Frustrated by the two-party system? Polling shows you’re not alone, with more Americans than ever supporting the idea of a third party. But the winner of November’s presidential election will be either Biden or Trump, and voters weighing other candidates need to consider if a protest vote to end the duopoly might instead help end our democracy. In the May+June 2024 issue, we examine the past and present of third-party outsiders, and how they could upend this year’s race. You can read all the pieces here.

When we asked the Mother Jones online community to answer a survey on their personal experiences with and thoughts on turning away from the two parties, hundreds of replies came in, along with thousands of responses on Threads, X, and Instagram. While some of you chimed in to talk about decades-old votes for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and even Eldridge Cleaver, many instead focused on this year’s election, and how Trump’s record and authoritarian tendencies are shaping their decisions. Read the selection below—and if you’d like to join the conversation, use the form at the bottom of the page.

Survey comments

I was a delegate to the 2016 Democratic convention for Bernie. I voted for Jill Stein that November. I don’t regret it one bit. I voted for Biden in 2020 after Trump’s “stand back and stand by” nonsense. I don’t regret that either. In 2024, I will be voting Stein again. Biden had a chance to prepare a successor and he didn’t. He turned his back on progressives. —Gabriel McArthur, Littleton, Colo.

In my opinion, there is zero value to voting for someone who has no chance of actually being elected. I prefer my vote actually count for the person running whom I think will be best for the citizens of the United States. —John Sturges, Chula Vista, Calif.

Unfortunately, our electoral system is dysfunctional and still has not been updated to be fair to voters, so I consider it necessary to vote for the Democrat to avoid further destruction of our country by Republicans. We need to give up the Electoral College and count the popular vote instead, or even use run-off voting, so that third party candidates have a fair chance. —Mary Hahn, Spring Green, Wis.

I’m a lifelong Democrat. But I don’t know if I can vote for Biden, who is supporting genocide in Gaza. But would doing that help the Republican maniac? In my state, New York, I’ll watch the polls right before the election. If Biden is way ahead, I’ll vote 3rd party. I really don’t know what I’m going to do. —Lee McClure, New York, N.Y. 

Since the end of World War II, our rulers have killed millions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Colombia, and Vietnam. The graveyards of this planet are full from atrocities set into motion by Democratic presidents. I’ve been voting for left-wing, anti-war “third party” candidates since 1992 and sleep soundly at night knowing I don’t have blood on my hands. —Duane Roberts, Anaheim, Calif.

I’m tired of the two-party duopoly that legislates for their corporate donors’ agenda and against the interests of the American people. —Michelle Torres, Hope Mills, N.C.

I started my political life in 1980 by not only voting for a third party candidate, John Anderson, but I was a campaign volunteer as well. I voted for Jill Stein in 2016, and Howie Hawkins in 2020. Why? I’ve always believed that the de-facto 2 party system in America is only one party better than a 1 party system. The fact is, the Electoral College makes my vote worth nothing since I live in Texas. —Richard Nicholson, Fort Worth, Texas

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I live in Washington State, so didn’t feel the outcome here was in doubt; my calculation would have been different if I’d lived in a state like Florida. If the circumstances were the same today, I would probably vote the same way for the same reasons (despite having good friends who still blame Nader for Gore’s loss, a position I strongly disagree with). But the circumstances are not the same today! Making sure Trump isn’t elected is of paramount importance. —Charles Klyn, Seattle, Wash.

Threads

I am a dual citizen of Canada and the US. I lived in Montreal for 25 years and really appreciated that there are more than 2 parties in Canada as it’s a parliamentary system. The US system is not made for more than the two and so a 3rd party does not have a voice except to negate one of the 2 major ones, as I see it. —@suzan_ballmer 

No, I’ve never voted 3rd party. I never will. Unless a party has the GOP/DEM type support behind it, they’re just wasted votes. And to people saying “I’m sending a message,” you’re really not. You’re only helping or hurting one of the candidates. WastedVote. —@vickie.sneddon 

I can only say to you that a lot of people are planning to vote third party in 2024 because of the massacre in Gaza and Biden’s conduct. —@lauretttt2

The two-party system has stagnated progress. We need more voices. I only ever vote for the candidate who best aligns with my beliefs, and I’ll never regret following my principles. —@chilidogsunday 

My first election I voted for John Anderson and we got Reagan and decades of trickle down bullshit. Worst mistake of my life and I’ll never do it again. I didn’t understand in a system where someone needs to get 270 electoral votes it was a waste of a vote. P.S. I’m in PA, always a swing state, so I would NEVER consider it. If you’re in a solid red or blue state it’s probably less critical but still sends zero message. —@elayne_baker 

How do we change the system if we just sit back and wait? What, do we expect the two major parties to voluntarily give up power, send us a perfumed invitation? —@muddlepi

Never saw the point. While I believe we would be much better off with multiple parties, we have a deeply entrenched two party system. So I will vote for the party that is most likely to represent the will of the people. In my lifetime that is the Dems, far from perfect but also far from fascism. —@cathy.walker.54738

X

I wrote in Jerry Garcia for President and Frank Zappa for VP in 1984 because I was a Democrat in California. They did not win.

—Reech – Four More Years. (@PDXReech) February 15, 2024

In my younger days I used that privilege. I voted for Nader in my first presidential election while in a swing state & I have guilt over it to this day.

—CM Facci (@GingerGinGauche) February 14, 2024

I voted for John Anderson. Those were different times. Going forward, I will never use my vote on any way that would benefit the GOP.

—Mama Allyson (@oakparkres) February 14, 2024

Instagram

By voting third party, you get a better Democratic Party. This is how politics works. If Biden isn’t willing to actually use his power to stop a genocide, I will do everything in my power to make sure trump beats Biden by voting for Jill Stein. —@marxengelsleninstalin1945

Hell no! Why screw up the most important election in a century and possibly in all time. —@farnsworthminnie5

I have only voted third party in local elections, but this year I’ll be carrying that practice into the national election because I cannot vote for Genocide Joe AND I believe the Democratic Party needs to be punished. —@sarah.kdosi

A viable strong third-party candidate would be great, but that doesn’t exist right now. The most important thing is to keep Trump out of the White House. —@fxtrot2000

I started voting in 1988, voted third party all the way up until 2016, with an exception in 2004. In 2004, 2016, 2020, and ’24 and onward, there is too much at stake. Democracy must be maintained, and the only way to do that is to vote for democracy, and vote blue. —@trystan830

I’m absolutely voting 3rd party this year, if not now.. when? I’m sure both parties are going to do their best to have the media scare us into staying away from 3rd party.. must be doing something right if they’re scared. —@both_sides_heard

Until we have nationwide ranked choice voting and eliminate the electoral college, we cannot vote third party! —@chrislovestechno

I have voted third party and was at one time registered as a third-party constituent. Today, I am registered NPP in CA, but vote in Dem primaries. I’m firmly entrenched, currently, in the “a vote away from Biden is a vote for Trump” camp. Accordingly, any 3P candidate is an anathema against democracy/tacitly supporting fascism. That said, in the spirit of Gene Debs, et al, we need to strengthen the DSA and support candidates from the smallest school boards to candidates for national office not beholden to corporate influences. Only then, IMHO, will viability of a 3P candidate for president be a reality. —@westley_man

Chime in!

Have you ever voted third party? If so, are you happy you did, or did you come to regret it? And are you considering voting third party in 2024? Why or why not?

So, here we are. 

The first day of the first criminal trial of a former US president. Can it get more extraordinary than that? “He keeps setting new Guinness Records in terms of unprecedented history,” Mother Jones’ own David Corn explained in a new video outside a Manhattan courtroom where Donald Trump’s trial kicked off this morning.

