Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.

Sunday, March 22, 2026

The Trump administration kills children abroad while being ‘pro-life’ at home | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

The Trump administration kills children abroad while being ‘pro-life’ at home | Arwa Mahdawi

How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.

In Lebanon, a US-backed Israel is killing or wounding a classroom’s worth of children every day, Unicef’s deputy executive director told Reuters. That’s just after killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza in two years, all with the help of US taxpayer dollars.

Classrooms full of massacred children sounds pretty shocking to any normal person. But remember, when it comes to the Middle East, the situation is always complicated. Certainly, our lawmakers aren’t losing any sleep over dead brown kids.

“I’m willing to live with that report,” Donald Trump shrugged after being informed the US was responsible for bombing an elementary school in Iran. And, to be fair, dead American schoolchildren don’t seem to bother many of our politicians much either; not enough to do anything about school shootings anyway.

No, the lives that really matter for the party of family values, as we all know, are the ones that haven’t actually started yet. Ever since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, emboldened anti-abortion extremists have been doing everything they can to punish any woman who so much thinks about ending a pregnancy.

In the two years after Roe fell, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with pregnancy-related crimes, the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.

The latest alarming example of this ongoing crusade to criminalize abortion comes from Georgia, where 31-year-old Alexia Moore was recently charged with murder after allegedly taking pills to induce an illegal termination.

If prosecutors move forward with the charge brought by local police, it will be one of the first cases of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions after around six weeks. (A woman was charged in 2015 with murder after inducing an abortion by taking pills but that was later dropped.) Women in states including Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky have also faced criminal charges for inducing abortions.

The details of Moore’s case are not completely clear. But, according to court records, Moore went to hospital in December with severe pain. Moore told medical staff that she’d taken the opioid painkiller oxycodone and misoprostol, a medication that, along with mifepristone, is commonly known as the abortion pill. She then gave birth to a premature fetus who was suffering from health issues and died within a couple of hours. Moore was not charged with a crime until last week, and is currently in jail without bond.

Again: a lot of the details of this case are not clear including how many weeks pregnant Moore was. According to one arrest warrant, Moore allegedly told a friend she believed she was within a 14-week time frame. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that the fetus was 22-to-24 weeks along. Still, while some details are murky, one thing is clear: nobody should be charged with murder for having an abortion.

Another thing that we can say for certain: making it practically impossible to have a safe and legal abortion doesn’t result in fewer abortions. Privileged women will go abroad to seek care, and desperate women will risk their lives and health trying to get terminations.

One can certainly argue that it was unwise for Moore to take misoprostol outside of the 10-week window approved by the FDA, but she may have found herself without many other options. Georgia makes abortion illegal after cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy.

Talking about “six weeks of pregnancy” is also misleading. Medical professionals date pregnancy from the first day of your last period rather than the date of conception. So being six weeks pregnant means the embryo is actually only around four weeks old. Many women have no idea they’re pregnant then because it’s only a couple of weeks after a missed period, and not everyone has regular periods.

As for that cardiac activity these so-called heartbeat bills are based on? While talking about a fetal heartbeat is emotive, they are sporadic electric impulses rather than anything you’d recognize as a heart. The Guardian has published some very illuminating photos of pregnancies before 10 weeks: there are no tiny fetuses, just microscopic tissue.

In short: if you need to terminate a pregnancy in Georgia, or another state with a similarly dystopian abortion ban, you have almost no time to do it safely and legally. You are still allowed to leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere if you can afford to travel – but several Republican-led states are trying to crack down on that as well.

Increasingly, you’re either forced to carry a pregnancy that might kill you, have a child that you are unable to care for, or be thrown in prison for trying to find a way out. The land of the free, eh? Perhaps instead of bombing Iran to “liberate” people from an autocratic religious regime, the US could try liberation closer to home.

