”Right to die” spreads
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced this week that she will sign a law legalizing the ability of terminally ill residents to end their lives with physicians’ assistance. Hochul, who is Catholic and said she struggled with “religious conflict” on the issue, insisted on several small tweaks to the legislation originally passed by the legislature, including increasing the number of physician certifications from two to three.
Medically assisted death has slowly become legal in blue states in recent years. Hochul’s announcement comes right after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a similar law legalizing the practice in Illinois last week. Their moves make their states the twelfth and thirteenth states to allow the option to the terminally ill.
The issue was once a major political lightning rod, an often forgotten third priority of the religious right in the 2000s, after abortion and same-sex marriage. In 2004, President George W. Bush asked the Supreme Court to issue a ruling blocking Oregon, then the only state to allow the practice, from allowing its law to go into effect. The following year, religious conservatives rallied to the cause of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state, helping the case become a national sensation. In the 20 years since, as the religious right’s political power declined, twelve states and D.C. have allowed the practice — all but one of them have voted for Democrats for president since 2008.
DNC kills its autopsy
Nevermind! The Democratic National Committee announced this week that it will not release its planned report about what went wrong in the 2024 election after all. It’s a curious move: DNC Chair Ken Martin had pledged multiple times that the committee would release a public report, going back to when he was first elected in February. Even before this announcement, though, there were signs that any eventual “autopsy” would be neutered. In July, the NYT reported that the report would not touch the questions of whether Biden should have run for re-election, whether Harris should have been the one to replace him, or whether Harris’s cultural liberalism and focus on “democracy” helped lose the election.
In other words, the report about the 2024 election was set not to mention the biggest decisions and events of the 2024 election. There are a lot of interpretations for why Martin is killing its release, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s part of the same pattern that lost them the election in the first place: Deferring deeper, more difficult conversations because the party is currently overperforming in off-year and non-presidential elections. That’s exactly the trap that many in the party fell into in 2022, 2023, and early 2024 — and it seems that at least some of them are eager to jump back into it.
There is, of course, a very real chance it leaks anyway — a bunch of reporters will now be very focused on getting their hands on it. But even if it does, one implication of the DNC not putting its name to a specific takeaway is that there is even more of a vacuum to be filled: There will be more latitude and more appetite for 2028-curious Democrats to offer up their own explanations for the 2024 loss in the coming months.
Rotunda Roundup
Two events from statehouses this week, both with implications for 2026 and 2028:
Maine Gov. Janet Mills allowed a measure limiting Maine law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE to become law this week. You read that right: A quirk of Maine law stipulates that, once the legislature has adjourned, the governor only has the option to veto a bill or stand by to allow it to become law. Mills chose the latter, and simultaneously announced she had rescinded a 2011 executive order signed by her Republican predecessor that encouraged cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
I noted last week how much Democrats have shifted on immigration over the course of this year. Both Mills’ actions and her language — she denounced the Trump administration's “horrifying actions” and said cooperating with it would be “dangerous” — are further proof of the trend. Remember, too, that Mills is running for Senate: This could also be used against her in a general election if she makes it there.
The Maryland legislature overrode Gov. Wes Moore’s veto, enacting a new law to create a commission that will study reparations for slavery. This whole saga has been interesting: Moore vetoed the bill this past spring, pointing out (correctly) that Maryland and other states have already studied the idea extensively. “I strongly believe now is not the time for another study. Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve,” he wrote in his veto letter.
Notably, the letter was carefully crafted so as to satisfy two different, contradictory interpretations: that the time for studying reparations was over and the state should simply enact them, and that the best path to advancing racial equality was to move on from the idea of reparations and instead focus on other avenues.
Reparations have been a difficult dance for Democrats in recent years: They’re overwhelmingly popular with Black Americans but deeply unpopular with every other racial group, including Asians and Latinos. All of it has been especially thorny for Moore, the only current Black governor (and only the third Black person elected to a governorship in U.S. history) who many believe wants to be in the White House. But he has ensured that, if he runs next time, he cannot be attacked for signing a reparations law.
Finally, a feel-good read to end the week on.
In 2025, New York became the biggest state so far to enact a bell-to-bell ban on cell phones in schools. This week, New York Mag published an incredibly heartwarming story about how the ban has transformed kids’ lives for the better — inspiring chess clubs, board game playing, new friends, and bike buying.
Good things can happen.
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