So much jamming is taking place in northeastern Norway, regulators no longer want to know.

For more than a year, Joseph Clifton Smith, a man who says he is intellectually disabled, has sat on death row, waiting to find out if the Supreme Court will greenlight his execution. Smith’s case, known as Hamm v. Smith, first arrived on the Court’s doorstep in August 2023. Since then, the justices have met more than two dozen times to decide what to do about the case, and each time they’ve put the decision off until a future meeting. No one outside of the Court can know for sure why the justices keep delaying, but if you follow the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases closely, it’s easy to see how the Hamm case could open up all kinds of internal rifts among the justices.  The Eighth Amendment, which has a vague ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” is at the center of the Hamm case because, for decades, the Court has held this amendment forbids executions of intellectually disabled offenders (and offenders who commit a crime while they are juveniles). The idea is that both groups have diminished mental capacity, at least as compared to non-disabled adults, and thus bear less moral responsibility even for homicide crimes. That idea, however, has long been contested by the Court’s various ideological factions, and the Hamm case potentially reopens up all of the Court’s issues with the amendment at once. Indeed, in the worst-case scenario for criminal defendants, the justices could potentially overrule more than 60 years of precedents protecting against excessive punishments. In two 2000s decisions, Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Roper v. Simmons (2005), a coalition of Democratic and moderate Republican justices handed down decisions that barred youths and people who are intellectually disabled from being executed. Those majority decisions came down over bitter dissents from the Court’s right flank — the same right flank that has since gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court. At least some of the current Court’s Republicans seem eager to use their newfound supermajority to blow up those two cases (and pretty much everything the Court has said about the Eighth Amendment in the last six or seven decades). So it’s possible that the Court is fighting over what to do with the Hamm case because many of the justices want a wholesale revolution in Eighth Amendment law. Beginning in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as a particular method of punishment grew less common, the Court was increasingly likely to declare it cruel and unusual in violation of the Constitution. At least some members of the Court’s Republican majority, however, have suggested that this “evolving standards of decency” framework should be abandoned. In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), the Court considered whether states could use execution methods that risked causing the dying inmate a great deal of pain. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which held that potentially painful methods of execution are allowed, seems to exist in a completely different universe than the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases that look to evolving standards. While the Court’s earlier opinions ask whether a particular form of punishment has fallen out of favor today, Gorsuch asked whether a method of punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. Though his opinion does list some methods of execution, such as “disemboweling” and “burning alive” that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch wrote that these methods are unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’” What makes Bucklew confusing, however, is that it didn’t explicitly overrule any of the previous decisions applying the evolving standards framework. So it’s unclear whether all five of the justices who joined that opinion share a desire to blow up more than a half-century of law, or if the justices who joined the Bucklew majority simply failed to rein in an overly ambitious opinion by Gorsuch, the Court’s most intellectually sloppy justice. In any event, Hamm opens up at least two major potential divides within the Court. Smith says he is intellectually disabled; the state of Alabama wants to execute him anyway. So the case perfectly tees up a challenge to Atkins if a majority of the justices want to go there. Meanwhile, Bucklew looms like a vulture over any cruel and unusual punishment case heard by the Court, as it suggests that the Republican justices may hit the reset button on all of its Eighth Amendment precedents at any time. The Court receives thousands of petitions every year asking it to hear a particular appeal, and it typically only grants several dozen of these petitions. The vast majority of these cases are nominally discussed at one of the justices’ regular conferences, then promptly denied. In recent years, the Court often discusses a case in two different conferences before agreeing to hear it — for this reason, I and other Supreme Court reporters often watch the list of cases the Court “relisted” for a second conference to identify cases the justices are more likely to hear. Occasionally, a case may be relisted for several conferences in a row. But this is rare, and typically is a sign either that the justices are negotiating over which issues they wish to decide in a particular case — or, more often, that a justice is dissenting from the Court’s decision not to hear a case and the “relists” are really just buying that justice time to draft an opinion. Hamm, however, has now been relisted in every single conference since the justices first discussed it on October 27, 2023. That is, to say the least, highly unusual. And it suggests that some particularly bitter internal negotiations are ongoing. If someone were dissenting from the Court’s decision to turn the case away, they likely would have released that dissent last July, because the justices typically try to resolve loose ends before they go on their summer vacation. Hamm involves a question that would inevitably arise once the Court decided Atkins — though it is unconstitutional to execute intellectually disabled offenders, there will always be some offenders who are on the borderline of what mental health professionals consider an intellectual disability. The specific question before the Court is what to do with these borderline cases. As a general rule, someone must have an IQ of 70 or below to be considered intellectually disabled. But IQ tests aren’t particularly precise — as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Moore v. Texas (2017), the IQ of someone who scores 74 on a particular IQ test falls within “a range of 69 to 79.” So, if courts read IQ tests as if they can identify an offender’s IQ score exactly, an intellectually disabled person could be executed due to something as arbitrary as a measurement error. Accordingly, the Court held in Hall v. Florida (2014) that a capital offender with an IQ score slightly above 70 must be given “the opportunity to present evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in adaptive functioning over his lifetime.” That is, such an offender must be allowed to present additional evidence beyond their IQ score to show that they are, in fact, intellectually disabled. Hamm is such a case. Smith took five different IQ tests, four of which showed him with an IQ in the low to mid-70s. Accordingly, two lower courts looked at additional evidence of his disability, determined he is, in fact, intellectually disabled, and ruled that he must receive a sentence other than death. In asking to execute Smith, in other words, Alabama is asking, among other things, that the Supreme Court overrule Moore and Hall, both cases that were handed down before former President Donald Trump remade the Court in the Federalist Society’s image. If the Court agrees, that alone would be a very significant legal development, both because it could allow intellectually disabled inmates to be executed due to a testing error, and because it would be a severe blow to stare decisis — the idea that judicial precedents shouldn’t be tossed out simply because the members of a court change. Of course, this Court’s Republican majority has shown little regard for stare decisis, at least in cases that divide along partisan lines. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the Republican Party a supermajority on the Supreme Court in late 2020, the Court has behaved as if it was going down a checklist, overruling liberal victories such as the cases establishing a constitutional right to abortion or the line of cases permitting affirmative action in limited circumstances, and replacing them with whatever outcome the GOP prefers. Yet, while this process has been painful for Democrats and toxic for the Court’s approval rating, it hasn’t been comprehensive — occasionally, one or more of the Republican justices signal that they will allow a previous liberal victory to remain in effect. Concurring in the Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh identified the Court’s past decisions protecting a right to contraception, as well as the right to marry a person of your own choosing, as cases he did not intend to overrule. All of which is a long way of saying that there’s no good way to know if Atkins or Roper is on the Court’s checklist of past liberal decisions to be overruled. These justices’ approaches to specific cases are often idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and unbound by preexisting law — just look at the Republican justices’ recent decision holding that Trump was allowed to commit many crimes while he was in office. The question of whether Atkins survives or falls will turn on whether there are five justices who want intellectually disabled people to be executed, and nothing else. But the fact Hamm has been relisted so many times suggests, at the very least, that there is a vocal faction within the Supreme Court that wants to use this case to aggressively reshape the law. The other uncertainty looming over Hamm is the Bucklew decision, which didn’t so much overrule the Court’s last six decades of Eighth Amendment precedents as pretend that they didn’t exist. Bucklew involved a death row inmate who claimed that the Eighth Amendment would not allow him to be executed using Missouri’s lethal injection protocol — he said he had an unusual medical condition that would cause him to experience extraordinary pain before his death. So the question was whether the Constitution allows a state to execute an inmate in a manner that may amount to torture. Gorsuch’s opinion denying relief to this inmate reads like the Court’s “evolving standards of decency” framework never existed. This phrase appears nowhere in Gorsuch’s opinion, and the only citation to Trop v. Dulles (1958), the first Supreme Court case to use that phrase, appears in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent. Rather than follow longstanding law, Gorsuch asked whether capital