Lazy Caturday Reads

Young girl with kitten, William Mulready, 1786-1863

Good Afternoon!!

I’m really struggling to get going on a post this morning. Each day this week the despair I’m feeling about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned has escalated. I go to sleep thinking about it and when I wake up the reality of what is happening hits me again. It feels like the grief I have felt over a death or the end of a relationship. It’s not just the loss of women’s bodily autonomy either–it’s the sense that this will lead to the loss of other rights and then to the end of U.S. democracy.

I read this piece by British economist Umair Haque at Medium yesterday, and I’m not sure how seriously to take it. I do agree with him that Democrats are not fighting hard enough against GOP efforts to turn our country into a patriarchal theocracy.

I Warned You the Far Right Was Seizing Control of Our Societies. Believe Me Yet? I Study Social Collapse, And I’ve Never Seen a Country Like America.

I warned you the far right was seizing control of our societies. Do you believe me yet? We warned you. Because the list of people who understood this fact is long. It ranges from thinkers like Sarah Kendzior and Jared Sexton and I, to plenty of average, sane people. And yet the warning was ignored. Not just that — but mocked.

I’m going to tell you what comes next for America — and it isn’t pretty — but before I do, it’s worth taking a moment to review how utterly incredible this situation is to someone like me. I study social collapse. I predict social collapse — and I’ve never, ever been wrong about where it will strike. That’s because I’ve lived social collapse, over and over again.

Antonio Rotta, Italian, 1828-1903

And yet even I’ve never — never — seen anything as painfully, jaw-droppingly idiotic as what transpired in America. That’s the only word for it. Even in the societies I’ve seen collapse into theocracy, none of this would have happened. None of what? A member of a fanatical religious cult being appointed to the Supreme Court. An alleged sexual predator. A man whose wife openly plots coups. And then all of the people on our side — the side of democracy — in power insisting that they wouldn’t do what they were obviously going to do.

I have never, ever, ever seen this level of jaw-dropping mind-melting idiocy. Anywhere. From the Islamic World to Eastern Europe and beyond. Think about what it means for a second when someone like me says that.

Even in the most hardcore failed states I’ve seen, appointing these kinds of figures to the Supreme Court — religious nuts, sexual predators, coup-plotters — would not have been normalized. By way of denial. It would have been fought tooth and nail. In many of those nations, frankly, the military would have stepped in to prevent it. I’m not saying that’s a wonderful thing, I’m just saying something would have happened, apart from denial. Because to the entire rest of the goddamned world, it is stroke-inducingly obvious what happens when you appoint religious nutcases, sexual predators, and coup-plotters to the Supreme Court. They try to kill democracy.

I hope you’ll read the article and share your thoughts on it.

Yesterday Dakinikat posted this in the comment thread:

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since I first read it and I’m not alone. Discussions about it have been dominating Twitter this morning.

And keep in mind, the quote in Alito’s footnote comes from a CDC report. Yes, you read it right: “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life” is a reason to outlaw abortion. Rich couples need a “supply of infants” if they can’t conceive a child. Therefore women who don’t have the means to get an illegal abortion must be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term in order to supply infants to their “betters.” This is human trafficking, and before Roe it was accepted by society. There was an industry that literally stole babies and sold them to rich wannabe parents. It is still happening, but it’s more difficult because of the reduced “domestic supply of infants” post-Roe.

This is from Time in June 2021: The Baby Brokers: Inside America’s Murky Private-Adoption Industry.

Shyanne Klupp was 20 years old and homeless when she met her boyfriend in 2009. Within weeks, the two had married, and within months, she was pregnant. “I was so excited,” says Klupp. Soon, however, she learned that her new husband was facing serious jail time, and she reluctantly agreed to start looking into how to place their expected child for adoption. The couple called one of the first results that Google spat out: Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC).

Klupp says her initial conversations with ANLC went well; the adoption counselor seemed kind and caring and made her and her husband feel comfortable choosing adoption. ANLC quickly sent them packets of paperwork to fill out, which included questions ranging from personal-health and substance-abuse history to how much money the couple would need for expenses during the pregnancy.

Klupp and her husband entered in the essentials: gas money, food, blankets and the like. She remembers thinking, “I’m not trying to sell my baby.” But ANLC, she says, pointed out that the prospective adoptive parents were rich. “That’s not enough,” Klupp recalls her counselor telling her. “You can ask for more.” So the couple added maternity clothes, a new set of tires, and money for her husband’s prison commissary account, Klupp says. Then, in January 2010, she signed the initial legal paperwork for adoption, with the option to revoke. (In the U.S., an expectant mother has the right to change her mind anytime before birth, and after for a period that varies state by state. While a 2019 bill proposing an explicit federal ban of the sale of children failed in Congress, many states have such statutes and the practice is generally considered unlawful throughout the country.)

François Aimé Louis Dumoulin, Self portrait, age 79

Klupp says she had recurring doubts about her decision. But when she called her ANLC counselor to ask whether keeping the child was an option, she says, “they made me feel like, if I backed out, then the adoptive parents were going to come after me for all the money that they had spent.” That would have been thousands of dollars. In shock, Klupp says, she hung up and never broached the subject again. The counselor, who no longer works with the company, denies telling Klupp she would have to pay back any such expense money. But Klupp’s then roommates—she had found housing at this point—both recall her being distraught over the prospect of legal action if she didn’t follow through with the adoption. She says she wasn’t aware that an attorney, whose services were paid for by the adoptive parents, represented her.

