus pandemic clobbered the health-care system, the FDA suspended its requirement that women pick up abortion medications in person. A few months later, it made the switch permanent. The timing was opportune: People became accustomed to receiving all of their medical care through virtual appointments at the same time that they could get abortion pills delivered to their doorstep, Rebouché told me. People no longer have to travel to a clinic and cross anti-abortion picket lines. But access to mifepristone, one of the most commonly used drugs for medication abortions, is under threat. After an anti-abortion group challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug, a federal court instated regulations that would require women to visit a doctor three times to get the pills, making access much more difficult. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to hear an appeal, and has frozen the 2021 rules in place while it decides.

But paradoxically, several of the factors that may have contributed to the rise in abortion rates seem to have sprung directly from the Dobbs decision. In the year since the ruling, six blue states have enacted laws that allow practitioners to ship abortion pills anywhere, even to deep-red Texas. Although these laws haven’t yet been litigated to test whether they’re truly impenetrable, doctors have relied on them to mail medication across the country. Aid Access, an online service that operates outside the formal health-care system, receives requests for about 6,500 abortion pills a month. (The pills cost $150, but Aid Access sends them for free to people who can’t pay.) Demand for Aid Access pills in states that ban or restrict medication abortion has mushroomed since the Dobbs decision, rising from an average of about 82 requests per day before Dobbs to 214 after. The Guttmacher report doesn’t count abortions that take place in this legally fuzzy space, suggesting that actual abortion figures could be higher.

As the Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to an abortion and turned the issue back to the states, it also hardened the resolve of abortion-rights supporters. In the five months after Roe fell, the National Network of Abortion Funds received four times the money from donations than it got in all of 2020. People often donate as states encroach on abortion rights. In many cases, they bankrolled people’s travel out of ban states. Community networks also gained experience in shuttling people out of state to get abortions. “There’s definitely been innovation in the face of abortion bans,” Abigail Aiken, who documents abortions that occur outside of the formal health-care system, told me.

[Katherine Turk: How financial strength weakened American feminism]

Some researchers believe that the Dobbs decision has actually convinced more women to get abortions. Abortion-rights advocacy groups have erected highway billboards that promise Abortion is ok. Public opinion has tilted in favor of abortion rights. Ushma Upadhyay, a professor at UC San Francisco, told me that California’s rising abortion rates cannot all be due to people traveling from states that ban abortion. “It’s also got to be an increase among Californians,” she said. “It’s just a lot of attention, destigmatization, and funding that has been made available. Even before Dobbs, there was a lot of unmet need for abortion in this country.”

Abortion used to be a topic that was “talked about in the shadows,” Greer Donley, an expert in abortion law and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “Dobbs kind of blew that up.” Still, she believes that it’s unlikely that people are getting significantly more abortions simply because of changes within blue states. Just as obstacles don’t seem to have stopped people from seeking abortions, efforts that moderately expand access are unlikely to lead people to get an abortion, she said.

The people I spoke with emphasized that even though overall abortion rates might be going up, not everyone who wants the procedure can get it. People who don’t speak English or Spanish, who don’t have internet access, or who are in jail still have trouble getting abortions. “What I foresee is a bunch of Black women being stuck pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant, in a state where it’s incredibly dangerous to be Black and pregnant,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told me.

Bertram Roberts’s fund used to provide travel stipends of up to $250. Now women need three times that. Most people travel from Mississippi to a clinic in Carbondale, Illinois. The trip takes two days—48 hours that women must take off work and find child care for. “If you are in the middle of Texas, and you have to travel to Illinois, even if funds covered all the costs, to say that abortion is more accessible for that person seems callous and wrong,” Donley told me.

Many women spend weeks waiting for an abortion. “It is excruciating to be carrying a pregnancy that one knows they’re planning to end,” Upadhyay said. And although studies show that abortion pills are safe, women who take them can bleed for up to three weeks, and they may worry that they’ll be prosecuted if they seek help at a hospital. Only two states—Nevada and South Carolina—explicitly criminalize women who give themselves an abortion (and few women have been charged under the laws), but the legislation contributes to a climate of fear.

More than a year out from the Dobbs decision, the grainy picture of abortion access is coming into focus. With the benefit of distance, the story seems not to be solely one of diminished access, widespread surveillance, and forced births, as the ruling’s opponents had warned. For most Americans, abortion might be more accessible than it’s ever been. But for another, more vulnerable group, abortion is a far-off privilege. “If I lived in my birth state—I was born in Minnesota—my work would be one hundred times easier,” Bertram Roberts told me, later adding, “I think about that a lot, about how the two states that bookend my life are so different.”

When Representative Mike Johnson arrived in Congress in 2017, he received an important piece of advice from a fellow Louisianan, Representative Steve Scalise. “Be careful about your early alliances that you make,” Scalise told Johnson, as the younger Republican recalled in a C-SPAN interview that year. Avoid getting “marginalized or labeled in any way.”

Six years later, Johnson has followed that advice all the way to the House speakership, reaching a post that is second in line to the presidency faster than any other lawmaker in modern congressional history. Staunchly conservative and closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, the 51-year-old former talk-radio host made few headlines and fewer enemies as he climbed the ranks of his party.

With a 220–209 House vote this afternoon, Johnson was able to forge a consensus that eluded three previous aspirants—including his own mentor, Scalise—to replace Kevin McCarthy. He earned unanimous support from Republican members, who stood and applauded when he clinched a majority of the chamber. His victory ends a weeks-long power struggle that immobilized the House as a war started in the Middle East and a government shutdown loomed.