Republican senator helpfully explains he’s ‘married to a married woman’

Senate Republicans are working overtime this weekend to try and pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (Save America Act), which Trump has called “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself”. He’s not entirely wrong there: if the Save America Act passes it would make it much harder for certain groups, including married women, to vote. On Thursday, Republican senator Rick Scott dismissed concerns that the legislation’s new paperwork requirements would make voting difficult for women who changed their names after marriage. “They say: ‘Married women, it’s gonna disenfranchise married women,’” Scott said. “I’m married to a married woman. I have two daughters that are married … They can figure this out. So, any Democrat that says that women can’t figure this out, they’re stupid.” Thanks for that, senator.

Be careful who you go hiking with

There have been a string of recent stories about men ditching their female partners while hiking together, leading TikTok to coin the phrase “alpine divorce”.

One of Trump’s buddies asked Ice to detain the mother of his child

Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who is now a special envoy of the President, has been in a longstanding custody battle with his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, Amanda Ungaro. The New York Times reported on Friday that, after Ungaro was arrested on fraud charges, Zampoli reached out to Ice agents and ensured she was put in detention and then deported.

Israeli police kill two young Palestinian boys and their parents in West Bank

The Israeli police shot a mother, father, a five-year-old boy, and a seven-year-old boy in the head and face while they were driving back from shopping for Eid. The Guardian writes: “Asked what threat was posed by four young children and their unarmed parents, or whether the shooting violated Israeli rules of engagement, the police and military declined to comment.”

A ‘Pints and Ponytails’ class teaches dads how to braid their daughters’ hair

They should expand this very wholesome class to include mums who can’t braid hair. Whenever I try to style my four-year-old’s hair, she gives me a failing grade and demands that her other mother do it instead.

The week in pawtriarchy

You’ve heard about the bull in a china shop, but what about the possum in a gift shop? Travellers browsing a souvenir store at Hobart airport in Australia this week were surprised to see a real life possum hiding out among a row of stuffed animals. The marsupial was escorted out of the airport before any tourists could take it home. This is not the first time something like this has happened at Hobart airport: a snake and an echidna have been rescued from the runway in recent years. Australia really is wild.

The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

"How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.

In the two years after Roe fell, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with pregnancy-related crimes, the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.

Republican senator helpfully explains he’s ‘married to a married woman’

Be careful who you go hiking with

There have been a string of recent stories about men ditching their female partners while hiking together, leading TikTok to coin the phrase “alpine divorce”.

One of Trump’s buddies asked Ice to detain the mother of his child

Israeli police kill two young Palestinian boys and their parents in West Bank

A ‘Pints and Ponytails’ class teaches dads how to braid their daughters’ hair

The week in pawtriarchy

The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live"

The Trump administration kills children abroad while being ‘pro-life’ at home | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian

Israel Orders Military to Intensify Demolitions in Southern Lebanon - The New York Times

Israel Orders Military to Intensify Demolitions in Southern Lebanon

"Defense Minister Israel Katz instructed troops to destroy more bridges and buildings in southern Lebanon, stoking worries that Israel could expand a military-controlled buffer zone there.

March 22, 2026Updated 10:29 a.m. ET

Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, in Greece in January. Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters

The Israeli defense minister said Sunday that he had ordered the military to step up its destruction of bridges and houses in southern Lebanon, adding to fears over Israel’s plans in its offensive against Hezbollah that has already killed more than 1,000 people and displaced over a million in Lebanon.

Israel Katz, the defense minister, said in a statement on Sunday that he had instructed Israeli forces to destroy more bridges that cross the Litani River in southern Lebanon. He charged that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group, was using them to bring reinforcements to the south to fight Israel.

The routes are also used by Lebanese civilians, including by people seeking to flee to the north for safety. The new orders have added to fears that Israel is seeking to essentially cut off swaths of southern Lebanon from the rest of the country.

The military had also been ordered to demolish buildings in some towns close to the border with Israel, Mr. Katz added. He suggested that the soldiers would clear the area “along the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” two Gazan cities which were largely razed by Israeli forces during the two-year war with Hamas, the Iranian-backed group in the Palestinian enclave.