Which case is this again? Good question. This one alleges that Trump falsified business records related to the hush-money scandal involving Stormy Daniels. As David explained in a curtain-raiser, the trial, though salacious in nature, is a very fitting symbol for Trump’s political rise and should be taken seriously.

“He is a creature of this trashy, celebrity, tabloid culture,” Corn says. “And that’s all going to be on display here in the next couple of weeks.”

Trump pleaded not guilty to the 34 felony counts last month. Less than a day before Monday’s trial was set to begin, the former president attacked the presiding judge again on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling today’s proceedings a “Fake Biden Trial.” As my colleague Julianne McShane recounted, Judge Juan Merchan already hit Trump with a gag order for similar statements about potential trial witnesses last month. The gag order was then extended in April.

With four indictments, 88 counts, and a seemingly endless stream of social media posts, it might be easy to write off the Stormy Daniels trial as celebrity fodder. But don’t forget this is truly—and you’ll hear this word a lot—unprecedented.

The justice system finally caught up with Individual-1—a.k.a. Donald J. Trump. 

On the opening day of Trump’s historic trial for his porn-star-hush-money caper—no former president has ever been on trial for criminal charges—New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan had to clear up a few pending legal issues before moving to the arduous task of selecting jurors. One of those matters concerned the criminal case of onetime Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who, according to filings submitted by federal prosecutors, broke the law at the behest of a person identified as “Individual-1.”

The immediate question for Merchan was whether and how prosecutors in New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office could refer to Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea for violating election law. Cohen was nabbed for making the illegal in-kind contribution to Trump’s 2016 campaign at the center of this case: the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels to keep mum about her alleged affair with Trump. He will be a key witness for Bragg. 

Both sides have been arguing over what can and can’t be said about that guilty plea during this trial. To discredit Cohen, Trump’s lawyers want to cite Cohen’s other guilty pleas (tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress), which were unrelated to the Daniels affair. But they’d rather jurors not hear about Cohen’s plea regarding the hush-money deal because that would reinforce the idea that the payment to Daniels was a felony. To win this case, Bragg’s team must prove that Trump falsified business records—that is, recorded the $130,000 payment as a legitimate legal expense for the Trump Organization—and did so to cover up a felony. The prosecutors, naturally, want the jury to know that the federal court that tried Cohen has determined the payment was a felony violation of campaign law. Trump’s defense team is expected to contend Cohen’s payment was not an election law violation. 

The back and forth on this is a reminder of a fact often lost in all the hubbub about the Trump-Daniels case: The feds identified Trump as a co-conspirator in the crime Cohen committed.

In December 2018, lawyers in the office of the US attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a sentencing memo following Cohen’s guilty pleas. The document referred to Cohen’s arrangement of the payment to Daniels, as well as a financial deal the National Enquirer made with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, to keep her quiet about her alleged extramarital romance with Trump. Here is a passage from the memo:

During the [2016] campaign, Cohen played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories —each from women who claimed to have had an affair with Individual-1—so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election. With respect to both payments, Cohen acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election. Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.  As a result of Cohen’s actions, neither woman spoke to the press prior to the election. 

At the direction of Individual-1. That’s the key line. As other parts of the memo show, “Individual-1” was Trump. With this filing, the feds were clearly stating that Trump and Cohen were in cahoots in this criminal venture.

Yet the US attorney’s office never pursued Trump for his role in the crime. At the time of Cohen’s prosecution, Trump was president, and Justice Department policy prohibited the indictment of a sitting president. (Legal experts have long debated whether this policy ought to stand.) And by the time Trump left office, the federal investigation of the hush-money payment was moribund. In his 2022 book, Holding the Line, Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney for the Southern District, suggested that the Trump Justice Department had tried to stifle this inquiry. (Berman did not work directly on this case). 

Once again, Trump was off the hook. Meanwhile, Cohen went to prison for a crime that Trump instructed him to commit but was not held accountable for. Now, Trump’s involvement in the hush-money payment is a central component in his own criminal case.

In the run-up to the trial, prosecutors have argued they would like to inform the jury of Cohen’s guilty plea not to suggest Trump is guilty, but to enhance Cohen’s credibility—essentially by showing that he ‘fessed up to his crime. Merchan said okay, as long as Bragg’s lawyers lay the appropriate foundation. The judge asked each side to draft instructions for the jury stating that the jurors could make no inferences about Trump’s guilt because of Cohen’s guilty plea. Obviously, the more Bragg’s attorneys can bring Cohen’s case into this one, the stronger their own argument will be—and the greater the odds that Individual-1 will not escape yet again.

From outside the Manhattan courthouse where Donald Trump made history today by becoming the first former president to face a criminal trial.pic.twitter.com/gfHaXi44os

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) April 15, 2024

State legislative bodies have always played a leading role in determining outcomes for fundamental but humdrum issues like state budgets, insurance regulations, road safety laws, and civil services. But the last few years have demonstrated their overriding importance in matters related to personal freedom and social wellbeing.

One issue where this has played out powerfully has been in reproductive rights. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, access to reproductive care has almost entirely been up to state legislatures, and sometimes elected state Supreme Courts. Add to this, access to gender-affirming care, the availability of Medicaid, and even whether a background check is required to buy a gun. Not to mention who gets to vote—and how. All these critical issues largely depend on the people elected to statehouses.  

That’s why fundraising for these races has been a special priority for the two parties. And this year, the primary group responsible for electing Democrats to state legislative chambers nationwide, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), has set a new record for its first quarter fundraising: $6.9 million since January 2024.

That’s nearly an 8 percent hike from the first quarter of the last presidential election cycle, the DLCC says. Meanwhile, the DLCC’s grassroots fundraising numbers—raised through digital, text, and phone call outreach—are up 45 percent from the group’s previous best first quarter. Since the beginning of the 2024 campaign fundraising cycle (which started right after the 2022 midterm elections), the DLCC has raised $28 million toward its $60 million goal for 2024.

But despite the record figures, the DLCC is still lagging behind the Republican State Leadership Committee and its affiliated social welfare organization, the State Government Leadership Foundation. Together the conservative groups raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2024 and a combined $47 million at the state level this cycle, eclipsing the DLCC and its affiliated 501(c)(4) partners by $19 million.

“Republicans know the importance of the states, especially as the Supreme Court continues to kick down issues to the states,” says DLCC communications director Abhi Rahman, “and states are where fundamental freedoms are being decided.”

That Republicans have an edge over Democrats in state legislature races isn't new. During the first Obama administration, conservatives were building the tea party movement from the local level up while Democrats remained focused on Washington. After the 2010 midterms, Republicans controlled the majority of state legislatures. With their newly entrenched power, state Republicans redrew district maps in ways that helped them keep existing statehouse seats and gain new ones. (This helped them at the national level too; elected state legislators often make strong congressional candidates). In 2009, Republicans had legislative control of 14 states (Democratic legislators controlled 27 states, 8 states had split chambers, and one state, Nebraska, has a unicameral nonpartisan chamber). By 2011, it was Republicans who had legislative control of 27 states. They now have control of 28 states. 

While OpenSecrets shows Democrats have enjoyed more success than Republicans at the national level this cycle, that advantage hasn't translated to the state efforts. "It's not enough to fund the top of the ticket," says Rahman. "This is the [governmental] level now that needs to be funded more than ever before."

"I think Democrats are catching up," Rahman adds, "but it's not fast enough."

Correction, April 16: Rahman's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article.

Conservative Supreme Court justices on Tuesday questioned the Justice Department’s use of a 2002 statute against obstructing an official proceeding to prosecute a number of people involved in the January 6 attack on Congress. In pressing Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on how broadly the DOJ can apply the law, several justices offered similar hypotheticals.

“Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked.

“Why has no one been charged for disrupting the Supreme Court?” Justice Samuel Alito asked, referring to previous protests that briefly disrupted high court hearings related to the court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling overturning abortion rights. 