Johnson’s win was as sudden as it was improbable. Early yesterday afternoon, he lost a secret-ballot vote to become the House GOP’s third speaker nominee in as many weeks. But the winner of that tally, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, faced immediate backlash from social conservatives and Trump allies over his support for same-sex marriage and his 2021 vote to certify Joe Biden’s election as president. More than two dozen Republicans told Emmer that they would not support him in a public floor vote, putting him in the same perilous position as the previous GOP speaker nominee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. While Emmer was trying to win them over, Trump denounced him as “a globalist RINO.” Emmer’s nomination was dead after just four hours.

[David A. Graham: The House Republicans’s new litmus test]

As the fifth-ranking House GOP leader, Johnson was next in line. Late last night, he captured the nomination in the second round of balloting. His victory was far from unanimous, but rank-and-file Republicans who had initially voted against Johnson, apparently weary after weeks of infighting, decided to support him.

Johnson’s ascent is a product of both the GOP’s ideological conformity and its ongoing loyalty to Trump. His record in the House is no more moderate than Jordan’s, whose preference for antagonism over compromise turned off an ultimately decisive faction of the party. Both Johnson and Jordan served as chairs of the Republican Study Committee—the largest conservative bloc in the House—and played key roles in Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in 2020. Johnson enlisted Republican lawmakers to sign a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to allow state legislatures to effectively nullify the votes of their citizens. Despite Johnson’s involvement, he won the support of at least one Republican, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, who had refused to vote for Jordan, because the Ohioan didn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s win.

For electorally vulnerable House Republicans, Johnson’s relative anonymity was an asset. They rejected Jordan in large part because they feared that his notoriety and uncompromising style would play poorly in their districts. By contrast, Johnson, who heeded Scalise’s advice to avoid being “marginalized or labeled,” comes across as mild-mannered and polite. He could be harder for Democrats to demonize. Johnson is so little known that operatives at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which sent out a flurry of statements criticizing each successive speaker nominee, were still combing through his record and listening to old recordings of his radio show this morning. “Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan in a sports coat,” a spokesperson, Viet Shelton, told me. “Electing him as speaker would represent how the Republican conference has completely given in to the most extreme fringes of their party.”

The next few weeks will test whether the inexperienced Johnson is in over his head, and just how far to the right Johnson is willing to push his party. “You’re going to see this group work like a well-oiled machine,” Johnson, flanked by dozens of his GOP colleagues, assured reporters after securing the nomination last night. He’ll have plenty of doubters. The new speaker will be leading the same five-vote majority that routinely rebuffed McCarthy, forcing him to rely on Democrats to pass high-stakes legislation.

[Read: The real-world consequences of the House speaker fight]

Congress faces a November 17 deadline to avoid a government shutdown—the result of a five-week extension in funding that ultimately cost McCarthy his job. Johnson has circulated a plan to Republicans that suggested he would support another stopgap measure, for either two or five months, to buy time for the House and Senate to negotiate full-year spending bills.

He’ll also confront immediate pressure to act on the Biden administration’s request for more than $100 billion in aid to Israel and Ukraine. Like Jordan, Johnson has supported aid for Israel but has opposed additional Ukraine funding. “We stand with our ally Israel,” Johnson said last night; he made no mention of Ukraine.

If the GOP holds on to its majority next year, Johnson would have a say in whether the House certifies the presidential winner in 2024. When a reporter asked him last night about his role in helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, the Republicans around him, unified and jubilant for the first time in weeks, started to jeer. A few members booed the buzzkill in the press corps. “Shut up!” yelled one lawmaker, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Johnson, the conservative without enemies, merely shook his head and smiled. “Next question,” he replied. “Next question.”

Lee Friedlander coined a term for the subject of his work: the “social landscape.”

The great American documentary photographer, now 89, gives each row house and strip mall and mass-produced car a living and breathing personality. He frames places so as to imbue them with strangeness, movement, intrigue. He often makes what would normally be the background of a photograph the subject of a photograph. He does not treat American cityscapes as another photographer might treat a static mountain or an ancient river. He treats them like main characters—confused, chaotic, tragicomic, all-American characters.

More than 150 such images, captured from 1961 to 2022, are collected in the epic new retrospective Real Estate, published this month by the Eakins Press Foundation. The book ends with a play on a rider-on-the-trail image: a whole house being towed on a western highway, off to its next adventure. It begins with a play on a classic American beauty-queen photograph: A girl in a crown, sash, and white stole beams and waves at the camera. But she’s out of focus. Friedlander has us looking at the asphalt-shingle one-story home behind her.

Many of the images in this book contain such layering and texturing, characteristic of Friedlander’s photography: a child or an errant bit of debris in the foreground, a procession or an animal or a poster in the middle ground, a building under construction or a skyline or a grove of trees in the background, framed by a highway, riven by a telephone pole, hugged by a statue, seen most clearly in a mirror or through a window. Some of the images are stark: Places that are home to millions of people seem empty. Many are awkward. I am not sure how he manages to make a home look as if it’s posing awkwardly, but he does it again and again. This has the effect of making the houses look alive.

