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      US appeals Texas judge’s ruling to suspend abortion pill approval

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      The US government on Monday appealed a Texas judge’s decision to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of a key abortion drug, saying the ruling endangered women’s health by blocking access to a pill long deemed safe.In a filing with the 5th US circuit court of appeals, the Department of Justice (DoJ) called judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision on the drug mifepristone “especially unwarranted” because it would undermine the FDA’s scientific judgment and harm women for whom the drug is medically necessary.The DoJ also said the anti-abortion groups that sought to overturn the FDA’s approval had no right to sue in the first place, saying they could not show they were harmed and had left the approval unchallenged for years.Kacsmaryk’s decision “upended decades of reliance by blocking FDA’s approval of mifepristone and depriving patients of access to this safe and effective treatment, based on the court’s own misguided assessment of the drug’s safety,” the department said.Lawyers for the anti-abortion groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kacsmaryk, a district judge appointed by former Republican president Donald Trump, had ruled on Friday that the FDA exceeded its authority by ignoring mifepristone’s risks and relying on “plainly unsound reasoning” when approving it.The judge, who works in Amarillo, Texas, stayed his ruling for seven days to allow the Biden administration time to appeal.In Monday’s filing, the justice department asked that Kacsmaryk’s stay remain in place until all appeals, including if necessary to the US supreme court, are resolved.Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen, also including misoprostol, for medication abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The drugs account for more than half of all US abortions.Kacsmaryk ruled just 18 minutes before a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory ruling that directed the FDA to keep the drug available in 17 states.In a Monday filing in that case, the justice department asked the judge there to clarify what should happen if Kacsmaryk’s order took effect.The conflicting rulings could foreshadow a resolution by the supreme court, which last June overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, eliminating a constitutional right to abortion.The supreme court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The New Orleans-based fifth circuit also has a conservative reputation, with three-quarters of its active judges appointed by Republican presidents.“This administration stands by the FDA and is prepared for this legal fight, and we will continue our work to protect reproductive rights,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said.Monday’s appeal came in a case brought by anti-abortion groups led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was formed last August.They accused the FDA of failing to consider during its approval process for mifepristone the drug’s safety when used by girls under age 18.The plaintiffs sought a sympathetic court by suing in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk is the only federal district judge.Kacsmaryk had written critically about Roe v Wade, and the former Christian legal activist’s courtroom is a popular destination for conservatives challenging Biden policies.Twelve US states ban abortion, while 14 others ban it at some point after six to 22 weeks of pregnancy, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. More

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      AOC urges Biden to ignore Texas ruling suspending approval of abortion drug

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      The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday there was “an extraordinary amount of precedent” for the Joe Biden White House to ignore a Friday court ruling suspending federal approval of a drug used in medication abortion.Those remarks from the Democratic US House member quickly prompted a threat by the Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales to defund certain programs under the federal agency which oversees medication approvals if Biden’s administration did as Ocasio-Cortez suggested.The Biden administration has already said it plans to appeal a Friday ruling from Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointed by the Donald Trump White House, that blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone. The FDA approved the drug in 2000, a move that is now being challenged by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group.In urging the Biden administration to decline to enforce the ruling, Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Trump administration had ignored court rulings on immigration issues. She also pointed out that there was a contradicting ruling from a federal judge in Washington state on Friday which blocked the FDA from taking any action to limit access to the drug, virtually ensuring that the US supreme court would settle the matter at some point.“There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this … The Trump administration also did this very thing. This has happened before,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.“The courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings. And when they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this mifepristone ruling, then I believe that the executive branch, and we know that the executive branch has enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington.”CNN host Dana Bash said Ocasio-Cortez was offering a “pretty stunning position” and pressed the congresswoman on whether the Biden administration should ignore the ruling if the US supreme court eventually upheld Kacsmaryk’s decision.“I think one of the things that we need to examine is the grounds of that ruling,” she said. “But I do not believe that the courts have the authority … over the FDA that [Kacsmaryk] just asserted. And I do believe that it creates a crisis. Should the supreme court do that, it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”During a later appearance on State of the Union, Gonzales told Bash that there would be consequences if the Biden administration ignored the ruling.“The House Republicans have the power of the purse,” Gonzales said. “And if the administration wants to not live up to this ruling, then we’re gonna have a problem. And it may become a point where House Republicans on the appropriations side have to defund FDA programs that don’t make sense.”Bash also asked the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, whether ignoring the ruling was “off the table”. Becerra declined to say specifically what the administration would do if appellate courts, including the supreme court, upheld the decision.“Everything is on the table,” he said on CNN. “We want the courts to overturn this reckless decision.” More