“I will never forget the way my heart sank,” says Klupp. “You have to buy your own baby back almost.” Seeing no viable alternative, she ended up placing her son, and hasn’t seen him since he left the hospital 11 years ago.

That’s how it works. In the old days, families sent their pregnant daughters to homes for unwed mothers, where their infants were taken at birth and passed on to adoption agencies. Read more about the adoption industry at the Time link. It’s a long article and well worth reading for background on the attitudes of people like Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett. The Handmaid’s Tale is not far from reality.

In the bad old days:

From Yahoo News UK, here is an adoptee’s point of view: Voices: Roe v Wade: I’m an adoptee – adoption is not a ‘simple’ solution to abortion, by Melissa Guida-Richards.

It is essential that we recognise the trauma of forcing people to carry pregnancies to term and the issue with promoting adoption as the “simple” solution to parenting. If Barett’s views were to become the precedent for women and pregnant persons who do not wish to carry a child, we are turning into a society that is no better than The Handmaid’s Tale. We must consider the consequences of how the United States’s previous stance on abortion threw us into the Baby Scoop Era, where 1.5 million pregnant women and girls were sent to maternity homes to remain pregnant in secret until the baby was born and placed into adoption whether the mother approved or not.

Annual adoption numbers in the States have plummeted from 175,000 in the 1970s to around 125,000 in recent years. With over a million families looking to adopt (mostly infants) it is a recipe for disaster for this struggling business. Adoptive parents in the US typically pay between $20,000 to $45,000 for domestic private adoptions and between $15,000 to $40,000 for independent adoptions, while foster care adoptions are generally much less. We are facing an era where those in positions of power are pushing adoption for questionable reasons: a Supreme Court Justice who benefited personally from adoption is the perfect example of how white saviorism and toxic positivity in the adoption industry can encourage unethical policies and laws.

If we think of adoption as the solution to unwanted pregnancies and forced parenting, we need to consider that while previously there was a stigma surrounding unwed motherhood that influenced many pregnant persons to place their child for adoption, our society has since changed and more and more unmarried women are choosing to parent. When suggesting that women carry to term, place their children for adoption and then go about their lives, we are also ignoring the systemic racism in our country that targets Black and Brown people. Over 70 per cent of adoptive parents are white and the majority of children adopted are Black, Indigenous or persons of colour.

Nikolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky, 1868-1945

To suggest safe haven laws as the optimal solution, we are also ignoring the trauma of placing a child for adoption and the overarching effect that it will have not just on the birth parent, but current or future siblings, grandparents, and other family members. Adoption does not erase a child’s or parents’ genetic and biological desire to connect with not only their family members, but their culture as well. It does not erase the pain of a birth parent being separated from their flesh and blood. It does not negate the risk of pregnancy and birth complications that Black and Indigenous women are more likely to die from.

As an adoptee I have felt the trauma of not just being placed for adoption from a country that banned abortions, but the intergenerational wounds of my birth mother placing not just one, but three of her children for adoption. Abandonment, (or more gently put, placement of a child for adoption) is a traumatic event for children that can jeopardize a child’s development. It can also deeply wound families. From my birth mother, to myself, to my half-siblings that were adopted into a different family, to the children my birth mother parented, we have all been deeply affected by adoption.

Of course rich women will still be unencumbered by the new reality of abortion being illegal and many states, right? Not so say Rebecca Traister at The Cut: The Limits of Privilege. The new abortion regime is going to affect everyone.

In 2015, the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.” If you have paid attention to mainstream progressive politics in recent years, you have likely heard some version of this message: that privileged women — middle- and upper-class women, cis women, white women — are not going to experience much of a change to their circumstances when Roe v. Wade goes. In September 2021, on the day Texas’s sweeping anti-abortion law, SB8, went into effect, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asserted that “when abortion is illegal, rich women still get abortions. Women with resources still get abortions.” It has become common wisdom, so much so that a December article on Bloomberg Law confidently predicted that “restrictive abortion laws will have little effect on professional women or those in their orbit.” [….]

But as we teeter on the threshold of the post-Roe world, it’s worth considering that the message that privileged women will be just fine is inaccurate and that its repetition, while well meaning, is counterproductive to the task of readying an unprepared public for massive and terrifying shifts on the horizon. It’s worth pointing out that it is simply not true that the reproductive options of white, middle-class, and even wealthy people are going to remain the same. Because while circumstances will certainly be graver and more perilous for the already vulnerable, the reality is that everything is about to change, for everyone, in one way or another, and to muffle that alarm is an error, factually, practically, and politically….

Anticipation, Victor Gabriel Gilbert 1847-1933 Frankrijk

Today, unlike in the early 1970s, we have mifepristone and misoprostol, pills that are available by mail and are safe and effective in inducing abortions, which are then indistinguishable from miscarriages. Lots of people in lots of places can end their pregnancies in medically safe ways that do not entail dirty coat hangers. However, now that there are widespread means of delivering abortifacients, anti-abortion crusaders are intent on criminalizing their use. Which means the frightening new questions are not simply about access but about whether people who take these pills, or the people who provide them, will be prosecuted, fined, and put in jail for doing so. In any criminal-justice context, it is true that people of color and poor people will still suffer more, but do not underestimate anger at abortion seekers of all races — including white women of privilege — who attempt to assert independence and reproductive autonomy.

