However troubling its political implications might be, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday that Donald Trump is disqualified from the state’s primary ballot for having “engaged in insurrection” demonstrates that the judicial system is still functioning in the United States. The reason is straightforward: The court applied the plain language of the Constitution, doing its job with clarity and fidelity to the rule of law.

But perhaps what is most striking about Colorado’s decision was the conservative reasoning the justices employed to reach their conclusion. The four justices who voted in the majority adhered to three stalwart principles of judicial conservatism: textualism (by which judges endeavor to strictly apply the plain text of the Constitution), originalism (by which they refer to historical sources for a contemporaneous understanding of that text), and federalism (by which judges take pains to respect the dual sovereignty of the states alongside the federal government as well as the state courts’ concomitant prerogative to construe their own laws).

This third element is perhaps the most interesting. The Colorado Supreme Court was tasked with interpreting Colorado’s Uniform Election Code of 1992, which contains that state’s criteria for getting on its presidential ballot. It determined that disqualification under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is also disqualifying under Colorado law. And it upheld the lower court’s conclusion, after a multiday evidentiary hearing, that Donald Trump in fact engaged in insurrection. Because he is thus disqualified as a matter of Colorado law, the Colorado Supreme Court determined, “it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Secretary [of State] to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

[George T. Conway III: The Colorado ruling changed my mind]

The U.S. Supreme Court has ignored this sort of reasoning before—and to ill effect. In Bush v. Gore, it ruled in 2000 that manual recounts under Florida’s law regarding contested election results would violate the Constitution’s equal-protection clause, and thus effectively handed the election to George W. Bush by a margin of 537 votes. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens emphasized that “when questions arise about the meaning of state laws, including election laws, it is our settled practice to accept the opinions of the highest courts of the States as providing the final answers.” The conservative justices of today’s Court should bear this example in mind—and the stakes for the Court’s legitimacy—when considering whether the Colorado court got this aspect of its interpretation right.

Next, consider the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which belies a handful of textual ambiguities: What is “insurrection” (and did January 6 qualify)? What does “engaged” mean (and did Trump do it)? And is the president of the United States an “officer” of the United States covered by Section 3? As for the first two questions, President Joe Biden summed things up yesterday, calling it “self-evident” that Trump “supported” an insurrection. Nobody seriously contends otherwise. The rebuttal instead is that Section 3 kicks in only if a jury makes these findings beyond a reasonable doubt pursuant to a federal statute that criminalizes insurrections (and which Special Counsel Jack Smith declined to invoke in indicting Trump)—an argument that one of the dissenting justices made as well.

The Colorado Supreme Court elegantly dispensed with that concern. Again, it applied a plain reading of the law, concluding that Congress’s decision to criminalize “the same conduct that is disqualifying under Section Three … cannot be read to mean that only those charged and convicted of violating the law are constitutionally disqualified from holding office without assuming a great deal of meaning not present in the text or the law.” Neither the Constitution nor the statute say anything of the sort. The court thus refused to go where it needn’t by theorizing about inferences buried beneath the plain text, which is precisely how conservative judging, at least in theory, is supposed to work.

On the officer question, the Colorado Supreme Court focused on the Constitution as written, noting that it “refers to the Presidency as an ‘Office’ twenty-five times,” including in connection with the natural-born-citizen eligibility requirement for the presidency (Article II, Section 5), the four-year cap on presidential terms in office (also in Article II, Section 5), and the impeachment clause (Article I, Section 3). It then turned to tools of originalism, observing, for example, that “dictionaries from the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification define ‘office’ as a ‘particular duty, charge or trust conferred by public authority, and for a public purpose,’ that is ‘undertaken by … authority from government or those who administer it.’” The court then reasonably concluded that “the Presidency falls comfortably within these definitions.” Judges make these kinds of interpretative decisions all the time.

Serious constitutional scholars have nonetheless pushed back on the notion that Section 3 applies to presidents, underscoring that prior drafts of Section 3 included references to “the office of the President” but that the language was ultimately abandoned. According to this argument, the framers of Section 3 intended only to prevent insurrectionists from serving in the Electoral College, but left qualified electors free to choose insurrectionists for the presidency. But those distinctions are missing from the actual text. As the conservative scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen argued in an exhaustive article, “The substantive terms of Section Three’s prohibition are not themselves difficult or inscrutable.” Even more to the point: Jurists differ over what tools of constitutional interpretation are paramount in construing arcane constitutional terms. The political right, for example, has long assailed progressive judges for emphasizing the purposes behind a law when a plain-text reading would arguably suffice. For conservative justices to abandon that hierarchy now, on a case this consequential, would destroy whatever guise of impartiality the Court has left.

