Also Thursday, the Kurdish-led forces reported an attempted escape from a prison in northeastern Syria that holds IS militants. According to the report, militants first started to riot inside Gerwan Prison in the city of Hassakeh, which houses about 3,000 prisoners.

Since, the Kurdish authorities have asked countries to repatriate their nationals, saying keeping thousands in crammed facilities is putting a strain on their forces. Prison riots are not uncommon.

The proposed deal illustrates the complex national-security issues in the U.S. relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally and regional power that hosts thousands of American soldiers.

“The United States and Turkey have longstanding and deep bilateral defense ties, and Turkey’s continued NATO interoperability remains a priority,” a State Department spokesman said. Several NATO member states fly F-16s, including Turkey.

The S-400 purchase drove a rift between the two countries that has resisted repair. Mr. Cevik said the country hasn’t yet deployed the missile batteries, though Mr. Erdogan has said he wants to buy more.

The deal faces significant skepticism among key senators who object to Turkey’s purchase of the Russian missile system, according to congressional aides. The leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sens. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and James Risch (R., Idaho), have yet to take public positions on the deal.

“Our concern is, if we’re giving them military equipment, if they are going to be continuing to act in this aggressive manner towards Cyprus, toward the Greek islands,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.). “We’re concerned about our intellectual property being shared with Russia. [Turkey] is acting in many ways like an adversary.”

British sanctions over Turkey’s incursion into Syria would hinder Ankara’s purchase of the Eurofighter Typhoon, and France is unlikely to approve a sale of its Dassault Rafale fighters, in part because it sold planes to Turkey’s rival Greece last year, said Mr. Forrester.

“They may go to the Russians,” Mr. Jeffrey, the former ambassador, said. “And then you’ll have a descending spiral of accusations and bad feelings, and it will just reinforce going in the wrong direction. That’s why the F-16 is so important.”

Now, much of the country is facing poverty and starvation: In December, the World Food Program (WFP) found that 98 percent of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, and Guterres warned this month that “we are in a race against time to help the Afghan people.”

In the aftermath of the US withdrawal, many Afghans working as interpreters, aid workers, prosecutors, professors, and journalists suddenly lost their positions and their incomes, and many have been forced into hiding, further hampering their ability to provide even the most basic necessities — blankets, food, fuel, and medicine — for their families.

Many of Afghanistan’s current problems are intimately connected to the US withdrawal from the country last year, and the Taliban’s ensuing takeover of the central government. Since then, US sanctions and an abrupt end to international aid have wrecked Afghanistan’s economy and sent it spiraling into crisis.

The US and the UN have made some concessions to allow humanitarian aid to operate outside the auspices of the Taliban; the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) granted some licenses to aid groups to operate in Afghanistan without running afoul of of financial restrictions on certain individuals and institutions in the country.

“Sanctions are intended to have a chilling effect, in that sanctions will always go beyond the face of the text,”

So far, however, no policy shift has been forthcoming. As of earlier this month, the US has pledged an additional $308 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but the Afghan central bank reserves remain frozen.

And while Afghanistan’s current crisis isn’t wholly caused by external factors — even without sanctions by the US and its allies, the Taliban’s inability to manage the bureaucracy of government would have created issues, as would the pandemic and a severe drought that began in June last year — US actions do play a substantial role.

The chilling effect of sanctions is keeping businesses and banks from actually engaging with the economy. As House Democrats pointed out in their letter last month, relatively simple steps — like issuing letters to international businesses assuring them that they are not violating US sanctions — could help alleviate the crisis and shore up the Afghan private sector, but Treasury has yet to do so.

In the meantime, however, the Taliban will hold talks this coming week with Western nations, including Norway, Britain, the US, Italy, France, and Germany, about humanitarian aid. The talks should not be seen as a legitimization of Taliban rule, Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt stressed to AFP on Friday, “but we must talk to the de facto authorities in the country. We cannot allow the political situation to lead to an even worse humanitarian disaster.”

A Taliban intelligence official in western Herat told the Associated Press that the bomb was attached to the van’s fuel tank. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to release the information to the public.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Saturday called on the Taliban to find two women rights activists — Tamana Zaryab Paryani and Parawana Ibrahimkhel — who disappeared on Wednesday from Kabul.

The women rights activist posted a video on social media shortly before they were taken away, showing them frightened, breathless and screaming for help. She said that Taliban were banging on her door.