More than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed in the Israeli offensive and over a million have been displaced, according to the Lebanese government. The Israeli military has bombarded sites across the country, including in the center of Beirut, the capital.

Israeli forces have been instructed to “immediately destroy all of the bridges over the Litani that are being used for terrorist purposes,” Mr. Katz said.

Israeli soldiers have already been advancing in southern Lebanon as part of an effort to create a military-controlled buffer zone. Many Lebanese fear that the Israeli assault could lead to a new occupation in parts of southern Lebanon, which Israel controlled for about two decades before withdrawing in 2000.

Israel’s long-simmering conflict with Hezbollah has ignited into full-blown war multiple times over the past two and a half years amid the broader crisis in the Middle East.

After a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited the devastating war in Gaza, Hezbollah began shooting rockets and drones at Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian allies. The fighting escalated the following year.

Israel killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2024 and forced the group to accept a cease-fire. Despite the truce, Israel continued to bomb Hezbollah fighters, leaders, and military sites in an effort to degrade the group’s forces. Badly battered by the fighting, Hezbollah did not respond militarily, although its officials threatened to do so.

After Israel and the United States attacked Iran last month and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the longtime Iranian ruler, Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at Israel. The Israeli military retaliated with a wide-scale military campaign, including airstrikes across the country and a ground offensive.

Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem."

Israel Orders Military to Intensify Demolitions in Southern Lebanon - The New York Times

The Supreme Court Could Make It Harder to Vote by Mail in the Midterms

"The Republican National Committee wants to toss ballots arriving after Election Day. Critics say thousands of votes — a majority cast by Democrats — are at stake.

March 22, 2026Updated 10:56 a.m. ET

The Supreme Court in Washington. Watson v. Republican National Committee will be the subject of oral arguments on Monday.Al Drago for The New York Times

A case about mail voting that will be the subject of oral arguments before the Supreme Court Monday in some ways boils down to a simple question. What is the definition of Election Day?

But the potential political consequences of the case, which was brought by allies of President Trump who want to bar states from counting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, are far more tangible.

Coming smack in the middle of this year’s hotly contested battle for control of Congress, the case could upend election rules in at least 18 states and territories, potentially disqualifying hundreds of thousands of mail ballots in upcoming contests that would be considered valid under current law.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, stems from President Trump’s fixation with mail voting, and will test the effort of Mr. Trump and his allies to impose voting restrictions born out of his baseless claims of widespread fraud. There is scant evidence, for instance, for his claim that accepting ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward invites a flood of phony votes that sway results.

Whether the law allows for states to establish such grace periods is a more convoluted legal question.

Federal statute establishes Election Day as the “Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November.” Some say that means all votes must be in the hands of election officials by then; others say ballots must simply be cast and postmarked by that day.

Specifically, Watson v. R.N.C. challenges a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving up to five business days later. Mississippi is one of 14 states with such laws, though the length of the grace period varies. Similar laws are also on the books in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Since the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has crusaded against mail voting, which exploded in popularity as a safe way to cast ballots during the pandemic.

Democrats flocked to mail voting in far greater numbers that year than Republicans, who were discouraged from using the practice by Mr. Trump’s sharp rhetoric. That in turn created an illusion on election night, when states typically tally in-person votes first, that Mr. Trump was ahead.

In fact, mail ballots took days and even weeks to tally in some states, and no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in any of the states where votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. caught up to and surpassed those for Mr. Trump. The phenomenon of the “red mirage” was born.

Mr. Trump claimed there was no mirage, and he and his allies have relentlessly continued to rail against mail voting. He has called for its end outright, and sought to place significant restrictions on the process through legislation, failed executive orders and numerous court cases.

“No more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel,” Mr. Trump said during his State of the Union address last month. “None.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the fray last month. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost,” Mr. Johnson said. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream.”