[David Frum: The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves]

If the U.S. Supreme Court winds up leaving the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision undisturbed, it will inevitably get GOP voters and politicians very upset with the justices in the majority. It could also encourage states to play fast and loose with Section 3 to keep legitimate candidates off future ballots. But the threat of political retribution is just the sort of possibility that motivated the Framers of the original Constitution to give federal judges lifetime appointments under Article III—they needn’t think about the popularity of their decisions. Moreover, the ostensible point of the so-called conservative judicial philosophies of textualism, originalism, and federalism is to confine judges to the business of judging. That means resolving, on the narrowest possible grounds, discrete disputes affecting the immediate parties, at least one of whom is concretely injured by the other—rather than wading into political or normative policy conundrums in ways that aggrandize their own power relative to that of the other branches of government. If the purportedly conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court are intellectually honest about their jurisprudential approach to the law, this case should not be hard.

The Supreme Court’s upcoming decision about the most common pharmaceutical used for medication abortions may be just the beginning of the political battle over the drug.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of lower-court rulings that would severely reduce access to mifepristone. The Court’s acceptance of the case marked a crucial juncture in the legal maneuvering over the medication.

But however the high court rules, pressure is mounting inside the GOP coalition for the next Republican president to broadly use executive authority at the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department to limit access to mifepristone and to reduce what abortion opponents call “chemical abortion.”

“Chemical abortion will be front and center and presented front and center by the pro-life movement if there is a Republican president,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, told me. “There is going to be a lot of action we want to see taken.”

The possibility of new executive-branch restrictions on abortion drugs, which are now used in a majority of all U.S. abortions, underscores the stakes over abortion in the 2024 presidential election. Even if Donald Trump or another Republican wins back the White House next year, they might not have enough votes in Congress to pass a nationwide ban on the practice. But through executive action, the next GOP president could unilaterally retrench access to mifepristone in every state, however the Supreme Court decides the current case. Multiple former FDA officials and advocates on both sides of the issue told me that through regulatory and legal actions by the FDA, the Justice Department, or both, the next Republican president could impose all the limits on access to mifepristone that anti-abortion groups are seeking in the lawsuit now before the high court.

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

“The FDA is a highly regulated space, so there are a lot of hoops they would have to jump through,” Jeremy Sharp, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy planning, legislation, and analysis during part of Barack Obama’s second term, told me. “But if they got a commissioner in there that was ideologically motivated, and if they changed the staff leadership, then there’s a lot they could do before anybody could get in the way and stop them.”

The growing Republican focus on using executive-branch authority against abortion access marks a new front in the broader political confrontation over reproductive rights. While Roe v. Wade was in place, the social conservative movement was focused overwhelmingly on trying to reverse the nationwide right to abortion and “wasn’t zoned in on this issue” of federal regulatory authority over abortion drugs, Hawkins noted.

Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). From 2000 through 2022, almost 6 million women in the U.S. used mifepristone to end a pregnancy, according to the FDA. In all those cases of women using the drug, the agency has recorded only 32 deaths (including for reasons unrelated to the drug) and a little more than 1,000 hospitalizations. The risk of major complications has been less than half of 1 percent.

Neither of the past two Republican presidents acted against the drugs administratively or even faced sustained pressure from social conservatives to do so. The FDA initially approved mifepristone for use in abortion during the final months of Bill Clinton’s presidency, in 2000. But during Republican President George W. Bush’s two terms, the FDA made no effort to rescind that approval.

During Obama’s final year, the FDA significantly loosened the restrictions on usage of the drug. (Among other things, the agency reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one; increased from seven to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used; and permitted other medical professionals besides physicians to prescribe the drugs if they received certification.) During Trump’s four years, the FDA did not move to undo any of those decisions.

But the right’s focus on abortion drugs has significantly increased since Trump left office. According to Hawkins, one reason is that the COVID pandemic crystallized awareness of how many abortions are performed remotely with the drugs, rather than in medical settings. Even more important may have been the decision by the six GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices in 2022 to overturn Roe. By fulfilling the top goal of anti-abortion activists, that decision both freed them to concentrate on other issues and raised their ambitions.

In one measure of that growing zeal, social conservative groups and Republican elected officials have pushed back much harder against Joe Biden’s attempts to expand access to mifepristone than they did against Obama’s moves. Under Biden, the FDA has eliminated the requirement for an in-person visit to obtain mifepristone; instead it allows patients to get a prescription for the drug through a telehealth visit and then receive it through the mail. The FDA under Biden has also allowed pharmacies that receive certification to dispense the drug.

