Category: News

Nonfat or full-fat, flavored or plain, probiotic or natural — yogurt is already peppered with labels. But you may soon see a new claim on your container: This month, the Food and Drug Administration announced it will allow yogurt makers to say their products may prevent Type 2 diabetes.

The F.D.A. said it has found “limited scientific evidence” that consuming yogurt may reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes. The agency’s decision came in response to a petition submitted on behalf of Danone North America, which makes yogurts sold under brands including Activia, Dannon and Oikos.

Yogurt can be a nutrient-rich food and part of a healthy diet, and there is some evidence to suggest that people who eat it regularly have a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

But consumers may not realize that “limited evidence” means “the evidence isn’t very strong,” said Bonnie Liebman, the director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which submitted a public comment opposing the petition. Here’s what the science says.

What is the evidence on yogurt and Type 2 diabetes risk?

The F.D.A. cited 28 studies in its review of the evidence on yogurt and risk of Type 2 diabetes. Overall, the evidence is somewhat limited and inconsistent, said Dr. Hu: Some studies found that people who consumed more yogurt were less likely to develop diabetes, but others did not.

Dr. Hu and his colleagues conducted several of the largest studies cited by the F.D.A. In a 2014 paper, for example, they looked at three large groups of adults in the United States, totaling nearly 200,000 people. They found that those who consumed two servings or more of yogurt per week had a 12 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes compared to those who rarely ate yogurt.

But a 2019 study of 7,633 women in Australia, as well as several others mentioned in the F.D.A.’s review, did not find a significant link between eating yogurt and preventing Type 2 diabetes.

All of the studies cited by the F.D.A. were observational, meaning that researchers primarily asked participants how much yogurt they consumed and then tracked whether or not they developed diabetes over time. Such studies can’t determine if yogurt directly prevents Type 2 diabetes, since people who eat yogurt may also have other healthy habits that could protect them from the disease, Ms. Liebman said. Researchers try to account for these other factors using statistical methods, Dr. Hu said, but he agreed that they could play a role in the lower risk seen among yogurt eaters.

According to the F.D.A., the label should specify that “eating yogurt regularly, at least 2 cups (3 servings) per week may reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes.” That weekly amount was the minimum needed to see a benefit in two studies that the agency reviewed.

Despite the uncertainties, it is plausible that consuming yogurt could contribute to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, Dr. Hu said. It’s rich in protein, minerals and vitamins, and unlike most other dairy products, he added, yogurt usually contains a significant amount of live bacteria which could reduce inflammation and insulin resistance.

The new health claim could serve as a useful reminder to people that yogurt can be a healthy choice, said Dr. Meera Shah, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

But, she added, eating three servings of yogurt a week is not likely to prevent Type 2 diabetes on its own. “It’s much more than that,” she added.

What other foods can reduce your risk of Type 2 diabetes?

Maintaining a healthy weight and following an overall balanced diet are both important for preventing Type 2 diabetes, Dr. Hu said.

There’s solid evidence that following the Mediterranean diet can prevent Type 2 diabetes. You can adapt the diet to your own preferences, Dr. Shah said, by building your meals around its main components — whole grains, fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds and healthy sources of fats such as olive oil and fish.

Drinking coffee has also been linked to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, Dr. Hu added.

Just as important, he said, is limiting your consumption of foods that can increase your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, including sugary beverages, processed meats, and ultraprocessed foods.

Several servings of yogurt per week — particularly plain yogurt without added sugars, perhaps sweetened with fresh fruit or a drizzle of honey — can certainly be part of an overall healthy diet, Dr. Hu said.

But, he added, “it’s not a magic bullet.”

Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team congregated at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a dreary, drizzly Tuesday and walked over to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. Then they went up to a second-floor conference room and took a vote that had been six months — or rather, many years — in the making.

When the yellow sheets of paper were tallied and certified about an hour later, the basketball players had accomplished something no other college athletes had done.

By a 13-2 vote, they had formed a union.

“It’s definitely becoming more real,” Cade Haskins, a junior on the basketball team and a leader of the effort, said to about a dozen reporters after the vote. “We know this could potentially be making history. That wasn’t the reason we were doing it, but to do that can be scary and daunting.”

Haskins expressed hope that his peers across the Ivy League and the rest of the country would soon be recognized as employees under federal labor law — a classification that has been a red line for college sports leaders who would be forced to share revenue directly with athletes.

But at a time when college sports’ amateur model is buckling under the strain of antitrust lawsuits, unfair labor challenges and waning support in Congress, it is unclear whether Tuesday’s election will be remembered as a signature moment or a footnote.

There is no visible movement to organize by other Dartmouth teams. And a reminder that the case is far from final arrived just before the vote: Dartmouth filed an appeal of a regional director’s decision last month to classify the players as employees to the full National Labor Relations Board, which has jurisdiction only over private employers.

(Nearly a decade ago, a regional director awarded the Northwestern football team the right to vote to form a union, but when the board declined to assert jurisdiction in the case, the votes, which had been impounded, were destroyed before they could be counted.)

Dartmouth could eventually take the board’s decision to a federal appellate court, meaning that the case may not be resolved until the current players have graduated.

In a statement, the college called the unionization vote inappropriate: “Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate.”

Also on Tuesday, a House of Representatives subcommittee announced a hearing next week titled “Safeguarding Student-Athletes from N.L.R.B. Misclassification.”

When asked how far the Dartmouth players were from the finish line, Haskins said, “We’re closer than we started.”

The vote is the latest flex by organized labor, whose nationwide activity — and popularity — has, with the backing of the Biden administration, surged to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Still, Dartmouth is a somewhat unlikely hub of activism. It does not have a rich history of rabble rousing like the University of California, Berkeley. The war in Gaza has not roiled the campus to the extent that it has at other Ivy League schools. The school is in a remote location and has the smallest enrollment in the Ivy League (4,556 undergraduates), providing organizers with only so much oxygen in a place whose independent streak is imbued in the state motto: Live Free or Die.

Yet, the basketball team is just the latest Dartmouth group to organize in the last two years, following student workers, graduate student workers and library workers. The dormitories’ resident advisers are in the process of forming a union.

“The last few years have been a whirlwind of labor activity in this tiny, rural place,” said Marc Dixon, the chairman of the Sociology department, who studies labor issues. “The pace has been really wild.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, this local wave of activity had its roots in the coronavirus pandemic.

