For more than a year, Sudan has been riven by a brutal civil war. The scale of misery is shocking: Nearly 18 million people face “high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to a global hunger monitor in March, and nearly five million were close to famine. Roughly three million children have fled Sudan, resulting in the world’s largest child displacement crisis.

The conflict broke out last year between rival camps in Sudan’s military government, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—both of whom have conducted egregious human rights violations, according to the United Nations.

“While two armed factions launched this conflict, this is less a civil war between two sides than a war which two generals and their affiliates are waging against the Sudanese people and their aspirations to a free and democratic future,” the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month.

The national security bill approved by Congress last month included broad humanitarian funding, and the Biden administration recently promised an additional $100 million in aid to respond to the conflict. The U.S. Treasury Department has also imposed sanctions on leaders and organizations involved in the conflict, although some in Congress believe the administration could go further: The chairs and ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to President Joe Biden this month asking him to determine whether the RSF and its leader were subject to sanctions for human rights violations under the Global Magnitsky Act.

However, within Congress as a whole, the issue has largely been placed on the legislative back burner amid other international emergencies, namely the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It was already a monthslong saga to approve the national security funding, and it’s unclear whether an aid package specific to Sudan could pass in Congress.

This past week, Representative Sara Jacobs, the Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Africa, introduced legislation that would prohibit U.S. arms sales to the United Arab Emirates until the Biden administration certifies that the UAE is no longer providing material support to the RSF. Jacobs, who visited the border between Sudan and Chad in March, said she had been shocked by the fallout from the conflict.

“Before Congress, I worked in international conflict resolution, so I’ve been to many refugee camps, but I had never seen children so clearly traumatized as the Sudanese refugee children I met at the Sudan-Chad border in March. The longer this war goes, the greater the suffering and the higher the possibility of the conflict spilling over,” Jacobs said in a statement. She added that, along with withholding arms sales to the UAE, the United States “must also continue surging humanitarian assistance to the region and hold the RSF, SAF, and other enabling actors accountable.”

Although Jacobs has solicited Republican support for this measure, it is not yet sponsored by any GOP members. Representative John James, the chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa, said that he believed Jacobs’s legislation was “on the right track.”

“We want to make sure that we are being very specific and very measured,” James told me. “We also have to maintain the fact that America is a reliable partner, but at the same time, you cannot commit human rights violations, commit atrocities, with any semblance of U.S. support.”

James also believes the situation in Sudan should be called a “genocide.” This is not an isolated opinion in Congress; several senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in February to recognize “the actions of the Rapid Support Forces and allied militia in the Darfur region of Sudan against non-Arab ethnic communities as acts of genocide.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Black Africans are being murdered and displaced each and every single day, and it’s not rising to the level of public consciousness that it needs to be,” James said, adding that it was necessary to place “increased pressure on those who are not just complicit but funding the belligerencies.” James said that he was hoping to schedule a conversation with the UAE ambassador: “We should talk quickly, or else consequences are coming.”

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said that “the diplomatic effort is likely going to have to be led by African partners.” Indeed, in a joint statement with Kenyan President William Ruto released during Ruto’s visit to Washington last week, Biden said that he “appreciates Kenya for engaging in multiple efforts to de-escalate conflicts” in the region, including in Sudan and South Sudan.

However, Murphy continued, the U.S. will likely continue to play a role in diplomatic efforts, citing the “important role” of Perriello and the humanitarian aid passed by Congress last month. “We need to do more,” he said.

How pig welfare became a states’ rights issue, by Grace Segers in The New Republic
The untold story of the network that took down Roe v. Wade, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in The New York Times
The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right, by Dylan Matthews in Vox
‘Just brutal’: Why America’s hottest city is seeing a surge in deaths, by Ariel Wittenberg in Politico
The hidden legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States, by Dana Hedgpeth and Sari Horwitz in The Washington Post
The real “deep state,” by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic
Inside Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s growing alliance, by Emily Glazer, Robbie Whelan, Alex Leary, Cara Lombardo, and Dana Mattioli in The Wall Street Journal

Want to have your pet included at the bottom of the next newsletter? Email me: gsegers@tnr.com.