While soaking in the book’s images, I kept noting how often the only clue to when Friedlander might have taken the photo was the cut of a person’s pants or the style of their hat. (The boxy, low cars were a dead giveaway too.) Looking at the buildings, I was never quite sure. They have a timeless quality. That’s a credit to Friedlander, who makes every image feel jarring, fresh. But it was also a reminder of how many of those buildings are still among us today. This decades- and continent-spanning documentary of change reveals an American stasis. Our current housing crisis is due to our unwillingness to build, grow, and allow new life to come into our cities. Friedlander made the built environment look dynamic and alive; we cast it in amber. If only we saw those neighborhoods like he did.

Seaside, Oregon, 1972 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Knoxville, Tennessee, 1971 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1971 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Left: Dallas, Texas, 2003. Right: Ridgewood, New Jersey, 2006. (© copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) California, 1961 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Oxford, Ohio, 1976 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Left: Victor, Colorado, 2001. Right: Boston, Massachusetts, 1975. (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) New England, 1981 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Buffalo, New York, 1962 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) San Francisco, California, 1977 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)

Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car.

A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that brutally exploits workers and harms ecosystems and sacred Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s comparatively tiny battery means less electricity, fewer emissions, fewer resources. They are clearly better for the planet than cars of any kind.

[Read: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all]

I knew all of this. But I also viewed getting rid of my car as a sacrifice—something for the militant and reckless, something that Greenpeace volunteers did to make the world better. I live in Colorado; e-biking would mean freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer. It was the right thing to do, I thought, but it was not going to be fun.

I was very wrong. The first thing I noticed was the savings. Between car payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas, a car-centered lifestyle is expensive. According to AAA, after fuel, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and the like, owning and driving a new car in America costs $10,728 a year. My e-bike, by comparison, cost $2,000 off the rack and has near-negligible recurring charges. After factoring in maintenance and a few bucks a month in electricity costs, I estimate that we’ll save about $50,000 over the next five years by ditching our car.

The actual experience of riding to work each day over the past year has been equally surprising. Before selling our car, I worried most about riding in the cold winter months. But I quickly learned that, as the saying goes, there is no bad weather, only bad gear. I wear gloves, warm socks, a balaclava, and a ski jacket when I ride, and am almost never too cold.

Sara Hastings-Simon is a professor at the University of Calgary, where she studies low-carbon transportation systems. She’s also a native Californian who now bikes to work in a city where temperatures tend to hover around freezing from December through March. She told me that with the right equipment, she’s able to do it on all but the snowiest days—days when she wouldn’t want to be in a car, either. “Those days are honestly a mess even on the roads,” she said.

And though I, like many would-be cyclists, was worried about arriving at the office sweaty in hotter months, the e-bike solved my problem. Even when it was 90 degrees outside, I didn’t break a sweat, thanks to my bike’s pedal-assist mode. If I’m honest, sometimes I didn’t even pedal; I just used the throttle, sat back, and enjoyed my ride.

Indeed, a big part of the appeal here is in the e part of the bike: “E-bikes aren’t just a traditional bike with a motor. They are an entirely new technology,” Hastings-Simon told me. Riding them is a radically different experience from riding a normal bike, at least when it comes to the hard parts of cycling. “It’s so much easier to take a bike over a bridge or in a hilly neighborhood,” Laura Fox, the former general manager of New York City’s bike-share program, told me. “I’ve had countless people come up to me and say, ‘I never thought that I could bike to work before, and now that I have an option where you don’t have to show up sweaty, it’s possible.’” (When New York introduced e-bikes to its fleet, ridership tripled, she told me, from 500,000 to 1.5 million people.)

[Read: How to get fewer people to commute in cars]

But biking to work wasn’t just not unpleasant—it was downright enjoyable. It made me feel happier and healthier; I arrived to work a little more buoyant for having spent the morning in fresh air rather than traffic. Study after study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the happiest commuters. One day, shortly after selling our car, I hopped on my bike after a stressful day at work and rode home down a street edged with changing fall leaves. I felt more connected to the physical environment around me than I had when I’d traveled the same route surrounded by metal and glass. I breathed in the air, my muscles relaxed, and I grinned like a giddy schoolchild.

“E-bikes are like a miracle drug,” David Zipper, a transportation expert and Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “They provide so much upside, not just for the riders, but for the people who are living around them too.”

Of course, e-bikes aren’t going to replace every car on every trip. In a country where sprawling suburbs and strip malls, not protected bike lanes, are the norm, it’s unrealistic to expect e-bikes to replace cars in the way that the Model T replaced horses. But we don’t need everyone to ride an e-bike to work to make a big dent in our carbon-pollution problem. A recent study found that if 5 percent of commuters were to switch to e-bikes as their mode of transportation, emissions would fall by 4 percent. As an individual, you don’t even need to sell your car to reduce your carbon footprint significantly. In 2021, half of all trips in the United States were less than three miles, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Making those short trips on an e-bike instead of in a car would likely save people money, cut their emissions, and improve their health and happiness.

E-bikes are such a no-brainer for individuals, and for the collective, that state and local governments are now subsidizing them. In May, I asked Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, to explain the state’s rationale for a newly passed incentive that offers residents $450 to get an e-bike. He dutifully ticked through the environmental benefits and potential cost savings for low-income people. Then he surprised me: The legislation, he added, was also about “putting more joy into the world.”

In a few weeks, a judge in Colorado will hold a trial to decide whether to bar Donald Trump from the presidential ballot on the grounds that he “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States in violation of the Constitution. The proceeding has unsettled many people: Can an unelected judge really stop voters from supporting a candidate of their choosing? The answer is yes. Just ask Abdul Hassan.

