Wednesday Reads

Good Day!!

There is quite a bit of news happening today. The top stories involve the Supreme Court, abortion, Hunter Biden, and the phony “impeachment” of President Biden by a bunch of Republican idiots. Here goes:

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two troubling cases, one involving access to early abortions, and another that could affect January 6th cases.

The Washington Post: Supreme Court will decide access to key abortion drug mifepristone.

The Supreme Court will decide this term whether to limit access to a key abortion drug, returning the polarizing issue of reproductive rights to the high court for the first time since the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

The Biden administration and the manufacturer of mifepristone have asked the justices to overturn a lower-court ruling that would make it more difficult to obtain the medication, which is part of a two-drug regimen used in more than half of all abortions in the United States. Oral arguments will likely be scheduled for the spring, with a decision by the end of June, further elevating the issue of abortion, which has proven galvanizing for Democrats, during the 2024 campaign season.

The justices will review a decision fromthe conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that said the Food and Drug Administration did not follow proper procedures when it began loosening regulations for obtaining the mifepristone, which was first approved more than 20 years ago. The changes made over the last few years included allowing the drug to be taken later in pregnancy, to be mailed directly to patients and to be prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor.

Medications to terminate pregnancy, which can be taken at home, have increased in importance over the last 18 months, as more than a dozenstates severely limited or banned abortions following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Read more at the WaPo link.

NBC News: Supreme Court agrees to hear Jan. 6 case that could affect Trump prosecution.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear an appeal brought by a man charged with offenses relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol in a case that could have a major impact on the criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

The justices will hear a case brought by defendant Joseph Fischer, who is seeking to dismiss a charge accusing him of obstructing an official proceeding, namely the certification by Congress of President Joe Biden’s election victory, which was disrupted by a mob of Trump supporters.

Two other Jan. 6 defendants, Edward Lang and Garret Miller, brought similar appeals, the outcome of which will be dictated by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fischer’s case.

Fritz Ulrich, a federal public defender representing Fischer, said he was pleased that the court will clarify the scope of the law in question but had no further comment.

Trump has been charged with the same offense as well as others in his federal election interference case. The court’s decision to take up the issue, as well as the timing of its ultimate ruling, could therefore affect his case.

How the case against Trump could be affected:

It will take months for the justices to hear oral arguments and issue a ruling sometime during the court’s current nine-month term, which ends in June.

Trump’s lawyers could use the Supreme Court’s involvement as one opportunity to delay his election interference trial, which is scheduled to start in March.

Trump is the front-runner in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, and any delay in his criminal trial in Washington would be to his benefit.

If Trump were to win the election in November, he would then be in a position to have the charges dismissed. If the case proceeds as scheduled in March and Trump were to be convicted, he could be sentenced before the election.

Read all the details at NBC News.

One more abortion story:

NBC News: Florida abortion rights activists win over Republicans in ballot measure push.

Jaymie Carter is a registered Republican.

She has been named by two Republican governors — first Rick Scott, then Ron DeSantis — to sit on the Board of Trustees for the State College of Florida, and she says she voted for DeSantis in his 2022 campaign for governor.

But when it comes to the issue of abortion, she’s breaking with her party.

“Women are concerned about what’s happening with our bodies and our right to choose. And there’s a lot of people that you wouldn’t think would be the pro-choice advocates, but they are,” she said. “And the government overreach, it’s huge right now.”

Carter is one of more than 150,000 registered Republican voters who have signed a petition in support of a ballot amendment that would bar the state from restricting abortion “before viability” — which is usually at 24 weeks — or “when necessary to protect the patient’s health.”

That total comes from the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, one of several groups working to gather the 891,523 signatures necessary to get the measure on the ballot, working with Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign leading the ballot initiative. The group says it has gathered and submitted more than 1.3 million signatures so far. The website of the Florida Division of Elections says it has validated 687,699 signatures as of mid-December.

Florida is one of nine states where groups are pushing to get measures on the ballot that would bar restrictions on abortion rights, following a streak of wins for similar measures in Kansas and Ohio.

And as the Feb. 1 deadline to get the petitions submitted and verified approaches in Florida, some Republican voters are coming out publicly to support and even advocate for it.

Very interesting. I wonder if Ron DeSantis has heard about this yet?

This is the day that House Republicans ordered Hunter Biden to undergo a behind-closed-doors deposition. In a surprise move, Biden held an impressive press conference, in which he reiterated his willingness to answer questions at a public hearing.

Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Hunter Biden, Defying Deposition Subpoena, Again Offers Public Testimony.

Hunter Biden, the president’s son, appeared on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning to offer to publicly testify in House Republicans’ impeachment investigation into his father, though he insisted he would not appear for a private deposition they scheduled over his refusals.

The younger Mr. Biden, who has been served a subpoena to testify, spoke to reporters in a hastily called news conference outside the Capitol near the Senate, across the complex from a House office building where Republican lawmakers were waiting to question him behind closed doors.

“I am here,” Mr. Biden said. “Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not involved in my business.”

“There is no evidence to support the allegations my father was involved in my business because it did not happen,” he added.

The younger Mr. Biden has objected to providing private testimony, saying he fears Republicans will selectively leak his remarks and try to distort what he says. He has repeatedly proposed that he appear at a public hearing instead to answer their questions.

“They have lied over and over,” Mr. Biden said of Republicans.

Republicans have threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress if he does not comply.

Jacqueline Alemany and Matt Viser at The Washington Post: Ahead of House GOP vote on impeachment inquiry, Hunter Biden defies subpoena.

“I’m here to testify at a public hearing today,” Hunter Biden said in a statement outside of the Capitol on Wednesday morning. “Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics … or hear what I have to say.” [….]