This week’s featured pet is Killer Patches, a tortie with an attitude, submitted by Antonia. Killer Patches loves begging for food, peanut butter, and opened doors. She’s very persistent and doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “no.”

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, races for state Supreme Courts have garnered increased attention and money, becoming the new battleground for abortion rights and access. This year will be no different, as 33 states will hold elections for seats on their high courts.

“Dobbs was a watershed moment in state judicial politics,” said Michael Milov-Cordoba, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. “As it became clear to advocates and to the public that abortion access in their state would be determined by decisions made by state Supreme Courts, there became increased attention from both the public and national interest groups to win races.”

Although many state Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, the courts themselves tend to have ideological wings, much like federal courts where nominees are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Party apparatuses and outside organizations also get involved, pouring money into the races. The Brennan Center found that 2021 and 2022 were record-breaking years in this regard: More than $100 million was spent in judicial races in 17 states. The high-profile Wisconsin race in 2023, won by Judge Janet Protasiewicz, saw upward of $50 million in spending.

But 2024 may set a new record. This Monday, two liberal organizations announced that they have linked up to invest $5 million in high court races in key states. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is dedicated to ensuring congressional and legislative maps are competitive for Democrats, and Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the organization, will fund digital and canvassing operations to get out the vote for candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

Jenny Lawson, executive director at Planned Parenthood Votes, said that they are specifically targeting “places where Republicans have tried to stack the court with radical antidemocratic justices.” The joint campaign plans to partner with community advocacy groups to tailor their strategies to local needs. “What’s important to voters is that it is clear to voters the biases and hyperpartisanship of judges that we need to reject,” she said. “Our job will be to inform the voters of the choices in front of them.”

Three of those states—North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—have explicitly partisan elections. North Carolina and Ohio have moved from nonpartisan to partisan elections in the past 10 years, with significant ramifications. Since North Carolina Republicans gained control of the state Supreme Court in 2022, the justices have reversed course on major issues such as gerrymandering and racial discrimination. (Other states have seen their legislatures attempt to limit the power of the high court, including Montana, where Republicans have been frustrated by the court’s protection of abortion rights and blocking restrictive voting laws.)

Michigan and Ohio also have a particularly narrow ideological divide on their state Supreme Courts, meaning that the upcoming elections could flip the courts’ partisan majorities. Abortion “looms large” in the Ohio race, Milov-Cordoba said, because the court will be evaluating the right to an abortion recently enshrined in the state Constitution by voters last year. Meanwhile, Democrats are defending their majority in Michigan.

For Ohio, Planned Parenthood Votes will emphasize to voters how the governor and state legislature attempted to stymie a ballot initiative to protect abortion and how the state Supreme Court permitted deliberately complicated wording for the measure on the ballot. “They’re watching their voices and votes being taken away,” Lawson said, adding that PPV’s campaign will argue that shifting the ideological leaning of the court would protect those “voices and votes.” In Michigan, however, the focus will be on how a “favorable” court has protected abortion access.

Even in states where justices are chosen by the governor or a judicial committee, voters have the chance to weigh in on those choices with “retention” elections. In Arizona, two of the justices who joined in the controversial decision to reinstate a nineteenth-century law banning nearly all abortions are now facing retention. Although Arizonans have never booted anyone from their high court, the two justices’ future may hinge on how important abortion is to voters on Election Day.

For Arizona and the other states, the goal is to ensure voters “know that these races are critical to these freedoms, and that they are making informed choices based on the positions of these justices,” Lawson said. “Our goal here isn’t partisanship, it’s about fundamental fairness.”

Each week, I provide an update on the vibes surrounding a particular policy or political development. This week: Senate Democrats press forward with a doomed immigration bill … again.

Eons ago, in February, a bipartisan bill that would have overhauled immigration, asylum, and border policy failed on the Senate floor. Although it was the fruit of months of negotiation by GOP Senator James Lankford, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, congressional Republicans turned their backs on the bill amid opposition from former President Donald Trump.

Immigration has long been a topic that favors Republicans, and in a hotly contested election year with control of the White House and Congress up for grabs, it may be more useful to GOP candidates, especially Trump, to have the topic as a political cudgel. (House Republicans passed their own hard-line legislation, which they insist is the correct and only path to their stated goal of securing the border.)