Mr. Trump has been transparent about his belief that changing voting laws would benefit his party.

“We’ll never lose a race in 50 years,” he said during a speech in Georgia last month, referring to passing federal voting legislation currently being debated in the Senate. He also falsely claimed without evidence that Democrats “cheat” with mailed ballots.

Such candor about his political aims has prompted Democrats, voting rights groups and some election administrators to counter that his real goal is to tip the scales of voting rules to give Republicans an advantage, to make voting more difficult or to simply continue to sow doubt about election results.

“We see this as a constant effort to basically intrude into the election process, and for this administration to figure out ways that they can discourage people from going to vote,” said Shirley Webber, the Democratic secretary of state in California. She added: “I find it somewhat ironic” that Mr. Trump had cast ballots by mail himself in the past.

Historically, changing voting rules in the middle of an election year has caused significant voter confusion, and has long been discouraged by election administrators and voting-rights authorities within the Department of Justice.

It has also produced a Supreme Court doctrine known as the Purcell principle, which discourages courts from allowing such changes when voting is imminent. Opponents of the lawsuit may argue that the principle should deter justices from tossing late deadlines.

Even laws signed well ahead of an election can have an outsize impact. In Texas in 2022, critics blamed a new, Republican-backed law featuring rigorous identification requirements for the rejection of roughly 30 percent of absentee ballots in the state’s most populous counties. The law had been enacted six months earlier.

Concerns about delayed counts — which have only grown with the proliferation of mail voting — in some cases reach beyond partisan politics.

Republicans have argued that requiring all mail ballots to be in by Election Day would help alleviate delays in results. Some Democrats and voting-rights advocates agree that weekslong counts can undermine public confidence in elections. But they say the problem isn’t only late-arriving ballots; it’s the mountain of ballots that arrive before the close of polls.

Stuart Holmes, the election director in Washington State, said an estimated 50 percent of ballots statewide — which in 2024 numbered 2 million — are typically received the final week ahead of Election Day. Late-arriving ballots in the state in 2024, by contrast, totaled about 127,000.

On Election Day, ballot drop boxes are “plum full,” Mr. Holmes said. “So those aren’t going to get processed Election Day. And the day after that, we’re still doing all of our signature verification, post-Election Day audits — all of those things contribute to a delay in results.”

Before Mr. Trump arrived on the political scene, Republicans were once the party promoting and using mail voting. The practice helped catapult the party to political dominance in Florida. And a mail voting law in Georgia was endorsed by a Republican governor and passed by a Republican-controlled legislature.

The process is still popular among Republicans in some deeply red, and particularly rural, parts of the country — raising the prospect of political peril for Mr. Trump and the G.O.P. leaders pushing the Supreme Court to act. In Nevada, a key swing state during the 2024 election, the counties with the highest mail ballot turnout were Douglas County and Nye County, according to the secretary of state’s office. Both counties voted in favor of Mr. Trump by more than 30 percentage points.

Besides Mississippi, three states with complete Republican control — Texas, West Virginia and Alaska — currently allow for some form of late-arriving ballots.

The legal argument made by the Republican National Committee could potentially apply to all late-arriving ballots, including those from the military and overseas voters. Mr. Trump has publicly called for military personnel to continue being able to cast absentee ballots by mail.

And late-arriving ballots have benefited Republicans in the past. A brief filed in the case by the Elias Law Group, a Democratic-leaning firm focused on voting rights, argues that former President George W. Bush would have lost the 2000 election had a ban on late-arriving ballots for military members been in place.

Conservatives argue that it’s simply a case of following clearly established federal law.

“If they’re told you must get your ballot in the mail a week before the election in order to guarantee that it’ll get here in time, then that’s what they’re going to do,” said Jason Snead, who leads the conservative Honest Elections Project. “They’ll respond to those changes. And I don’t think that’s a particularly difficult thing to do.”