For the really rich, it is true: Traveling to get an abortion and evading prosecution will more or less be a cinch. But the chasm between really rich and everyone else gets deeper every day, and it is simply not true that a suburban white mom of three in Missouri or the teenage daughter of well-off Christian conservatives in Alabama will be in a position to get the abortion she needs when she needs it with ease and without risk to herself, her family, or the people willing to help her. Even crossing to another state to obtain an abortion may entail legal jeopardy as states consider various means to prohibit and criminalize abortion travel.

Again, please read the whole thing if you have time.

More articles to check out:

LA Progressive: Alito’s ‘Raw Judicial Power’: An Attack on Dignity, Autonomy, and ProgressWhat is the end game here for the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority? It’s not pretty.

Jill Lepore at The New Yorker: Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion.

Susan Matthews at Slate: The Constitution Wasn’t Written for Women.

The Washington Post: Clarence Thomas says he worries respect for institutions is eroding.

The Hill: Justice Thomas on SCOTUS decisions: People need to ‘live with outcomes we don’t agree with’

ProPublica: Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Quotes Infamous Witch Trial Judge With Long-Discredited Ideas on Rape.

Take care everyone. These are desperate times, but it’s not over yet.

Thursday Reads: Day 4 of Shock and Disbelief

Girl with Blue Birds, Auguste Macke

Good Afternoon!!

Today is day four since we got the news from Politico on Sunday night that 5 Supreme Court justices have signed on to a draft opinion by Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade and could impact multiple individual rights decisions based on the right of privacy. The sense of shock and disbelief hasn’t worn off for me; in fact, it has only gotten stronger each passing day. I know I’m not alone.

Yvonne Abraham at The Boston Globe: Alito’s hall-of-mirrors opinion on Roe reveals the GOP’s death spiral. Abortion rights and democracy fall together.

It has been a few days since Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s hall-of-mirrors opinion seeking to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked. But for those of us who support abortion rights, it will be a long time before the shock subsides, if it ever does.

We all knew something likethis was coming: Republicans’ machinations over the last few years left no doubt that one day soonwe’d arrive at the moment when the nation’s highest court would overturn the 50-year-old precedent….

But Alito’s decision – just a draft, the chief justice reminds us, but let’s get real here – is so expansive that his reasoning (if one can call it that) imperils other rights as well. As others have pointed out, Alito’s very restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment means other hard-won rights, including same-sex marriage, are now threatened….

Of all the spurious and outrageous assertions Alito makes in a ruling that would strip away the rights and safety of millions of citizens, one is especially galling.

Washing his hands of the consequences of the decision, Alito claims that abortion is now a matter for the voters – women voters, he says, as if they’re the only ones affected by pregnancies, planned and otherwise – to resolve. Turning the issue of abortion back to the states, half of which would outlaw it almost immediately, “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Mary Cassat (1844–1926), Lilacs in a window

Oh of course, elections will help settle the question of whether women who can’t afford to travel will now be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancies result from rape.

Why didn’t we think of that? Oh yeah, we did!

It takes a lot of nerve for Alito to call democracy the solution here, given how his GOP – his very bench – has been making a mockery of it for years. He and his colleagues have opened the door for virtually unlimited monetary influence in elections and destroyed the Voting Rights Act. One of his colleagues sits in a seat Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell stole from a Democratic president, refusing to consider Barack Obama’s nominee during an election year. McConnell then installed an anti-abortion zealot after voting began in the next election.

Also from The Boston Globe: Asserting that fetuses have rights, draft opinion could lead to abortion ban even in states like Mass., experts warn.

The strongly worded legal language used in the draft Supreme Court opinion that appears to overturn nearly 50-year-old abortion-rights protections could provoke conservative efforts to enact a universal, nationwide abortion ban, according to legal and policy analysts on both sides of the political debate. They say the case has already galvanized advocates who want a federal law criminalizing abortion….

But the legal arguments cited in Alito’s opinion could give political momentum to efforts to enact a federal abortion ban similar to what Mississippi enacted — or, potentially, even more restrictive — on the grounds the fetus is an unborn human being with its own rights. Attempts to pass a federal ban have been proposed before but always failed under the protections of Roe v. Wade.

In his ruling, Alito argues a woman has no constitutional rights to an abortion and suggests that fetuses deserve protection. A federal ban based on the ruling could set up legal challenges of state laws that protect an individual’s right to decide. Massachusetts’ Constitution grants far broader legal rights than the federal Constitution allows, say legal observers, who point out the state was the first to legalize same-sex marriage. But federal law trumps state law.

“The court ruling signals to those in Congress that it’s providing a blueprint for those who want to take away the reproductive rights of all people,” said Carol Rose, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Massachusetts. “It suggests Justice Alito is providing something of a legal road map for people trying to criminalize abortion.” [….]

Elisabeth von Eicken

Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote on Twitter: “If the Alito opinion savaging [the Roe decision and similar cases] ends up being the opinion of the court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.” Tribe added, “Predictable next steps after the Alito opinion becomes law: a nationwide abortion ban, followed by a push to roll back rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and the full array of textually un-enumerated rights long taken for granted.”

