The Trump administration is once more trying to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In a recent federal appeals court filing, the Justice Department said it concurred with a federal judge in Texas, who ruled to strike down the ACA after deeming it unconstitutional.

This comes almost two years after the administration pushed to repeal the law and replace it with a plan that would have stripped health coverage from millions of Americans. The administration has never stopped trying to undermine the ACA. It has consistently chipped away at it by attempting to undermine its provisions and resisting efforts to expand the law’s reach. Yet this new attempt to undo the law through the courts is arguably its most direct challenge to the ACA’s existence since the GOP-led Senate failed to repeal the law in a dramatic, middle-of-the-night vote.

On March 15, a gunman killed 50 people, and injured dozens more, at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attack, which was the deadliest in the country’s recent history, was made even more horrible by happening near the time of Friday Prayer, one of the central rituals of Islam. While the investigation into the shooting is still ongoing, the alleged shooter reportedly wrote a manifesto espousing anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and white supremacist beliefs.

That same day, in the US, President Donald Trump continued his efforts to build a wall between the US and Mexico, vetoing a Congressional resolution that would have blocked his declaration of a national emergency along the southern border. Such a wall would fulfil his often-stated campaign promise to reject immigrants who ostensibly threaten the country’s “security,” immigrants about whom the President has spoken in disparaging terms, using an expletiveto refer to countries with predominantly nonwhite populations and callingundocumented immigrants “animals.”

Over the last year, we have seen high profile suicides that have gripped our attention—from Kate Spade, to Anthony Bourdain, to, most recently, the tragic death of Parkland shooting survivor Sydney Aiello. It is often recognized, correctly, that suicide is highly linked to mental illness, particularly depression. That, in and of itself, is ample reason for us to think carefully about mental illness and its consequences, but before I tackle the issue of suicide, I want to comment, more foundationally, on why mental health should matter, and be more central to our attention in health. 

In recent weeks, the political conversation has been animated by talk of a Green New Deal (GND). The idea behind the GND, unveiled last month as a Congressional resolution by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is to tackle the threat of climate change through a series of wide-ranging reforms. The goals of the GND address not just the challenge of reducing carbon emissions, but the underlying socioeconomic inequities that gave rise to climate change. These goals include overhauling the country’s transportation system, providing universal health care, creating a federal jobs guarantee, and investing in infrastructure. They reflect the plan’s broader call for social and economic justice, workers’ rights, and greater investment in public goods. Through these aspirations, the GND acknowledges that carbon emissions are just the tip of the (rapidly melting) climate change iceberg, that the problem is the sum of deeper, structural challenges, and that solving climate change means using public policy to tackle the problem at every level of society, addressing not just the science of climate change, but the injustice that created the crisis in the first place.