As I wrote earlier this year, the paradox is that Biden’s rules will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Almost all red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, and, even though the FDA allows their use through 10 weeks of pregnancy, the drugs cannot be prescribed in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion.

Shortly after last November’s midterm election, an alliance of conservative groups sued in federal court to overturn not only Biden’s measures to ease access to the drug but also the changes approved in 2016 under Obama, and even the decision under Clinton in 2000 to approve the drug at all.

[​​Read: Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination]

In April 2023, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and abortion opponent, ruled almost entirely for the plaintiffs, striking down the Biden and Obama regulations and the FDA’s original approval of the drug. In August, a panel of three Republican-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Obama and Biden regulatory changes. But the panel, by 2–1, ruled that it was too late to challenge the drug’s original approval.

The Supreme Court along the way blocked the implementation of any of these rulings until it reached a final decision in the case, so mifepristone has remained available. In its announcement earlier this month, the Court agreed to hear appeals to the Fifth Circuit decision erasing the Obama and Biden administrations’ regulatory changes but declined to reconsider the circuit court’s upholding of mifepristone’s original approval. Those choices have raised hopes among abortion-rights activists that the Court appears inclined to reverse the lower court’s ruling and preserve the existing FDA rules. “We are very hopeful this is an indicator the Court is not inclined to rule broadly on medication abortion and they are concerned about the reasoning of the decisions [so far],” said Rabia Muqaddam, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion.

But the legal process has shown that even a Supreme Court decision maintaining the current rules is unlikely to end the fight over mifepristone. The reason is that the proceedings have demonstrated much broader support in the GOP than previously for executive-branch action against the drug.

For instance, 124 Republicans in the House of Representatives and 23 GOP senators have submitted a brief to the Supreme Court urging it to affirm the Fifth Circuit’s ruling overturning the Obama and Biden actions on mifepristone. “By approving and then deregulating chemical abortion drugs, the FDA failed to follow Congress’ statutorily prescribed drug approval process and subverted Congress’ critical public policy interests in upholding patient welfare,” the Republican legislators wrote. Republican attorneys general from 21 states submitted a brief with similar arguments in support of the decision reversing the Obama and Biden administrations’ regulatory actions.

In another measure, a large majority of House Republicans voted last summer to reverse the FDA’s decisions under Biden that expanded access to the drugs. Though the legislation failed when about two dozen moderates voted against it, the predominant support in the GOP conference reflected the kind of political pressure the next Republican president could face to pursue the same goals through FDA regulatory action.

Simultaneously, conservatives have signaled another line of attack they want the next GOP president to pursue against medication abortions. In late 2022, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.” That interpretation, the opinion argued, was in line with multiple decisions by federal courts spanning decades that the law barred the mailing of only materials used in illegal abortions.

Conservatives are arguing that the next Republican administration should reverse that OLC ruling and declare that the Comstock Act bars the mailing of medications used in any abortions.

The fact that both Kacsmaryk and Circuit Court Judge James Ho, also appointed by Trump, endorsed that view in their rulings on mifepristone this year offers one measure of the receptivity to this idea in conservative legal circles. As telling was a letter sent last spring by nine GOP senators to major drug-store chains warning that they could be held in violation of the Comstock Act not only if they ship abortion drugs to consumers but even if they use the mail or other freight carriers to deliver the drugs to their own stores.

Trump and his leading rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, have avoided explicit commitments to act against medication abortions. But all of these efforts are indications of the pressure they would face to do so if elected. Hawkins said that anti-abortion groups have chosen not to press the candidates for specific plans on regulatory steps against mifepristone but instead intend to closely monitor the views of potential appointments by the next GOP president, the same tactic signaled by the senators in their letter to drug-store chains. “It will make for probably the most contentious fight ever over who is nominated and confirmed” for the key positions at the FDA and other relevant agencies, Hawkins told me.

Stephen Ostroff, who served as acting FDA commissioner under both Obama and Trump, told me that future Republican appointees would likely find more success in reconsidering the regulations governing access to mifepristone than in reopening the approval of the drug altogether this long after the original approval. Even reconsidering the access rules, he predicts, would likely ignite intense conflict between political appointees and career scientific staff.

“I think it would be challenging for a commissioner to come in and push the scientific reviewers and other scientific staff to do things they don’t think are appropriate to do,” Ostroff told me. “You’d have to do a lot of housecleaning in order to be able to accomplish that.” But, he added, “I’m not saying it is impossible.”

In fact, political appointees under presidents of both parties have at times overruled FDA decisions. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary for Obama, blocked an FDA ruling allowing the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception to girls younger than 17; the Biden White House has delayed an FDA decision to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes, amid concerns about a possible backlash among Black voters.

