The Supreme Court has decided that ten weeks before a national election is an excellent time to let the executive branch begin rearranging the machinery of voting by mail, because apparently democracy functions best when everyone receives the instructions after the envelopes have already gone to the printer.
In a 6–3 decision, the Court’s conservative majority lifted an injunction that had blocked parts of Trump’s executive order on mail voting. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to construct state-by-state citizenship lists, tells the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of election officials who issue ballots to people the administration considers ineligible, and orders the Postal Service to establish new requirements for mail ballots.
The Court didn’t find any of this constitutional, and the administration didn’t even defend the legality of the order before the justices. Instead, the majority decided that Oregon and the other states challenging it had sued too early because the harm hadn’t yet become concrete enough. The legal theory appears to be that you can’t object to someone dismantling the fire alarm until the building is actively burning.
A second injunction remains in place, and Oregon officials say our November election will proceed normally. Secretary of State Tobias Read has promised that Oregon’s elections will remain “secure, accurate, and fair,” while Attorney General Dan Rayfield called the decision a temporary setback and vowed to keep fighting. That reassurance matters here because voting by mail isn’t an optional convenience tucked onto the side of Oregon’s election system. It’s the system.
The Supreme Court’s majority even acknowledged that anything the administration does to implement the order may still be unlawful, concluding with the soothing declaration that “time will tell,” which is not generally the phrase one hopes to hear from the nation’s highest court while election officials are preparing millions of ballots.
At our house, meanwhile, we spent yesterday doing something almost radical by national standards, which was finishing what we had started. A year ago, my husband was just beginning to emerge from the depression that followed his spinal damage, and one of the things that helped bring us back toward each other was an epoxy river table made from Oregon maple burl. It was going to become a desk, but before it could become anything, it gave us a project. We designed it together, shaped it together, and worked to make the wood beautiful again.
Then summer arrived, the garden began demanding our attention, I was pregnant with Ezra, and the table became one of those unfinished objects that quietly absorbs time until you can no longer remember whether you abandoned it last month or in a previous geological period.
Yesterday, we finished it, or at least brought it to the wonderful stage where the remaining finishing work feels like a promise instead of an accusation. It’s beautiful, and I can’t wait to sand, polish, and fuss over every last detail with him. We also began sanding the Myrtle slab I bought for shelves, because apparently one overdue woodworking project should always be celebrated by introducing another piece of wood into the household.
Then we worked on his wisteria tree, which he has elaborate plans to train and braid until it becomes a glorious, thick-trunked wisteria tree thing. That may not be the recognized botanical term, but horticultural science has not yet seen his vision. For a while, it felt like it did when we first made the table, when we were simply two people working beside each other and imagining what something could become.
Then we sat down and agonized over money. Homeownership has a way of suggesting that every problem can be solved with one more trip to the hardware store, right up until your bank account gently explains that it does not share your commitment to the vision. We have spent a great deal on this house, on necessary renovations, on children, and on the steady parade of expenses involved in keeping five people clothed, fed, sheltered, and occasionally entertained. There comes a point when you have to accept the cold reality that there is no limitless fund for projects hidden behind the drywall, although I continue to believe the previous owners could have left us one as a courtesy.
This realization affects my husband more deeply than it affects me because he is wiser about money, while I remain susceptible to the dangerous belief that any problem can be solved if I wander through a hardware store long enough. Still, I worry that my enthusiasm unintentionally makes him feel as though what we have will never be enough, when the truth is that his happiness is worth more to me than anything we could possibly add to this house.
I would rather spend the rest of my life completing tiny projects beside him than spend any amount of money on a perfect renovation without him. Some of the large projects still have to happen, because apparently roofs, stairs, and functioning rooms can’t be sustained by emotional commitment alone, but I never want the house we’re trying to build to become more important than the life already happening inside it.
That life currently includes an oldest child who is struggling with fatigue from his new ADHD medication, so we are working with him to figure out what needs to change. Medication is supposed to help him participate in his life, not make him so sleepy that he watches childhood pass from beneath a blanket.
Our daughter has reached the age when she wants to play video games with her big brother and then bring some of his attitude into negotiations with her mother. I have lovingly informed her that she may inherit his gaming interests, but she will not be inheriting immunity from consequences, and we are addressing this now before she turns into a tiny electronic gremlin who starts referring to bedtime as government overreach.
Then there is Ezra, my sweet baby pie and my mister boy, who has reached the stage where we are ordering his first birthday smash cake. My little baby will be presented with the finest cheesecake available, which he will almost certainly dismantle with both hands while the adults photograph the event as though no human being has ever encountered dessert before.
Today, his father and I got tattoos of Ezra’s name to complete the collection because we already carry the names of our older two children. We got to watch each other be poked repeatedly with needles, which is one of the more peculiar ways marriage allows two people to express tenderness.
On the Homefront, we are making difficult financial decisions, finishing the projects we once ran out of time to finish, and teaching the children moderation with technology before they begin communicating exclusively through usernames and threats to report us. The administration is also confronting the consequences of spending and economic choices, although its preferred response is to make those consequences someone else’s problem.
Canada announced today that it will impose retaliatory tariffs of 15%, 25%, and 50% on C$27.6 billion worth of American products beginning September 8. More than 700 categories of goods are involved, including steel, aluminum, appliances, electronics, agricultural equipment, dairy products, clothing, furniture, paper, cosmetics, and enough varieties of seafood to suggest that the trade war has now reached the ornamental fish.
