Nearly 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the order that freed slaves in states rebelling against the Union during the Civil War, Louisiana voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the use of involuntary labor as a form of punishment. Similar amendments were proposed in four other states, passing in Alabama, Tennessee, and Vermont, and with results still too close to call in Oregon.

The ballot measures address a caveat in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The loophole was exploited by many former slaveholding states, including Louisiana, to criminalize newly freed former slaves and create involuntarily held workforces during Reconstruction. Louisiana has long been home to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a sprawling prison-farm nicknamed “Angola.” Malcolm Alexander, a former inmate who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for almost four decades and exonerated in 2018, described working at Angola as something “like you see in old pictures of slavery…we even had a quota we had to meet at the end of the day,”

Before Tuesday’s midterms, only four other states had barred slavery as a form of punishment, Colorado, Rhode Island, and as of 2020, Nebraska and Utah. “It is time for all Americans to come together and say that it must be struck from the U.S. Constitution,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) told the Associated Press. “There should be no exceptions to a ban on slavery.”

The votes this week are a major step in establishing labor rights for incarcerated people. “Incarcerated workers are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse,” reads an ACLU report published in June. The ACLU has advocated for a total repeal of “federal and state constitutional exception clauses allowing slavery and involuntary servitude to be used as punishment for a criminal conviction.”

International relations (IR) experts overwhelmingly agree with Biden. The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute asked IR scholars at U.S. universities and colleges for their views on the use of U.S. air power to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The results reported below are based on responses from 866 respondents surveyed between March 10 and 14. (Complete results can be found here.)

These experts are nearly unanimous in their opposition to the establishment and enforcement of a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Respondents reject a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone because they fear it raises the risk of escalation, including the likelihood of a Russian nuclear attack against Ukraine or NATO countries.

When asked whether the United States should respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, just 7 percent of respondents agreed. Large majorities supported other U.S. policy responses, including sanctions against the Russian government and its leaders, resettling Ukrainian refugees in the United States, sending military supplies to Ukraine, banning oil and gas purchases from Russia, and deploying more military forces to the region.

The only U.S. policy response less popular than a no-fly zone was a more general military campaign against Russian forces. Support for cyberattacks against Russian forces was also quite low, with just 29 percent of respondents backing the idea. Overall, the message is clear: IR experts are generally unwilling to support U.S. policy responses that Russia may perceive as escalatory.