Calculating the impact of eliminating post-election ballot deadlines is a complex task. A review by the Times last year found that in 2024, at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window, according to election officials in 14 of the 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. Four of these states — Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio and Utah — have since changed their policies and will accept only mail ballots that arrive by Election Day.

Discerning political impact is even trickier, as Democrats still far outpace Republicans in their use of mail voting. In Virginia, 73 percent of ballots that arrived after Election Day and were counted in 2024 were cast for Vice President Kamala Harris, compared with just 23 percent for Donald J. Trump. But mail ballots that arrived before Election Day had almost the same partisan breakdown.

Regardless of how the court rules, many voting rights experts do not expect Mr. Trump’s obsession with mail voting to subside — especially if Republicans lose seats in the November elections.

Said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, a New York nonprofit: “I think it’s all part of an effort to delegitimize elections and mail voting so as to soften the ground for efforts to try to overturn or interfere in election.”

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections."

"Experts are calling it “the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress.” As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on a Trump-backed voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, millions of citizens who lack easy access to its required forms of documentation are now at risk of disenfranchisement. “Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote and pursuing this MAGA fever dream,” explains Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “It is the overarching goal of the Republican Party now to make it harder to vote.”
The groups most at risk of disenfranchisement include people who have changed their names after marriage, older voters who never received birth certificates, rural voters who could find it increasingly difficult to register to vote and trans people who have changed their names or gender markers on government documents. The GOP and MAGAmovement’s goal, says Imara Jones, the founder and CEO of TransLash Media, “is to enshrine anti-trans discrimination in the law, because what they’re doing is using trans people as a road test in order to try to figure out how to disenfranchise and marginalize and strip citizenship away from millions of Americans who disagree with them.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Senate is debating the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act, following intense pressure from President Trump to pass the bill before the midterm elections, saying he won’t sign off on any bill unless that one’s passed. Voting rights experts say the SAVE Act could disenfranchise millions of citizens who lack easy access to what would be required — either a birth certificate or a passport, or who have changed their birth names, including many married women and trans people.
We’re joined now by two guests. Imara Jones is the founder and CEO of TransLash Media, host of its investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. And Ari Berman is voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, his latest piece headlined “The World Is on Fire. Gas Prices Are Rising. Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote.”
Ari, let’s begin with you. We just have a few minutes. Lay out what this bill would do. Who has access to a passport? Less than half of Americans. Who has access to a birth certificate? What would this mean for the American voters?
ARI BERMAN: Hi, Amy. Thank you for having me back on to discuss this.
So, the SAVE America Act this could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who don’t have access to the documents needed to register and vote under this bill. The centerpiece of it is a “show your papers” requirement, requiring a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. That could disenfranchise tens of millions of people. Only half of Americans have a passport, for example. Twenty-one million Americans don’t have access to their citizenship documents. That probably understates the number of people that could be disenfranchised, because there are 69 million married women who have a different last name than the name on their birth certificate. It also requires you to show your documentation in person at an elections office, which means that people in rural areas could drive up to eight hours just to register vote. It could effectively end mail registration, online registration, voter registration drives.
So, there’s a reason why voting rights advocates believe this is the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress. And it’s just crazy, with everything that’s going on in the world — the U.S. invasion of Iran, rising gas prices, the economy in shambles — that, instead, Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote and pursuing this MAGA fever dream.
AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t this not so surprising, as President Trump goes down in popularity, he wants to limit the number of people who could vote against him? I mean, talk about especially African Americans and poor people in the South when it comes to having access to a birth certificate.
ARI BERMAN: That’s true. I mean, Trump and Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote. It is the overarching goal of the Republican Party now to make it harder to vote. There are lots of people that don’t have these documents. For example, if you were born at home in the Jim Crow South, you never had a birth certificate. So there’s elderly voters in the Jim Crow South who never got that documentation.