Alito’s question led Prelogar to assert that peaceful protesters who cause only brief interruptions of government proceedings would likely not be prosecutable under the obstruction law, in part because the government would struggle to prove they had “corrupt intent”—a requirement of the statute. In contrast, violent protesters appear to have demonstrated their intention of attempting to help a defeated presidential candidate remain in power.

It’s “a fundamentally different posture than if they had stormed into this courtroom, overrun the Supreme Court Police, required the justices and other participants to flee for their safety,” Prelogar said.

Alito acknowledged, “What happened on January 6 was very, very serious, and I’m not equating this with that.” But, he continued, “We need to find out what are the outer reaches of this statute under your interpretation.”

The case turns on a federal statute enacted in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal that prohibits obstructing a federal proceeding. Since January 6, federal prosecutors have charged hundreds of people involved in the attack on Congress with violating the law, drawing challenges from lawyers for many of those clients.

The petitioner in the case, Joseph Fischer, is a former police officer who joined in the January 6 attack. The prosecution charges that Fischer breached the Capitol building with the crowd, yelling “Charge!” and rushed toward a police line. His attorney argues that Congress intended the obstruction law to apply only to instances where defendants tampered with physical evidence, such as destroying or forging documents used in proceedings. The statute does not apply, however, to more general plans to stop a hearing or other government proceeding from taking place.

A ruling in Fischer’s favor could disrupt the convictions of about 350 January 6 attackers, whom DOJ has successfully prosecuted under the obstruction law. A total of approximately 1,350 people have been charged with crimes related to their actions in 

A favorable ruling could also eliminate two of the four criminal charges Special Counsel Jack Smith brought last year against former president Donald Trump. Smith argues that his obstruction charges against Trump would stand even if the high court narrows the application of the law. That’s because Trump’s effort to create slates of fake presidential electors to help him retain power, Smith says, is an example of falsifying evidence, a point that even Fischer’s lawyer concedes falls under the statute.

The Supreme Court has also agreed to separately consider Trump’s long-shot claim that he has “absolute immunity” from any prosecution. By finally agreeing to hear the case, the court has likely delayed Trump’s federal trial on charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election. Many argue this delay may prove to be hugely beneficial to the former president and current GOP presidential nominee.

Notably multiple justices used hypotheticals that suggested some sympathy for the extremist arguments that DOJ is acting unfairly by prosecuting the January 6 attackers with more vigor than they have used against left-leaning demonstrators. These lines of questioning seemed to reveal general skepticism among the court’s conservative majority about the obstruction statute.

Even so, it’s still not clear how the high court will rule in the obstruction case. Much of Tuesday’s argument revolved around the interpretation of the single word “otherwise,” which connects two provisions in the statute. The first makes it illegal to corruptly alter, destroy, or conceal evidence to undermine official proceedings. The second provision says it is a crime “otherwise” to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding.

Fischer argues that “otherwise” limits the second provision to apply only to evidence. DOJ says the word is part of a “classic catch-all.” That is to say that Congress intended that the second provision should be applied independently and broadly with reference to any efforts made to stop courts or lawmakers from doing their jobs.

A straightforward reading of the statute, Prelogar said, shows Fischer and others violated it on January 6. “Many crimes occurred that day,” she said. “But in plain English, the fundamental wrong committed by many of the rioters, including the petitioner, was a deliberate attempt to stop the joint session of Congress from certifying the results of the election.”

One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves.

Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa.

Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land here in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14 million gross profit. More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.

A Guardian investigation into the unprecedented water transfer, and how it took shape, reveals that Greenstone strategically purchased land and influence to advance the deal. The company was able to do so by exploiting the arcane water policies governing the Colorado River.

Experts expect that such transfers will become more common as thirsty towns across the west seek increasingly scarce water. The climate crisis and chronic overuse have sapped the Colorado River watershed, leaving cities and farmers alike to contend with shortages. Amid a deepening drought and declines in the river’s reservoirs, Greenstone and firms like it have been discreetly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland.

As US states negotiate how they will divide up the river’s dwindling supplies, officials challenging the Greenstone transfer in court fear it will open the floodgates to many more private water sales, allowing investors to profit from scarcity. The purchases have alarmed local residents, who worry that water speculators scavenging agricultural land for valuable water rights will leave rural communities like Cibola in the dust.

“Here we are in the middle of a drought and trying to preserve the Colorado River, and we’re allowing water to be transferred off of the river,” said Regina Cobb, a former Republican state representative who has tried to limit transfers. “And in the process, we’re picking winners and losers.”

In February, a federal judge ruled that the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer was done without proper environmental review, ordering the federal Bureau of Reclamation to complete a more thorough evaluation. The Department of Justice, which is representing the bureau in the legal proceeding, declined to comment on whether the bureau would be appealing the decision.

Meanwhile, Greenstone—which appears to be the first water brokerage firm to sell rights to the Colorado River—could help chart the course of how the resource can be bought and sold in the west.

Greenstone first arrived in Cibola a decade ago—though few here knew anything of the company at the time. Through a subsidiary called GSC Farm LLC, the company purchased 485 acres of land in the Cibola valley in 2013 and 2014, for about $9.8 million. Hardly anyone in town took notice.

“Why would we?” said Holly Irwin, a supervisor for La Paz county, which encompasses Cibola.

Initially, Greenstone leased that land back to farmers, who planted fields of alfalfa and rows of puffball cotton.

Then, in 2018, the company sold the water tied to that farmland to Queen Creek, a fast-growing sprawl of gated communities on the outskirts of Arizona’s capital. The city’s government agreed to pay the company $24 million for the annual entitlement to 2,033 acre-feet of Colorado River water.

In July of last year, amid continuing legal challenges and national scrutiny, that water was finally diverted. The alfalfa and cotton fields were fallowed—reduced to dry brush and cracked earth. Many in town were blindsided. “We were all just like: ‘What the heck?’” Irwin recalled.

GSC Farm, she realized, wasn’t really a farm at all—it was part of a water investment firm that had brokered water transfer deals all across the south-west.

GSC Farm is one of at least 25 subsidiaries and affiliates of Greenstone, registered in Arizona and other states. Business registration records, deeds, loan documents and tax records show that these companies share the same executives. To local residents, including elected officials such as Irwin, it was initially unclear that the business—which had been acquiring thousands of acres of farmland not only in Cibola but across Arizona—went by so many names.

Greenstone’s executives and lawyers did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the company’s corporate structure, its business model, and how it initiated the Queen Creek deal.

Public records revealed that Greenstone’s financial backers include the global investment firm MassMutual and its subsidiary Barings, as well as public pension funds. At least one of its acquisitions appears to be financed by Rabo AgriFinance, a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational banking and financial services company Rabobank.

On its website, Greenstone describes itself as “a water company” and as “a developer and owner of reliable, sustainable water supplies,” Its CEO, Mike Schlehuber, previously worked for Vidler Water Company—another firm that essentially brokers water supply—as well as Summit Global Management, a company that invests in water suppliers and water rights.

Greenstone’s managing director and vice-president, Mike Malano—a former realtor based in Phoenix who remains “active in the Arizona development community,” per his company bio—got himself elected to the board of the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district, a quasi-governmental organization that oversees the distribution of water for agriculture in the region.

Irwin was horrified. She felt that a company with ties to big banks and real estate developers, posing as a farm, had infiltrated her small town and sold off its most precious resource.

The deal won’t have an immediate impact on Cibola’s residents. It doesn’t affect the municipal water supply. But she worries that the transfer will be the first of many. And if more and more farms are fallowed to feed water to cities, what will become of rural towns along the river?

“It’ll be like Owens Valley,” she said, referring to the water grab that inspired the movie Chinatown. In the early 20th century, agents working for the city of Los Angeles, posing as farmers or ranchers, bought up land in the valley and diverted its water to fuel their metropolis, leaving behind a dustbowl.

