Instead of Fixing an Already Broken Industry, Government Approves Another Rail Merger

After a Norfolk Southern derailment crippled East Palestine, Ohio, and after Congress had its first hearing taking the company to task for industry corruption, federal regulators on Wednesday approved the first major U.S. corporate railroad merger in more than two decades: Canadian Pacific’s $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern.

The merger combines the two smallest of the largest railroad companies in the country; the combined duo will now reduce the number of Class I freight railroads from seven down to six. Moreover, the merger of the two will create the only railroad that links Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Previously, Canadian National railroad had attempted to buy Kansas City Southern for $33.6 billion, but the plan fell through after the Surface Transportation Board rejected part of the merger plan.

While workers and regulators aim to get a hold on a runaway industry driven by a practice known as precision scheduled railroading, or PSR, that has cut jobs and made trains bigger and bigger—thus making the whole industry less safe—it’s worth noting the relevance of this consolidation.

In 2011, billionaire investor Bill Ackman was undergoing a proxy battle with the railroad’s board of directors. He won and installed Hunter Harrison—a railway executive who pioneered PSR at the smaller Illinois Central Railroad—as president and CEO of Canadian Pacific. Once there, he continued his PSR regime, further spurring the industry to be more profit-driven and less safety-oriented.

Now one of the test subjects of PSR becomes another emblem of consolidation, which opponents worry will lead to further job losses and fewer consumer choices in an already consolidated industry.

While proponents say the merger will allow for more shipments and a stronger linkage between the three nations in North America, there’s surely reason for scrutiny. Existing debilitating conditions for workers and a status quo of over 1,000 derailments a year does not offer trust in the industry. A Surface Transportation Board analysis also found that the merger would increase the deployment of longer trains and more tank cars carrying hazardous materials, and even increase the already high risk of train derailments.

There’s also the matter of worker negotiations. Last year, the Biden administration imposed a rail contract on workers that left them with no paid sick leave. On the same day that the U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to add paid sick leave days to the negotiations, Canada announced it would offer 10 days of paid sick leave to workers in the federally regulated private sector—which includes Canadian Pacific. Still, some of their workers are in the United States; now, Canadian Pacific must align with Kansas City Southern on worker benefit and wage packages, negotiating with their respective workforces together.

That the companies will need to navigate aligning how they treat their workers points to the broader issue. While regulators approve such a consequential merger, we have yet to address the current problems that plague the industry and that will only be compounded by the merger: unequal and insufficient worker wages and protections, a too-high risk of derailments, weak classifications of how much regulation should be on trains carrying hazardous materials, and weak safety standards for all trains. It has been barely a month since the East Palestine derailment—and the government appears readier to approve more consolidation than it is to address what led to such a disaster at all.

Texas-based Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is poised to change the entire market for abortion pills.

Kacsmaryk, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2019, is a known conservative and has a track record of viewing abortion unfavorably. He is currently hearing arguments over whether the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved mifepristone for widespread use more than 20 years ago. Reports from the Wednesday hearing thus far indicate that Kacsmaryk entertained disproven claims that the abortion medication is unsafe.

A coalition of anti-abortion groups and individuals filed the lawsuit in November specifically in Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo is a federal district with a single judge, meaning the plaintiffs could essentially guarantee that Kacsmaryk would hear their case, a practice known as “forum shopping.”

It seems unethical, but it’s a common practice on both sides of the political divide. During the 2017 Senate hearing for his current job, Kacsmaryk promised to be fair and said he didn’t believe judges should impose their religious beliefs on their rulings. But his actions both during and before his judicial career have abortion rights advocates bracing for one of the biggest blows since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Kacsmaryk and his siblings were raised deeply Christian and taught from an early age that abortion was wrong. Over the years, he has published multiple essays arguing against the procedure, including in college, when he described abortion as “the federally sanctioned eradication of innocent human life.”

Kacsmaryk worked for several law firms in the early 2000s and at different divisions of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas from 2008 to 2013.

In 2014, he became the deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal group that has challenged anti-discrimination laws and birth control coverage. During his time there, Kacsmaryk represented the Christian owners of a bakery in Oregon who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

In commentary and legal briefs, he said same-sex marriage would send the U.S. “on a road to potential tyranny,” and the demand for “so-called marriage equality” was a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.”

Two months before Trump nominated him to the bench, Kacsmaryk met with administration budget officials at the White House to argue that businesses should be allowed to refuse to cover their employees’ contraception based on religious or moral beliefs.

Kacsmaryk also served as a trustee of Christian Homes and Family Services starting in 2014. The group works to dissuade people from getting abortions and instead carry the pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption to a Christian family.

Although Kacsmaryk left the organization’s board when he joined the bench in 2019, he and his wife are still donors.

Since assuming his current position, Kacsmaryk has ruled in several high-profile cases, including striking down Biden administration protections for transgender people and forcing thousands of asylum-seekers to return to Mexico while their cases are processed.

Most recently, in December, Kacsmaryk ruled that health clinics that provide birth control to minors violate Texas law and federal constitutional rights, shutting down a crucial channel for reproductive health care in the state.

If he rules that mifepristone was improperly approved, the case will likely be appealed. It could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but the nine justices have already made clear what they think about abortion rights. And it isn’t looking good.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously accepted a draft plan with suggestions on how to pay millions in reparations to the city’s Black residents, in an effort to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism.

The case for reparations has been made many times in recent years, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. California was the first state to establish a task force to determine how to compensate for the legacy of slavery and racist policies made after the practice of enslaving people was abolished, both of which have crippled Black people’s economic mobility.