But I will also say, Amy, the bill could hurt Republicans in a lot of ways. You look at the states that have the lowest rates of passport ownership. They all voted for Trump. Married women who change their names are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Rural voters who have to drive eight hours to register to vote are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. So, in their zest to try to disenfranchise voters, I don’t think Republicans have thought through the fact that they may be disenfranchising some of their own voters, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Imara Jones. President Trump is now demanding the SAVE America Act include bans on trans youth healthcare and sports participation. Talk about the amendments that will be voted on. And again, he says he won’t sign off on any other legislation unless this is passed.
IMARA JONES: Right. But we also know, more broadly, that the SAVE Act provisions that have been enacted at the states already have disenfranchised up to 200,000 trans people. That was reported by NBC News in 2024. Additionally, now the administration is demanding the inclusion of these particular riders and provisions. And what it shows is that for the Republican Party, the issue of trans people is central to their identity. As a matter of fact, we know that Donald Trump told people in January, told the Republican Congress that this was the issue that they were going to run on in 2026. And this project is not just some marginal culture war. People have to understand that the erasure of trans people is a part of their broader vision to remake America, which is why, at every single turn, at every single opportunity, they take that opportunity to enshrine anti-trans discrimination into American law.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about birth certificates when it comes to trans people.
IMARA JONES: Well, I mean, this is going to be a mess, because there are certain states where trans people are able to change their gender marker, so there are going to be some trans people who are going to be able to vote or present these documents. But there are many trans people who do not. And so, if you do not have a passport, and if you have to present a birth certificate, if there is any difference between your ID and who the person in front of you believes that you are, then that is a reason to deny you the right to vote. And as I said, there are already 200,000 trans people in states that have implemented SAVE Act-like laws that have been disenfranchised already.
AMY GOODMAN: In just the last two months, you have pointed out that Kansas retroactively invalidated the driver’s licenses of some 1,700 trans residents?
IMARA JONES: Right. And the whole point is we know that these laws don’t stay in one state. Everything is a test. Everything is a road test. And so, now that we know that this law has passed in Kansas, it’s already been introduced in Oklahoma. It’s going to spread like wildfire across the country. At every single turn, their goal is to enshrine anti-trans discrimination in the law, because what they’re doing is using trans people as a road test in order to try to figure out how to disenfranchise and marginalize and strip citizenship away from millions of Americans who disagree with them.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you doing about this?
IMARA JONES: So, I think that what we do is tell people what’s happening. I think that what we do is to underscore for people that this is not — again, it’s not a culture war. It is a political project that has broad implications for the rest of the country.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ari Berman, they’re saying driver’s licenses are not enough. As many as 69 million people who’ve taken their spouse’s name don’t have a birth certificate matching their legal name. More than 140 million U.S. citizens don’t possess a passport, which, by the way, costs something like $165 to apply for one. We have just 30 seconds.
ARI BERMAN: Well, the SAVE Act is a modern-day poll tax in so many different ways. They’re trying to make it seem like it’s requiring documentation that everyone has. It’s requiring documentation that people don’t have, that’s expensive to get, that people don’t carry around with them every single day. So this is not a voter ID bill. This is a “show your papers” bill. It would have far-reaching ramifications. Many more people would be affected by this than Republicans suggest. And it’s just crazy that this is the thing that Republicans are focusing on when there’s so many other problems in the world. It’s doomed to failure. But the worry is that when it fails, Trump is going to take more extreme action to try to interfere with the midterms. This is just the beginning of a much bigger fight over the president’s desire to interfere in the midterm elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, I want to thank you for being with us, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. We’ll link to your article, “The World Is on Fire. Gas Prices Are Rising. Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote.” And Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media and host of its investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine.
Again, next Monday, 7 p.m. Eastern, live-stream at democracynow.org our 30th anniversary celebration at Riverside Church here in New York, with Patti Smith and Michael Stipe and Angela Davis and others. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us."

Criminal Justice And Human Rights Law Blog

What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.

Sunday, March 22, 2026