--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, October 8th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, how a Trump or Harris presidency could shape the future of the Supreme Court, doctors say private equity is hurting emergency medicine, and the weird, wonderful world of giant pumpkin competitions. But first, to the Supreme Court, which started a new term yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the coming months, the justices will hear a number of high-profile cases. Their decisions will impact gender-affirming care for minors, the death penalty, and more. And the court declined to get involved in a number of other closely watched cases, including a dispute in Texas about whether federal law requiring emergency room care supersedes the state abortion ban, which is one of the strictest in the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We reached out to Washington Post Supreme Court correspondent Anne Maramo to talk about one major case the court will hear today involving so-called ghost guns.
--:-- Anne Maramo: So the Biden administration identified what they said was a big problem of people assembling homemade firearms from these kits that doesn't have a serial number, that the owner has not gone through the traditional background checks, and that makes it hard for law enforcement to track these firearms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Trace has done a lot of reporting on these DIY-assembled guns. Evidence shows they're being used in crimes more often. According to one report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, law enforcement recovered more than 72,000 ghost guns between 2016 and 2022. More than 1,000 were connected to homicides and attempted homicides.
--:-- Anne Maramo: In this case before the Supreme Court, gun rights groups are arguing the ATF exceeded its authority by passing a rule in 2022 requiring vendors who sell these kinds of partially finished guns to follow the same licensing and record-keeping rules that apply to fully assembled guns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These gunright advocates claim gun kits don't meet the definition of a firearm and shouldn't be regulated the same way. It'll be up to the court now to decide whether they're subject to federal regulation.
--:-- Anne Maramo: In a similar case involving the ATF in June, the court struck down the agency's ban on bump stocks. Those are devices that attach to semi-automatic rifles, allowing them to fire rapidly, like machine guns. The justices split along ideological lines, and the argument came down to whether the ATF could regulate something that technically was not a machine gun.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The court said no. This case involving ghost guns will be decided sometime in 2025. And Maramo reminded us that, of course, the election will be looming in the background of this Supreme Court term.
--:-- Anne Maramo: The court could get pulled into election disputes if the presidential election in November is close. One legal analyst told Maramo if it unfolds in a similar way to what happened in the 2000 election, when the Supreme Court's decision secured the win for George W. Bush over Al Gore, the court would risk appearing partisan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A recent survey found seven out of ten Americans believe the justices are guided by ideology and are not ruling impartially. Let's stay with the Supreme Court and politics and talk about how the court might get reshaped by a possible Trump or Harris presidency.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are, after all, on retirement watch for two conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, who's 76 years old, and Samuel Alito, who is 74. Republicans are favored to win the majority in the Senate this fall, which handles the process of confirming vacancies on the court.
--:-- Sahil Kapoor: There is a long history of justices waiting for a president with shared political leanings to take office before they resign. The thinking being, as NBC reporter Sahil Kapoor explains, that'll help maintain the overall ideological balance on the court.
--:-- Sahil Kapoor: We've seen several judges, including Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia, die while trying to wait out the presidency so they can retire under a president who would pick a judge who's more like them. So there's no guarantee that if these two conservatives don't retire under a Trump presidency over the next few years, that they would be able to retire under a Republican.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Republicans are also drawing up plans for how they could potentially limit Harris if she wins the White House and they control the Senate. Republican senators I've talked to, including two of them who are running to be the next leader of the Senate GOP, John Cornyn and John Thune, both said that they would like a negotiation with a potential President Harris on judges, that the Senate would have the power to consider or deny any judicial nominee that Harris sends over and that she should consider what can make it through the Senate.
--:-- Sahil Kapoor: In other words, as our politics have become more polarized, so has the once sort of routine nomination process for confirming Supreme Court justices, which explains the hand-wringing over what to do if the Senate goes red and the White House stays blue under Harris.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It would be the first time in decades a newly elected president enters office without their party in control of Congress as well. Every president newly elected since George H.W. Bush has entered office with a trifecta, which gives them a significant amount of runway to advance the judges they want, the legislation that they want, and so forth.
--:-- Sahil Kapoor: Harris, if she faces a Republican Senate, should not expect that courtesy. Trump exercised a lot of power in making judicial appointments while in office. He appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench in his first term and nearly as many federal appeals court judges as Barack Obama did in his two terms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Coming up, however, the next president will inherit very few judicial openings. Less than 5 percent of seats are vacant, the lowest in over three decades.