By allowing the Greenstone deal to go through, “I’m afraid we’ve opened Pandora’s box,” she said.

The Colorado River, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico, has declined by about 20% since the turn of the century, amid the most severe drought the west has seen in 1,200 years. In a painfully negotiated deal, Arizona, Nevada and California agreed to reduce the amount of water they draw from the river by 13% through 2026. Experts warned that even deeper cuts would be necessary in the coming decade, but states are currently deadlocked over a longer-term conservation plan.

“With ongoing shortages on the river, driven by climate change, Colorado River water is going to become very valuable,” said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University. “Anyone who understands this dynamic thinks, ‘Well, if I could buy Colorado River water rights, that’s more valuable than owning oil in this country at this stage.’”

Though the price Queen Creek paid for the water was remarkable—amounting to more than $11,500 per acre-foot—lawyers and water experts in Arizona told the Guardian it would probably sell for even more today.

The process of selling and transferring the water, however, can be bureaucratic and complicated. In most cases, a company like Greenstone would have to first convince fellow landowners in their local irrigation district to allow the sale, and then secure approvals from the state department of water resources and the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages water in the west.

What Irwin and many of Cibola’s residents didn’t realize was that in their sleepy, riverside town, a select group of farmers and landowners had been working for years to facilitate such deals.

Irrigation districts, as the name suggests, are designed to distribute water for irrigation across the US west. These districts were formed in the 19th and 20th centuries as cooperatives, allowing farmers to pool resources to develop water infrastructure. In the Colorado River basin, the districts contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver water flowing through federal infrastructure to farms and ranches.

Farmers tend to be possessive of their precious water, explained Susanna Eden of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. Most irrigation districts are set up to keep water for farming—and to keep it within their jurisdictions.

But in the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district (CVIDD), landowners seem to have anticipated the market potential of their water. “It has been said, and I think it has been demonstrated, that the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district was set up by people who were investing in water, rather than pure agriculturalists,” said Eden.

In 1992, long before Greenstone arrived on the scene, CVIDD amended its contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to explicitly contemplate “water exchange, water lease, water transfer” or a change in the “type or place of use” of its water allotment.

The CVIDD board president, Michael Mullion, a farmer in Cibola who had been leasing land from GSC Farm in addition to tending his own land, vouched for the Greenstone’s water transfer at a 2019 hearing with the state’s department of water resources. In his testimony, Mullion talked about how his grandfather had come to the Cibola valley in 1949. “He brushed, cleared, leveled and built the canals for this particular ground,” he said. “But his dream was to actually sell this water.”

The district’s governing philosophy already aligned with Greenstone’s, but the company’s 500-acre purchase here allowed it to more directly influence the district’s policies. Irrigation district boards make key decisions about water in the district—and buying more land can buy more influence on the board. Landowners in the district are entitled to two votes for every acre they hold in board elections.

The district’s board of directors now includes the heads of prominent farming families in the area, including Mullion and his father, Bob, as well as Greenstone’s vice-president, Malano.

Over the years, CVIDD helped landowners, including Greenstone, gain more agency and direct control over their water rights. In most irrigation districts, the district contracts with the Bureau of Reclamation for the right to a lump sum of water, which it distributes to landowners and farmers.

However, a review of CVIDD’s contracts with the bureau revealed that between 2006 and 2014, the district began removing itself as the middleman—giving a few large landowners even more agency over how they use their water. Whereas in other irrigation districts, members would have to vote to approve a water transfer like the Greenstone deal, in the Cibola valley, some landowners can propose transfers as they please, subject to federal approval.

Amid growing public scrutiny of the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer, the CVIDD board in 2019 unanimously approved a resolution disputing the idea that water rights are reserved for local use, and supporting landowners’ right to change “the place of use and purpose of use” of their water.

“I believe they’ve been setting the stage for the Queen Creek transfer,” said Jamie Kelley, an attorney based in Bullhead City. “This was their long-term plan.”

Mullion and lawyers representing CVIDD did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about its founding principles. They also did not address critiques that their policies were set up to benefit landowners seeking to sell water rights.

Even now, after years of public debate and litigation, local residents remain baffled by the idea that water could be sold and syphoned away from them, for ever.

Down a dusty, two-lane road, just past the unassuming cream-colored building where the Cibola valley irrigation district is headquartered, a group gathered for an informal meeting with Holly Irwin last summer to discuss their grievances.

“Why is somebody coming from so far away to take water from here?” said Carol Stewart, who runs B&B convenience store—the only shop in town.

She hosted a handful of friends and neighbors, mostly retirees and recreators who had settled here decades ago. Everyone huddled into Stewart’s wood-paneled RV trailer, a respite from the searing heat, and shouted their questions over the buzz of the AC. What did the transfer mean? Would they have enough water to supply homes here?

“It’s all about the mighty dollar,” Irwin said. “It’s all about money, and how much they can come in and take advantage.”

This deal wouldn’t affect the town’s residential water supplies, Irwin explained. But it meant that more and more farmers might choose to sell out—the water that once irrigated Cibola’s fields could be diverted away. And as the Colorado River shrank, corporations were growing increasingly thirsty for rural supplies.

“Don’t we have water rights?” asked John Rosenfeld, who has lived in Cibola for 24 years. “I have a right to that water, because I’m paying for it.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, Irwin responded. Most of Cibola’s residents get their water from a municipal supply or from private wells. But some properties here come with water rights attached, sometimes dating back to before Arizona was a US state. In the 1800s and the decades following, miners and farmers could snatch water rights up and down the Colorado River simply by laying claim to the water and putting it to use for livestock or irrigating land. It didn’t matter to these settlers that some of that water and land was taken from Indigenous tribes that were here before them.

Those water rights were then passed down from generation to generation. They were formalized in agreements and interstate contracts that left some farming regions and tribes with the highest-priority water rights, while other rural and metropolitan areas received lower-priority rights. Such contracts assign water rights a “priority level” of one through six—priorities one through four represent rights for permanent water service, whereas priorities five and six represent the temporary rights to surplus supplies. The water rights Greenstone purchased in Cibola and sold to Queen Creek are fourth priority—permanently secured and prized.

Notably missing from the group at B&B were farmers. The Guardian tried to contact a number of farmers in the region, but other than Mullion, none were available for an interview. Not all agriculturalists are interested in selling their water—but the option may be increasingly appealing as the climate crisis and water shortages disrupt their ability to effectively farm. “It’s hard to know, but demands create pressure,” said Wade Noble, an attorney representing farmers with the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district, north of Cibola. “The drought on the river has created very high pressure.”

Greenstone isn’t the only company coveting such water rights. Across the US west, private investors have been scouring rural communities in search of high-priority water rights. In Arizona, Greenstone and firms like it have acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land and their corresponding water rights.

In the Cibola valley, for example, Western Water LLC, another company that specializes in “the sale and transfer of water rights,” owns about 100 acres of land, along with its entitlement to a modest 620 acre-feet of water, public records from the Bureau of Reclamation and La Paz county showed.

Before the Bureau of Reclamation approved Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found that Greenstone and its competitors had acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land across Arizona, including in La Paz, Pinal, Maricopa, Mohave and Yuma counties. The newspaper’s reports were cited by local officials who argued that Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek would be a harbinger of many more such deals, as water becomes increasingly scarce across the west.

A Guardian review of deeds and other public records found that in Yuma county, companies associated with Greenstone hold about 5,300 acres of farmland, much of it within the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district. Taxes on those lands were paid by Sunstone Farms LLC, a Greenstone subsidiary that leases agricultural properties.