Paryani was among about 25 women who took part in an anti-Taliban protest last weekend against the compulsory Islamic headscarf, or hijab, for women.

The coalition launched an offensive in 2015 to restore Yemen's internationally recognized government after it was ousted by the Houthis. The coalition has intensified its attacks in the wake of a deadly Houthi missile and drone strike in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi earlier this week.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday it was "deeply concerned about the intensification of hostilities" and "deplores the human toll this escalation has caused." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called for deescalation.

"The escalation in fighting only exacerbates a dire humanitarian crisis and the suffering of the Yemeni people,

"From what I hear from my colleague in Sa'ada there are many bodies still at the scene of the airstrike, many missing people," said Ahmad Mahat, head of the MSF mission in Yemen. "It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence."

"victory for the rule of law and American democracy"

Trump had mounted an intense effort to avoid such scrutiny and had already lost cases in district and appellate courts as part of a broad campaign of obstruction of the committee, which has included expansive executive privilege claims by ex-aides -- even some, like his populist political guru Steve Bannon, who were not serving White House officials at the time of the insurrection.

The Supreme Court did not rule on the key legal question of what happens when there is a dispute between a current and a former president on the scope of executive privilege -- a concept meant to ensure that advice to a commander in chief from subordinates can stay private. But it allowed to stand a ruling by the appellate court that found Trump had not demonstrated that his concerns for executive branch confidentiality should override "profound interests in disclosure" cited by Biden.

Wednesday's ruling, in which only conservative Justice Clarence Thomas signaled dissent, will also offer a new mark of legitimacy to the select committee, amid claims by pro-Trump Republicans that it is an illegally constituted witch hunt despite being voted into being by the House. It will also boost the committee's race against time as it tries to complete its work before a possible new Republican majority shuts it down.

The net has significantly tightened around the Trump White House in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, CNN exclusively reported that the committee had subpoenaed and obtained phone number records from one of the ex-President's sons, Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to his brother, Donald Trump Jr. The committee is interested in investigating the level of coordination between Trump's team and organizers of the Washington rally at which the then-President told supporters who later moved to the Capitol to "fight like hell" to stop Congress from certifying Biden's election win.

it appears unlikely to meaningfully reshape the fraught politics of the insurrection. Swathes of the Republican Party, especially in the House, have done their best to whitewash Trump's role that day as he contemplates a possible comeback presidential bid in 2024.

There is no doubt, however, that Trump will be apoplectic that his three Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not publicly dissent from denying his bid to keep his West Wing records secret.

Trump has repeatedly slammed the Supreme Court for throwing out his false claims of election fraud, claiming he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice even though his delusional cases were also dismissed by multiple lower courts.

Throughout his presidency, Trump appeared to equate judicial and Cabinet nominations with an act of patronage, viewing those selected as owing him a debt that would be repaid by pursuing his interests rather than honoring the rule of law and the Constitution.

The gathering clouds around Trump would represent a grave legal and reputational risk to a normal politician, but given his talent for impunity, it's far from certain that they will slow his political aspirations.

Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “

Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.

Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.

The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.

Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”

They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.

Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.

But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.

But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.

So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.

The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.

They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.

Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?

The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?

Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.

I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.

In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.

and he refused.

Wednesday was like no day I can recall in the history of the court, opening as it did with a “joint statement” released by Gorsuch and Sotomayor in which the two announced that the “reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends.”

“I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench,” and further affirmed that Roberts would have no additional comment. In other words, everyone has clarified that Gorsuch refuses to mask, that Sotomayor cannot come to court, and that nobody has asked him to do otherwise, but also that there is nothing to see here, kindly move along.

as NPR stands behind its story, conservatives claim that NPR is lying, and liberals claim that the issue isn’t who said what, so much as one justice refusing to make the workplace safe for a colleague.

whether Gorsuch is a monster or a libertarian hero is kind of unknowable without more information and also kind of irrelevant. I just wanted the court to tell us what their public health rules were, and when, and if the justices declined to abide by their own rules, to explain why.

Mike Davis—a minor player in the push to confirm Donald Trump’s judges and, more importantly, a former clerk and current friend of Gorsuch. Davis criticized the NPR story on Fox News on Wednesday. He was quick to condemn Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post and Nina Totenberg at NPR for, he claimed, intentionally spreading misinformation to smear Gorsuch.