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      China sends dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan as US urges restraint amid military drills

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      China sent dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan for a second day of military drills on Sunday, launching simulated attacks in retaliation to the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting the US House speaker during a brief visit to the US.Taiwan’s defence ministry said it was monitoring the movements of China’s missile forces, as the US said it too was on alert.China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent 70 warplanes, including fighter jets, reconnaissance craft and refuellers, into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday morning, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry. It did not provide a map or locations, but said 31 planes had crossed the median line – the de facto border in the Taiwan strait between Taiwan and China.The PLA had announced the immediate start to three days of drills on Saturday morning. By 7pm that evening it had sent 71 warplanes and eight ships into Taiwan’s ADIZ with almost 60 crossing the median line.Taiwan’s ministry said the activity had severely violated Indo-Pacific peace and stability, and had a negative effect on international security and economies. It urged other countries to speak out against China’s actions.Chinese state television reported that multiple units carried out simulated strikes on key targets in Taiwan and the surrounding sea. The Chinese military’s eastern theatre command put out a short animation of the simulated attacks on its WeChat account, showing missiles fired from land, sea and air into Taiwan with two of them exploding in flames as they hit their targets.A Taiwan security source told Reuters that on Saturday the Chinese drills around the Bashi channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, included simulated attacks on aircraft carrier groups as well as anti-submarine drills.Last August, after a visit to Taipei by then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, China staged war games around Taiwan including firing missiles into waters close to the island, though it has yet to announce similar drills this time.Chinese maritime authorities have issued just one notice of a live fire zone, in a small area of water near Pingtan, in the Taiwan strait. The mandatory notice warns air and seacraft to keep clear of the area, which is just a fraction of the areas designated for live fire during last year’s drills.While in Los Angeles last week, on what was officially billed a transit on her way back from Central America, Tsai met the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, despite Beijing’s warnings against the meeting.The de facto US embassy in Taiwan said on Sunday that the US was monitoring China’s drills around Taiwan closely and is “comfortable and confident” it has sufficient resources and capabilities regionally to ensure peace and stability.US channels of communication with China remain open and the US had consistently urged restraint and no change to the status quo, said a spokesperson for the American Institute in Taiwan, which serves as an embassy in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in favour of Beijing in 1979 but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control, says Taiwan is the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with the US, and the topic is a frequent source of tensions.Beijing considers Tsai a separatist and has rebuffed her repeated calls for talks. Tsai says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.China has over the past three years or so stepped up its military pressure against Taiwan, flying regular missions around Taiwan, though not in its territorial airspace or over the island itself.Chinese state media said the aircraft flown into the ADIZ this weekend were armed with live weapons.Taiwanese air force jets also typically carry live weapons when they scramble to see off Chinese incursions.Late on Saturday, Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, which runs the coast guard, put out footage on its YouTube channel showing one of its ships shadowing a Chinese warship, though it did not give an exact location.“You are seriously harming regional peace, stability and security. Please immediately turn around and leave. If you continue to proceed we will take expulsion measures,” a coast guard officer says by radio to the Chinese ship.Other footage showed a Taiwanese warship, the Di Hua, accompanying the coast guard ship in what the coast guard officer calls a “standoff” with the Chinese warship.Still, civilian flights around Taiwan, including to Kinmen and Matsu, two groups of Taiwan-controlled islands right next to the Chinese coast, have continued as normal.In August, civilian air traffic was disrupted after China announced effective no-fly zones in several areas close to Taiwan where it was firing missiles.Meanwhile the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in an interview published on Sunday that Europe must not be a “follower” of either the US or China on Taiwan, saying that the bloc risks entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours”.His comments risk riling Washington and highlight divisions in the European Union over how to approach China, as the US steps up confrontation with its closest rival and Beijing draws closer to Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must be followers and adapt ourselves to the American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron told media as he returned on Friday from a three-day state visit to Beijing.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Biden proposal forbids US schools from outright bans on transgender athletes