Hunter Biden

Hunter Biden maintained that he would answer questions only in a public hearing. His legal team has pointed to past comments in which House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) all but dared Hunter Biden to testify — publicly or privately — and the team has said they don’t trust House Republicans not to selectively leak his testimony.

“For six years I’ve been targeted by the unrelenting Trump Machine asking ‘where’s Hunter,’” Hunter Biden said. “Here’s my answer: I am here.”

Comer over the past two weeks has rebuffed Hunter Biden’s offer to publicly testify before the committee, and Republicans on Wednesday vowed to move expeditiously to initiate proceedings to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying their subpoena.

Hunter Biden “does not get to dictate the terms of the subpoena,” Comer told reporters outside of an empty hearing room where Hunter Biden was scheduled to be deposed. Pressed about whether he has found evidence that President Biden had engaged in wrongdoing or criminal conduct, Comer said he had found “some very serious evidence,” before citing two examples of banking records he has repeatedly mischaracterized.

The fake charges against President Biden:

The foundation of the impeachment inquiry, outlined by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a briefing with reporters last week, rests on an unsubstantiated accusation that has become the linchpin of allegations regarding the Biden family’s purported corrupt and criminal conduct.

Republicans allege that Joe Biden as vice president pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to quash a probe into the former owner of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden sat on the board. That allegation has been widely refuted by former U.S. officials, as well as Ukrainian anti-corruption activists.

As part of the inquiry, House Republicans also have elevated claims that the Biden administration slowed a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial background, but that testimony has been repeatedly disputed by officials involved in the case.

“There is no fairness or decency in what these Republicans are doing. Their false facts have become the beliefs of too many people,” Hunter Biden said Wednesday.

“They have taken the light of my dad’s love for me and presented it as darkness,” he continued. “They have no shame.

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine: We Were Told Biden Is Secretly Running the DOJ. Why Is His Son Being Charged?

It has long been an article of faith on the right that Attorney General Merrick Garland is prosecuting Donald Trump because President Biden wants him to. Even the Trump-skeptical corners of the conservative media casually assert, without bothering to supply any evidence for the charge, that Biden is behind the DOJ investigations.

“Biden Justice Department officials and Democratic prosecutors are currently trying to put the other side’s leading contender for the White House in jail … The vapors over Trump saying he’s going to target his enemies,” argues National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, “is rich coming from people who have targeted their enemy by any means necessary for years now.”

“Meantime, a Justice Department special counsel has filed trumped-up charges against Mr. Trump for allegedly defrauding the U.S. … writes Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley, “Abuse executive power. Ignore the law. Run roughshod over individual liberties. Retaliate against political opponents. Mr. Biden and his allies have done exactly what they warn Mr. Trump will do if he returns to the White House.”

You’d think those conservatives might be questioning this assumption, now that Garland’s Justice Department is prosecuting Joe Biden’s son for tax evasion. But no, they’re just pretending it isn’t happening.

There was never any basis for the charge that Garland is working at Biden’s behest. Garland is well-respected by legal types in both parties — that’s why Barack Obama thought he was the only Supreme Court nominee who stood any chance of confirmation by a Republican Senate in 2016 — and received 70 votes for his confirmation.

Unlike Trump, who repeatedly demanded his attorneys general prosecute his enemies and let his criminal buddies go free, and made these demands privately with even more corrupt intent, there is zero public evidence or reporting to suggest Biden has improperly tried to influence Garland’s decisions.

What’s more, the two Justice Department cases against Trump both flow directly from publicly identifiable sources. Trump is being charged in the documents case because the National Archive asked him to return government property, he refused, and then covered up his crimes when the FBI came looking. The January 6 case comes directly out of an investigation by a House committee that turned up damning evidence….

Indeed, the president is angry with his attorney general. “Biden’s relationship with Garland — which was already tense — has become more frigid amid Biden’s frustration at the lengthy criminal investigation and now prosecution of Hunter by the Justice Department,” reports Alex Thompson, “People close to Biden also have fumed at Garland for appointing a special counsel in August.” Thompson also reports, “One person close to the president unflatteringly compared Garland to the former FBI director James Comey, claiming they both have been obsessed with the appearance of having integrity rather than just trying to make the right decision.”

Read the rest at the link.

The accusers: Jim Jordan and James Comer

The New York Times: House Set to Approve Biden Impeachment Inquiry as It Hunts for an Offense.

The Republican-led House is on track to approve a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden on Wednesday, pushing forward with a yearlong G.O.P. investigation that has failed to produce evidence of anything approaching high crimes or misdemeanors.

Republicans say the vote, which is expected in the evening, is needed to give them full authority to carry out their investigations amid anticipated legal challenges from the White House. Democrats have denounced the inquiry as a fishing expedition and a political stunt.

G.O.P. leaders refrained for months from calling a vote to open an impeachment inquiry, given the reservations of mainstream Republicans, many of them from politically competitive districts, about moving forward without proof that Mr. Biden did anything wrong. But the political ground has shifted considerably, and most of them are now willing to do so, emphasizing that they are not yet ready to charge the president.

“Voting in favor of an impeachment inquiry does not equal impeachment,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, and if they uncover evidence of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors, then and only then will the next steps towards impeachment proceedings be considered.”

Read more at the NYT. I guess we’ll learn later today if the Republicans have the votes for their impeachment inquiry without a shred of evidence to support it.

More stories worth checking out today:

AP: Biden takes a tougher stance on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ of Gaza.

The New York Times: Top Court Clears Path for Democrats to Redraw House Map in New York.

Reuters: US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit.

The New York Times: In a First, Nations at Climate Summit Agree to Move Away From Fossil Fuels.

Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Trump, Elon Musk, and Billionaire ‘Populists’ Threaten Democracy and Freedom.