…Alito appears to refer to fetuses as human beings as a matter of traditional and common law and refers to a fetus as an “unborn human being,” which could give constitutional rights and protections to the fetus and set up legal challenges of state laws that do protect abortions. He refers to a fetus as being destroyed by abortion rights. Rose said the opinion fails to discuss the viability of a fetus. “They don’t distinguish whether you’re pregnant for one day or 24 weeks,” she said.

It appears that Alito is feeling the pressure of public opinion now, even though he claims it doesn’t matter. Reuters: EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court’s Alito cancels conference appearance after abortion ruling leak.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has canceled an appearance at a judicial conference set to begin on Thursday after a draft decision he wrote indicating the high court would overturn its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide was leaked.

Alito had been set to appear at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ judicial conference, a gathering of judges from the New Orleans-based federal appeals court and the district courts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a person familiar with the matter said.

But he has since canceled, the person said, and Patricia McCabe, a spokesperson for the Supreme Court, on Wednesday said he was not attending. The spokesperson gave no reason for why Alito, who is the justice assigned to hear emergency appeals from the 5th Circuit, was not going.

Alito and Clarence Thomas have another appearance scheduled:

Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas were slated to speak separately on Thursday and Friday at the 11th Circuit’s judicial conference in Atlanta, according to an event program.

It was unclear if they would still attend. McCabe referred inquiries about their scheduled appearances to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which did not respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.

Alex Russell Flint

Here’s a terrifying example of the ways in which this opinion could be applied to other issues. Austin-American Statesman: Abbott says Texas could ‘resurrect’ SCOTUS case requiring states to educate all kids.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that Texas would consider challenging a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to offer free public education to all children, including those of undocumented immigrants.

“Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe,” Abbott said, speaking during an appearance on the Joe Pags show, a conservative radio talk show. “And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue. …

I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler versus Doe was issued many decades ago.”

The remarks came days after a leaked draft of a forthcoming U.S. Supreme Court opinion revealed that a majority of justices are poised to revoke Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing the right to abortion….

Abbott raised the possibility of challenging the ruling on education during a discussion about border security, after Pagliarulo asked whether the state could take steps to reduce the “burden” of educating the children of undocumented migrants living in Texas.

More horrors from Greg Hilburn at Lafayette, LA’s The Daily Advertiser: ‘We can’t wait on the Supreme Court’: In Louisiana, abortion could become a crime of murder.

A Louisiana legislative committee on Wednesday advanced a bill to make abortion a crime of homicide in which the mother or those assisting her in terminating the pregnancy can be charged.

The measure cleared the House Appropriations Committee on a 7-2 vote despite at least one of the representatives voting in favor acknowledging the bill is unconstitutional.

Rep. Danny McCormick said his House Bill 813 should move forward even though the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade that guarantees abortion rights as soon as June, according to an opinion leaked from the high court this week.

“We can’t wait on the Supreme Court,” said McCormick, a Republican from Oil City.

McCormick’s bill says the unborn should be protected at fertilization.

He said the Rev. Brian Gunter of First Baptist Church in Livingston helped author the bill.

A powerful piece from media critic Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post: The media fell for ‘pro-life’ rhetoric — and helped create this mess.

Tuesday Reads: War on Women

Good Morning!!

It has finally happened. Roe v Wade will be overturned, and women will be stripped of their constitutional right to bodily autonomy. Forced birth will be legal in 22 states as soon as the decision is announced. Women will die. This is what Hillary warned us about in 2016. And it’s not just women who will have their rights taken away. Roe v. Wade is based on the right to privacy, which also underlies decisions about civil rights like gay marriage, the right of same sex people to have sex in their own homes, the right of adults to have access to birth control, and the right of people of different races to marry.

https://twitter.com/kriswernowsky/status/1521323384361127937?s=20&t=K8chrhPeQtX59UmB1yXVPw

As Dahlia Lithwick pointed out last year, we are not headed back to the way it was pre-Roe; this is going to be far worse than that. We are likely going to see laws establishing the “personhood” of fetuses. From the Slate article, Dec. 8, 2021

There has been a tendency, in the week since it became clear the U.S. Supreme Court will likely either uphold Mississippi’s unconstitutional 15-week abortion ban or overturn Roe v. Wade outright, to suggest that when this happens, America will return to the days “pre-Roe.” That is intended to mean, one assumes, that we will go back to a patchwork of laws in the various states, and see the grim return of women attempting to terminate their own pregnancies with sometimes lethal results as well as the backroom illegal abortions that were the norm before Roe became law. But it is not quite accurate to say this would be a simple return to life pre-Roe: If the boldest voices in the pro-life movement have their way, America would not so much be reverting to its pre-Roe past but slipping sideways into something that could be—believe it or not—much worse.

Michelle Goldberg made this point two years ago in the New York Times, after Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri passed a raft of (at the time) unthinkably punitive abortion bans immediately after Brett Kavanaugh was seated at the Supreme Court. As she wrote at the time, “it’s important to understand that we’re not necessarily facing a return to the past. The new wave of anti-abortion laws suggests that a post-Roe America won’t look like the country did before 1973, when the court case was decided. It will probably be worse.”