When Dartmouth students returned to campus under a hybrid schedule in the fall of 2020, students who worked at the two campus eateries felt stuck. They needed the $11-per-hour jobs, but they also felt especially vulnerable to the virus.

Around the time when the food service workers began to organize, their effort received a boost: Dartmouth announced in the fall of 2021 that its endowment had generated a whopping 46 percent return in the previous fiscal year, climbing to $8 billion. (Dartmouth said at the time that it would raise its minimum wage from $7.75 to $11.50.)

About six months later, the food-service workers had voted to unionize.

When negotiations with the college lagged, the workers voted to strike in February 2023. Dartmouth immediately relented — bumping food service workers pay to $21 per hour, along with agreeing to sick pay for Covid-19 and overtime for late-night shifts.

“As a freshman, you’re not in position to get a research job,” said Ian Scott, a senior who worked in the dish room at a campus cafe and was an organizer. “Dining service is where you go when you can’t be choosy. Many people who work there were — and still are — low-income people of color who need aid.”

Watching this play out was Haskins, who worked at a dining hall. He also plays basketball. (About half of the team members have jobs at the school.)

Haskins, a junior from Minneapolis who is a policy, philosophy and economics major, had struck up a friendship with Walter Palmer, a former Dartmouth player who works in the alumni office. Palmer, who remains the most recent Dartmouth player to be drafted by the N.B.A., in 1990, helped form the first players’ union in Europe and has also worked for the N.B.A. Players Association. He connected the players with the local Service Employees International Union — and other influential figures like Tony Clark, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Soon plans were made for taking their case to the N.L.R.B. in September, after the three freshmen on this year’s team arrived. (Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, a junior from Solna, Sweden, who is studying computer science, were viewed as ideal leaders because they would not graduate until next year.)

“We take an oath to organize the unorganized, but it doesn’t really say what that means,” said Chris Peck, a painter who is the longtime president of Local 560. “College athletes — how does that fit? You assume they come from money and they’ve got the world by the tail. Then you hear that they’re working jobs on top of going to practice and studying. It was a similar story as the dining workers.”

This case, though, does not fit neatly into any box.

Dartmouth, like the rest of the Ivy League schools, does not offer athletic scholarships — only need-based financial aid. And the basketball team did not reap tens of millions like Kansas or Kentucky. In fact, it is subsidized by Dartmouth, which has incurred more than $3.2 million in losses operating the program over the last five years, according to testimony at the hearing. (Distributions from the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament and the Ivy League television contract with ESPN are categorized as athletic department revenue.)

In granting the players employee status, the regional director hearing the case, Laura A. Sacks, ruled that the six pairs of basketball shoes (valued at $200 apiece) given to players each season and the two to four tickets that players are provided to each game for their family and friends served as compensation and thus place the players under the college’s control.

She also ruled that another form of compensation is access to the “early read” admissions process because of their value as basketball players.

Those are among the issues that Dartmouth, which recently hired the same lawyers who are representing the University of Southern California in an N.L.R.B. case asserting that football and men’s and women’s basketball players are employees, is pushing back against in its appeal to the full board. The law firm, Morgan Lewis, also represents SpaceX, Amazon and Trader Joe’s, companies that have challenged the authority of the N.L.R.B.

While there seems to be general support for the basketball players, there does not seem to be widespread eagerness to take on the hard work of organizing athletes in many of the other 33 sports that Dartmouth sponsors.

New rules allowing athletes to make money from endorsements has prompted them to think about their circumstances, a member of the men’s hockey team said.

“I think guys are comfortable with the way things are,” said the player, who asked to not be identified because he had not received authorization from Dartmouth to speak with the news media. “We get to play hockey and go to a school that we’re super thrilled about. It’s a choice we make to come here, and so you accept the pros and the cons.”

An urgent care chain in Ohio may be forced to stop paying rent and other bills to cover salaries. In Florida, a cancer center is racing to find money for chemotherapy drugs to avoid delaying critical treatments for its patients. And in Pennsylvania, a primary care doctor is slashing expenses and pooling all of her cash — including her personal bank stash — in the hopes of staying afloat for the next two months.

These are just a few examples of the severe cash squeeze facing medical care providers — from large hospital networks to the smallest of clinics — in the aftermath of a cyberattack two weeks ago that paralyzed the largest U.S. billing and payment system in the country. The attack forced the shutdown of parts of the electronic system operated by Change Healthcare, a sizable unit of UnitedHealth Group, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval for services ranging from a drug prescription to a mastectomy — or to be paid for those services.

In recent days, the chaotic nature of this sprawling breakdown in daily, often invisible transactions led top lawmakers, powerful hospital industry executives and patient groups to pressure the U.S. government for relief. On Tuesday, the Health and Human Services Department announced that it would take steps to try to alleviate the financial pressures on some of those affected: Hospitals and doctors who receive Medicare reimbursements would mainly benefit from the new measures.

U.S. health officials said they would allow providers to apply to Medicare for accelerated payments, similar to the advanced funding made available during the pandemic, to tide them over. They also urged health insurers to waive or relax the much-criticized rules imposing prior authorization that have become impediments to receiving care. And they recommended that insurers offering private Medicare plans also supply advanced funding.

H.H.S. said it was trying to coordinate efforts to avoid disruptions, but it remained unclear whether these initial government efforts would bridge the gaps left by the still-offline mega-operations of Change Healthcare, which acts as a digital clearinghouse linking doctors, hospitals and pharmacies to insurers. It handles as many as one of every three patient records in the country.

The hospital industry was critical of the response, describing the measures as inadequate.

Beyond the news of the damage caused by another health care cyberattack, the shutdown of parts of Change Healthcare cast renewed attention on the consolidation of medical companies, doctors’ groups and other entities under UnitedHealth Group. The acquisition of Change by United in a $13 billion deal in 2022 was initially challenged by federal prosecutors but went through after the government lost its case.

So far, United has not provided any timetable for reconnecting this critical network. “Patient care is our top priority, and we have multiple workarounds to ensure people have access to the medications and the care they need,” United said in an update on its website.

But on March 1, a bitcoin address connected to the alleged hackers, a group known as AlphV or BlackCat, received a $22 million transaction that some security firms say was probably a ransom payment made by United to the group, according to a news article in Wired. United declined to comment, as did the security firm that initially spotted the payment.