Nevertheless, Democrats are trying to flip the switch on Republicans, hammering them for opposing the bipartisan legislation. On Thursday, the Senate will vote once more to proceed on the bill—even though it will not garner sufficient GOP support to succeed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell scoffed on Tuesday that the upcoming vote was “just a gimmick, a way to try to convince the American people that they’re concerned about this.”

It will also be opposed by Lankford, who has condemned the exercise as opportunistic. “This is not trying to accomplish anything, this is about messaging. This is trying to hurt Republicans,” Lankford told reporters this week, complaining about the lack of outreach from Democrats on trying to find a new consensus bill. “There’s been no legwork. There’s been no attempt to try to bring people back together again to try to figure out how we resolve this.”

But politically speaking, it doesn’t matter if Lankford votes for it, or any other Republican, or even most Democrats. Really, it just needs to make a small subsection of Democrats look like they’re “tough on the border”: those incumbents who face difficult reelection battles in red and swing states. Take Senator Jon Tester, who’s up for reelection in Montana. When I was in the state last month, I saw a TV ad by Tester’s campaign hailing his support for shutting down the southern border and his willingness to work with Republicans on legislation to expel certain migrants. Other vulnerable Democrats include Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and Jacky Rosen of Nevada.

There is a question of timeliness; Lankford wondered why Democrats were putting the bill to a vote the week before Memorial Day, when Americans aren’t likely to be paying attention to what the Senate is doing. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted there was no political calculation behind the vote now.

“Everything the Republicans do has no chance of passing. So who’s more serious about fixing the border? We are. And I think the public will understand that,” Schumer said.

Murphy, who helped negotiate the bill, echoed that argument. “I don’t know if there’s magic to voting this week, but if you think something’s important, you don’t give up on it just because you fail once,” Murphy said. “I think it would be insincere for us to say we care about passing the bipartisan border bill and not try to bring it up a second time.”

A second time, a third, a fourth—there’s no real political downside to continuing to vote on the measure between now and November. All the more chances to counter the narrative that Democrats are soft on immigration. If immigration is an important issue this year—and polling points to that being the case—those vulnerable Democrats will want to tout their voting for a bipartisan bill that Republicans rejected as often as they can.

But Tester rejected the implication that there would be electoral benefits to his voting on the immigration measure this week, telling Punchbowl News that was “bullshit.”

The lynching that sent my family north, by Ko Bragg in The Atlantic
Is ‘Love Is Blind’ a toxic workplace? by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker
How free school meals went mainstream, by Susan Shain in The New York Times
He came to L.A. 3 months ago with his young family. A ride on a Metro bus led to his death, by Rachel Uranga in the Los Angeles Times
Inside Georgia’s crusade to make bail unpayable, by Nia T. Evans in Mother Jones
How a Southern Baptist minister came to lead an LGBTQ-affirming church, by Monica Hesse in The Washington Post
She wanted an abortion. Her only option was driving to Mexico, by Shefali Luthra in The 19th. (Side note: This is an excerpt from Shefali’s new book, Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, out this week! Shefali is a great abortion reporter, and this is a nuanced and deeply reported book.)

Want to have your pet included at the bottom of the next newsletter? Email me: gsegers@tnr.com

This week’s featured pet is Ziggy, a 4-year-old, six and a half pound Yorkshire terrier submitted by Iris Lopez. As evident in this photo, Ziggy hurt his foot while playing “monkey in the middle,” his favorite game (aside from playing fetch in the snow). Iris assures us that his foot is fine now.

Louisiana has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The procedure is banned with very few exceptions, which do not include rape or incest. And yet, legislators there are hard at work trying to further restrict the procedure. This week, they added a provision to an abortion-related bill that would reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances.” This would criminalize possession of the two abortion medications without a prescription. Although pregnant women are exempt from the law, anyone who helps them obtain the medication could be criminally charged. Doctors naturally are worried about the move, not least because the drugs are also commonly used in miscarriage management.