The Supreme Court spent a bunch of money to upgrade the air filtration system, and for months, all nine Justices sat through these oral arguments, eight of them without masks. It was not an issue. Justice Sotomayor wore a mask, the other eight didn’t. And so two Fridays ago for some reason, the science somehow changed for the two COVID [mandate] cases, and Gorsuch didn’t want to play along with that. He wasn’t going to play politics. So he continued to do what he did for the prior months and not wear his mask.

Gorsuch believes that to wear a mask in January if you were not wearing one in November is to “play politics,” rather to respond directly to the evolving situation that is the coronavirus pandemic. Which means, one must also infer, that Justices like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas are “playing politics” by wearing masks now when they didn’t do so before. This is deeply strange not just because it denies that “the science changed” around omicron (it did). It’s deeply strange in that he expressly links the change in the court’s masking policy to the public oral arguments in the vaccine-or-test cases, suggesting that the two are somehow related, rather than simply coinciding in time.

His argument, ostensibly on behalf of Gorsuch—that the decision of justices to don masks this month is all gratuitous virtue signaling about an imaginary spike in a pandemic that coincides with oral arguments on the topic—is actually one of the most damning things I’ve read all week. He isn’t saying Gorsuch wants to infect his colleague. He seems to be saying that, the science notwithstanding, masks don’t make a lick of difference and everyone aside from himself is buckling to the creeping evil of the Fauci state.

Imagine if everyone had simply put on a mask for a few weeks, not because the science was perfect, but out of respect for a colleague they loudly claim to adore.

Gorsuch still isn’t wearing a mask, and Sotomayor is still phoning in from the safety of her chambers. Call it “playing politics,” but in another time, demonstrating out of an abundance of caution some regard for your colleagues’ health—without being asked—would have merely been “leadership,” or “empathy,” or even “humility.”  That other time is long gone. We are all of us scorpions in a bottle now.

Mr. Sarwari said hundreds of houses had been destroyed in impoverished areas in the Qadis District, in the southern part of the province. Men, women and children were killed, many of whom had been inside the buildings.

the death toll would most likely rise significantly, because many families were still buried under the rubble.

The first quake struck just after 2 p.m. local time, east of the city of Qala-e-Naw, the capital of a province that the Taliban swept through in July on the way to capturing Kabul in August. It registered a magnitude of 4.9, according to the United States Geological Survey. The second struck about two hours later six miles away, registering a magnitude of 5.3.

For civilians in Afghanistan, earthquakes have added to the misery of living through a war that has gone on for years. There have been several earthquakes in recent weeks along Afghanistan’s eastern borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan, data from the U.S. Geological Survey show. Most were magnitude 5 or less.

The economic crisis is everywhere. In December, bread lines stretched around the corner. And as the Turkish lira plunged, Turks around the country rushed to change money into U.S. dollars.

But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says it's part of his plan.

The economic pain runs deep. Extensive borrowing and previous interest rate cuts were already driving up prices. But analysts say Erdogan's recent medicine is making the country sicker. Under his pressure, since September, Turkey's Central Bank slashed interest rates four times.

Soner Cagaptay, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Anyone who took econ 101 in college would know, if your inflation climbs up, interest rates have to follow that. Erdogan is doing the opposite.

He says Erdogan's motivation is difficult to know, but, in the last few months of 2021, the lira lost almost half of its value, in December, 18.4 for $1. And a weak lira can boost tourism and Turkish exports.

Erdogan is maybe trying to create what is called growth out of contraction. In other words, let the economy crash and burn, and that will make Turkish exports very affordable, because the lira has lost its value, and the country will have a restored growth driven by strong export sector and also demand for Turkish tourism and services.

There are some signs of increased tourism. Last month, Bulgarians by the busload arrived in Istanbul to buy cheap groceries and bargain bazaar Christmas gifts.And Erdogan says exports are at an all-time high. Turkish authorities have also raised the minimum wage by 50 percent. And a new plan pays Turks to keep their bank deposits in lira. But the depreciation is still large, as is the anger. In November, protesters called for the government to resign and the police to back down.

If Erdogan does not restore economic growth, he's not going to win the next elections in 2023. We're going to see the country's economic resilience pushed back, and also a more unified opposition.

At this stage, I think the only way for him to stick to power — it looks like he's not going to be able to restore strong economic growth — is by becoming more autocratic only.

Ms. James’s filing argued that the company misstated the value of the properties to lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service. Many of the statements, the filing argued, were “generally inflated as part of a pattern to suggest that Mr. Trump’s net worth was higher than it otherwise would have appeared.”