Canada says it is matching Trump’s tariffs “dollar for dollar, rate for rate,” after the United States imposed a 50% tariff on the same value of Canadian goods. Ottawa is also preparing another C$7.5 billion in assistance for businesses and workers harmed by the dispute, meaning both governments are now spending billions to help people survive the economic damage created by the tariffs that were supposedly going to make everyone prosperous. Tariffs are paid by importers, and those costs tend to travel through the supply chain until they arrive at the familiar final destination of the consumer, who is already standing at a grocery store register wondering whether ground beef has begun accruing interest.
This may explain why Trump has temporarily suspended higher tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef, promising that it will be sold at 25% below current market prices. The administration spent months explaining that tariffs protect American producers, but apparently protection becomes negotiable when grocery prices begin appearing in midterm polling.
American ranchers and Republican senators from cattle-producing states are furious because importing cheaper foreign beef could lower what domestic producers receive and discourage them from rebuilding the nation’s cattle herd, which is already at its smallest size in decades. Agricultural economists have also noted that the imported amount represents only about 3% of the beef Americans consume in a year, making it unlikely to produce the dramatic price reduction Trump has promised. The tariff wall now has a temporary beef window, but only because the administration has discovered that Americans can’t feed their families with economic nationalism.
Consumer confidence fell again in August to its lowest level in seven months, while gasoline remains above $4 a gallon because of the Iran conflict. Employers cut 23,000 jobs in July, and revisions erased another 103,000 jobs that the government had previously reported for May and June. The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure reached 3.7% in June, compared with 2.5% when Trump returned to office.
People aren’t gloomy because they’ve failed to appreciate the magnificence of the economic plan. They’re gloomy because groceries, gasoline, housing, healthcare, and children all cost money, and no amount of presidential insistence can persuade a checking account that it has misunderstood its own balance.
Medicare has now offered its own contribution to the national collection of promises with trapdoors. The new Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program offers certain weight-loss medications to eligible beneficiaries for $50 a month, which sounds like the beginning of an unusually humane healthcare story until one reaches the fine print. Approximately 5.9 million Medicare beneficiaries with conditions such as Type 2 diabetes or moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea can be excluded from the discount because those diagnoses make them eligible to seek coverage through their existing Part D plans.
The problem is that “eligible for coverage” can still mean paying $200 to $600 every month, navigating prior authorization, and completing months of step therapy before arriving at the pharmacy counter to discover that the medicine remains unaffordable. KFF Health News spoke with a 68-year-old man named Jeff La Marca who has a BMI of 42, severe sleep apnea, prediabetes, and a history of quadruple bypass surgery. His medical conditions demonstrate exactly why the medication could help him, but his sleep apnea is also what disqualified him from the $50 price. As one physician told KFF, “Coverage doesn’t always mean affordable,” a sentence that could be engraved above the entrance to the entire American healthcare system.
The program is called Bridge, although it functions more like a bridge that carries patients almost to treatment before directing the sickest among them toward a tollbooth they can’t afford. Once again, the help exists, the medicine exists, and the patient qualifies in every ordinary meaning of the word, but the bureaucracy has discovered a more profitable definition.
Then the day broke open in a different way when the news arrived that Dolly Parton had died at eighty. Dolly’s death isn’t just another dose of celebrity news in our house because every month, one of her Imagination Library books arrives with my daughter’s name on it. We read those books together every night, which means Dolly’s work has been carried through our front door, opened in my daughter’s hands, and tucked into bed alongside her.
Dolly created the Imagination Library because her father couldn’t read or write, and what began as a local program in Tennessee now distributes nearly 25 million books every year across several countries. She once explained that children receive “this little book with their little name on it in the mail, and they feel special.” That child is Ember, and every month the evidence of Dolly Parton’s generosity arrives addressed directly to her. Her family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, people donate to the Imagination Library, which feels less like a memorial request than an instruction to keep the best part of her moving.
Dolly also gave $1 million to research that helped produce the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, supported families after the Smoky Mountain wildfires, funded scholarships, helped open a local hospital, and used the enormous fortune she built to make other people’s lives a little safer and more hopeful. She possessed the rare ability to accumulate wealth without mistaking it for proof that she mattered more than everyone else.
There is something almost unbearably poignant about losing her on a day when the federal government is attempting to turn the Postal Service into another obstacle between Americans and their rights. One vision of power uses the mail to decide which citizens may receive a ballot, while another places a child’s name on a package and sends her a book.
Today my husband and I had Ezra’s name written permanently into our skin, completing the little record of the people who make our lives valuable. Tonight, Ember and I will open one of the books Dolly sent her, and tomorrow we will continue deciding which projects the house truly needs and which ones can wait while we make the wood we already have beautiful again.
Money is finite, time is finite, and even the people who seem permanent eventually leave us. What matters is what we choose to build with what we have. The administration keeps asking what can be extracted from a voter, a patient, a consumer, or a trading partner. Dolly Parton spent her life asking what she could place in a child’s hands, and here at home, where the renovation budget has limits but love does not, I know which kind of power I want us to practice.
Lovely. Thank you. I understand Dolly once said " if you like rainbows, you gotta put up with the rain". Or, something close to that. When I read about your family life I think of you all living under a rainbow and putting rain to good purpose.