But this bill, like the anti-abortion laws that precede it, may not fully represent the wishes of the state’s residents: A recent survey found that most Louisianans believe the state should allow access to abortion in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

This disparity—which exists across the country, including in conservative states—is the Republicans’ dilemma in a nutshell. GOP-controlled legislatures continue to introduce and enact measures restricting abortion even further, despite the fact that their voters have made clear they want more moderate restrictions.

In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the country has become functionally divided along the lines of abortion access. Fourteen states, most of them in the South, have enacted a total ban on the procedure; seven additional states prohibit abortion at or before 18 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal before the Dobbs decision. Many of the states that have banned abortion continue to attempt to layer further restrictions, such as with measures targeting medication abortion, making it more difficult for minors to obtain contraceptives or abortion care, and funding “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are established by anti-abortion groups to persuade pregnant patients not to obtain an abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion access, this year six laws have been enacted in four states to fund crisis pregnancy centers, and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill to allow the state Health Department to provide pregnancy services through crisis pregnancy centers.

Kimya Forouzan, the principal policy associate for state issues at Guttmacher, also noted that state bills to limit access to abortion for people under 18 are becoming increasingly common. She pointed to a law Idaho enacted in 2023 to penalize nonparent adults who help a minor obtain an abortion, which was blocked by a federal judge. However, four states introduced nearly identical measures this year, with a measure in Tennessee passing in the state legislature. Another law recently upheld in Texas blocked clinics that receive federal funding from providing contraception to minors.

“We know that often there are restrictions that are very targeted toward youth, either as a test to see if the restrictions that they’re placing on youth can also be expanded to everyone, or as a way to prevent abortion for young people in a way that can’t be done for adults,” said Forouzan. Thirty-six states require parental consent or notification for minors to obtain an abortion, which she called a “normalization” of restrictions that “raises alarm bells” for abortion advocates.

Anti-abortion copycat bills have become common, so the new legislation introduced this week in Louisiana may give abortion rights supporters cause for alarm. “It’s really meant to add an additional layer of restriction, and to add an additional layer of stigma and fear, around abortion in general but medication abortion specifically,” said Forouzan about the Louisiana bill.

As Republicans continue to introduce abortion restrictions, Americans have become more supportive of abortion access: A poll by Pew Research Center released this week found that 63 percent of U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 36 percent who believe that it should be illegal in all or most circumstances. Even though conservative Republicans and Republican-leaning voters oppose access to abortion, according to the survey, the majority of moderate and liberal Republicans and Republican-leaning voters believe it should be legal in all or most cases.

The relative popularity of abortion access accounts for the success of recent ballot initiatives to protect it in state constitutions nationwide. This year, abortion-related initiatives are likely to be on the ballot in several red and swing states, such as Arizona, Montana, Florida, South Dakota, and Missouri. The future of abortion access in many states may come down to who has the final say: the state legislature or the voters themselves.

Each week, I provide an update on the vibes surrounding a particular policy or political development. This week: Can Congress get anything done before the election?

With six months left before the election, it’s unclear whether Congress will accomplish anything significant beyond approving must-pass legislation. This is partially a function of timing: Thanks to the summer recess and the vagaries of campaigning, lawmakers will leave Washington for almost the entirety of the months of August and October. But in a deeply divided Congress, where Democrats hold a narrow majority in the Senate and Republicans have tenuous control in the House—not to mention the additional politics of the presidential election—any nonmandatory bipartisan bills may have to wait until the lame-duck session after the election.

Now that the Federal Aviation Administration has been reauthorized, there are few big-ticket items remaining. Aside from funding the government and approving the National Defense Authorization Act—the only real sure things in Congress—most of the serious legislation left to consider is more nice-to-have than need-to-pass. In theory, there is a deadline to approve the farm bill by the end of the year, but disagreements between the upper and lower chambers over its contents are complicating negotiations (stay tuned for my story on the negotiations).

Which is why we’re now seeing a preponderance of “messaging” bills that are less about policy than political gamesmanship. Last week, the House passed the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act. This week, which is “Police Week,” Republicans are trying to put moderate Democrats’ feet to the fire with a resolution condemning the “defund the police” movement.

“I think a reasonable accomplishment is to keep the government open, with this crowd. I don’t see a lot of significant legislative action,” said Democratic Representative Dan Kildee.

However, GOP Representative Dusty Johnson argued that government funding........

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