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      The Biden administration has released a proposal that would forbid schools and colleges across the US from enacting outright bans on transgender athletes. But teams could create some limits in certain cases – for example, to ensure fairness.If finalized, the proposal would become enshrined as a provision of Title IX. It must undergo a lengthy approval process, however, and it’s almost certain to face challenges from opponents.“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” said Miguel Cardona, Biden’s education secretary, in a statement.The Biden administration used “fairness of competition” as criteria, which has been part of the debate in the US and globally.The move is an effort to counteract a wave of Republican-backed measures targeting LGBTQ+ rights, particularly the participation of trans athletes in school sports. The proposal must undergo a lengthy approval process, however, and it’s almost certain to face challenges. While opponents sharply criticized the proposal, some advocates for transgender athletes were concerned that it did not go far enough.The proposal came on the same day that the US supreme court refused to let West Virginia enforce a state law banning trans athletes from female sports teams at public schools, one of many similar measures across the country.The justices denied West Virginia’s request to lift an injunction against the law that a lower court had imposed while litigation continues over its legality in a challenge brought by a 12-year-old transgender girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson.Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented from the decision.The law, passed in 2021, designates sports teams at public schools including universities according to “biological sex” and bars male students from female athletic teams “based solely on the individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”.In the lawsuit, Pepper-Jackson and her mother Heather argued that the law discriminates based on sex and transgender status in violation of the US constitution’s 14th amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law, as well as the Title IX civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education.West Virginia said in a court filing that it can lawfully assign athletic teams by sex rather than gender identity “where biological differences between males and females are the very reason those separate teams exist”.Pepper-Jackson, who attends a middle school in the West Virginia city of Bridgeport, sued after being prohibited from trying out for the girls’ cross-country and track teams.Critics argue trans athletes have an advantage over cisgender women in competition. Last year, Lia Thomas became the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming title. College sports’ governing body, however, adopted a sport-by-sport approach to transgender athletes in January 2022, which was to bring the organization in line with the US and International Olympic committees, though recently the NCAA’s board decided it won’t be fully implemented until 2023-24.At the same time, international sports-governing bodies are instituting policies that ban all trans athletes from competing in track and field and effectively ban trans women from swimming events. More

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      Afghans resettled in US fear being sent back as pathway to legal status stalls in Congress