Anyone listening carefully to the newly ascendant views of abortion opponents can hear it—the talk of legal “fetal personhood” and of punishing mothers who endanger an embryo takes us into a new, uncharted, and theological realm that is quite different even from the status quo before Roe….

Prior to Roe, faith groups were hardly monolithic in their opposition to abortion. Many religious leaders stood firmly on the side of the health and welfare of mothers….But in the decades since, hard-line religious opposition to Roe has both solidified and moved the goal posts. Since 1984, the Republican Party platform has called for a constitutional amendment banning abortion nationwide. The ground has shifted.

In other words, this doesn’t necessarily end at “returning abortion to the states.” Talking to the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner this week, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, talked about plans for a nationwide 15-week abortion ban in the years to come. Religious groups that oppose abortion now speak openly of a project set forth by scholars such as John Finnis, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, who argued in the Catholic journal First Things that legislators who wrote the 14^th Amendment viewed unborn children as persons, such that unborn children would receive the full guarantees of equal protection and due process of the law under the 14^th Amendment.

Yesterday, Lithwick wrote: The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost. Regardless of Roe falling, the leaks, and the Court’s disregard for the public it is supposed to serve, have already gone too far.

If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Caseythis June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.

If this draft opinion becomes precedent of the court, the results will be catastrophic for women, particularly for women in the states that will immediately make abortion unlawful, and in those places, particularly for young women, poor women, and black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state. The court’s staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy is exceeded only by its vicious disregard for the real consequences for real pregnant people who are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from terminating a pregnancy. The Mississippi law—the law that this opinion is upholding—has no exception for rape or incest. We will immediately see a raft of bans that give rights to fathers, including sexual assailants, and punish with ever more cruelty and violence women who miscarry or do harm to their fetuses. The days of pretending that women’s health and safety were of paramount concern are over.

Lithwick notes that the American people overwhelmingly support abortion rights, but the extremist on the Court simply don’t care.

…[I]n his draft opinion Justice Alito wants America to know he doesn’t care about voters’ feelings. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito writes. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.”

Ironically, whoever decided to leak the opinion cared very much about the political implications of the impending decision. It is one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the court, actually. It is perhaps the most emphatic confirmation that there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules, but is instead currently under unprecedented public scrutiny for its very absence of binding rules. 

https://twitter.com/lyzl/status/1521358662282973184?s=20&t=K8chrhPeQtX59UmB1yXVPw

Lyz Lenz grew up in a right wing “christian” home and is very familiar with the attitudes of right wing “christian” extremists. She writes at her blog Men Yell at Me: This Was Always The Plan.

I grew up one of eight children. We were washed, dressed in coordinating jumpers and shirts, and trotted out on stage at church on Right to Life Sunday, where our mother would testify that we were an example of always choosing life.

We went to rallies, too. Bows in our hair, marching beneath the angry shouts and the ghostly, whale-like images of aborted fetuses that would haunt me at night as I tried to sleep

My whole life, I knew the plan. Vote for politicians who’d nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Abortion was murder. I heard this preached in churches; at Sunday dinners over brisket. I heard the plan at rallies for homeschoolers in D.C., where we’d lobby our senators for more rights for families — or so I was told.

I heard about the plan when, as a teen, I read fundraising fliers for Christian schools that would turn out a whole new generation of lawyers, lawyers with a Godly worldview, who’d overturn Roe v. Wade.

I heard about it again in 2016, when a nice lady from church smiled at me at school drop-off the day after Trump was elected. “I didn’t want to vote for him,” she whispered to me. I was hung over, and sick. “But he will put good judges in place to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Later, when I wrote a book about Christianity and the Midwest, and then another about mythology and motherhood, people at book events, journalists in interviews and editors looking for a hot take would all ask me why people would vote for a candidate like Trump. “To overturn Roe,” I’d say. And they’d scoff. No, no. That can’t be it.

But it is. It’s always been the plan. And it’s never been a secret. The plan has been shouted at rallies. Held up on signs. It’s been plotted and spoken of and written about over and over. 

Click on the link to read the rest. It’s well worth your time.

This is from historian Heather Cox Richardson at her substack blog, Letters from an American: May 2, 2022.

Tonight, news broke of a leaked draft of what appears to be Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing access to abortion as a constitutional right.

That news is an alarm like the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring both that Black Americans had no rights that a white man was bound to respect and that Congress had no power to prohibit human enslavement in the territories. The Dred Scott decision left the question of enslavement not to the national majority, which wanted to prohibit it from western lands, but to state and territorial legislatures that limited voting to white men.

According to law professor and legal commentator Neal Katyal, the draft appears to be genuine and shows that in a preliminary vote, a majority of the court agreed to overturn Roe v. Wade. It takes a hard-line position, saying that states can criminalize abortion with no exceptions for rape and incest. This is a draft and could change before actually being handed down, but it has already stirred a backlash. As soon as the draft hit Politico, which published it, security put up fences around the Supreme Court in expectation of protesters and counterprotesters.

We are in a weird moment, in which Democrats are trying to shore up democracy while Republicans are actively working to undermine it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) issued a statement after the draft leaked, calling the draft “one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.” They noted that the justices lied to senators to get confirmed, saying they considered Roe v. Wade settled law, and are now—if the draft is confirmed—stripping away from American women a constitutional right they have held for 50 years.