Still, the prolonged effects of the attack have once again exposed the vast interconnected webs of electronic health information and the vulnerability of patient data. Change handles some 15 billion transactions a year.

The shutdown of some of Change’s operations has severed its digital role connecting providers with insurers in submitting bills and receiving payments. That has delayed tens of millions of dollars in insurance payments to providers. Pharmacies were initially unable to fill many patients’ medications because they could not verify their insurance, and providers have amassed large sums of unpaid claims in the two weeks since the cyberattack occurred.

“It absolutely highlights the fragility of our health care system,” said Ryan S. Higgins, a lawyer for McDermott Will & Emery who advises health care organizations on cybersecurity. The same entity that was said to be responsible for the cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline, a pipeline from Texas to New York that carried 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel supplies, in 2021 is thought to be behind the Change assault. “They have historically targeted critical infrastructure,” he said.

In the initial days after the attack on Feb. 21, pharmacies were the first to struggle with filling prescriptions when they could not verify a person’s insurance coverage. In some cases, patients could not get medicine or vaccinations unless they paid in cash. But they have apparently resolved these snags by turning to other companies or developing workarounds.

“Almost two weeks in now, the operational crisis is done and is pretty much over,” said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president for the National Community Pharmacists Association.

But with the shutdown growing longer, doctors, hospitals and other providers are wrestling with paying expenses because the steady revenue streams from private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid are simply not flowing in.

Arlington Urgent Care, a chain of five urgent care centers around Columbus, Ohio, has about $650,000 in unpaid insurance reimbursements. Worried about cash, the chain’s owners are weighing how to pay bills — including rent and other expenses. They’ve taken lines of credit from banks and used their personal savings to set aside enough money to pay employees for about two months, said Molly Fulton, the chief operating officer.

“This is worse than when Covid hit because even though we didn’t get paid for a while then either, at least we knew there was going to be a fix,” Ms. Fulton said. “Here, there is just no end in sight. I have no idea when Change is going to come back up.”

The hospital industry has labeled the infiltration of Change “the most significant cyberattack on the U.S. health care system in American history,” and urged the federal government and United to provide emergency funding. The American Hospital Association, a trade group, has been sharply critical of United’s efforts so far and the latest initiative that offered a loan program.

“It falls far short of plugging the gaping holes in funding,” Richard J. Pollack, the trade group’s president, said on Monday in a letter to Dirk McMahon, the president of United.

“We need real solutions — not programs that sound good when they are announced but are fundamentally inadequate when you read the fine print,” Mr. Pollack said.

The loan program has not been well received out in the country.

Diana Holmes, a therapist in Attleboro, Mass., received an offer from Optum to lend her $20 a week when she says she has been unable to submit roughly $4,000 in claims for her work since Feb. 21. “It’s not like we have reserves,” she said.

She says there has been virtually no communication from Change or the main insurer for her patients, Blue Cross of Massachusetts. “It’s just been maddening,” she said. She has been forced to find a new payment clearinghouse with an upfront fee and a year’s contract. “You’ve had to pivot quickly with no information,” she said.

Blue Cross said it was working with providers to find different workarounds.

Florida Cancer Specialists and Research Institute in Gainesville resorted to new contracts with two competing clearinghouses because it spends $300 million a month on chemotherapy and other drugs for patients whose treatments cannot be delayed.

“We don’t have that sort of money sitting around in a bank,” said Dr. Lucio Gordan, the institute’s president. “We’re not sure how we’re going to retrieve or collect the double expenses we’re going to have by having multiple clearinghouses.”

Dr. Christine Meyer, who owns and operates a primary care practice with 20 clinicians in Exton, Pa., west of Philadelphia, has piled “hundreds and hundreds” of pages of Medicare claims in a FedEx box and sent them to the agency. Dr. Meyer said she was weighing how to conserve cash by cutting expenses, such as possibly reducing the supply of vaccines the clinic has on hand. She said if she pulled together all of her cash and her line of credit, her practice could survive for about two and a half months.

Through Optum’s temporary funding assistance program, Dr. Meyer said she received a loan of $4,000, compared with the roughly half-million dollars she typically submits through Change. “That is less than 1 percent of my monthly claims and, adding insult to injury, the notice came with this big red font that said, you have to pay all of this back when this is resolved,” Dr. Meyer said. “It is all a joke.”

The hospital industry has been pushing Medicare officials and lawmakers to address the situation by freeing up cash to hospitals. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the chamber’s majority leader, wrote a letter on Friday, urging federal health officials to make accelerated payments available. “The longer this disruption persists, the more difficult it will be for hospitals to continue to provide comprehensive health care services to patients,” he said.

In a statement, Senator Schumer said he was pleased by the H.H.S. announcement because it “will get cash flowing to providers as our health care system continues to reel from this cyberattack.” He added, “The work cannot stop until all affected providers have sufficient financial stability to weather this storm and continue serving their patients.”

Coming after nearly 15 years of deliberation, a ruling by geologists on Tuesday feels almost anticlimactic: Our species has not so radically altered our world as to have started a new chapter in its history, at least not yet, a scholarly panel decided.

But even if textbooks and research papers don’t feature the “Anthropocene” epoch anytime soon, earth scientists have no doubt that humans are changing the planet. In deciding whether or not to amend the geologic timeline to reflect this, they contemplated a variety of human-driven changes that will be marked in the rocks for a long time to come.

In the end, several scholars who voted on the Anthropocene question said humankind had left too many different kinds of imprints on nature, over too broad a stretch of time, to be captured neatly by a single starting point, which is what geological timekeeping requires.

Here are some of the planet-spanning changes they considered.

Nuclear fallout

A key part of the case that some scientists made for declaring the start of the Anthropocene epoch was the pulse of radioactive isotopes that hundreds of nuclear detonations scattered across the Earth in the mid-20th century. There’s zero doubt that humans are responsible for these particles, even if they end up in different places at slightly different times.

Some scholars have, however, voiced concern about whether using weapons of mass destruction to signpost humankind’s transformation of the planet would send the wrong kind of message about our time.

Biodiversity changes

Fossilized life tells scientists a lot about what Earth was like in its deep past, and that will no doubt remain the case when future researchers try to study our time. Not only are we losing species at a rapid rate, we have also upended the places where they live and thrive (or fail to thrive), both by destroying their habitats or by domesticating them for agriculture and companionship.