There, unlike in CVIDD, individual landowners cannot initiate water transfer agreements on their own. But because votes within Wellton-Mohawk are also weighted based on how much land someone owns, larger landowners could seek more influence on its board. County records indicate that a Greenstone-affiliated LLC is one of the largest landowners in the district.

Meanwhile to the north, in Mohave county, Greenstone’s competitor Water Asset Management holds more than 2,400 acres, and access to nearly 16,000 acre-feet of water, per public records from the county.

In 2022, La Paz along with Mohave and Yuma counties filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation, challenging its claim that the deal would cause “no significant” environmental impact.

“We are arguing in our lawsuit that Reclamation did not analyze the precedent that this transfer set,” said John Lemaster, an attorney representing Mohave county. “The entire purpose of Greenstone is to develop and sell water resources. We know future transfers are likely.”

This year, a federal judge in Arizona sided with them, ruling that the Bureau of Reclamation’s environmental evaluation was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordering the agency to prepare a more thorough assessment. While it’s unclear how the agency will proceed, given that water is already flowing to Queen Creek, the outcome could define how future deals are made and who can lay claim to the Colorado River’s water.

Greenstone, meanwhile, has tried to play down the significance of the transfer. At a March 2022 committee hearing to discuss a bill introduced by Cobb, the former state representative who tried to limit water transfers, Malano balked at descriptions of his company as a hedge fund, describing Greenstone as “one of the largest farming operations in the state of Arizona,”

Indeed, Greenstone and its competitors, such as Water Asset Management, often lease their land to farmers. But Greenstone’s ultimate goal, per its website, “is to advance water transactions,” And it has been busy doing so.

In 2017, it helped secure the right to Rio Grande water for a Facebook data center in Los Lunas, New Mexico. While the Queen Creek deal was the company’s first sale off the Colorado River, it has also brokered a number of deals to supply groundwater to developing communities across Arizona.

In September, the state’s Democratic attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of the counties challenging the transfer. “Future transfers will be likely, if not inevitable,” Kris Mayes wrote, “given the need for water across Arizona.”

Queen Creek is growing fast.

Wide, tree-lined boulevards vine off into neat, master-planned communities named Harvest and Encanterra, featuring resort pools, lush golf courses and ornamental lakes. Beyond the sand-hued estates, which blend into the Sonoran landscapes, there is construction. Cranes clear ground, crews build wood frames through suburban cul-de-sacs in various states of completion.

Queen Creek was the seventh-fastest growing city in the US, according to a Census Bureau report released last year. It, like many Arizona suburbs, has struggled to balance a development boom with a shrinking water supply.

Last year, the state moved to limit new housing construction in the suburbs of Phoenix—one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country—to avoid emptying region’s underground aquifers. Projecting a 4.86 million acre-foot shortfall in groundwater supplies over the next century, the state announced that all future housing developments in the desert would have to find some other source of water, by purchasing or importing their supply.

Ambitious cities and developers have been left scrambling. The suburb of Buckeye, west of Phoenix, has considered building a desalination plant in the Mexican town of Puerto Peñasco and piping the treated water several hundred miles north to Arizona.

Queen Creek’s water manager Paul Gardner said the town had been working for years to secure water for its future. In addition to piping water from the Colorado River, the city has also sought to import groundwater from the Harquahala valley, to the east of Cibola. It recently signed a $30 million deal with Harquahala Valley Landowners LLC, a company that represents farmers and investors with water rights, to syphon off 5,000 acre-feet of groundwater a year to feed its maze of gated communities and sprawling subdivisions.

Meanwhile, in Cibola, Holly Irwin dreams of development too—though of a different sort.

On the east bank of the Colorado, she recently oversaw the cleanup and restoration of a stretch of open space for residents and visitors. “Now we have trash cans, we have picnic tables,” Irwin said. “My goal is we’ll have campsites that stretch all the way down. And more electrical hookups for RVs.”

In the summertime, she hopes, the river will be filled with boats and its shore with picnickers and campers. “We could attract more people, from all over.”

Stewart, the shop owner, first came here as a “weekender” from San Diego, California. She was drawn to the region’s rugged beauty and rural familiarity. “This was a place to roam, to be with family.”

In the decade since she and her family moved here, she has also seen the Colorado shrink, and its lush banks fade. “There’s been years when you could basically walk across the river,” she said. “That is what has scared a lot of people. We need the water here.”

Last week, in a bid to clarify his historically nebulous stance on abortion, Donald Trump said that if reelected, he intends to leave abortion rights “to the states,” seemingly contradicting his prior stance in favor of a 16-week national ban. 

But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and leading abortion historian, thinks that a complete ban could be on the agenda for a future Trump administration—and the vehicle for it would be the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law still on the books. Ziegler and other legal experts warn the law could be marshaled to ban all abortions—even in blue states that protect abortion rights—and possibly even contraception and gender-affirming care, while circumventing the democratic process. 

Let’s start with a quick history lesson. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which bars the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” It was named after anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran molded by his strict Puritan upbringing who was obsessed with enforcing a culture of sexual purity, which was his mission as a Special Agent of the US Post Office after the eponymous law was passed. His views on abortion, though, were more nuanced than what the text of the law might suggest: he believed abortion should be permissible to protect a woman’s life.

The act was challenged, narrowed, and broadly seen as irrelevant in the decades after Comstock’s 1915 death, but recently, anti-abortion conservatives have suggested deploying it to skirt the broad support that exists for abortion rights nationwide. They “argue that every abortion involves an item that’s put in the mail or transported by common carrier,” Ziegler said, “and that if there’s this effective mailing ban, that is a de facto ban on [abortion] procedures, full stop.” That would mean a ban on medication and procedural, in-clinic abortions—and, as the health policy research organization KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, points out in a policy brief, enforcement of the Comstock Act could also affect the treatment of miscarriages and other OBGYN care.

Anti-abortion activists took that argument to the Supreme Court last month to drastically restrict access to mifepristone, one of the two pills used in medication abortion, which research has shown has continued to grow in popularity since the FDA allowed them to be prescribed virtually and sent by mail starting in December 2021. Project 2025, an initiative led by dozens of conservative groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, repeatedly cited the Comstock Act—by its statute numbers, not by name—throughout “Mandate for Leadership.,” its blueprint for Trump’s next term. Given Comstock, it stated, “the Department of Justice in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.” Jonathan Mitchell, the conservative lawyer behind the Texas abortion ban, told the New York Times in February, “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” cautioning Trump and anti-abortion groups to keep quiet about the Comstock Act until after the election. Trump appears to be following these orders and hasn’t publicly addressed whether he’d enforce Comstock if re-elected (his campaign also didn’t respond to repeated questions about that from Mother Jones). 

These efforts ignore the fact that medication abortion is safe and effective—including when it’s prescribed virtually and mailed to patients—and that polling by the Pew Research Center shows the majority of Americans disapprove of Dobbs and support legal abortion in all or most circumstances. But as Ziegler writes in a forthcoming Yale Law Journal article on the history of the Comstock Act, co-authored with Yale law professor Reva Siegal, “Comstock revival has emerged as a tool to create an abortion ban that would be unachievable in democratic politics—and a vehicle for Republican surrogates to demand a national ban that it would be too politically risky for candidates to assert in their own voices.” 

I talked with Ziegler—who has written six books on the history of abortion and the law in the US—about the Comstock Act, the problems with the right’s reading of it today, Democrats’ strategies (or lack thereof) to resist it, and what the law’s possible revival reveals about the risks posed by other similar centuries-old “zombie laws” that could come back to haunt us.

What was Comstock supposed to accomplish when it was passed back in 1873? 