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      On the day he turned 24 earlier this month, Asmatullah checked the status of his asylum request online, hoping that an approval would be his birthday gift.When he realized that his case was still pending, he took a deep breath and looked up at the California sky, more than 7,000 miles away from the city he grew up in but that he fears returning to.It’s been more than 18 months since Asmatullah and some members of his family rushed to Kabul’s besieged international airport after Taliban fighters stormed into the capital and retook control of Afghanistan.“It was crowded and I saw a little boy that lost his parents,” he told the Guardian, speaking in a park in Sacramento during a break between rainstorms last week. “I grabbed him and started yelling ‘whose son is this?’ whose son is this?’”Asmatullah called out for help at one of the airport’s busiest gates, where Afghan citizens and US military were all trying to deal with the chaos, but to no avail.In the crush and mortal danger from so many directions, he knew he needed to get himself out. Asmatullah managed to board an evacuation flight after showing an American soldier a certificate his father had received for his work as a civil engineer in several US military construction projects in the country, which would put him and his family in peril as Afghanistan came back under Taliban control.Asmatullah asked for his last name to be withheld out of concerns for the safety of his father, who remains in Afghanistan.The plane took off and he, his mother, sister and two brothers escaped, flown first to Qatar for vetting then the US via the government’s humanitarian parole system, a special immigration authority that the Biden administration used to resettle tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees, dubbed Operation Allies Welcome.Within six days of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, Asmatullah arrived in Pennsylvania. He was later taken to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where he was offered temporary housing and medical care for four months until he was able to travel to Sacramento, home to several relatives who had emigrated to California following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, after Al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the US on September 11.Asmatullah was given permission to live and work in the country legally for two years.That period runs out this September and he’s increasingly concerned that if his asylum request is not approved he – along with tens of thousands of other Afghan evacuees in the US – is at risk of losing his work permit and protection from deportation and he dreads the prospect of having to return to a Taliban-controlled nation gripped by humanitarian crises.But nearly two years since the fall of Kabul, only a small percentage of evacuated Afghans have managed to secure permanent legal status in the US’s clogged immigration system.“We are strongly pushing for an extension of parole status. This is very much within the power of the [Biden] administration,” said Tara Rangarajan, executive director of the the International Rescue Committee in Northern California, a resettlement organization that assisted 11,612 of the more than 78,000 Afghan refugees relocated to the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome.“There’s an unbelievable mental instability of not knowing what the future holds. It’s our responsibility as a country to help ensure their stability,” she added.In the Sacramento area alone, IRC has helped resettle 1,164 Afghans.Asmatullah watched his little brother ride a bike near a tennis court in busy Swanston Park, in a part of Sacramento with a growing Afghan population, in the county with the highest concentration of Afghan immigrants nationwide.“Sacramento feels like home and I love it,” he said. “Here, we are not concerned about getting killed, I just want to worry about getting an education.”Nearby is bustling Fulton Avenue, notable for its Afghan stores and restaurants, where Asmatullah and his family enjoy spending free time, he said.Asmatullah’s ambition in the US is to become a computer scientist and he recently enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at American River College, a Sacramento public community college.His 14-year-old sister is one of more than 2,000 Afghan refugee children in the local public school district and he said she’s eager to pursue higher education, an opportunity now out of reach for women in Afghanistan.He also hopes that his asylum request is approved so that he can apply for a green card and ultimately find a legal path for his father to come to the US and be reunited with the family.His voice cracked as he began talking about concerns for his father’s safety back in Afghanistan and he quickly asked to switch topics.Meanwhile, legislation that would help Asmatullah and thousands of other Afghans out of their nerve-racking wait with a clear pathway to permanent residency, the bipartisan Afghan Adjustment Act, stalled in Congress last year.The law would provide the evacuees a sure pathway to permanent US residency. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar called it “the right and necessary thing to do”, while Republican Lisa Murkowski called on the US to “keep our promises” adding she was proud of legislation designed “to give innocent Afghans hope for a safer, brighter future”.But Chuck Grassley, the Senate judiciary committee’s top Republican, blocked the bill, seeking tougher vetting.Almost 4,500 Afghans have received permanent residency through the Special Immigrant Visa program for those who directly assisted the US war effort, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).And as of 12 March this year, USCIS has received approximately 15,000 asylum applications from Afghans who arrived under Operation Allies Welcome, but has so far approved only 1,400, according to agency data provided to the Guardian.Asmatullah said he always knew that starting again in America from scratch would be a challenge.But he said: “I just want to show my siblings that a better life is possible.” More

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      Biden says gun violence ‘ripping our communities apart’ after Tennessee shooting