Shifting ground

Our civilization moves and modifies the ground beneath us in very direct ways. We flatten hills to build cities and grow crops. We gouge out the land to extract resources or bury waste. We dam up rivers, stopping them from transporting mud and earth from the continents to the seas. Worldwide, by one estimate, the total volume of sediment that humans move each year is now more than 24 times the amount supplied by rivers.

Fossil fuels

The burning of fossil fuels is adding huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere, which together are warming Earth’s surface and oceans. Already, temperatures are rapidly moving away from their relatively stable levels during the present geologic epoch, the Holocene. That’s the period that began 11,700 years ago, when the melting of the glaciers made many parts of the planet habitable to humans.

But industrial activity is also leaving another kind of enduring legacy: Ash from the combustion of coal and fuel oil is finding its way into lake beds, sediments and the seafloor.

Plastics and other pollution

Industrial ash isn’t the only kind of matter that will remain in the mineral record as a distinctive marker of our time. There’s also pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, concrete and fertilizers, not to mention trash of all kinds from landfills.

In major cases concerning former President Donald J. Trump, the Supreme Court has tried to put some distance between itself and politics. That fragile project does not seem to be succeeding.

“If the court is trying to stay out of the political fray, it is failing miserably,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University.

The case for attempted unity at the court in cases involving the former president is built on 27 data points, or nine votes each in three important rulings, all nominally unanimous. Those rulings suggest that the justices are trying to find consensus and avoid politics.

There were no dissents, for instance, in Monday’s Supreme Court decision letting Mr. Trump stay on ballots nationwide despite a constitutional provision that bars insurrectionists from holding office.

Nor were there noted dissents in December, when the court turned away a request from government prosecutors to bypass a federal appeals court and render a prompt decision on Mr. Trump’s audacious claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election. That could have ensured a trial well before the 2024 election.

And there were, similarly, no noted dissents last week when that case returned to the court after a unanimous three-judge panel of the appeals court soundly rejected the immunity argument. The Supreme Court, after mulling what to do for more than two weeks, decided to keep Mr. Trump’s trial on hold while it considers the case, scheduling arguments for about seven weeks later and putting the prospect of a trial verdict before the election in grave peril.

But the unity displayed in the three rulings is fraying.

On Monday, all nine justices agreed with the bottom-line conclusion that states may not bar presidential candidates from their ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits officials who had sworn to uphold the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection from holding office.

The court should have stopped there, said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago. But five justices, in an unsigned majority opinion, went on to issue a much broader ruling, saying that detailed federal legislation was required to give Section 3 teeth in any setting.

“In fairness to the court,” Professor Strauss said, “they were in a tough spot — they understandably did not want to disqualify Trump, but all the offramps had major problems. Having said that, though, if they were inevitably going to have to write a weak and flawed opinion, maybe they could have written one that got nine votes instead of five.”

In a concurring opinion, the three liberal members of the court — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — seemed puzzled by the majority’s rush to decide matters not before them when nine justices had already found common ground. “We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily,” they wrote of the majority’s unsigned “per curiam” opinion, which is legal Latin for “by the court.”

J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals court judge, called the majority’s broader ruling astonishing and reminiscent of the excesses of the famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969.

“The decision is a textbook example of the kind of activist judicial opinions from the Warren court era that begot the conservative legal and judicial movement in the 1980s in first place,” he said.

Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, said the court had done damage to itself by going further than it needed to.

“To my mind,” she said, “the court’s effort to appear apolitical was undercut by the decision of the per curiam majority to go beyond the minimalist rationale of the concurrence — that there are special considerations with respect to the presidency that counsel against having state courts enforcing Section 3 — that could have gotten Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson to sign on. And for what?”

Professor Murray had a theory, and it was not one that flattered the court.

“While this decision rejects state authority to invoke Section 3 in favor of Congress’s authority to do so, in the end, the real winner here is the court, which gets to decide when states’ prerogatives matter and when they do not,” she said. “And the beneficiary of the court’s arrogation of power to itself is not just the court, but also Donald Trump.”

The decision in the Colorado case, she added, at least had the virtue of speed. The court granted Mr. Trump’s petition seeking review on Jan. 5, two days after he filed it. It scheduled arguments for a month later and rendered its decision a month after that.

Disposing of a significant case bristling with novel constitutional issues in two months was exceptionally quick work by Supreme Court standards.

The immunity case is much simpler and yet is moving much slower. True, the court put it on what it said was an expedited schedule when it got around to addressing the matter 16 days after Mr. Trump asked it to put the trial on hold. But that schedule called for arguments some seven weeks after the court acted, during the week of April 22.

Professor Murray said the contrast between the two cases was telling.

“The disqualification case was decided relatively quickly, proving that the court can act expeditiously when it wants to do so,” she said. “The immunity appeal makes clear that the court can also drag its feet when it wants to.”

The delay will matter, Professor Murray said.

“It is very unlikely that the D.C. Jan. 6 trial will proceed — at least in its current form — to a verdict before the election begins in earnest,” she said. “This means that, in addition to giving Trump an actual victory over Colorado in the disqualification case, the court has given Trump the delay he sought — and a de facto victory on the immunity issue.”

Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard, said the justices were in an impossible spot.

“Everyone on the court is acting in good faith and thinks they are being nonpolitical and doing the right thing,” he said. “The court far more than any federal institution has avoided the Trump and Trump-reaction craziness. But these cases involving or implicating Trump, which the court is right to consider, invariably have a huge impact on presidential politics, no matter what or how the court decides.”

Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s mug shot. The wooden electric chair where he was put to death. A sponge like the one that was dampened with salt water and placed on his head to conduct the deadly jolts of electricity.

This grim assortment of relics is housed in a small museum in New Jersey, about 20 miles away from where the decaying body of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the toddler Hauptmann was convicted of kidnapping and killing, was discovered face down in the dirt.

Nearly 100 years ago, the Lindbergh case was known as the crime of the century by virtue of its cinematic details and the boy’s high-profile parents, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a diplomat’s daughter, and Charles A. Lindbergh, an aviator who had catapulted to fame by completing the world’s first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris.