The Comstock Act was passed by a group of people who saw themselves as deeply concerned with sexual purity. This was a period when many Americans were moving to cities; when people from all over the world were immigrating to the United States; when women were campaigning for the right to vote in a way that they really hadn’t before. And this was causing something of a moral panic, particularly among white Protestant well-to-do men who believed that cities were changing the way people, their children, and wives, were behaving. Comstock himself had become particularly concerned about pornography, which he’d been exposed to during the Civil War. But he thought the problem was broader than that. He thought that a broad array of materials—from sex toys to medical textbooks to great works of literature—were all incentivizing people to have impure sex. And this was a concern, I would say, in a different way for women and other female-identified folks because they could get pregnant. But Comstock was concerned with the debauching of boys as well as girls. 

Contraception and abortion came into the picture because Comstock believed they made these forms of illicit sex possible. He called them “incentives to crime,” meaning that if you knew you could have this kind of illicit sex without a pregnancy, you’d be more likely to engage in it if you were female. At the time, the law wasn’t very clear about what obscenity meant. No one had really been regulating contraception much at all. Abortion laws were very new and untested, particularly insofar as early pregnancy was concerned. So the Comstock Act basically was designed to stamp out illicit sex…and it spawned a bigger movement. It was not the end of the story. It was sort of the beginning.

You write that “revivalists selectively quote the Comstock law to construct it as an abortion ban, rather than recognizing that the law Congress enacted was a broad obscenity statute, and remains so today.” Can you say more about the problem with their reading of the law? And how does understanding it as an obscenity statute, rather than a plain and simple abortion ban, complicate its application today? 

Their argument to the Supreme Court is essentially, “This is the way to a nationwide abortion ban that isn’t about the Constitution, that isn’t about our values, and that isn’t about politics.” It’s sort of a way to give the anti-abortion movement what it wants…and in part, I think this cherry-picking is problematic because if the statute has a plain meaning, it covers much more than abortion. 

The other problem…is that I don’t think the statute has a plain meaning. The word “abortion” didn’t have a plain meaning in 1873. [In her paper, Ziegler noted that at the time, abortion often referred to miscarriages.] I don’t think it has a plain meaning today. And if the statute is ambiguous, then what you’re doing is imposing a 21st-century reading of the statute as a ban they would never enact, which it is not. Reading the text—it’s doing something very different.

You write that when Comstock was passed, “Congress was enacting a law that would be flatly unconstitutional today.” How so, and why do you think we aren’t seeing more Democrats mobilizing to resist it? 

The Comstock Act applies not only to items but to speech. Even in the mifepristone Supreme Court case, Clarence Thomas asked, “Wouldn’t information about this pill be illegal under the Comstock Act?” So a lot of speech was covered by the Comstock Act—that’s one potential dimension of a challenge. There are also due process questions about what the heck the terms in the Comstock Act mean. I think the term “abortion” is ambiguous because anti-abortion leaders have contested its meaning [and] have offered literally dozens of definitions and state laws that vary from place to place. 

But there are other terms that I would imagine anyone would agree are vague—like, the statute says you can’t mail items. What does that mean? Does that mean medical textbooks? Does that mean Viagra? Does that mean drugs for gender-affirming care? Does that mean methotrexate, because you could theoretically use it as an abortifacient? Does it mean vaccines? So there are also due process questions raised because you can’t criminally punish someone for violating the rules when they don’t know what the rules are. 

There is an interesting interplay between the litigation groups, which really don’t want Democrats going full tilt on the argument that Comstock is going to function as an abortion ban. They think that’s a ridiculous argument legally and don’t want to give it more momentum by having everyone believe that conservatives are right about how the Comstock Act operates. They don’t want that before the Supreme Court weighs in, because they could, in theory, adopt this theory of the Comstock Act. At the same time, Democrats are aware that there’s a real political threat in not discussing Comstock. 

So my guess is that after the mifepristone case is resolved, you’ll see a more forceful response from Democrats who’ve been trying to balance not wanting to give conservatives a leg up in the conservative Supreme Court, where they already have an advantage, and not leaving voters in the dark about the threat Comstock poses. I don’t know if they’ve been striking the right balance. Essentially, litigation is pulling one way and the politics are pulling another way.

I didn’t realize this until I read what you wrote, but there was no mention of Comstock in the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade—or even in the privacy-related decisions that flowed from Roe. But a couple of the justices brought it up in the case they heard last month seeking to restrict medication abortion. Why do you think the right didn’t invoke Comstock sooner? Why are they doing it now? 

I mean, it’s not a great idea politically to bring it up now, right? I would sort of pose the question of, why would you bring it up at all? [Laughs]

Politically, it seems pretty disastrous. I mean, Anthony Comstock was a very strange, troubled man who introduced a law that raised grave First Amendment and equal protection concerns, which was enforced against his political enemies in ways that swept in a lot of stuff unrelated to abortion. And you have conservatives for decades spending time creating a single-issue anti-abortion movement, saying, “We are not the sex police. We are not coming for contraception. We are not worried about women voting. We are not concerned about sex outside of marriage. That’s just not our thing. We’re worried about the rights of the unborn here.” So invoking Comstock really undermines that message because Comstock is unambiguously about more than abortion. 

The other thing is that…enforcing it would have been unconstitutional under Roe. So there was no point in bringing it up. There was both a pretty high political cost of invoking Comstock and not much upside. The other thing that’s important to mention is if you’re thinking of the anti-abortion movement as a single-issue movement, for a long time, its game plan was a constitutional personhood amendment. That was the end goal. And to get a constitutional amendment, you need to win hearts and minds. You need to convince a majority of Americans that you’re right. And invoking the Comstock Act is not going to help you with that. I think we’ve seen a little bit of a pivot since Dobbs toward imagining that fetal personhood will come from a judicial decision from the US Supreme Court, not from a constitutional amendment. If your goal is to win via the courts, you don’t need to care as much about whether voters are with you—or not. So I think to some degree, the invocation of the Comstock Act tells you that the anti-abortion movement has been moving away from strategies that focus on winning in elections and instead on strategies that are taking the issue away from voters and putting it in the hands of people who are not accountable to voters. 

You raised earlier the question of, what exactly Comstock could regulate? Would the question of what it regulates ultimately depend on how the Department of Justice enforces it?

Absolutely. We don’t know a lot about how it would be interpreted. Contraceptives, I think, would be on the table, because we know that a lot of abortion opponents believe that at least IUDs, the birth control pill, and the morning-after pill are abortifacients. If Comstock is being interpreted as an abortion ban, you would have some contraceptives potentially swept in—emergency contraceptives are the most likely. I mean, we don’t know, right? Because the law is very vague, and it would depend on what the Trump Justice Department’s priorities will be. We know that in Project 2025, the priority has been people who manufacture pills and abortion providers who have been called out as prosecution targets. But what actually happens would be left a lot to the prosecutorial discretion of the Justice Department.

The recent ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court reignites this whole question of “zombie laws” like Comstock and how they can come back to haunt us. I read a piece in the Washington Post that laid out some of these discriminatory zombie laws that are technically still in the books: 13 states have laws that technically ban same-sex marriage and another dozen states technically ban sodomy. How likely is it that we could see laws like those revived, given that Clarence Thomas has called for overruling the decisions keeping them at bay? Are there other similarly disturbing zombie laws that we should be aware of?

Any of what you could imagine as “morals laws” are still on the books. The dynamic, essentially, was the same with Comstock, which is that at a certain point everyone said, “Well, that’s Comstockery,” which meant Victorian, antiquated, prudish. And no one really thought they would be enforced. But then repealing them felt weird because that somehow seemed to be saying, “This kind of sex is OK.” It felt very different for legislators to say, “Well, we don’t want to repeal this ban on sodomy because that makes it seem like we’re saying sodomy is good. But we’re not going to enforce it because that would make us seem like we’re engaging in Comstockery.”