offenders could be subjected to similar pain “at the time of the framing.” This is the Eighth Amendment rule long favored by the Court’s rightmost flank, including in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Atkins. Scalia’s Atkins dissent, moreover, doesn’t simply disagree with the Court’s past decisions. It lays out many examples of how the law would change — and how much easier it would be to subject even minor criminal offenders to outlandish punishments — under a framework that looks to how things worked in the 1790s. For starters, Scalia argues that only “severely or profoundly” intellectually disabled people enjoy some protection against execution (he argues these individuals were often “committed to civil confinement or made wards of the State” rather than being criminally punished). One of the sources Scalia cites suggests that only people with an IQ of 25 or below enjoy any constitutional protection. More significantly, Scalia also argues that the Eighth Amendment only forbids “always-and-everywhere ‘cruel’ punishments, such as the rack and the thumbscrew,” and that it does not prohibit the government from imposing excessive punishments for minor crimes. Under Scalia’s framework, if the death penalty can constitutionally be applied to murderers (and he believes it can) then it can also be applied to shoplifters. If a rapist can be sentenced to life in prison, so too can a jaywalker. Gorsuch’s Bucklew opinion elaborates on the sort of punishments that, under this originalist framework, are prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. He lists “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” as examples. So there is a faction within the Supreme Court that would drastically shrink Americans’ constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. This faction would allow more people to be executed. They would apparently eliminate any concern that punishments must be proportionate to the crime. And the kinds of punishments they do offer up as examples of impermissible sanctions are the kinds of things normally depicted in torture scenes from movies set in the Middle Ages. Will five justices go there? It’s impossible to know. But that a total of five justices joined Gorsuch’s opinion in Bucklew suggests this faction could very well prevail — if and when the Court decides to take up Hamm.

Security researchers created an algorithm that turns a malicious prompt into a set of hidden instructions that could send a user's personal information to an attacker.

This fundamentally alters our understanding.

This fundamentally alters our understanding.

It's everywhere now.

It's everywhere now.

She was the 20th hire at Google, then the head of Yahoo, and now the CEO of Sunshine. For Mayer, geekery supersedes gender.

When Joe Biden took office, the Democratic Party had been bleeding support among working-class voters for decades.  At mid-century, America’s two parties were cleaved by class, with educated professionals backing the GOP and blue-collar workers voting Democratic. But starting in the 1960s, this class divide began narrowing gradually, as white voters with college diplomas drifted left while those without them shifted right, in a process political analysts have dubbed “education polarization.” By 2004, college graduates were more Democratic than working-class voters. And Donald Trump’s conquest of the GOP accelerated this realignment. In 2016, for the first time since at least 1948 when the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey began collecting data, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution voted for Democrats at a higher rate than those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. This same pattern of support repeated in 2020, according to an analysis from Ohio State political scientist Tom Wood. In the latter election, Democrats also lost ground with nonwhite voters without college degrees, according to Catalist, a Democratic data firm.  The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions. After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former. Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws. The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to 350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed a staunchly pro-union federal labor board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying. In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the political return on Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.  Last month, the Teamsters declined to make a presidential endorsement, after an internal survey found 60 percent of its membership backed Trump over Kamala Harris. In early October, the International Association of Fire Fighters also announced that they would not be making a presidential endorsement, despite backing Biden four years earlier. These high-profile snubs — both driven by rank-and-file opposition to the Democratic nominee — may reflect a broader political trend. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, between 2012 and 2016, the Democratic presidential nominee’s share of union voters fell from 66 to 53 percent. Four years ago, Biden erased roughly half of that gap, claiming 60 percent of the union vote.  