In the decades since, as the keepers of the Lindbergh kidnapping archives can attest, public interest in the case has never subsided — nor has skepticism about Hauptmann’s guilt. But a bizarre and grisly new theory about Lindbergh’s potential involvement in his son’s death, and renewed legal pressure to force DNA testing of evidence, have combined to thrust one of the country’s most enduring murder mysteries squarely back into public consciousness.

Hauptmann, a German immigrant who had worked as a carpenter and lived in the Bronx, was executed for the crime in April 1936. His great-great niece, Cezanne Love, and her aunt recently provided DNA samples in the hope that New Jersey’s courts would decide to clear the way for modern science to explore century-old doubts: Was an innocent man put to death? And, if not, did he act alone?

“I personally don’t think he did it,” Ms. Love said, noting that Hauptmann and his widow maintained his innocence, and his alibi, until the end. But if the evidence does link him to the case, “then so be it,” she said. “I want to uncover the truth.”

Charles Lindbergh Jr. was 20 months old when he disappeared from his bedroom in East Amwell, N.J., on March 1, 1932. A wooden ladder, a chisel and the first of more than a dozen ransom notes were found at the house after the kidnapping. The family arranged for a $50,000 payment, but the child was discovered dead 10 weeks later.

The investigation, led by the New Jersey State Police and splashed across front pages worldwide, raged on until September 1934, when a $10 gold certificate from the ransom payment was used to buy gasoline in New York.

Investigators traced the car at the gas station to Hauptmann and later discovered $13,760 in ransom bills in his garage — money he said he’d been asked to hold for a man who died in Germany before the trial.

There were no fingerprints, and there was no confession and no explanation for how a solitary kidnapper might have orchestrated a toddler’s abduction from a second-floor nursery on a rainy Tuesday evening, while five adults and a dog were in the home. Hauptmann was convicted after a six-week trial in Flemington, N.J., and sentenced to death.

At the time of the boy’s kidnapping his father was a national hero.

But history would come to view the renowned pilot who died 50 years ago far more critically. Lindbergh was fascinated with the study of eugenics and was vilified by the media after accepting a medal for his contributions to aviation from Hermann Goering on behalf of Hitler in 1938 — seen by many as a sign of his sympathies with the Nazi regime.

Lise Pearlman, a retired California judge, now speculates that Lindbergh was capable of something even more sinister: sacrificing his son for scientific experiments that led to the child’s death.

“I take advantage of the distance in time to treat the boy’s father as a potential suspect in his kidnap and murder; like all the others on the list, a fallible human being, not a demigod,” Ms. Pearlman wrote in a 2020 book, “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away.”

It is a theory that other Lindbergh researchers view with deep skepticism.

Ms. Pearlman acknowledged that her findings were based on circumstantial, yet compelling, evidence about the crime scene, the condition of the boy’s remains and the research that Lindbergh was conducting at the time with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon and organ transplant pioneer.

Last February, she shared her theory at a conference held by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, broadening the reach of her views and stoking renewed debate about the crime’s persistent riddles.

Writers who have researched the case just as extensively as Ms. Pearlman said it would be impossible to definitively prove a whole new theory 100 years later. But that has not stopped people from trying.

A former Rutgers University professor, Lloyd C. Gardner, founded a social group decades ago that called itself the State Street Irregulars, a homage to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. The group met at the bar of a restaurant in Lambertville, N.J., while Professor Gardner was writing his book on the subject, “The Case That Never Dies.”

“It will never be proven one way or another,” Professor Gardner said.

Push for DNA tests

Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, which has represented roughly 200 clients exonerated by DNA evidence, was a classmate of Ms. Pearlman’s in college and in law school and wrote a supportive blurb for her book. The Innocence Project has not taken on the case, but Mr. Scheck said he had provided consultation to Ms. Pearlman.

In an interview, Mr. Scheck said his interest in the Lindbergh case was tied more to the possibility that an innocent man was executed than the identity of a culprit.

“If there is a DNA test that you can do that will shed light on the guilt or the innocence of somebody, particularly someone who was executed, I think the family has the right to get that information,” he said.

His sentiment is in line with many people’s lasting interest in the case and follows renewed efforts to determine Hauptmann’s guilt or innocence.

Lawrence S. Lustberg, a prominent criminal defense lawyer in New Jersey, said Monday that he had joined the effort on behalf of “opponents of wrongful conviction.” He said he was “carefully considering what procedural mechanisms” might be available to “redress what appears to be a terrible, historic injustice.”

There is already an unrelated legal challenge in New Jersey over a request to test the saliva on the stamped ransom envelopes for clues. Researchers have also argued that the ladder and a wooden board found in Hauptmann’s attic should be evaluated using modern methods to confirm that they match.

A Superior Court judge ruled last year against releasing the envelopes for DNA testing, and an appeals panel is expected to set a date to hear arguments on the matter in the coming months.

Kurt Perhach, who has cited the state’s open public records laws in his fight to win access to the envelopes, traces his career as a lawyer to a teenage fascination with the Lindbergh kidnapping case.

“I have felt compelled that there’s something wrong here since I was a boy,” said Mr. Perhach, 46, who grew up about 30 minutes away from the Lindberghs’ farmhouse in East Amwell. He represents a group of people, including Wayne McDaniel, a New York City-based filmmaker, hoping to use information gleaned from testing to explore a new documentary angle within the already well-plumbed Lindbergh oeuvre.

The New Jersey attorney general’s office has opposed the request, arguing that the “integrity of the historical items outweighs any interest in conducting DNA testing that will permanently alter and potentially damage the items.”

A trove of records

In 1981, a former governor of New Jersey, Brendan Byrne, issued an executive order that made all records pertaining to the Lindbergh investigation available to the public for research.

That material — roughly 225,000 documents — is housed in a large room adjacent to the Lindbergh museum gallery at the State Police’s headquarters near Trenton, N.J., and overseen by a full-time archivist, Greg Ferrara.

Visitors are free to open filing cabinets and leaf through original crime-scene photos, the trial transcript, index cards bearing names of potential witnesses, police reports and Hauptmann’s account of his life, which was typed onto translucent paper so brittle it crinkles when handled.

“Much has been said in the newspapers about my life to make me appear as a black sheep,” he wrote. “Why don’t they investigate the true course of events?”

Since then, few cases have generated more independent investigation.

Sleuths, some of them admittedly obsessed by the case, still flock to online discussion boards to trade hypotheses. The kidnapping has inspired dozens of researched books, movies, documentaries and even musicals.