Richardson ties together the Court’s likely decision to strip women of their rights to the Republican Party’s war on democracy. Read the whole thing at the link above.

Republicans know very well that 70 percent of American voters support abortion rights, so they are instead focusing on the leak instead of the prospect of women once again becoming second class citizens. The Daily Beast: Laura Ingraham Wants FBI to Hunt Down SCOTUS Leaker: ‘Give Me Your Phone!’

The FBI should launch an investigation to find the person responsible for leaking to the press a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Laura Ingraham said Monday. The leak, which is the first of its kind, should also spur Chief Justice John Roberts to act, she said. “It’s incumbent upon him to bring in every law clerk before him… or the FBI. ‘Give me your phone. We want all your accounts. We’ve got to do our own—look at every device you’ve ever used, and find out who did this.’” The Fox host claimed that “there are names floated out there” for possible leakers but declined to go into detail. Ingraham then said she dreaded the consequences—as others on Fox News did earlier in the night—of the leaker being celebrated by those on the left. “That’s the end of the court,” Ingraham predicted. “Clerks are never going to be able to have this role at the court that they have now. They’re never going to be able to have access to opinions. I don’t know what will happen to the court, period, if that’s the case.”

I’ve been assuming this was leaked by someone who is outraged by the Alito opinion, but check out this Twitter thread from a Yale law professor:

Read the rest of the thread on Twitter.

One more from Aaron Rupar at Public Notice: The very simple reason Republicans are railing against leaks instead of celebrating the seeming demise of Roe.

You’d think Republicans would be taking a big victory lap, considering ending abortion rights is something most of them have campaigned on since the Nixon administration. Instead, however, they’re focusing on railing against whoever leaked the decision, and bemoaning the death of norms.

“To violate an understanding that has held for the entire modern history of the Court — seeking to place outside political pressure on the Court and justices themselves — is dangerous, despicable, and damaging,” lamented Sen. Mike Lee in a statement….

“This is a blatant attempt to intimidate the Court through public pressure rather than reasoned argument,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz. “I hope my fellow former clerks and the entire legal community will join me in denouncing this egregious breach of trust.” [….]

“The Court should not abide this coordinated assault by the left,” added Sen. Josh Hawley in a tweet of his own. “Issue the decision now.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went as far as to suggest the leaker should be charged with a crime, even though legal experts say leaking a SCOTUS draft decision is not unlawful.

They are angry, because they know this decision goes against popular opinion.

Polls consistently show overturning Roe is opposed by a majority of between 58 and 70 percent of Americans….

And ending federal abortion rights isn’t just unpopular in blue states. According to Data for Progress, there isn’t a single state in the union where support for a federal ban on abortion — something antiabortion activists and Republicans are already talking about — has more than 30 percent support….

In short, while railing against abortion rights is a good way to rile up the Republican base, it doesn’t resonate with the general public. And that’s why Democrats are already expressing hope the SCOTUS draft decision could help them in the upcoming midterm elections.

That’s all I have the stomach for this morning. I expect there will be many more reactions forthcoming throughout the day and in the days and weeks to come.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

By Matt McCarthy

Sigh . . . yesterday on Twitter, Elon Musk was reacting sympathetically to right wing white supremacists and holocaust deniers. Today he’s dispensing medical advice based on things some random people told him. I won’t post the links; you can find his idiotic ramblings easily enough. I sure hope Musk ends up backing out of this deal. He reminds me of Trump, and another Trump is not what the world needs right now, IMHO. Here are a couple of interesting articles on the Musk takeover:

The Wall Street Journal (no paywall): The Shadow Crew Who Encouraged Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover. Behind the scenes, fellow billionaires and internet provocateurs bent Tesla CEO’s ear; Jack Dorsey’s role.

Charlotte Alter at Time: Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Obsession With ‘Free Speech.’

White House Correspondent’s Dinner and Covid-19

Tonight the self-important members of the White House press corps will meet at their traditional dinner after the event was cancelled for two years because of the pandemic. On Tuesday, I wrote about the organizers’ decision not accept an offer of free installation of germicidal UV lighting to protect attendees from airborne transmission of the coronavirus. I really think it’s a mistake for the president and first lady to attend this event.

At Yahoo News, Michael Arceneaux offers other reasons why the Bidens should not be going to the dinner: Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a bad look for Biden.

Although the Biden administration waited until little more than a week out to confirm attendance – in part due to a recent COVID-19 outbreak stemming from the recent Gridiron dinner — it was confirmed that the president and first lady would attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner….

Every president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the WHCA’s annual dinner with the exception of Donald Trump. To him, members of the media are “enemies of the people.” In 2019, the Trump administration banned any of its officials from attending the dinner.

The dinner was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, so this marks the official return of a Washington tradition. I understand Biden’s good intentions, but the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one of the traditions that I hoped would have died in the plague. Or at the very least, dramatically change while it was away.

Consider all the bad news in the world — some of which the diners are supposed to cover. Well, at least for the night, instead of doing their jobs, they are hobnobbing with celebrities par excellence. Given inflation, an ongoing plague, and the litany of other problems impacting the nation, the “nerd prom” resurgence feels ill-timed. Given the times, a return to spectacle strikes me as a bad idea.

The guest list points to the frivolousness of the event.