But contemporary polling indicates that Democrats have lost ground with unionized voters since then. In fact, according to an aggregation from CNN’s Harry Enten, Kamala Harris is on track to perform even worse with union households than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  Some on the left have a simple explanation for why a historically pro-union presidency hasn’t bought the Democrats many union votes: Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and she lacks his credibility on labor issues. This theory is unsatisfying because Biden’s numbers with union voters early this year were roughly as bad as Harris’s are today. In February, NBC News found Biden winning only 50 percent of voters from union households. All this raises the possibility that organized labor’s capacity to prevent working-class voters from drifting out of the Democratic tent is more limited than progressives had hoped. None of this means that Democrats would derive no political benefit from a stronger labor movement. And it certainly does not undermine the substantive case for collective bargaining as a means of reducing inequality and safeguarding workers’ interests. But the trends outlined above suggest that delivering for unions and helping them expand may be insufficient to dramatically improve the party’s performance with working-class voters in general and white ones in particular.  Progressives have long believed that organized labor is a liberalizing force, and the notion that unions influence their members’ political views — to Democrats’ benefit — is far from baseless. The party consistently performs better with unionized voters than nonunionized ones. Historically, this held true within demographic groups, with unionized white workers backing Democrats at higher rates than their nonunionized counterparts. Many unions also actively engage in politically educating their members. Theoretically, unions that represent diverse memberships should discourage racial prejudice, as solidarity is indispensable to successful organizing and labor actions. A 2021 paper by the political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach found that white voters who gained union membership between 2010 and 2016 tended to display lower levels of racial resentment after getting their union cards. But there is reason to think that unions’ capacity to liberalize the views of non-college-educated voters has declined in the Trump era. According to the Democratic data scientist David Shor, his party’s “union premium” — the degree to which Democrats perform better with union voters, when controlling for all other demographic variables — dropped nearly to zero in 2020. Democrats still did better with unionized workers than nonunionized ones that year. Extrapolating from Shor’s math, this was almost entirely attributable to the demographic traits of America’s unionized population, which is more highly educated and less Southern than the American electorate. More broadly, a recent study from Alan Yan, a political science graduate student at UC Berkeley, suggests that unions’ historical tendency to liberalize their members’ views has been widely exaggerated.  To evaluate the impact of union membership on voters’ political views, Yan examines 13 panel surveys — in other words, polls of the same group of voters across multiple election cycles — conducted between 1956 and 2020. He looks at voters’ preferred party and issue positions in the election year before they gained union membership and in subsequent elections, when they were unionized. Controlling for other variables, he finds that the typical voter’s views barely change at all upon joining a union.  Yan also offers some theoretical arguments for why this result makes sense. For one thing, political scientists generally believe that voters’ political identities tend to crystallize in early adulthood, much earlier than they usually gain union membership. By the time a given voter arrives in a unionized shop, therefore, their political views may be largely fixed. Furthermore, many unions make little effort to politicize their memberships. In the 2016 Cooperative Election Study — a large sample survey — only 20 percent of union members reported frequent political discussions with coworkers, according to Yan, while 39 percent could not remember ever being contacted by their union in the previous two years. Daniel Schlozman, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist whose work has focused on the relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party, says that he finds Yan’s results unsurprising.  In many European countries in the early 20th century, unions often pervaded nearly every aspect of their members’ lives, not only mediating their workplace disputes, but providing gathering halls and clubs, mutual aid programs, and political parties. In that context, Schlozman would expect unions to shape the politics of their members more thoroughly. In the modern United States, by contrast — where unions have a light footprint outside the job site and myriad religious, ethnic, and ideological divisions inform voters’ politics — it makes sense that union leaders can’t dictate a party line to their members.  “In a big pluralistic country where we are not pillarized like Austria in the old days — where you join your union and then go to your social democratic stamp collecting club — union membership is just not going to be as powerful a force in determining political behavior” as other social attachments and identities, Schlozman said. Still, there’s some reason to think that Yan’s paper understates unions’ political influence on their members. In an interview with Vox, Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer noted that during many of the years Yan studies — particularly in the 1950s and ’60s — many unions were still profoundly racist institutions, which one would scarcely expect to liberalize their memberships. “If a lot of unions are fighting integration, fighting immigrants, fighting the inclusion of Black Americans, of women,” Frymer said, “then yeah, that’s just going to create a push the other way.” Yan and Frymer agree that some unions do successfully promote progressive political views among their members. But this requires both a leadership committed to evangelizing for liberal politics and a membership that’s open to such political messaging. To the extent that education polarization and culture wars render many working-class union members skeptical of progressive messaging, their union leaders will have an incentive to back away from internal political advocacy. After all, such leaders ultimately need to win reelection in order to retain their positions. This could theoretically create a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the less Democratic a union’s members become, the less their leaders try to sell members on progressive politics, which then leads members to become even less Democratic. As Yan notes, even teachers unions, whose members tend to be better educated than union members, often focus on compensation rather than partisan politics because the latter divides their memberships.  Further, in a 2020 survey experiment, researchers from Columbia and MIT measure how workers’ interest in joining a hypothetical labor organization changed as different characteristics of that union were emphasized. When told that this union would campaign for pro-worker politicians in elections, the surveyed workers became less likely to want to join. If this result is representative, then many union leaders have a structural incentive to focus narrowly on bread-and-butter issues and keep quiet about their Democratic sympathies (to the extent that they possess them). All this said, Democrats are still likely to benefit politically from delivering for labor unions and helping them grow. Even if such organizations can’t persuade their more culturally conservative members to vote for Democrats, they can help to mobilize the progressives within their ranks, since unions are effective at promoting higher voter turnout.  Separately, unions are major funders of Democratic campaigns, with almost 90 percent of organized labor’s political contributions going into Democrats’ coffers.  And it is possible that a larger and more self-confident labor movement would also be a more politically effective one. “As unions have retreated, even as they have put more efforts into politics and kept up their formal ties to the Democratic Party, their sociocultural imprint has declined,” Schlozman said. “It would not surprise me that union members feel less tied into the culture of unionism that would tie them into the Democrats.”  Were Democrats to successfully promote a wave of unionization through labor law reform, unions could become more culturally relevant. Perhaps most importantly, a more powerful labor movement could nudge the Democratic Party’s issue positions into closer alignment with those of American workers. As unions have declined, power in the Democratic coalition has shifted away from organizations that represent mass working-class memberships and toward nonprofits that are accountable primarily to their wealthy, ideologically motivated donors.  Nevertheless, the Biden era should temper expectations of what organized labor can politically achieve, at least by itself. Perhaps, Biden’s historically pro-union policies would have paid more dividends if he had not also presided over inflation and the expiration of various social welfare benefits established during the Covid crisis. The president’s advanced age surely did not help matters.  But it remains the case that, under Biden, Democrats have seen their poll numbers with union voters decline at the presidential level, even as their support for organized labor’s interests increased. All the while, education polarization has continued apace. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins non-college-educated white voters by 30 points, while Harris wins college-educated ones by 23. And although the Democrat wins working-class nonwhite voters overwhelmingly, her margin among them is 8 points narrower than her margin among nonwhite Americans with college degrees. Democrats should not lessen their support for organized labor in light of these disappointing trends. But they should lower their expectations for what they’re likely to gain from delivering for individual unions with politically diverse memberships. For now, education polarization does not look all that calamitous for the Democratic Party. The share of voters with college degrees is growing over time. In part because she is winning a historically large share of college graduates, Harris is currently competitive with Trump in enough states to win an Electoral College majority, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. But in order to win comfortable Senate majorities and prevent figures like Donald Trump from remaining competitive in national elections, Democrats will need to improve their standing with working-class voters. Delivering for unions may be necessary for achieving that goal. But if the past four years are any guide, it will not be sufficient. Correction, October 17, 4:00 pm: A previous version of this story misquoted Daniel Schlozman as saying, “In a big pluralistic country where we are not polarized like Austria in the old days.” He actually said “pillarized.”