“I got four calls this week,” Mr. Ferrara said, describing the level of continuing public interest.

Professor Gardner, 89, said he once suggested adding a sign above the New Jersey archive.

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” he said, borrowing a passage from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

“You get into this and you can’t get out,” he said. “It’s so intriguing.”

Del Quentin Wilber heard the same Dante line as he researched a book he is writing about the case for Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Wilber, the Washington investigations editor for The Associated Press, said he had mined hundreds of thousands of records held at the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New Jersey archives and several universities.

“It’s still the ultimate American spectacle that draws people to it in this obsessive way,” said Mr. Wilber, who is convinced of Hauptmann’s guilt despite trial flaws that have opened the case to unceasing scrutiny.

“They railroaded a guilty man,” he said.

‘Complicated, flawed men’

One of the most grotesque theories to emerge since the boy’s death is detailed in the book by the retired judge in California.

Ms. Pearlman said she considered the apparent absence of blood in the woods where the body was discovered a smoking gun that proved the boy died somewhere else. Unexplored questions about the condition of the body and items found nearby have led her to speculate that Lindbergh colluded with Dr. Carrel, his friend who worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, to experiment on his son.

She wrote that the boy, who had an unusually large head and took medicines associated with rickets, would have been seen as expendable to the men, who, as eugenicists, believed in improving the genetic quality of the population. She has concluded that there was a “horrendous probability” that the men removed his organs in hope of achieving a medical breakthrough that might help Lindbergh’s sister-in-law, who had a damaged heart valve.

To reach this conclusion, Ms. Pearlman worked with a New Jersey pathologist, Dr. Peter Speth, who evaluated records from the crime scene and autopsy, which showed that all the boy’s organs other than the heart and liver were missing. At the time, investigators deduced that foraging animals had mutilated the body as it lay in the woods.

Dr. Speth said the apparent absence of vermin on the boy’s remains — and clues suggesting the child’s face and one of his feet decayed more slowly than other parts of the body — indicated that the body had been dumped in the woods well after the abduction and that chemicals commonly found in laboratories had also probably been used.

“Bruno could not have conceived of it and could not have carried it out,” Dr. Speth said in an interview. He called Hauptmann’s execution “a terrible miscarriage of justice.”

The Academy of Forensic Sciences routinely includes disclaimers noting that the research presented at its conferences is unverified, and Ms. Pearlman’s findings have not been subject to peer review. But a screening team would have had to approve Ms. Pearlman’s participation in the conference, and the academy published an abstract summarizing her findings, as is routine, Jeri Ropero-Miller, a scientist and member of the academy, said.

Still, authors who have also studied the crime and its characters extensively question Ms. Pearlman’s book and its extreme conclusions.

David M. Friedman, who wrote “The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever,” said he had not read Ms. Pearlman’s book but found the theory about Lindbergh and Carrel absurd.

“They were complicated, flawed men,” Mr. Friedman said. “But the idea that they would collaborate in an act of infanticide strikes me as malicious garbage.”

Ms. Love, Hauptmann’s relative, said she remained focused less on the whodunit than on helping to wipe away a stain that had haunted her family for nearly a century.

Her goal, she said, was to expose the limits of science and justice in the 1930s.

“With the hysteria and the horribleness of the crime, the police wanted to put a nice little bow,” she said.

“But in today’s court system it would have been a totally different outcome.”

Bitcoin hit a record high of more than $69,000 on Tuesday, capping a remarkable comeback for the volatile cryptocurrency after its value plunged in 2022 amid a market meltdown.

Bitcoin’s price has risen more than 300 percent since November 2022, a resurgence that few predicted when the price dropped below $20,000 that year. Its previous record was just under $68,790 in November 2021, as crypto markets boomed and amateur investors poured savings into experimental digital coins.

The cryptocurrency was “pronounced dead for the 150th time,” said Cory Klippsten, the chief executive of Swan, a financial services firm focused on Bitcoin. “And Bitcoin continues to do what Bitcoin does, which is win people over as they take the time to actually learn about it.”

Bitcoin’s recent surge has been driven by investor enthusiasm for a new financial product tied to the digital coin. In January, U.S. regulators authorized a group of crypto companies and traditional finance firms to offer exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.s, which track Bitcoin’s price. The funds provide a simple way for people to invest in the crypto markets without directly owning the virtual currency.

As of last week, investors had poured more than $7 billion into the investment products, propelling Bitcoin’s rapid rise, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

The price of Ether, the second-most-valuable digital currency after Bitcoin, has also risen more than 50 percent this year, reaching about $3,800. Its increase has been driven partly by enthusiasm over the prospect that regulators may also approve an E.T.F. tied to Ether.

But cryptocurrencies remain volatile. Within a few minutes of hitting the record, Bitcoin’s price dropped to about $67,500.

And despite the euphoria, the crypto industry is still navigating the legal aftermath of the 2022 crash. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, is set to be sentenced to prison at the end of this month. The Securities and Exchange Commission has sued several prominent crypto firms, including the U.S. exchange Coinbase, arguing that the companies offer unregistered securities.

Courts have begun weighing in on some of those lawsuits, and the outcome could determine whether crypto companies can continue operating in the United States. Many skeptics remain unconvinced that digital currencies offer much real-world utility.

“There’s no inherent value,” said John Reed Stark, a former S.E.C. official and an outspoken critic of the crypto industry. “There’s no proven track record of adoption or reliance.”

Bitcoin was invented in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis by a mysterious developer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The digital coin was originally envisioned as a decentralized alternative to the traditional financial system, a way for people to exchange funds without relying on banks or other intermediaries.

But as Bitcoin’s value increased, it became a vehicle for financial speculation. The currency’s price rose rapidly, before falling just as quickly — minting new millionaires one day and erasing their savings the next.

In the early part of the pandemic, a surge in day trading by amateur investors helped turn cryptocurrencies into a hot commodity. The industry promoted itself in splashy magazine spreads and Super Bowl commercials, sending Bitcoin’s price soaring.

Within a year, the bubble burst. A series of corporate implosions culminated in November 2022 with the collapse of FTX, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s exchange. Investors lost billions of dollars, as Bitcoin’s price plummeted to around $16,000.