Martha Stewart will be in attendance as a guest of The Daily Mail. Michael Keaton will be a guest of ABC News. CBS News is apparently bringing Drew Barrymore and Melinda Gates as their guests to the dinner. Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson will be sitting at the Disney/ABC table.

Quite a few of those White House correspondents are also frivolous lightweights, but that’s just my opinion. But back to the Arceneaux piece. He agrees with me about health concerns.

Oh, and the pandemic isn’t over, no matter what the White House Correspondents Association thinks.

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris shared her health news after returning from a weeklong trip to California. “Today I tested positive for COVID-19. I have no symptoms, and I will continue to isolate and follow CDC guidelines. I’m grateful to be both vaccinated and boosted,” Harris tweeted….

One other factor that we must consider: The president is 79 years old. With all due respect, at that age, if Biden can’t walk around in a protective bubble, he should at least avoid being in rooms with hundreds of people.

I understand the venue will be testing for attendance, but if it can happen to the vice president, why not the president?

Yet, here everyone is, partying the night away with celebrity guests — as the world falls apart and in the middle of a pandemic. I hope everyone has a good night, but it feels like the wrong time to have this kind of party.

I couldn’t agree more, and I will not be watching tonight.

The New York Times: Cases are rising in nearly every corner of the United States.

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are rising in a majority of American states, in what appears to be the first widespread increase since the peak of the Omicron surge in January.

Reports of new cases were nearly flat in the United States at the beginning of April, but as the month draws to a close, they are increasing in all but three states, signaling a wave that is increasingly national in scope.

“Most of the cases are relatively mild,” said Dr. Eric S. Toner, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Ted Takes Manhattan, by Matt McCarthy

The recent increase was once concentrated in the Northeast, but the effects of the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant is growing more geographically diverse. In the last two weeks, cases have more than doubled in states from West Virginia to Utah.

Hospitalizations are also on the rise nationwide, after plummeting early this month to their lowest point since March 2020. More than 30 states and territories have seen their hospitalization rates tick up in the past two weeks, and in much of the Northeast, the number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus has increased since mid-month by 40 percent or more.

“It’s not over yet,” Dr. Toner said in an interview on Friday. “It may be a mistake to relax all of our protective measures too quickly.”

Student Loans

The Biden administration is currently considering the possibility of forgiving some student loans. Here’s the latest:

The Washington Post: White House officials weigh income limits for student loan forgiveness.

The White House is considering income caps for eligibility for student loan relief that would exclude higher-earning Americans, as President Biden nears a decision on the matter, according to three people aware of administration discussions.

The administration is considering various ways to forgive some student loan debt through executive action. In recent weeks, senior Biden aides have examined limiting the relief to people who earned less than either $125,000 or $150,000 as individual filers the previous year, the people said. That plan would set the threshold at around $250,000 or $300,000 for couples who file their taxes jointly, the people said. No final decisions have been made, and the people familiar with the matter stressed that planning was fluid and subject to change.

The White House is also weighing exactly how much student debt to eliminate for each borrower. Biden indicated to reporters this week that the amount would be lower than $50,000 per person. Administration officials have also signaled that the White House will cut at least $10,000 per qualifying borrower, the people said, embracing a position Biden himself appeared to support in a private meeting with the congressional Hispanic Caucus. The administration has also discussed limiting forgiveness to undergraduate loans, excluding those who had taken out loans for professional degrees in fields such as law and medicine, the people said.

“There’s different proposals floating around the administration about how to structure this,” said one person involved in the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. “Over the course of the past week especially, administration and congressional staff have focused the conversation on debt cancellation on how to best meet the president’s desire to ensure the most economically vulnerable people with student debt benefit from any action.”

Forgiveness of $10,000 wouldn’t even put a tiny dent in what I owe in student loans, but I’m on an income based payment plan, and my income is too low for me to have to pay anything. After 25 years, if I live that long, the debt will be forgiven. In the meantime the government is spending lots of money to get me to file paperwork every year to prove I can’t pay anything. But for anyone who can benefit from a $10,000 reduction, I wish you well. Meanwhile, the government has no problem subsidizing billionaires like Elon Musk who pay no taxes.

For more on this issue, here’s a long think piece on student loan debt by Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic: Who Really Benefits From Student-Loan Forgiveness?

Trump Crime Family News

The Washington Post: Trump grand jury ending in N.Y. with no charges against ex-president.

A six-month grand jury that was convened late last year to hear evidence against Donald Trump was set to expire this week, closing a chapter in a lengthy criminal investigation that appears to be fizzling out without charges against the former president, people familiar with matter said.

San Francisco (Matt McCarthy)

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who took office in January, inherited a probe launched by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who was convinced that there was a case against Trump for crimes related to manipulating the value of property assets to secure tax advantages or better loan rates.

The grand jury was convened in November with a mandate to hear evidence against the former president. But the decision on whether to finish the presentation and ask the panel to vote on charges would ultimately fall on Bragg, who decided to pause the process, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been declared publicly.

A key problem, some of those people said, was Bragg’s concern over whether former Trump fixer Michael Cohen should be used as a witness.

Bragg has said he will announce when the investigation is over, noting that even after the special grand jury disbanded, other grand juries hearing a broad range of criminal cases in New York would be available to take action in this one if needed.