Hassan ran for president in the 2012 election as an independent, on a platform of reducing the national debt. He created a website and a YouTube channel, and bought digital ads to spread his message. But he had a problem: To get on the ballot in some states, including Colorado, Hassan had to complete a form swearing that he met the requirements for president spelled out in the Constitution. Been a resident of the United States for at least 14 years? Check. 35 years old? Check. Natural-born citizen? That’s where the trouble began.

Hassan, who was born in Guyana, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, not a “natural-born” one; the latter term has been interpreted to mean either born in the United States (like Donald Trump) or born to an American parent (like Ted Cruz). He is also, by trade, a lawyer who represents employees suing employers over mistreatment. The choice he faced felt like no choice at all: To check the last box on the form was to commit perjury; to walk away was to accept discrimination based on national origin, which is prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Working out of his office in Queens, Hassan took himself on as a client.

Hassan sued in several states, but Colorado, with its formal application process, offered the cleanest case, and his claims got their fullest airing there. First, in a 16-page decision, a magistrate judge rejected Hassan’s claim that the natural-born-citizenship clause had been “trumped, abrogated, and implicitly repealed” by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868. Nothing in the historical record, he ruled, suggested that Congress had a “clear and manifest” intent to repeal the citizenship requirement.  

On appeal, Hassan emphasized an alternative theory: Even if the Constitution barred him from assuming the presidency after winning the election, that shouldn’t give states the power to block his candidacy preemptively. This argument fared no better. In a brief order, three judges on the Tenth Circuit ruled that if you’re found to be ineligible, the state can keep you off the ballot as part of its “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.”

[J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe: The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever running for president again]

This ruling has been heartening to those who wish to see Trump ruled ineligible on constitutional grounds. The two cases feature some eerie parallels, and not just because they both involve political outsiders from Queens. Colorado is once again center stage. Scott Gessler, who as Colorado’s then–secretary of state kept Hassan off the ballot, has reemerged as a lawyer representing Trump, who is trying to stay on it. And the judge who wrote the Tenth Circuit order in 2012 was none other than Neil Gorsuch, now a Trump-appointed member of the Supreme Court, which may render a final verdict on Trump’s eligibility next year.

There are obvious differences too. The two men couldn’t be more dissimilar in character. One is measured in his comments and steadfast about following the rules, and the other is Donald Trump. Speaking with me, Hassan looked back with appreciation on how the legal system treated his claims. “Judicial rulings are never totally bad or good,” he wrote in an email, “and there is almost always something there to work with.”

Hassan sought shelter in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The case against Trump, by contrast, uses a different clause of the same amendment as a weapon to keep him off the ballot. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, prevents any former “officer of the United States” from holding office again if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the nation or aided those who did. According to an academic article by the conservative law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, this straightforwardly disqualifies Trump. But there have been a host of nits picked with the theory: whether the president is technically an “officer of the United States”; whether Trump “engaged in” insurrection or rebellion, or merely encouraged it; whether the January 6 attack on the Capitol and other efforts to overturn the 2020 election results constitute an “insurrection” at all; and, finally, whether Trump must be convicted at trial before a court can bar him from running.

Offering a path through this thicket of questions is Gorsuch’s conclusion about a state’s “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.” In Trump, we have a candidate who, without evidence, has denied that he lost the previous election and won’t promise to abide by the results of the next one, despite taking an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Couldn’t Colorado conclude that, to protect the integrity of its election, it will not allow such a candidate to run? The nonprofit organization that brought the lawsuit in Colorado, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, explicitly highlighted Gorsuch’s line in its legal filing.

[David Frum: The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy]

“Hassan is kept off, because he’s not a citizen,” Derek T. Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame who has written about the legal significance of Hassan’s case, told me. “And court after court says, ‘Absolutely, a state can do that.’ So that’s why you’re now seeing these challenges to Trump, and people saying, ‘Aha! You have the power to keep these candidates who are not qualified off the ballot, and Trump is not qualified.’”

Muller added that whether Trump is in fact ineligible involves “intensive, divisive, factual questions.” But he cautioned against concluding that it should be left up to the voters. To do so, he argued, would run counter to the values of the American legal system. “We don’t have many requirements in the Constitution for federal office, but we have a few of them, and they’re designed to limit voters,” he said. “That’s part of the point.” It would be absurd, for example, to say that voters should be allowed to elect a president to a third term in violation of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Constitutional eligibility rules restrain democratic choice by definition.

Even Hassan agrees. He doesn’t have a view on Trump’s eligibility, he said, but he observed that if a court rules against Trump, that should be the end of it. “Because the role of the court is to ultimately interpret and apply the Constitution,” he said, “if you are kept off the ballot in the first place, the voters do not get to decide the issue.”

Representative Jim Jordan may or may not break down the last few Republican holdouts who blocked his election as House speaker yesterday. But the fact that about 90 percent of the House GOP conference voted to place him in the chamber’s top job marks an ominous milestone in the Republican Party’s reconfiguration since Donald Trump’s emergence as its central figure.

The preponderant majority of House Republicans backing Jordan is attempting to elevate someone who not only defended former President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election but participated in them more extensively than any other member of Congress, according to the bipartisan committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. As former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who was the vice chair of that committee, said earlier this month: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.”