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      The White House led reactions in a shocked America with a call for tightening gun control in the US after a 28-year-old woman opened fire at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing six, including three children.“While you’ve been in this room, I don’t know whether you’ve been on your phones, but we just learned about another shooting in Tennessee – a school shooting – and I am truly without words,” first lady Jill Biden said at an event in Washington as reports of the shooting at the Covenant School began circulating.“Our children deserve better. And we stand, all of us, we stand with Nashville in prayer,” she added.President Joe Biden addressed the mass school shooting soon after, and reiterated his calls to Congress to take legislative action.Biden called the shooting “heartbreaking, a family’s worst nightmare”. He said more needs to be done to stop gun violence.“It’s ripping our communities apart,” he said, and called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, saying we “need to do more to protect our schools”.“It’s about time we began to make some more progress,” he added.Earlier this month Biden announced a new slate of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence and the proliferation of guns sold to prohibited people. The measures were aimed at stiffening background checks, promoting more secure firearms storage and ensuring law enforcement agencies get more out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer. But his actions did not change government policy, but instead directed federal agencies to ensure compliance with existing laws and procedures.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the Nashville school shooting “devastating”, “heartbreaking”, and “unacceptable”.“How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban, to close loopholes in our background check system or to require the safe storage of guns?” she added.“Our children should be able to go to school feeling safe, feeling protected. People should be able to go to the grocery stores feeling safe,” Jean-Pierre said.Nashville police said the shooter – who has not yet been publicly named – killed three kids and three adults before being shot dead by police.“At one point she was a student at that school, but unsure what year,” the Metro Nashville police department chief ,John Drake, said at a press conferences. He declined to give the ages of those who had been killed.“Right now I will refrain from saying the ages, other than to say I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” Drake said.According to reports, the woman entered the school through a side door at 10.13am. She began firing on the second floor using two assault-style rifles and a handgun. By 10.27am, she had been shot dead.The private school with 200 students opened in 2011. It is not believed to have armed guards.Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, said he was “closely monitoring the tragic situation at Covenant” and asked people to “please join us in praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community”.Nashville Mayor John Cooper said his “heart goes out to the families of the victims”.“In a tragic morning, Nashville joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting,” he added.As parents rushed to collect their children from a nearby church, a police officer offered condolences. “I know this is probably the worst day of everyone’s lives,” the officer was heard to tell parents. “I can’t tell you how sympathetic we are.” More

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      White House ‘very in favor’ of bill thought to target TikTok

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      One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.“I think the White House is very in favor of this bill,” said Warner, chairperson of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence. Without saying whether Biden’s administration would push for these steps to be taken against TikTok, Warner added: “We [would] give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale.”TikTok has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users on the popular video sharing platform could be available to the government of China, the US’s rival global superpower. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, and Warner said laws in China require the owner company to make user data accessible to the country’s ruling Communist party.Some lawmakers have advocated for a blanket ban of TikTok, which is headquartered in San Jose. But one of the other responses from Capitol Hill has been for Warner and the Republican South Dakota senator John Thune to draft and rally support for what is known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Act.Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the Oval Office – through the commerce department – to review technologies which arrive from abroad. The commerce department could then move to ban those technologies or seek to force their sale, depending on any review’s findings.As with all such bills, the proposal would need approval from both congressional chambers as well as the president’s signature to become law. Democrats and the independents who caucus with them have a 51-49 advantage in the Senate where the Restrict Act has drawn support from both sides of the political aisle. Republicans hold a slight numerical edge in the House of Representatives.Warner’s remarks on Sunday came three days after TikTok’s chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, spent five hours publicly answering questions from members of the US House. As he testified, Chew defended TikTok’s relationship with China, saying the country’s rulers had never asked for user information and that the platform wouldn’t comply with such a request.“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said during the occasionally testy session, at which he also tried to assuage concerns about how the platform affects the mental health of its youngest users.Warner on Sunday said he was not impressed with Chew’s performance in front of lawmakers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While I appreciated Mr Chew’s testimony, he just couldn’t answer the basic questions,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, … and by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data.”Appearing separately on CNN’s State of the Union, Washington congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers – who is chairperson of the House’s energy and commerce committee – argued that TikTok could not be trusted despite Chew’s testimony. The Republican congresswoman called TikTok an “immediate threat” and said it deserved to get banned in the US.Though not directly related to TikTok, US fears about Chinese government surveillance reached a fever pitch after American fighter jets shot down a China-owned spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. The US was later reportedly investigating whether strong winds had blown the balloon off course after it took off from China’s Hainan Island and ultimately entered US airspace. More