Still, the expiration of the grand jury — and the departure in February of two senior prosecutors who said Bragg was stalling the inquiry — makes any potential indictment of Trump seem unlikely, legal observershave said. By the time Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne quit, the grand jury had been inactive for weeks, with jurors being told to stay home, a person with knowledge of the issue previously said.

Lawyers in the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who is a partner in the probe, are skeptical that any criminal case will be brought, people familiar with the situation said. They also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. A spokeswoman for James said the investigation continues.

Once again, Trump escapes accountability for his criminal behavior. Meanwhile, another grand jury begins deliberations in Georgia. CBS News: Special grand jury considering Trump election interference in Georgia convenes Monday.

Fulton County prosecutors will begin selecting participants Monday for a special grand jury to consider whether former president Donald Trump should be charged for his attempts to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost.

By Matt McCarthy

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked a panel of judges in January for the special grand jury because of “information indicating a reasonable probability” that the election “was subject to possible criminal disruptions.”

Willis has said in interviews that the investigation includes a January 2, 2021 phone call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” Trump lost the state to Joe Biden by that margin — an outcome that was affirmed by several recounts. 

Special grand juries are unusual. They focus on just one investigation, and can be impaneled for far longer than typical grand juries, which often consider charging recommendations for a variety of investigations….

Willis wrote in the request that “a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”

Willis said in an April 19 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she will wait until after the state’s May 24 primaries to issue subpoenas to public officials — meaning the special grand jury may not hear witnesses until June.

January 6 Investigation News

Kyle Cheney at Politico: Eastman to produce 10,000 pages of Trump-related emails as broader legal fight looms.

Attorney John Eastman, a key architect of former President Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn the 2020 election, is preparing to provide another 10,000 pages of records to the Jan. 6 select committee, his attorney revealed late Friday.

It’s the latest breakthrough for congressional investigators in their ongoing fight to obtain details of Trump’s last-ditch plans to overturn his election loss.

Eastman had claimed attorney-client privilege over 37,000 pages of post-election emails related to his work for Trump. But under pressure from U.S. District Court Judge David Carter — who ruled in March that Eastman and Trump likely entered into a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election — Eastman withdrew privilege claims for nearly a third of that total.

In Friday’s court filing, Eastman’s lawyers indicated that the select committee now wants more time to consider how to handle the remaining 27,000 pages of records that remain in dispute. Carter has asked Eastman to produce a log of all the emails that remain contested, but Eastman is now asking Carter for a brief reprieve while the select committee reviews the new documents and determines how to proceed.

The committee’s legal fight to obtain Eastman’s records — all originally housed by his former employer, Chapman University — has been a top priority for the panel, which is fending off dozens of lawsuits from witnesses to Trump’s conduct in the aftermath of the election.

The panel has used the Eastman lawsuit, as well as litigation against former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, to reveal broad swaths of the evidence it has obtained showing Trump ignored overwhelming legal advice that he had been defeated. Their evidence also shows that Trump sat by on Jan. 6, 2021 as a mob of his supporters ransacked the Capitol, waiting hours and continuing to press allies to block now-President Joe Biden’s victory even as he watched the violence unfold on TV.

By Matt McCarthy

Also by Kyle Cheney at Politico: Second Oath Keeper pleads to seditious conspiracy.

A second member of the Oath Keepers facing a seditious conspiracy charge for his role in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol pleaded guilty Friday and is preparing to cooperate with prosecutors.

Brian Ulrich, one of 11 Oath Keepers facing the gravest charges to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of Congress’ electoral vote-counting session. He follows Joshua James, an Oath Keeper who provided personal security to Roger Stone, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy last month.

Cooperation from Ulrich of Georgia and James of Alabama — in addition to others who have previously reached cooperation deals with the government — could arm prosecutors with substantial evidence as they work to secure the convictions of the remaining defendants, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes III.

The indictment against the broader group suggests Ulrich discussed bringing firearms and ammunition to store at a hotel in Arlington, Va., where the group amassed a cache of weapons they called a “quick-reaction force” or QRF.

Ulrich was among a group of Oath Keepers who used golf carts to travel from a hotel to the Capitol, “at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles” while another defendant, Roberto Minuta, livestreamed, prosecutors say.

A bit more from The Daily Beast: Rioter Turns on Oath Keepers Boss at Tearful Plea Hearing.

A member of the Oath Keepers accused of sedition in the Jan. 6 riots pleaded guilty on Friday, agreeing to cooperate with the feds in their investigation. Brian Ulrich, 44, was reportedly tearful as he pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding, which could land him in prison for up to seven years. As part of the agreement, Ulrich said he would sit down with federal investigators and specifically fingered Oath Keepers boss Stewart Rhodes as having a role in the conspiracy to stop President Joe Biden’s certification. According to court documents, Ulrich messaged Oath Keeper leadership ahead of the riots: “Someone can tell me if I’m crazy but I’m planning on having a backpack for regular use and then a separate backpack with my ammo load out with some basics that I can [just] switch to is [sic] shit truly the fan blades. I will be the guy running around with the budget AR.”

Read more at WSAV.com: Guyton man pleads guilty to Jan. 6 charges, by Molly Curley.

NOTE: The artwork in today’s post is by Matt McCarthy, who uses Photoshop to create surrealistic cat art. You can find more of his work on Instagram, where he posts as Mr. Matt McCarthy.