Then you had other people, Democrats essentially, saying over and over again, “Maybe we don’t need to repeal this stuff because it’s not going to be enforced anyway.” And it’s not that they thought it was OK, or they didn’t want to be seen as opposing those things, but rather that they had other priorities. So you would have these zombie laws left on the books time after time because people were prioritizing other things. One of the lessons, obviously, is that that’s a stupid idea—if a law looks dangerous in theory, it can become dangerous in practice. 

If Comstock were enforced, could it pave the way for the formal recognition of fetal personhood? And conversely, could states that explicitly protect abortion rights—like New York or California, for example—challenge Comstock’s enforcement? 

Comstock is interestingly not about fetal personhood—I mean, Anthony Comstock would occasionally call abortion “antenatal murder,” but it was mostly about sex for him. Sex was the main problem, and abortion was an issue because it let people have sex. It wasn’t that abortion was an issue because of fetal protection. Comstock, if anything, was more worked up about things like dildos than he was about abortion to begin with. Reviving the Comstock Act would be an abortion ban, but the history and the language of the statute aren’t fetal protective in the same way at all. From the anti-abortion movement standpoint, Comstock is clearly a stopgap solution because they want recognition that fetuses are persons. That is what leaders of the movement call the new North Star of the movement, the new kind of fight that replaced the fight to get rid of Roe v. Wade. 

It would certainly move the needle in terms of making abortion harder. Because if the Comstock Act were being enforced, it would preempt state laws that protect abortion rights, and states that have ballot initiatives, and states that have other protective legislation. And I think that’s a really important point for people to sit with for a minute. Because if you don’t like Joe Biden, and you are planning on staying home, and you think that that’s going to be okay if you support abortion rights because you live in a state that either has, had, or will have a ballot initiative, that ignores the fact that the Trump could get elected, enforce the Comstock Act as a ban, and override whatever protections are in your state. 

Trump has never said he’s not going to do that—you have a lot of former Trump officials who have been going around essentially promising that he is going to enforce the Comstock Act as a ban. The Trump campaign has never disavowed those claims, never really even addressed those claims. I don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen, but at least it’s a reasonable concern to have, given that Trump has done nothing to discourage those concerns.

In November, ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release casting himself as a fierce opponent of China. It declared, “Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Senator Scott has introduced dozens of bills to punish Communist China for its increased military aggression, continued cyberattacks on both private companies and U.S. government agencies, unfair trade practices and stealing of data and intellectual property from American citizens and businesses.” Several months earlier, Scott, who is up for reelection this year, called on Americans to boycott products manufactured in China and to demand that US companies halt doing business there. Last year, he declared that the United States had to “Stop buying [Chinese] stuff. Stop helping them. Stop investing in China.” And he tweeted, “You don’t do business with your enemies.”

Yet contrary to the image he now eagerly projects as a fierce China hawk looking to ban business with China, Scott, a former health care executive whose firm was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud and who is worth hundreds of million of dollars, has a long record of supporting Chinese investment in the United States and personally making money off Chinese commerce. 

In 2014, while Scott was governor of Florida, his administration tried to recruit Chinese businesses to establish operations in the Sunshine State. Enterprise Florida—a partnership between the state government and local businesses—opened offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong to attract Chinese investment in Florida, and Scott dispatched the state secretary of commerce, Gary Swope, who was CEO of Enterprise Florida, to China for this occasion. A report issued by Enterprise Florida in 2020 (a year after Scott left the governor’s mansion for the Senate) noted that the outfit had positioned “Florida as an ideal business destination for Chinese companies.”

One particular venture stood out. In 2018, Scott’s administration boasted that through EF it had helped expand the operations in Florida of a Chinese solar firm called JinkoSolar. When JinkoSolar that year announced it would build a new state-of-the-art solar panel manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, Scott took credit for this and declared, “Florida’s economy is on a roll.” City and state tax incentives for the JinkoSolar plant totaled $4.2 million.

A few months later, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported the deal with this Chinese firm “could pad Scott’s vast, personal bottom line.” The paper noted that he was an investor in a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, the parent of utility giant Florida Power & Light. And NextEra had said it planned to purchase 7 million solar panels from JinkoSolar over the following four years. 

A Scott spokesperson at the time said that Scott “has never made a single decision as governor with any thought or consideration of his personal finances.” The newspaper pointed out that Scott had played a very public role in bringing JinkoSolar to Jacksonville and owned as much as $250,000 in NextEra Partners stock, with his wife holding up to $500,000 in this stock. When Scott and his wife sold their NextEra holdings in 2019, they cleared between $150,000 and $1.1 million in capital gains, according to his Senate financial disclosure report (which lists amounts in categories, not specific figures). 

Two years after selling his NextEra holdings, Scott introduced a bill called the “Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act” to prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar panels manufactured or assembled in China, specifically the Xinjiang province, which has been known as a site of forced labor camps. The following year, US Customs and Border Protection officials seized solar energy components heading to JinkoSolar and two other Chinese companies, under a new law that banned imports from China’s Xinjiang region due to concerns about slave labor at Uyghur detention camps. 

Though Scott now advocates cutting off any US investment in China, he held direct investments in Chinese stock funds in the early 2010s. For instance, according to his annual financial disclosure forms, in 2010 he held up to $328,315 in a particular Chinese fund. 

Scott also made a bundle with a plastics company that teamed up with a Chinese firm to manufacture components for automotive vehicles in China. As the Miami Herald reported in 2018, Scott in 2005 used $14 million in cash to arrange the leveraged buy-out of Continental Structural Plastics, a Michigan-based firm that made parts for car and truck manufacturers. Scott led the company until he was elected governor in 2010. But by then the firm was near insolvency and racked with high debt. Scott’s successors mounted a turnaround that included a 50/50 joint venture struck in 2014 with the Qingdao Victall Railway Group in Tangshan, China. According to a press release put out at the time, the new project would operate out of a 322,000 square-foot manufacturing facility located in Tangshan and produce “composite components for the automotive, heavy truck and bus, construction and agriculture markets in China.”

In 2016, Teijin, Ltd., a Japanese conglomerate bought Continental Structural Plastics for $825 million. The Herald noted that Scott and his family owned 66.7 percent of the company when it was sold, meaning they apparently pulled in about $550 million from the sale of a firm that had partnered with a Chinese company. His net worth increased by 55 percent mainly due to this one deal. (By the way, in 2013, according to the newspaper, Scott had led a delegation of business leaders to Japan to meet with Japanese executives, and the list of Japanese firms invited to talk with the Americans included Teijin, Ltd.)

More recently, Scott and his wife, Ann Holland Scott, have held a variety of investments with Chinese connections. In 2021, according to Business Insider, they sold a massive investment in Valterra Products Holdings, a California firm that manufactures products and parts for recreational vehicles, buses, pools, spas, and other applications, and netted between $15 million and $75 million. Its product line included goods manufactured in China.

The couple reported on his 2022 financial disclosure form that their family earned at least $4 million from their holdings in Gainline Capital Partners, which owned a handful of companies, including Galaxy Universal, a footwear company, and Core Health & Fitness, a maker of fitness equipment. Both of these firms manufacture products in China. (In 2018, Core Health announced it was shifting much of its manufacturing to China.)

Scott and his wife also invested over $3.5 million in Casdin Partners, which invested in Zentera, a Chinese biopharmaceutical company; CANBridge Pharmaceuticals, a drug company based in China and the United States; and LianBio, a Chinese biotech firm. The couple owned $2 million of stock in Wireless Telecom Group, a global designer and manufacturer of advanced radio frequency and microwave components, modules, systems, and instruments that does significant sales in China. 

Scott and his wife, according to his disclosure forms, have invested millions of dollars in other financial corporations with major interests in China. In 2022, they had between $1.8 million and $3.75 million invested in funds managed by OVO Fund, a venture capital firm. One of its portfolio companies is Avaamo, an AI firm that has drawn backing from a Chinese VC firm called WI Harper. And that VC company has been funded by another Chinese VC firm, Westlake Ventures, which has been tied to the Chinese government. OVO Fund has also held investments in other firms engaged in business in China.