After receiving the subpoenas, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt Ms. James’s civil investigation and to bar her office from participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation.

Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she can sue Mr. Trump and his company but cannot file criminal charges. Her inquiry is running parallel to a criminal investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, which is examining some of the same conduct.

Ms. James already questioned another of Mr. Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, in October 2020. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in response to more than 500 questions, the new court filing said.

“Three years later, she is now faced with the stark reality that she has no case,” the spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

A case could be hard to prove. Property valuations are often subjective, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers are likely to note that his lenders and insurers — sophisticated financial institutions that turned a profit off their relationship with the Trumps — did not rely on the company’s estimates.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump Organization, engaged in criminal fraud by intentionally submitting false property values to potential lenders.

The Atlanta district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation of election interference in Georgia by Mr. Trump and his allies.

In 2015, for example, while seeking to refinance a loan on his 40 Wall Street tower in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s statement of financial condition estimated that the property was worth $735 million. Yet one lender concluded it was worth only $257 million.

Ms. James’s lawyers also argued that Mr. Trump submitted at least two misleading statements to the Internal Revenue Service, saying that he substantially overstated the value of land at both his Seven Springs Estate in Westchester County and his Los Angeles Golf Club. The value of Seven Springs, Ms. James said, had been boosted by counting the value of seven nonexistent mansions, said to be worth $61 million. Mr. Trump received tax deductions worth millions of dollars on both properties.

Mr. Weisselberg, the filing contends, also falsely told one of Mr. Trump’s insurance companies that the property valuations were based on assessments by professional appraisers, when that was not the case. In reality, “the valuations were prepared by Trump Organization staff,” the filing said.

Gorsuch, from the beginning of his tenure, has proved a prickly justice, not exactly beloved even by his conservative soulmates on the court.

"somebody who takes pleasure tearing the wings off flies," he said, provoking loud snickers on the bench.

something out of the ordinary is happening.

Noting that 15 justices over 50 years have reaffirmed the basic framework of Roe, and only four have dissented, she asked this pointed question: "Will this institution survive the stench that this [turnaround] creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?"

They often agree on the outcome of a case but not the legal reasoning, with Chief Justice Roberts sometimes trying to rein in the court's most aggressive conservatives.

the court in the 1940s, when the justices detested each other so much they were known as "nine scorpions in a bottle." We are not scorpions, Kagan and Sotomayor said.

"The only way we get people to do what we say that they should do is because people respect us and respect out fairness,"

At the same time, many of the conservatives are vying for the position of intellectual leader of the conservative majority, while the chief justice privately worries about going too far too fast.

Many of the justices on the court in the 1940s were very famous; they were household names; they were from very different professional backgrounds, both political and legal. In contrast, the justices today have had very similar careers; they were and are largely unknown to the public as individuals. And while they initially got on reasonably well, says Feldman, two things are happening to change that.

historic opportunity to reverse some liberal decisions that their whole movement grew out of hating, with Roe v. Wade the most famous."

you're seeing fissures in the conservative legal movement based on its success."

"fainthearted originalist" and "what he meant by that was that he was an originalist, but not if it meant overturning some of the things that have existed for a long time, like the administrative state."

They are "come-what-may originalists," says Feldman, "while others are more moderate and reasonable in their exercise of originalism."

Conservatives are united on hot-button issues

"The conservatives are playing with fire."

"as it looks like it probably will, it will be doing something the Supreme Court has never done ... in its history, and that is, reverse a fundamental right that ordinary people have enjoyed for 50 years, and say, 'Whoops, ... you never really had this right at all." The court, he maintains, "has never turned back the clock of liberty in that way before."

"I don't think it will happen through the drip, drip drip," he says. "I think it will happen through the tsunami. But I also think that overturning Roe v. Wade ... could well turn out to be the beginning of that tsunami."

That playbook is how Washington typically tries to punish objectionable regimes. But the result has been catastrophic for civilians.

Isolation was fast and easy to do: It cost no money or political capital and satisfied the imperative of expressing disapproval.

But these steps are insufficient.

Funding for emergency aid delivered by the United Nations and humanitarian organizations has grown, with Washington providing the largest share, nearly $474 million in 2021. The U.S. government also has gradually broadened humanitarian carve-outs from its sanctions and has taken the lead in getting the Security Council to issue exemptions from U.N. sanctions, making it easier for those delivering aid to carry out their work without legal risk.