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      Power move: Stacey Abrams’ next act is the electrification of the US

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      Stacey Abrams has been hailed as a masterly community organizer, after she helped turn out the voters that secured two Senate seats for Democrats in once solidly red Georgia. She has also run twice – unsuccessfully – for state governor. For her next move, she’s not focusing on electoral power so much as power itself.Recently she left the world of campaign politics and took a job as senior counsel for the non-profit Rewiring America. Her role will focus on helping thousands of people across America wean their homes and businesses off fossil fuels and on to electricity, at a moment when scientists have given a “final warning” about the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global catastrophe.“We are at an inflection point where we can choose to electrify,” she said in an interview. “We don’t have to do it everywhere, all at once. If you want to see what the future looks like, we start building it here and now.”The impetus for her role comes from significant moves taken by the Biden administration. When he signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year, President Joe Biden hailed it as “the biggest step forward on climate ever”. It includes a sprawling array of tax credits, rebates and other incentives to help people electrify their lives.“The government has basically filled a bank account for you with thousands of dollars that will help you go electric,” Abrams said.Her mission is to help people access that so-called bank account.“You can improve your indoor air quality, make cooking quick and easy, make being cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and be more affordable,” Abrams said. “But we have to talk about it.”Abrams is perhaps best known for registering 800,000 voters in Georgia through her voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight Action. She wants to use a similar playbook with electrification, and doing so could benefit many of the same people whose voices risked going unheard in elections.Low-income communities and communities of color have long had to contend with polluting, inefficient appliances. This has an impact on public health by increasing the risk of asthma and leads to higher utility bills that take a bigger bite out of households’ income. The IRA takes aim at some of those wrongs, with tax credits and rebates that can help those households swap in heat pumps, induction stoves and electric vehicles for their gas-powered counterparts.But figuring out what incentives you qualify for and how to access them can be involved, to say the least. While Rewiring America has a calculator that lets individuals suss out what IRA benefits they can snag, Abrams will be taking that and other tools to the community level. She highlighted how houses of worship could be prime places to talk about the IRA and a potential target for outreach.And she hopes to work with local leaders such as teachers, mayors and city council members to make the IRA a kitchen table issue. Enlisting them will, she hopes, eventually lead to neighbors talking to neighbors about how much money they saved on a new induction stove or how much more comfortable their home was during a heatwave thanks to a newly installed heat pump.“You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be,” she said. “That means understanding the lives they’re living and the questions they have and who they go to to talk about their questions.”While the IRA has the potential to be transformative, it’s also not enough to electrify every household in the country. The law has billions set aside for home upgrades, but more resources will be needed to achieve the Biden administration’s goal of reducing US emissions up to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn analysis by the Rhodium Group found the law has the potential to cut emissions by up to 42%. And that it could reduce home energy bills by $717 to $1,146 by 2030.Abrams said that, based on her experience in the arena of voting rights, the prospect of such benefits could help foster an electrification movement. “As people get more, they expect more,” she said. “The most sustainable movement is when people expect more and are willing to work for more.”This isn’t Abrams’ first foray into climate. She was quick to point out her college senior thesis was on environmental justice and that she interned with the Environmental Protection Agency. During her tenure in the Georgia house of representatives, she also worked as minority leader to help pass a bill that included the state’s biggest influx of cash for public transportation.Ultimately, the Biden administration wants the US to reach net zero by mid-century. It might be hard to imagine that occurring – a distant future, when perhaps technologies that are only nascent today like carbon dioxide removal will be more widespread, almost every car and home will be electric, and the inequalities targeted by the IRA and Biden’s executive orders will have dwindled.That scenario can read a bit like science fiction – a genre of which Abrams is a well-known fan.“In almost every sci-fi story, it begins with what decisions people are making long before the story takes place,” she said. More