The industry’s fortunes started improving in August, when a federal appeals court paved the way for companies to offer E.T.F.s tied to Bitcoin. An E.T.F. is essentially a basket of assets broken up into shares. Investors buy shares in the basket, rather than owning the assets directly.

In the crypto world, that means investors can gain exposure to Bitcoin without mastering the technical details of a digital currency wallet, or entrusting large amounts of money to fly-by-night firms with checkered legal histories. Financial giants like BlackRock and Fidelity are offering the Bitcoin investment products, providing a measure of stability to a volatile industry.

For years, crypto advocates predicted that the approval of Bitcoin E.T.F.s would bring billions of dollars in new investment to the industry, though some analysts expressed skepticism about those projections.

Early data suggests the impact has been significant. Over recent months, the approval of the investment vehicles has combined with other factors to send Bitcoin’s price up.

“During every period when you’re in despair, it looks like crypto and Bitcoin will never come back,” said John Todaro, an analyst at Needham who tracks the crypto industry. “But we’ve seen time and time again that it continues to go forward.”

Later this year, the amount of new Bitcoin that goes into circulation will decrease because of an event known as “the halving.” The event, which was programmed into Bitcoin’s underlying code, will reduce by half the amount of Bitcoin that people receive when they run software to validate crypto transactions (a process commonly known as “mining”).

The prospect of scarcer Bitcoin supply has helped drive up its price this year, some analysts have argued. And with the halving expected to take place in the spring, Bitcoin advocates are predicting that prices will continue to surge.

“This is just the beginning of this bull market,” said Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto company Anchorage Digital, as prices were skyrocketing this month. “The best is yet to come.”

China’s real growth agenda

China announced an official growth target of about 5 percent on Tuesday that’s already looking hard to pull off. The world’s second-biggest economy is facing headwinds, from a consumer slowdown to weak investor confidence and a trade war with the West.

But the growth target only tells part of the story of how Beijing is rethinking economic policy.

Left out of the pronouncements: a stimulus package. Investors watch the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, and a parallel meeting of China’s top policy body, for clues on the government’s priorities. Spending is set to remain at roughly last year’s level, suggesting that there’s no big-bang boost on the horizon.

That’s not great news for Western brands that have ridden a surge in Chinese consumer spending to big growth in recent years. Apple reportedly has seen its Chinese iPhones sales plummet this year.

The growth target matches last year’s too, when the post-lockdown economy grew 5.2 percent. (Some analysts say the real growth rate was much lower.) Global investors need to accept that slow growth is the new norm, says Yu Jie, a senior fellow on China at Chatham House, a think tank. “Beijing wants to draw a line under the past economic model which focused on infrastructure and property,” she told DealBook.

Beijing’s real focus is reshaping the economy. The government knows that it faces a raft of challenges, but China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is trying to move away from debt-fueled sectors like property and move toward strategically important industries. The terms it uses are “high-quality development” and “new productive forces,” which includes electric vehicles, climate tech, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. The latest measures to achieve that: Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official, said on Tuesday that the government would increase spending for science and technology research by 10 percent.

More state-led investment is the priority, rather than “other kinds of more politically painful reforms,” George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Center and a former chief economist at UBS, told DealBook.

It may also mean more pressure on private businesses to toe the party line, with even bankers being ordered to be more patriotic and develop a “financial culture with Chinese characteristics.”

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Donald Trump is expected to win big in Super Tuesday contests. Voters in 15 states, including California and Texas, are headed to the polls. A sweeping Trump victory in Republican primaries could force Nikki Haley to drop out. Elsewhere, the outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed President Biden in the general election, and supporters of the No Labels third-party initiative worry that the group is no longer politically viable.

The White House takes on “corporate rip-offs.” The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it was forming a “strike force” to coordinate federal efforts to combat “unfair and illegal pricing.” It’s part of Biden’s effort to pin rising prices — a voter concern that is costing him politically — in part on greedy companies, a topic sure to resurface during his State of the Union address on Thursday.

Nelson Peltz publishes his full case against Disney. The activist investor shared his white paper outlining his recommendations for turning around the media giant; among them are finding a partner for Disney’s broadcast TV assets and scrapping plans to introduce a new ESPN streaming service that would supersede ESPN+. Peltz’s 133-page dossier comes less than a month before Disney shareholders vote on whether to give him control of two board seats.

How hard will the E.U.’s new law bite Apple?

European antitrust authorities have finally taken on Apple, fining the iPhone maker $2 billion for trying to thwart competition in music streaming. A bigger test of the E.U.’s ability to constrain tech giants is still to come.

On Thursday, the Digital Markets Act, intended to ensure competition across popular digital platforms, will come into force. But skeptics think that tech behemoths like Apple will find ways to avoid being hemmed in.

The D.M.A. represents an aggressive effort to police digital competition. Monday’s fine covered the narrow issue of Apple moving to thwart rivals like Spotify in music streaming. The new law is supposed to prevent “gatekeepers” of major platforms — including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta — from using their market power to lock out new entrants.

The cost of not complying is steep: D.M.A. offenders could be forced to pay up to 10 percent of their global revenue, or up to 20 percent for repeated violations.

Apple says it will comply with the law, offering multiple options to app developers that it says could reduce their fees. Several involve paying Apple a per-download fee once their apps hit a million downloads a year.

But critics say Apple has sought to skirt the new rules. In the Netherlands and South Korea, both of which adopted legislation that required app store owners to allow alternative payment systems, the iPhone maker agreed to open up its app store. But it began charging a 26 percent commission to those using non-Apple payment methods, a move that the Korean government said undermined its law.

In a letter to the European Commission published last week, three dozen companies argued that Apple was taking a similar approach to the D.M.A. “Apple has a history of skirting these rules,” Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder and C.E.O., said after the E.U. fine was announced on Monday. “It’s going to keep on acting the way it has been acting.”

Apple has the resources to fight. The company said it planned to appeal Monday’s ruling and could contest accusations made under the D.M.A. It’s worth noting that the tech giant is still fighting against other government punishments, including a €13 billion tax assessment that the European Commission handed down in 2016.

The battle over the S.E.C.’s new climate mandate

The S.E.C. is set to vote on a new rule tomorrow that would require companies to disclose the climate risks from their business, a key piece of the Biden administration’s green agenda.