Many legal and regulatory experts closely following the issue believe that a Republican president’s first target would be the FDA’s decision to allow mifepristone to be prescribed remotely and shipped by mail or dispensed in pharmacies. To build support for action against mifepristone, a new FDA commissioner also might compel drug companies to launch new studies about the drug’s safety or require the agency’s staff to reexamine the evidence despite the minimal number of adverse consequences over the years, Sharp told me.

Faced with continuing signs of voter backlash on efforts to restrict abortion, any Republican president might think twice before moving aggressively against mifepristone. And any future attempt to limit the drug—through either FDA regulations or a revised Justice Department opinion about the Comstock Act—would face an uncertain outcome at the Supreme Court, however the Court decides the current case. The one certainty for the next GOP president is that the pressure from social conservatives for new regulatory and legal action against mifepristone will be vastly greater than it was the most recent two times Republicans controlled the executive branch. “We want all the tools in the tool kit being used to protect mothers and children from these drugs,” Hawkins told me. Amid such demands, the gulf between the FDA’s future decisions about the drug under a Republican or Democratic president may become much wider than it has been since mifepristone first became available, more than two decades ago.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.

In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:

The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.

Dodd’s story is the closest you’ll ever feel to an alien hearing about pizza for the first time. How does the pizzaiolo stretch the dough? “He places this large flat pancake on his closed fist, like a floppy hat, and twirls it round and round. The elastic dough becomes thinner and thinner. A skilled pizza-maker knows exactly when to stop twirling: when the cake is at its thinnest, just before it breaks through.” What do you put on top of a freshly cooked pie? “Garlic and chopped orégano (wild marjoram) are the seasonings, used as the customer may request.”

At that point, when President Joe Biden was in grade school and The Atlantic was almost a century old, pizza was completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. We began to evolve beyond the days of “orégano (wild marjoram)” only in the 1960s, when pizza became synonymous with takeout and delivery—a cheap, delicious, and customizable food for the masses. One pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan, DomiNick’s, focused on delivering to nearby college students. In 1965, it changed its name to Domino’s, and within 24 years had ballooned into 5,000 locations. Now America’s love affair with the dish has reached such heights (some 3 billion pies are eaten each year) that imagining a time before pizza feels as unnerving as imagining New York without the subway or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. So much of the American diet has followed the same arc: Food we now eat all the time and take for granted probably wasn’t available even a few decades ago.

We all know that computer mainframes the size of rooms gave way to laptops and iPhones, but that same kind of “disruption” has also infiltrated our meals. Decades before the rise of pizza, spaghetti and meatballs—a dish that did not exist in Italy—became an American favorite. How that happened is one of the “few fundamental questions” that Corby Kummer explored in “Pasta,” an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 1986. (Bring back the one-word headlines!) In the early 1900s, new arrivals from Italy had limited access to some of the fruits and vegetables that went into dishes they’d slurped up back home. But they did have meat. So much meat. The meatball, born out of necessity, just made sense. Other American takes on Italian food from that era now sound revolting at best: Mushy pasta cooked in a sauce of canned tomato soup and Worcestershire sauce. One early recipe for baked ziti, Kummer writes, called for “one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta.”

America’s changing tastes are because of immigration, yes, but also because of the grocery store. In the ’70s, the average supermarket stocked approximately 9,000 items. You might have found a few flavors of yogurt, if that. Now when you head to a supermarket, you can find 60,000 options and choose among blueberry, strawberry, and peach kefir. The modern grocery store is a triumph of science and technology. Why are brussels sprouts no longer a metaphor for stinky grossness? Partly because plant breeders figured out how to eliminate a compound that turned them bitter. Hear me out: American life is more delicious now that the Red Delicious apple has given way to the holy Honeycrisp.

Over the next 70 years, the food we eat will continue to change. Silicon Valley is on a quest to perfect the pizza robot, which could cook up a pie inside a truck while it’s on the way to your home. Maybe we will soon be eating more pawpaws, an enigmatic fruit native to the eastern United States and Canada that somehow tastes tropical, like a mix of mango, pineapple, and banana. Once an all-American favorite, the pawpaw disappeared from our diet because it’s hard to grow and ship—but now food scientists are working on a version that might survive a journey to Whole Foods. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, the fruit aisle is getting trippy—starting with yellow watermelon, pink pineapples, and white strawberries. In the future, we may eat more chickpeas. And MSG. And yerba mate. And … gluten-free pasta made of durian seeds.

Perhaps, actually, science has gone too far.