[Read: Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead]

Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them. That means the nation now faces the possibility of sustained threats to the tradition of free and fair elections, with Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies not only tolerated but amplified by his allies across the party.

Ian Bassin, the executive director of the bipartisan group Protect Democracy, told me that the American constitutional system “is not built to withstand” a demagogue capturing “an entire political party” and installing “his loyalists in key positions in the other branches of government.” That dynamic, he told me, “would likely mean our 247-year-old republic won’t live to celebrate 250.” And yet, he continued, “those developments are precisely what we’re witnessing play out before our eyes.”

Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me that whether or not Jordan steamrolls the last holdouts, his strength in the race reflects the position inside the party of the forces allied with Trump. “Even if he doesn’t make it, because the majorities are so slim, you can’t argue that Jim Jordan doesn’t represent the median Republican today,” she told me.

Longwell said House Republicans have sent an especially clear signal by predominantly rallying around Jordan, who actively enlisted in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, so soon after they exiled Cheney, who denounced them and then was soundly defeated in a GOP primary last year. “Nominating Jim Jordan to be speaker is not them acquiescing to antidemocratic forces; it is them fully embracing antidemocratic forces,” she said. “The contrast between Jim Jordan potentially ascending to speaker and Liz Cheney, who is out of the Republican Party and excommunicated, could not be a starker statement of what the party stands for.”

In one sense, Jordan’s advance to the brink of the speakership only extends the pattern that has played out within the GOP since Trump became a national candidate in 2015. Each time the party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, it has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.

Even against that backdrop, the breadth of Republican support for Jordan as speaker is still a striking statement. As the January 6 committee’s final report showed, Jordan participated in virtually every element of Trump’s campaign to subvert the 2020 result. Jordan spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies, spread baseless conspiracy theories through television appearances and social media, urged Trump not to concede, demanded congressional investigations into nonexistent election fraud, and participated in multiple White House strategy sessions on how to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results.

Given that record, “‘undermining the election’ is too soft a language” to describe Jordan’s activities in 2020, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, told me. “He was involved in every step to try to destroy American democracy and the peaceful transfer of the presidency.” If Jordan wins the position, she said, “you could no longer count on the speaker of the House to defend the United States Constitution.”  

Jordan didn’t stop his service to Trump once he left office. Since the GOP won control of the House last year, Jordan has used his role as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to launch investigations into each of the prosecutors who have indicted Trump on criminal charges (local district attorneys in Manhattan and Fulton County, Georgia, as well as federal Special Counsel Jack Smith). Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has described Jordan’s demand for information as an effort “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding” that is “flagrantly at odds with the Constitution.”

The willingness of most GOP House members to embrace Jordan as speaker, even as he offers such unconditional support to Trump, sends the same message about the party’s balance of power as the former president’s own dominant position in the 2024 Republican race. Though some Republican voters clearly remain resistant to nominating Trump again, his support in national surveys usually exceeds the total vote for all of his rivals combined.

Equally telling is that rather than criticizing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, almost all of his rivals have echoed his claim that the indictments he’s facing over his actions are unfair and politically motivated. In the same vein, hardly any of the Republican members resisting Jordan have even remotely suggested that his role in Trump’s attempts to subvert the election is a legitimate reason to oppose him. That silence from Jordan’s critics speaks loudly to the reluctance in all corners of the GOP to cross Trump.

“If Jordan becomes speaker, it would really mean the complete and total takeover of the party by Trump,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent, now the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s congressional program, told me. “Because he is the closest thing Trump has to a wingman in Congress.”

All of this crystallizes the growing tendency at every level of the GOP, encompassing voters and activists as well as donors and elected officials, to normalize and whitewash Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In an Economist/YouGov national poll earlier this year, fully three-fifths of Trump 2020 voters said those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were participating “in legitimate political discourse,” and only about one-fifth said they were part of a violent insurrection. Only about one-fifth of Trump 2020 voters thought he bore a significant share of responsibility for the January 6 attack; more than seven in 10 thought he carried little or no responsibility.

That sentiment has solidified in the GOP partly because of a self-reinforcing cycle, Longwell believes. Because most Republican voters do not believe that Trump acted inappropriately after 2020, she said, candidates can’t win a primary by denouncing him, but because so few elected officials criticize his actions, “the more normal elements of the party become convinced it’s not an issue or it’s not worth objecting to.”  

The flip side is that for the minority of House Republicans in highly competitive districts—18 in seats that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and another 15 or so in districts that only narrowly preferred Trump—Jordan could be a heavy burden to carry as speaker. “Everyone is worried about their primary opponents, but in this case ameliorating the primary pressures by endorsing Jordan could spell political death in the general election in a competitive district,” Dent told me. Even so, 12 of the 18 House Republicans in districts that Biden carried voted for Jordan on his first ballot as a measure of their reluctance to challenge the party’s MAGA forces.

The instinct for self-preservation among a handful of Republican members combined with ongoing resentment at the role of the far right in ousting Kevin McCarthy might be enough to keep Jordan just below the majority he needs for election as speaker; many Republicans expect him to fail again in a second vote scheduled for this morning. Yet even if Jordan falls short, it’s his ascent that captures the shift in the party’s balance of power toward Trump’s MAGA movement.