--:-- Sahil Kapoor: Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, you'll hear Harris bringing up the Supreme Court in the context of Roe v. Wade and reproductive rights, hammering Trump for his role in overturning federal protections for abortion. And for that same reason, Kapoor told us, Trump has been trying to avoid talking about the court in his campaign.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Donald Trump recognizes that the Dobbs decision is a massive political liability for him And that is only the case because he picked three out of the five Supreme Court justices that were instrumental to that majority opinion Kapoor reports Republicans are also planning for a scenario where Trump wins and at most gets to replace two justices. If that were to happen, we would be in a highly unusual place for the balance of power. It would mean Trump appointees make up over half of the Supreme Court. That's happened only once before in U.S. history under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is a trend happening in emergency rooms across the country, and doctors say it's putting profits over patients. We spoke to Dr. Karen Landman, a physician and senior health reporter for Vox, who's been writing about this.
--:-- Dr. Karen Landman: Doctors don't screw their patients typically. But in the late 2010s, private equity started getting interested in emergency care and started taking over staffing firms. Today, private equity firms control about a quarter of emergency rooms across the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In her reporting, Landman follows one doctor who she calls John, who saw firsthand over his career how private equity ownership transformed emergency medicine.
--:-- Dr. Karen Landman: Around 10 years ago, he took a job at an ER in the Midwest, and he really liked it. Management was responsive to requests for staffing, training, and other resources to support patient care. But John told Landman things changed practically overnight when a private equity firm bought the practice.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They flipped the ratio of doctors to other clinicians, which meant that rather than having mostly doctors overseeing nurse practitioners and physician associates, Suddenly there were huge numbers of physician associates and nurse practitioners and very few doctors. And so that really changed the quality of the care that he said patients were receiving.
--:-- Dr. Karen Landman: They also instituted all kinds of new metrics for doctors to meet. One of the harshest of which was that they really needed to see patients very, very quickly after they arrived in the emergency room. In some cases, these private equity firms established numeric goals, basically encouraging doctors to admit as many patients as possible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Landman told us at the same time, these firms are often cutting staff and cutting hours. They often strip the staffing to really, really low levels. And that might be fine for, you know, when you have just a couple of people showing up with like earaches and strep throat or a little injury that needs stitches.
--:-- Dr. Karen Landman: But it means that if a bunch of very sick, very complicated patients show up at the same time, somebody's care is going to suffer and some people may die unnecessarily. John was so unhappy with the changes, which he said hurt patient care, that he moved to a new ER. And it happened again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it just seemed like he could not outrun these private equity firms that were buying up emergency rooms. Emergency doctors told Landman this trend of private equity buying up health care practices is driving physicians out of emergency medicine.
--:-- Dr. Karen Landman: This specialty was already known for being one of the most stressful. Fewer medical students are pursuing it today and a recent survey by Medscape found 63 of ER physicians report burnout.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We link to Landman full reporting including on how Congress tried and failed to fix the problem on our show notes page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. Starting with Hurricane Milton, which is hurtling toward Florida's Gulf coast with alarming intensity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Workers across the state are still racing to pick up debris left behind by Hurricane Helene. Things like furniture, appliances, pieces of lumber, all of which could pose a serious risk to people as winds from Hurricane Milton pick up and storm surge floods the coastline.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fox Weather was live from Tampa Bay yesterday as a line of dump trucks with their very own police escort raced through the streets. There had to be with this one at least 40 or 50 trucks that went by empty and they're going north, they're going to get more debris and take it out to some landfill somewhere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More evacuations and emergency orders have been issued across the state. You can follow the latest developments in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This next finding will vindicate people with end-of-the-alphabet last names who suspect they've often gotten the short end of the stick.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Researchers at the University of Michigan believe computerized grading systems lead to unintended negative outcomes for students with names at the end of the alphabet. And they suspect, because instructors who use digital grading systems usually go in alphabetical order, by the time they hit the end of their list, they're often tired, grumpy, hungry, or just in a bad mood, which shows up in feedback.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Researchers observed comments to kids with later letter last names were often more negative than the ones that kids with earlier letter names got. One idea put forward by these researchers that could even the playing field is pretty simple. Change the grading systems and randomize the order.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, let's go to Western Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia Inquirer takes us inside the world of competitive giant pumpkin growing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The photos in the story are unbelievable. The lead image is a pumpkin that weighs close to 1,800 pounds. But since all I've got are words, not images, just let this sink in. We're talking about pumpkins way bigger than the people who grow them, with leaves the size of elephant ears and vines thicker than human arms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One farmer says his pumpkins grow at a rate of 60 pounds a day. And he's hoping that this is finally the year that one of his giants will help him break the state record of 2,404 pounds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next flying cars are here kind of they're not totally legal and at two hundred thousand dollars a pop they're definitely not affordable but since the technology is so new new york magazine reports the flying vehicle for now mostly exists in a world of uncertainty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