The United States should draw a distinction between the Taliban as former insurgents and the state they now control.

It will help curb growing migration from the country and rising illicit narcotics production by Afghans desperate for income. It could also produce at least limited opportunity for getting the Taliban to cooperate with the United States to suppress terrorist threats from the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan and other groups.

And appearing to turn a blind eye to the Taliban’s past and current human rights violations is deeply unappealing.

But I’ve seen over the past two decades how Western powers have consistently overestimated their ability to get Afghan authorities — whoever they are — to acquiesce to their demands. Governments that were utterly dependent on U.S. security and financial support brushed off pressure to adopt Washington’s preferred peacemaking, war-fighting and anti-corruption strategies.

The Taliban are never going to have a policy on women’s rights that accords with Western values. They show no signs of embracing even limited forms of democratic governance.

But the alternative is worse, foremost for the Afghans who have no choice but to live under Taliban rule and who need livelihoods.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of a new economic plan, promising to turn around the decline. But instead, that announcement, including a promise to lower interest rates despite high inflation, set off the country’s worst currency crisis in two decades.

“You cannot win a fight against us.”

They survived the pandemic — Bilal was on half pay for a while, but the government made up the other half.

Turkey went through a similar economic downturn at the millennium. But then, under Mr. Erdogan, who came to power in 2003, the country enjoyed about a decade of uninterrupted growth, giving many Turks a taste of the middle-class lifestyle.

Economists say, however, that there has been a steady erosion of confidence in Mr. Erdogan’s stewardship of the economy as he has grown more authoritarian, intervened in the workings of the Central Bank, which is supposed to set interest rates independent of political pressure, and undermined the rule of law.

urkey was trying to ward off a recession caused by mountainous debt, steep losses in the value of the lira and rising inflation.

As the lira’s slide continues, sporadic protests have broken out around Turkey and the opposition parties have called for a series of rallies to demand a change of government. Scores of people have been detained for joining street protests.

acing an election in 2023 and sliding in opinion polls, Mr. Erdogan has doubled down on his financial approach and seems convinced that his strategy will enable the economy to grow out of its problems. Most economists, however, say a crash is more likely.

Ms. Sinema has been under pressure from her colleagues to drop her opposition to a rules change, but her refusal to reverse course appeared to doom the bills in the Senate.

the House approved the new measure on a party-line vote of 220 to 203 after a heated partisan debate in which lawmakers clashed over the state of election laws across the country.

Democrats said the legislation was urgently needed to offset efforts taking hold in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after Democratic gains in the 2020 elections and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the vote was stolen.

“There are people who don’t want you to vote and they are using every tool in the toolbox to make it harder,”

Democrats of “hijacking” the space agency measure to push through legislation that they said represented federal intrusion into state voting operations to give an unfair advantage to Democratic candidates.

The administration estimated that it would cause 22 million people to get vaccinated and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations.

The employer mandate would have required workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or to wear masks and be tested weekly, though employers were not required to pay for the testing.

the court’s conservative majority seemed doubtful that the administration had congressional authorization to impose the requirements.

It would affect more than 17 million workers, the administration said, and would “save hundreds or even thousands of lives each month.”

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld state vaccine mandates in a variety of settings against constitutional challenges. The new cases are different, as they primarily present the question of whether Congress has authorized the executive branch to institute the requirements.

most “likely lacks congressional authority” to impose the vaccine-or-testing requirement.

First, let's be clear that the Court could and likely will decide the SB8 case without saying anything about the continuing vitality of the abortion right. That's easy to see if a majority holds on procedural grounds that neither the U.S. nor the abortion providers (in the companion case) can bring suit for injunctive relief. If the federal court plaintiffs lack standing or a cause of action, or if the Court holds that state court judges are not proper party-defendants, or that for injunctive relief to be effective it must--but is not permitted to--run against private non-parties, then the Texas law will remain in effect pending resolution in state court and a possible eventual return to the US Supreme Court posing the question whether a six-week ban is permissible on the merits.