Bassin, of Protect Democracy, points to a disturbing analogy for what is happening in the GOP as Trump surges and Jordan climbs. “When you look at the historical case studies to determine which countries survive autocratic challenges and which succumb to them,” Bassin told me, a key determinant is “whether the country’s mainstream parties unite with their traditional opponents to block the extremists from power.”

[Philip Wallach: Newt Gingrich’s degraded legacy]

Over the years, he said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”

That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.

Nestled among the Rocky Mountains, in a yawning stretch of sagebrush, granite rocks, and flowing hills near Gunnison, Colorado, is the Hartman Rocks Recreation Area, one of the first spots to clear of snow in spring. Which means that it is one of the first spots to give cooped-up humans a place to stretch their legs and fill their lungs—to ride their bikes.

Unfortunately for the Gunnison sage grouse, the seasonal rhythms that send cyclists outside coincide with the rhythms that make the birds start fanning and strutting like little brown peacocks, in a bid to reproduce. Back in the early 2000s, they were stuck flaunting their strange mating dance amid Hartman Rocks’ ever-more-popular trail system. The birds did not love loud noises and two-legged creatures zooming by on wheels. Stress made them mate less and abandon their leks, one more straw on a dwindling population’s back.

And so the Bureau of Land Management decided to limit spring disturbances such as motor and mountain biking. To balance the needs of bikers and birds, the agency posted signs telling riders to stay out of one portion of the trails—at least from March 15 to May 15.

As far as human activities go, outdoor recreation has seemed relatively benign in its impacts compared with building a subdivision, oil-and-gas field, or shopping center. But researchers are beginning to understand that it’s causing distress to wildlife all over the country. The signs ordering bikers to stay out of Hartman Rocks were an early example of an uncomfortable realization: Our fun and the future of wildlife do not always align.

Today, in the West alone, where some of the fastest-growing states contain some of the largest tracts of federal public land, bighorn sheep burn calories avoiding backcountry skiers, elk have a harder time raising their calves around cyclists and hikers, and grizzly bears appear to miss important meals because of lookie-loos. These problems exist precisely because the ways we connect with the planet—hiking, biking, trail running, skiing, climbing—put us in such close proximity to other animals, in some of the few spaces they now have left to roam.

Being outside benefits us and benefits the outdoors: Love the mountains, and you’re more likely to support biodiversity conservation and other pro-environmental efforts. But the wildlife we’ve pushed into nature’s corners is starting to bear the brunt of all that love. Recreation-without-consequences is coming apart at the seams.

“If we can really be smart about it, I think we can continue to enjoy the wildlife that we do,” says David Wiens, the executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, which has worked on hundreds of trail-building projects across the globe. Being smart, he told me, requires restricting ourselves in certain places during certain parts of the year, where and when the well-being of wildlife depends on it. That would mean accepting new norms for even the lightest uses of this country’s more wild spaces—and at the same time recognizing just how many places we can still visit.

I’ve spent more than a decade as a journalist encouraging, cajoling, and even demanding that people just go outside. I follow my own advice: Someone asked me after a recent backpacking trip how many nights my young daughter has slept in a tent. I realized the answer was roughly a year, or about a seventh of her life. Camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, and otherwise existing outside of cities and towns can be sources of solace, peace, and connection to our place on Earth. We want her to be able to identify an elk track as easily as she can identify Frozen’s Elsa, because elk are a part of her world, one we want her to understand, to love, to eventually protect.

This idea is fundamental to the conception of natural spaces in the United States. More than a century ago, after settlers had run roughshod over the nation’s forests, grasslands, and prairies, environmentalists began arguing that the country needed a constituency for the outdoors. After national leaders began carving spaces for wildlife, nature’s new constituents flocked outside, and by using these places learned to love and protect them. Over time, the tracts of land managed by federal agencies became massive playgrounds, used all the more during the coronavirus pandemic. BLM land clocked 81 million visits in 2022—a jump of 10 million from just three years before, and a 40 percent increase over 2012. Visits to national forests and wilderness areas, too, increased by 18 million from 2019 to 2020.

Not every glimpse of an elk or grizzly bear in every location is disrupting the creature’s natural rhythms. Take lynx. Studies in some of the most ski-heavy areas of Colorado show that as long as skiers stay on predictable trails in relatively open areas, they don’t bother the wild cats all that much, John Squires, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana, told me.

Contrast that with grizzly bears who scarf ants as readily as they take down elk calves. Some bears in Wyoming and Montana flock to high talus slopes to munch on high-calorie moths in the summer. The moths can provide up to a third of the calories a bear needs to build fat for winter. But if people hike up near those sites, as quiet as they may be, bears often leave, Frank van Manen, the leader of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, told me. He doesn’t yet know the toll those moves take, but every day spent avoiding humans is another day not preparing for winter.

Most of these brushes, of people spooking bighorn sheep, elk, or deer, fall into the grizzly-bear category: Almost 60 percent of wildlife interactions with outdoor recreation are negative, according to a 2016 review of 274 scientific papers. Although the review authors acknowledged the research is limited, that finding would mean that after more than half of species-recreationist interactions, animals become more vigilant, move somewhere else, or stop eating, which over time can result in fewer babies, lower fat reserves, and even death.

But knowing we have an impact doesn’t mean we know its extent, or the solutions for varied species over an even more varied landscape, Kathy Zeller, a researcher with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, told me. She and Mark Ditmer, a fellow biologist at the research station, are studying the effect of biking and hiking sounds on wildlife. They know the sounds change how deer, bears, moose, and other wildlife behave, but not if those animals can tolerate those changes and still survive and reproduce.  