When the proposal was introduced two years ago, Gary Gensler, the S.E.C. chair, said it would help safeguard “tens of trillions of dollars” of investors’ money. But climate experts and former S.E.C. commissioners expect the measure will have been watered-down amid intense corporate lobbying and a wider conservative pushback against agency power.

The rule was meant to help investors assess climate risks. The money flowing into companies that prioritize environmental, social and governance principles has boomed in recent years, a huge profit driver for Wall Street. But E.S.G. investors have begun to pull back lately amid concerns about greenwashing, red-state boycotts and regulatory uncertainty.

Some fear that muted S.E.C. rules could hinder transparency. Another issue: California and Europe have advanced aggressive disclosure mandates, leaving large companies to potentially navigate a mishmash of regulations.

What’s expected to be gone? The most contentious aspect said to have been axed involves so-called Scope 3 discharges, which would apply to the bulk of a company’s emissions. But measuring Scope 3 involves an expensive examination of the entire suppliers-to-customers value chain.

Scope 3 is a “centrally important metric for investors” and critical to preventing greenwashing, Allison Herren Lee, the former acting chair of the S.E.C., told DealBook. (In 2021, she pushed for this requirement.)

What’s probably in? Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, measuring a company’s direct carbon footprint, are expected to be part of the new rules, but only if they’re deemed “material.” This qualification leaves companies some wiggle room.

“If the S.E.C. ultimately leaves climate disclosure decisions up to corporate executives, that’s a policy choice with an unhappy history,” said Satyam Khanna, a former S.E.C. climate adviser.

Even watered-down rules could ignite a legal battle. Business groups have repeatedly challenged the Biden administration’s environmental agenda in the courts.

The S.E.C. will be sued “just as surely as the sun rises in the East,” said Joseph Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former S.E.C. commissioner.

“This is gonna hit zero faster than my portfolio when my Wendy’s pay check comes in.”

— 96Phoenix, a member of the WallStreetBets online community, on Reddit’s I.P.O. plans. Reddit has been betting on enthusiasm among its users but some are expressing reservations instead.

Musk’s legal cases pile up

More than a year after Elon Musk closed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (now X) the challenges — and lawsuits — are stacking up.

Musk, who filed his own blockbuster lawsuit last week against OpenAI, has faced down a mountain of legal trouble before. But these distractions come at an especially rough moment for the billionaire. Musk is wrestling with an investor exodus at Tesla, his electric vehicle maker, and the banks that lent him billions to buy Twitter two years ago have reportedly met with him to discuss refinancing the terms.

Former Twitter executives are the latest to join in. One of Musk’s first acts after he bought the company was to fire Parag Agrawal, its C.E.O.; Ned Segal, the C.F.O.; Vijaya Gadde, the legal and policy chief; and Sean Edgett, the general counsel. They sued Musk for $128 million on Monday, accusing him of withholding severance payments and depriving them of unvested stock awards when he took the company private in October 2022.

Musk believes he fired them “for cause.” The lawsuit quotes Musk telling the biographer Walter Isaacson that he would “hunt” the executives “till the day they die.”

“This is the Musk playbook: to keep the money he owes other people, and force them to sue him,” the executives’ lawyers write. “Even in defeat, Musk can impose delay, hassle and expense on others less able to afford it.”

The case puts Musk’s multiple legal suits back in the spotlight. Here are a couple more:

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As of Monday, March 4, 2024, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is essentially a dead letter, at least as it applies to candidates for federal office. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.

In the aftermath of the oral argument last month, legal observers knew with near-certainty that the Supreme Court was unlikely to apply Section 3 to Trump. None of the justices seemed willing to uphold the Colorado court’s ruling, and only Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave any meaningful indication that she might dissent. The only real question remaining was the reasoning for the court’s decision. Would the ruling be broad or narrow?

A narrow ruling for Trump might have held, for example, that Colorado didn’t provide him with enough due process when it determined that Section 3 applied. Or the court could have held that Trump, as president, was not an “officer of the United States” within the meaning of the section. Such a ruling would have kept Trump on the ballot, but it would also have kept Section 3 viable to block insurrectionists from the House or Senate and from all other federal offices.

A somewhat broader ruling might have held that Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion or provide aid and comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. Such a ruling would have sharply limited Section 3 to apply almost exclusively to Civil War-style conflicts, an outcome at odds with the text and original public meaning of the section. It’s worth noting that, by not taking this path, the court did not exonerate Trump from participating in an insurrection.

But instead of any of these options, the court went with arguably the broadest reasoning available: that Section 3 isn’t self-executing, and thus has no force or effect in the absence of congressional action. This argument is rooted in Section 5 of the amendment, which states that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

But Section 5, on its face, does not give Congress exclusive power to enforce the amendment. As Justices Elena Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in their own separate concurring opinion, “All the Reconstruction amendments (including the due process and equal protection guarantees and prohibition of slavery) ‘are self-executing,’ meaning that they do not depend on legislation.” While Congress may pass legislation to help enforce the 14th Amendment, it is not required to do so, and the 14th Amendment still binds federal, state and local governments even if Congress refuses to act.

But now Section 3 is different from other sections of the amendment. It requires federal legislation to enforce its terms, at least as applied to candidates for federal office. Through inaction alone, Congress can effectively erase part of the 14th Amendment.

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

As Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson point out, this approach is also inconsistent with the constitutional approach to other qualifications for the presidency. We can bar individuals from holding office who are under the age limit or who don’t meet the relevant citizenship requirement without congressional enforcement legislation. We can enforce the two-term presidential term limit without congressional enforcement legislation. Section 3 now stands apart not only from the rest of the 14th Amendment, but also from the other constitutional requirements for the presidency.

In one important respect, the court’s ruling on Monday is worse and more consequential than the Senate’s decision to acquit Trump after his Jan. 6 impeachment trial in 2021. Impeachment is entirely a political process, and the actions of one Senate have no bearing on the actions of future Senates. But a Supreme Court ruling has immense precedential power. The court’s decision is now the law.

It would be clearly preferable if Congress were to pass enforcement legislation that established explicit procedures for resolving disputes under Section 3, including setting the burden of proof and creating timetables and deadlines for filing challenges and hearing appeals. Establishing a uniform process is better than living with a patchwork of state proceedings. But the fact that Congress has not acted should not effectively erase the words from the constitutional page. Chaotic enforcement of the Constitution may be suboptimal. But it’s far better than not enforcing the Constitution at all.