For the U.S. and/or the abortion providers to win, at least one of the Justices who might vote to overrule Roe v. Wade in Dobbs would need to nonetheless allow a challenge to SB8 to go forward. Why would they do so? Perhaps they'll see the case in purely procedural terms. If the stakes were lower, it would be relatively easy to imagine any Justice thinking Case X is ripe for overruling but until we overrule it, state legislatures must abide by it.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that that happens--say that next month the Court rules 5-4 that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to lift the preliminary injunction in the DOJ case. Then suppose that a different 5-4 majority or a 6-3 majority rules in late June that the Mississippi law is constitutional but that they're not deciding whether to overrule Roe (even though they would have de facto overruled much of Roe). At that point the news coverage would indeed likely be muddled. Is there still a constitutional right to abortion? When? Where? Pro-choice activists might have a harder time mobilizing voters based on Dobbs if there is also floating around the notion that the Supreme Court had invalidated the Texas law just a few months before--even though that would have been only a procedural holding.

(2) Quite apart from the substance, the procedural grounds for reinstating the injunction are strong. I acknowledge that there are genuine questions of standing, causes of action, remedy, proper defendants, and more, but the bottom line for me is fairly straightforward: As I argue in the column, the case fundamentally presents a question whether states and other government actors can use trickery to evade their constitutional obligations. Tax law has a substance-over-form principle that should be universal. Texas has made no secret of the fact that it crafted SB8's trapdoors with the clear purpose of preventing lawsuits and thus chilling the exercise of a constitutional right. Permitting this kind of evasion and defiance will invite more.

“S.B. 8 was designed to nullify this court’s precedents and to shield that nullification from judicial review,” wrote Brian H. Fletcher, the acting solicitor general, in the federal government’s brief. “So far, it has worked: The threat of a flood of S.B. 8 suits has effectively eliminated abortion in Texas at a point before many women even realize they are pregnant, denying a constitutional right the court has recognized for half a century.”

The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, and people who help pay for the procedure or drive patients to it are all potential defendants. Plaintiffs do not need to live in Texas, have any connection to the abortion or show any injury from it, and they are entitled to at least $10,000 and their legal fees if they win. Defendants who win their cases are not entitled to legal fees.

“Where, as here, a state enacts a blatantly unconstitutional statute, assigns enforcement authority to everyone in the world and weaponizes the state judiciary to obstruct those courts’ ability to protect constitutional rights,” the brief said, “the federal courts must be available to provide relief.”

The law effectively deputizes ordinary citizens — including those from outside Texas — allowing them to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, filed a single brief in both cases, arguing that neither the federal government nor the providers were entitled to sue. The right way to challenge the law, Mr. Paxton said, was for abortion providers to violate it, be sued in state court, and present constitutional or other arguments as defenses.

“If Texas is right, no decision of this court is safe,” he wrote in his brief. “States need not comply with, or even challenge, precedents with which they disagree. They may simply outlaw the exercise of whatever constitutional rights they disfavor; disclaim enforcement by state officials; and delegate the state’s enforcement authority to members of the general public by empowering and incentivizing them to bring a multitude of harassing actions threatening ruinous liability — or, at a minimum, prohibitive litigation costs.”

The court has repeatedly said people don’t need to violate a law in order to challenge its constitutionality.

If no one can bring a suit challenging a state law authorizing civil suits, then states can adopt laws creating liability for the exercise of any constitutional right. As a consequence, states could, for example, adopt a law authorizing suits against those performing same-sex weddings, even though there’s a constitutional right to marriage equality.

Therefore, the issue of whether to overrule Roe v. Wade is not directly before the court on Monday. The two cases to be argued that day are both about who, if anyone, can challenge a state law that authorizes civil suits for exercising a constitutional right.

The two cases to be heard by the court on Monday thus raise the question of whether a state can adopt an unconstitutional law and immunize it from being enjoined by any court.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of what will be argued next week, which is ultimately about whether a state can flout the Constitution. If no one can sue to enjoin an unconstitutional law, what is left of the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law?

The first is that many Americans who have begun to embrace the evangelical identity are people who hardly ever attend religious services. For instance, in 2008, just 16 percent of all self-identified evangelicals reported their church attendance as never or seldom. But in 2020, that number jumped to 27 percent. In 2008, about a third of evangelicals who never attended church said they were politically conservative. By 2019, that had risen to about 50 percent.

The second factor bolstering evangelicalism on surveys is that more people are embracing the label who have no attachment to Protestant Christianity.

White evangelicalism has never been more politically unified than it is right now. In the 1970s, only 40 percent of white weekly churchgoing evangelicals identified as Republicans; in the most recent data, that number has risen to an all-time high of 70 percent.