Belief in America’s boundless plenty has caught up with this country before. Back when tens of millions of bison roamed its expanses, along with millions of bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn, deer, and countless other species, wild animals seemed endless. Until they weren’t. By the early 1900s, those species numbers were dwindling, some with populations in the tens of thousands as a result of market hunting, meat hunting, railroad expansion, and environmental warfare against Native Americans.

The answer wasn’t to stop hunting forever. Hunters began backing license fees supporting state agencies that managed wildlife, and seasons regulating how many animals were killed in what places. The answer was limitations. Hunters became crucial advocates for maintaining some of America’s wildlife.

Unlike hunting, other outdoor recreation doesn’t rely on wildlife. Still, seeing a moose or bighorn sheep while hiking, or a fox or bald eagle while mountain biking, is part of what separates the experience from biking in a city or spinning on a Peloton. It helps transform these spaces that we use into spaces that we love.

The answer, again, could be limitations targeted to each species and area. Some trails in high-use places such as national parks and rafting trips down rivers already rely on permitting to manage use; more sites could start. Restrictions could last for full seasons—or only for certain hours of the day. By mid-morning, some animals such as sage grouse are often already done mating.

Getting used to the idea of limitations can take time. In Colorado, at first, those edicts to keep mountain-biking pressure off the sage grouse went largely unheeded. But Wiens found that when mountain bikers understood why they were supposed to keep out, eventually they did.

He understands the need to ride: He’s in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, and his wife, Susan DeMattei, won an Olympic bronze medal for mountain biking. In 2006, he formed a local organization called Gunnison Trails to provide order and funding to often-haphazardly-built trails. He then realized that the new association could rally its own to follow the rules.

“It took a while for some of the late adopters to finally join in,” he told me. But in the past decade or so, during breeding season he’s seen almost no sign of bikers using the closed trails.  

Rules require adjustments, sure. We want to just go for a hike and let our dogs run. We want to camp and play and not worry if we’re harming a bird we might never see. But we’re sharing those spaces with humans and wildlife alike.

There will always be places we can ride, too. The other 75 percent of the Hartman Rocks Trails aren’t closed in the spring. Better understanding how we’re affecting other creatures also means that we better know which areas host animals that are less sensitive to human presence, or which times of year or even times of day we’re least disruptive. We can advocate for conservation and still go hiking, skiing, and biking. We can also put our dogs on leashes and heed signs erected by land managers. Because if we want wildlife to be there, too, we might need to accept that the outdoors can’t be open everywhere, all the time.

A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

[Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem]

With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.

If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.

But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.

Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”

The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.

Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.

“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.

Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.

“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”

The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want]

Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.

Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.

This article originally appeared in High Country News.

In July 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish fish lined with vertical black stripes. He texted photos of his catch to colleagues, who confirmed his fears: The fish were smallmouth bass, voracious predators that have invaded waters around the West. Worse, they were juveniles. Smallmouth weren’t just living below the dam—they’d likely begun to breed.

It was a grim discovery. Smallmouth bass, whose native range encompasses rivers and lakes throughout the eastern United States and the Great Lakes, have long plagued the Colorado River. State agencies and anglers probably began stocking them in the watershed in the mid-1900s, and they’ve since conquered much of the basin, including Lake Powell, the reservoir that sloshes above Glen Canyon Dam. Downriver from the dam, however, lies the Grand Canyon, whose sandstone depths have historically provided a bass-free haven for native fish—most of all, the humpback chub, a federally threatened species endowed with an odd dorsal bulge. Now, biologists realized, neither the canyon nor its chub were safe.

Scientists have been dreading this development. As Lake Powell has shrunk over the past two decades, drained by overallocation and drought, its diminishment has created prime conditions for bass to infiltrate the Grand Canyon. But Brian Healy, a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey and the former fish biologist at Grand Canyon National Park, says that even though he and his colleagues expected the species to eventually become a problem, “we didn’t realize it would be an issue so quickly.”

Preventing a bass takeover won’t be simple, biologically or politically. The Colorado’s users expect it to simultaneously serve as a pipeline for water conveyance, a source of cheap electrons, a recreational playground, and, not least, a suitable habitat for native fish. For decades, the river’s human managers have uneasily balanced these often-contradictory purposes—and now they must also work to exclude smallmouth bass, an immense challenge that may well compete with the river’s many other functions. “The best way to think about this is that everything in the Colorado River is connected to everything else,” Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist and an emeritus professor at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies, says. “Everything has a ramification.”

[Read: The cost of killing tiny fish]

Forty million people rely on the Colorado River’s largesse, from Wyoming ranchers to the residents of sprawling Arizona subdivisions to the lettuce farmers in California’s Imperial Valley. Less visibly, the river is also a lifeline for 14 native species of fish. They are rarely seen by humans—the river they inhabit is as turbid as coffee, and they’re seldom fished for sport—yet they require a healthy Colorado as much as any Angeleno or Tucsonan.

Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker, and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated native fish in tributaries such as the Yampa River. (“Smallmouth” is a misnomer: Bass have maws so cavernous they can gulp down prey more than half their own size.) Bass arrived in Lake Powell in 1982, courtesy of a hatchery manager who dumped 500 spare smallmouth into the reservoir. The bass, he crowed decades later, “performed magnificently,” adding, “Anglers have caught millions of smallmouth bass over the past 30 years.”

