The Nation

AFTER MORE THAN THREE YEARS, TITLE 42—A POLICY THAT ALLOWED IMMIGRATION officers to return migrants they encountered at the border with Mexico without a hearing, thereby shutting hundreds of thousands out of the asylum system—has ended. The Biden administration didn’t rescind Title 42 because of a desire to rebuild the asylum process, but because it had to. The statute authorizing the border closure is part of the Public Health Service Act. Once Biden lifted the Covid-related emergency declarations, the pretext for Title 42 disappeared. Instead of a return to the pre-pandemic status quo, however, the end of Title 42 has ushered in a labyrinthine set of new regulations, many of which are right out of Trump’s playbook. In order to qualify for asylum, migrants must now make an appointment with Customs…

JOE BIDEN’S REELECTION CAMPAIGN ISN’T GOING well. Since announcing his bid for a second term in April, the president’s poll numbers have remained dismal. RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls gives him a 41.4 percent approval rating among likely voters, while 53.8 percent disapprove. And it won’t necessarily get better when Biden is in a two-person race against a MAGA Republican. The overall RCP average of recent polls currently has Biden trailing former president Donald Trump by 1.4 points, while a mid-May Harvard CAPS/Harris survey put the incumbent down by seven points against the indicted Republican. An early May ABC News/Washington Post poll had Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading Biden by five points. These numbers should be a clear wake-up call. Biden’s been a better president than most progressives expected, and he’s…

IN EARLY MAY, TEXAS RESIDENT GABRIELLA GONZALEZ traveled to Colorado for abortion care. The journey out of state is a familiar one for Texans, who have lived under a draconian six-week abortion ban since 2021, well before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, as well as a criminal “trigger law” that imposes up to life in prison for providers since last August. Like so many before her, the 26-year-old mother of three was forced to leave her home state for health care. Upon her return, Gonzalez’s 22-year-old ex-boyfriend Harold Thompson—who is believed to have impregnated her and did not approve of her abortion—sought revenge. During an argument at a gas station in Dallas the morning after she returned, Thompson placed her in a choke hold and then…

THE DRUMBEAT FOR SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN TO resign has reached a kind of dull fever pitch. Aside from the open secret of her cognitive decline, the California Democrat was “working from home” for three months straight due to shingles, holding up President Biden’s judicial nominees in Washington, D.C., at a time when women are dying like it’s 1973 all over again. Now Feinstein is back in the Senate, looking and sounding completely decrepit. There’s absolutely nothing feminist about defending her nonexistent “right” to remain in office, no matter what Kirsten Gillibrand tries to argue on CNN. Yet there is a double standard at work here, and leftist men in particular would do well to check themselves. At 89, Feinstein is the oldest sitting US senator, first elected to local office before…

WHEN LIBERALS WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY, they have Technicolor nightmares: the orange oaf inciting an attack on the Capitol by his red-cap-wearing MAGA minions, including the QAnon shaman with his ridiculous stars-and-stripes facial makeup. But the threat to democracy is multipronged and doesn’t always come in vibrant hues. Trump’s most thuggish supporters represent the street-fighting wing of the right. But as much as the goons unleashed a level of violence unseen in national politics in decades, they also proved politically ineffectual. The January 6, 2021, insurrection was successfully thwarted; Joe Biden was duly inaugurated; the majority of the public was horrified by Donald Trump’s antics; the January 6 committee provided a narrative that blamed Trump and cemented the popular consensus; and the Democrats have successfully used the memory of…

FLORIDA GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS, WHO WAS planning to launch his presidential campaign as this issue of The Nation went to press, is accruing leadership credentials in a party that no longer exists. DeSantis has used his supermajority in the Florida Legislature to launch a head-spinning array of salvos in the right-wing culture wars—from an anti-trans surveillance regime in public schools and rolling book bans to an improbable assault on Disney as the avatar of all things woke. But even as DeSantis has been polishing up his inquisitorial résumé, he’s been hemorrhaging support among the conservative movement faithful. Some of that slippage may be due to DeSantis’s defiantly anti-charismatic stump performances, or a reaction to the sort of executive overreach that comes with a state government’s steady transformation into an ideological plaything.…