San Francisco is the first major city to propose a reparations plan, and its draft, put forward in December, is “unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth,” as described by the Associated Press. Under the plan, suggestions include giving every eligible Black adult a lump payment of $5 million. Personal debt and tax burdens could be eliminated, annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years could be guaranteed, and families in San Francisco could get a home for just $1. More than 100 recommendations are included in the draft proposal, though no specific plan has been formally accepted yet.

“Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people,” San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said during the five-hour hearing Tuesday night. “It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody’s collective future.”

The plan does not say how much the proposed payments would cost the city, nor is it clear how many San Franciscans would be eligible. Critics argue that it’s unreasonable to pay reparations in a city or state that never enslaved Black people. But advocates of the plan note that the majority of data and historical evidence shows that after slavery ended in 1865, policies and practices across the nation helped curb the rights of Black Americans.

The African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which proposed the plan, has until June to put forward a final report on reparations. Until then, the board of supervisors can approve, change, or reject any or all of the plan’s points.

The California state reparations committee is due to give a final report in July.

Other cities are toying with reparations too. The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first city to pay for reparations, offering eligible residents funding for home repairs, down payments, and interest or late penalties for property. Experts say Evanston’s approach is a good start but has a ways to go in terms of achieving actual justice.

Leaders in Asheville, North Carolina, have also promised reparations through funding housing, business, and career programs for Black city residents. The City Council in Boston approved a reparations study task force in December.

Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a bill in 2021 to develop a reparations study task force. President Joe Biden has expressed support for studying reparations, but he has yet to back Lee’s bill, and the issue has yet to be seriously discussed at the federal level.

A just society would not allow teachers to hit disabled kids at school. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well, Oklahoma Republicans disagree.

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House, in which Republicans have a supermajority, voted against House Bill 1028, which would have outlawed school district personnel from “using corporal punishment on any student identified with a disability in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.”

After lawmakers read Bible verses and talked about the need for physical discipline, the measure failed to proceed by a vote of 45–43 (though a narrow majority, the bill needed 51 votes to pass).

Current Oklahoma law only prohibits “deliberate infliction of physical pain” to discipline students with “the most significant cognitive disabilities.” Even then, schools can obtain permission from parents or guardians to supersede the ban.

“The rod and reproof give wisdom. But a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame,” said Republican Representative Jim Olsen. “So that would seem to endorse the use of corporal punishment. So, how would you reconcile this bill with scripture’s counsel on this matter?” he asked Representative John Talley, a proponent for the bill.

Olsen then asked, “On what basis would we automatically conclude a special needs child should not get corporal punishment?” as if there’s some dangerous risk in allowing children not to be hit by their teachers.

Olsen proceeded to nonblushingly cite a constituent call he apparently received from someone who said their “special needs” child “did not respond to positive motivation but that she responded very well to corporal punishment.”

According to his biography, Olsen himself serves as a Sunday school teacher.

Another Republican representative, Randy Randleman, actually wanted to get into the minutiae of the bill to make sure parents could still freely hit their kids.

“A child could have dyslexia, and then you couldn’t spank him, correct?” he said. “I would never spank an emotional problem, I would never spank a neurological problem,” he continued, in curious syntactical manner. “But if a parent has the choice, and they know that it can stop a misbehavior for behavioral problem, is this bill stopping that?”

Again, the bill’s bare-minimum ambition was just to outlaw school staff (not even all people) from being able to hit disabled children (not even all children).

“‘You can’t touch me.’ I hear that over and over. I don’t want to hear that in school,” Randleman said.

Randleman (supposedly a certified teacher, counselor, principal, psychometrist, school psychologist, and superintendent) has “a passion for children—his children, your children, Oklahoma’s children,” according to his biography.

“We need to help teachers understand how to discipline difficult children while keeping consistency in all classrooms,” he says in his bio.

The people are not letting the government off the hook for breaking promises. Numerous conservation, environmental, local, and Indigenous advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against the government to stop Willow, a massive oil drilling project in Alaska set to pillage up to 600 million barrels of crude oil over 30 years.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday, led by environmental law organization Earthjustice, accuses the Biden administration of failing to consider alternatives that could have reduced greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts. The gargantuan oil drilling operation is projected to emit the equivalent of roughly two million cars’ worth of carbon pollution every year.

Biden’s approval of the Willow project comes after he repeatedly promised “no more drilling.”

“Now we have to step up and fight for these priceless wild places and the people and animals that depend on them. It’s clear that we can’t count on Biden to keep his word on confronting climate change and halting drilling on public lands,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The lawsuit also charges the administration did not assess the full climate impact of the project, neglecting to consider additional pollution from future development once the project’s infrastructure is in place. Earthjustice cites ConocoPhillips’s description of the project to investors as the “next great Alaska hub,” and that as much as three billion barrels’ worth of oil may lie nearby for them to further plunder from inside the earth.

The lawsuit also charges the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service with failing to consider how the project directly violates their mandates of protecting surface resources and endangered species.

“Permitting Willow to go forward is green-lighting a carbon bomb. It would set back the climate fight and embolden an industry hell-bent on destroying the planet,” said Christy Goldfuss, chief policy impact officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Wednesday lawsuit follows one filed the day before by another six groups, led by Trustees for Alaska, which leveled similar charges against the government. The lawsuits note that the now-approved project violates similar laws that led a court to void previous approval for the project signed off on by Trump.

“ConocoPhillips has made record profits year after year and hopes to continue to do so at the cost of our communities and future generations,” said Siqiñiq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic. “The true cost of Willow is a future where we lose our traditional practices and diet because of the pollution and destruction to land, water, and climate caused by the fossil fuel industry’s unending greed.”