Mother Jones sent Scott’s office a request for comment and a list of questions regarding Scott’s specific actions and investments related to China. His communications director, McKinley Lewis, replied in an email, “Nobody has fought harder in the US Senate to combat the threats posed by Communist China than Senator Rick Scott, and he’ll be happy to put his record up against the China-loving Biden admin and the Democrats who are all pushing Biden’s pro-China agenda. You know it’s a weak hit when no legitimate outlets will take the Democrats’ oppo and they have to settle for giving it to Mother Jones.”

Lewis did not address any of the details in this article.

Scott is a tycoon with massive financial investments, and in the world of global finance and industry it is hard to avoid contact with Chinese businesses. Yet there’s no public indication that Scott, who has strived to be the Senate’s top China-basher, made efforts to steer clear of China when it came to making money. He has raised legitimate concerns about human rights and free speech in China and about China’s military intentions. But such matters did not seem to get in the way when he was trying to whip up business opportunities for Florida or when it came to managing his personal financial portfolio. He’s a China hawk whose nest egg grew in part due to the sort of China-related business activity he now seeks to ban.

New York City Police gathered in force outside of Columbia University on Wednesday, after students convened in the pre-dawn hours to erect dozens of camping tents on a campus lawn. The demonstration backing Palestine was launched hours before president Minouche Shafik began testifying at a Congressional hearing addressing allegations of anti-semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

The students are part of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, which formed after administrators suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace this fall, claiming violations of campus safety and event planning rules.

Organizers of the tent occupation drew inspiration from Vietnam-era protestors who, after Columbia announced plans to build a student gym by grabbing city parkland, occupied administrators’ offices in 1968 and demanded the university cut ties with a defense department think tank.

Today’s divestment coalition is similarly demanding the university’s board cut all funding ties with weapons manufacturers that have been supplying Israel, as well as, according to organizer Isra Hirsi, extend amnesty to pro-Palestinian students who have been punished for past campus actions.

“I never expected to see this many people here,” said Hirsi, a Barnard student who is the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, “despite the fact that they know the risks of disciplinary action and arrest.” 

While Columbia’s grounds are usually open to all, it has largely closed the campus gates and barred public access following demonstrations this fall protesting Israel’s war in Gaza that the administration said were unsanctioned. (When I requested access, spokesperson Robert Hornsby denied me, claiming I couldn’t observe under a longstanding policy related to “our end-of-term campus preparations.”)

Pro-Israel demonstrators are also expected to stage a rally near campus regarding Shafik’s testimony, setting up a day of tension and high police presence.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree-planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.

Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard.

“If I ever retire, I’d like to be able to spend more time outside. The weather is changing, so I am really happy to get these trees. We need more shade,” said Cordoba, 75, a legal secretary, whose family has lived in Grant Park for more than a century.

Over the course of three days in early April, arborists planted 40 or so desert adapted trees in Grant Park, as part of the city’s equity-driven heat mitigation plan to create a shadier, more livable environment amid rising temperatures and hundreds of heat-related deaths.

Phoenix is America’s fifth largest and hottest city, a sprawling urban heat island which has expanded without adequate consideration to climate and environmental factors like water scarcity and extreme heat. ​Multiple heat records were broken last year, including 133 days over 100F and 55 days topping 110F .

Only around 9 percent of Phoenix is protected by tree canopies, yet this citywide figure masks vast inequities between wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods like Willo (13 percent coverage) just two miles north of Grant Park (4 percent). One census tract in the north-west of the city, Camelback East, has 23 percent tree cover.

“This is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods—and one of the most neglected,” said Silverio Ontiveros, a retired police chief turned community organizer who drummed up interest for the tree planting by knocking on doors and putting flyers through every neighbor’s letterbox.

“Our goal is to change the inequity and create enough shade to provide residents and passersby reprieve from the heat. For that we need many more trees, but we also need to take care of them,” added Ontiveros, as he walked through the neighborhood making sure the right families got the right trees.

Grant Park is a majority Latino community in south Phoenix situated next to a sprawling electrical substation—a hot and dusty neighborhood with ​​200 or so homes, but no stores and plenty of empty lots and boarded-up houses. It was once a thriving neighborhood—one of the few places where people of color could live due to discriminatory housing policies that lasted most of the 20th century.

Redlined neighborhoods like Grant Park still have higher pollution levels, less vegetation, more noise pollution and higher temperatures. In recent years, the local outdoor pool was shuttered and scores of trees cut down by a previous administration to prevent homeless people from gathering in the shade.

“This is one of the hottest parts of the city because the people here don’t have political power,” said Leo Hernandez, 78, the master gardener at the thriving community garden where he created a butterfly sanctuary for migrating monarchs. “We need shade, but trees also suck up carbon dioxide, create places to socialize and healthier, happier neighborhoods.”

Trees have multiple benefits in urban areas which include cleaner air, improved physical and mental health, water conservation, increasing wildlife habitat, CO2 storage and sequestration and lower temperatures through shade.

The city is mostly concerned with reducing the urban heat island effect and improving public health, and its 2010 shade masterplan set out a goal of achieving 25 percent citywide canopy cover by 2030. Amid little progress and rising heat mortality and morbidity, in 2021 Phoenix established the country’s first office of heat response and mitigation. Its community tree planting program is now being rolled out to public schools, churches and homes in qualifying census tracts—low-income neighborhoods with little shade.

Residents can choose from a list of 19 native and desert-adapted trees including the Texas olive, Chinese red pistache and Chilean mesquites. The trees, which are a couple of years old and pretty heavy, are planted by contracted arborists. For insurance reasons, they must be within the property—not the sidewalk—and not too close to walls or power lines. Each household also gets a tree kit—a 100 foot hose, irrigation timer, and instrument to measure the soil pH and moisture, as well as written care instructions.

This is the fourth tree-planting initiative in Grant Park, but the other schemes involved donations of smaller, younger trees which residents themselves had to plant in the dry, rocky earth. Several didn’t survive last summer’s heatwave, when temperatures hit 100F on 31 consecutive days, while others died from overwatering or a lack of attention.

Tree planting has become increasingly popular among corporations, governments and environmental groups alike in recent years, with mixed results. In Turkey, 90 percent of the government’s 11 million new trees died within months, while polluting industries including mining and fossil fuel companies have been accused of trying to greenwash environmental and climate harms.

“It is very hard to grow trees here, our environment is very extreme, so we’re doing everything we can to help them survive, which includes giving people the choice so they have species they love and feel excited about,” said Kayla Killoren, the heat office tree equity project coordinator. “There’s been a lot of greenwashing, and some people are weary and think it’s a scam at first, until they see their neighbors get trees planted.”

In Phoenix, a 75 to 80 percent survival rate would be considered a success, according to Killoren.

So far, 700 trees have been planted with scores more events planned throughout April and May, and will resume again in the fall after the summer heat. The project is mostly funded through nonprofits and local and federal government grants, including millions of dollars from the Covid stimulus package—the 2021 American Rescue Plan—and the Inflation Reduction Act.

There’s a long way to go and limited funds. According to American Forests, more than 800,000 more trees are needed to achieve 15 percent canopy cover for every residential block in the city.

The slow progress in improving tree coverage has frustrated many Phoenix residents, and in May, the heat team will present a new master shade plan to the city council, setting out more nuanced data-driven goals for homes, sidewalks and parks to replace the 25 percent citywide one. At the heart of the plan will be tackling shade inequalities that make rising temperatures increasingly deadly for the city’s most vulnerable communities, according to David Hondula, who leads the office of heat response and mitigation.