David McNew / Getty

Through it all, the Grand Canyon remained a bass-less sanctuary—thanks, paradoxically, to Glen Canyon Dam. Although smallmouth teemed in Lake Powell, they stayed in the reservoir’s warm, sunlit upper strata, well above Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, the massive tubes that convey water through its hydropower turbines and thence downriver. Bass never reached the Grand Canyon because they never swam deep enough to pass through the dam.

As Lake Powell withered, however, so did the Grand Canyon’s defenses. By the spring of 2022, some two decades of climate-change-fueled drought had lowered the lake’s surface by more than 150 feet, drawing its tepid, bass-filled top layer ever closer to the penstocks. At the same time, the warmer water flowing through the dam and downstream made the Grand Canyon more hospitable to bass. “The temperature was ideal for them,” Charles Yackulic, a research statistician at the U.S. Geological Survey, says.

Last summer, after bass swam through Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, slipped past its whirling turbines, and apparently reproduced, managers hastened to control the incipient invasion, netting off the slough where Arnold discovered the juveniles as though it were a crime scene. The Park Service also doused the backwater with an EPA-approved fish-killing poison. When biologists electroshocked the river that fall and the following spring, though, they found hundreds more juveniles. The slough wasn’t an isolated beachhead; it was merely a battleground in a broader invasion.

If there is a saving grace, it is that the bass remain concentrated above the cold, clear stretch of river known as Lees Ferry. Humpback chub, by contrast, have their stronghold deep in the Grand Canyon, some 75 miles downriver from the dam, where bass haven’t shown up—at least not yet. “The worry is that you got them in Lees Ferry and they’re reproducing,” Yackulic says. “And then suddenly, you’ve just got all these babies dispersing downstream.”

[Read: How many fish are in the sea?]

The Colorado River is at once in a state of crisis and rebirth. The decline of Lake Powell has revealed Glen Canyon, the gorgeous red-rock labyrinth that the reservoir drowned in the 1960s. Ironically, the forces behind this restoration are also imperiling native fish. “Last year was the closest we’ve had to a natural thermal regime in more than 50 years,” Yackulic notes. But for the humpback chub, it was a catastrophe.

River managers thus face a conundrum: How do you preserve native species in a broken ecosystem? In February 2023, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that controls Glen Canyon Dam, released a draft environmental assessment evaluating four options for manipulating river flows to deter smallmouth bass. The plans are variations on a theme: When the Colorado gets dangerously warm, the agency releases cold water to lower its temperature below the threshold where bass spawn. Two options—one of which is favored by conservation groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity—include high-intensity “flow spikes” designed to freeze bass out of sloughs and backwaters. “We need flows that are cold enough for long enough that it prevents smallmouth bass from spawning,” Taylor McKinnon, the center’s Southwest director, says. “Not disrupt reproduction—prevent reproduction.”

Managing the Colorado River to thwart bass, however, could conflict with the bureau’s other goals. For one thing, all four options would release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s “bypass tubes,” outlets closer to Lake Powell’s frigid bottom. But the bypass tubes, as their name suggests, don’t pump water through the dam’s hydroelectric turbines—which, as the agency acknowledges, could lead to “a reduction in the revenue generated from power proceeds.” That possibility doesn’t thrill the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association, which represents electric utilities and co-ops and has warned of “measurable financial impacts” to ratepayers.

[Read: The fight over California’s ancient water]

Some environmentalists may find themselves at odds with bass deterrence too. The Glen Canyon Institute has long called on river managers to “Fill Mead First,” letting Lake Powell shrivel while sending Colorado’s water downstream to Lake Mead, the river’s other massive reservoir. As scientists pointed out in a 2020 paper, however, this strategy could “lead to warmer water temperatures throughout Grand Canyon” and render invasive-fish control “especially problematic.” Indeed, if your sole goal were to protect humpback chub in the immediate term, Lake Powell—whose deep, chilly waters staved off bass for 40 years—might be the first reservoir you’d fill. “The decisions of where you store water in the system are going to determine the fate of native fish,” Utah State’s Schmidt says.

Although last winter’s strong snowpack should ultimately raise Lake Powell’s surface by about 70 feet, the invasion continues. Scientists have pulled hundreds of bass from the slough so far this year, along with thousands of carp and sunfish, two other warm-water non-natives. The Park Service poisoned the slough again in late August, but that fix is clearly neither complete nor lasting. In February 2023, a group of researchers convened by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey to study the bass problem recommended outfitting Glen Canyon Dam with “fish-exclusionary devices”—basically fancy nets—to keep bass from swimming through the penstocks. That’s hardly a new idea—biologists first recommended that the Bureau “pursue means” of preventing invasive fish from passing through the dam in 2016—but at an August meeting of federal managers and researchers, one Reclamation official claimed that an effective screen design is still at least five years away.

Ultimately, staving off the bass crisis may call for even more ambitious fixes. In one paper, Schmidt and his colleagues raised the idea of drilling colossal diversion tunnels that would funnel water and sediment around Glen Canyon Dam and thus restore the silty, flood-prone conditions that favor native fish. Reengineering the Colorado would be neither simple nor cheap, but, in recent comments to the bureau, McKinnon and other conservationists claimed that the “climate-inevitable obsolescence” of Glen Canyon Dam calls for drastic measures. If bass dominate an ever-warmer river, McKinnon says, “it’s game over.”