Wednesday Reads

Posted: February 28, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: 2024 Michigan primaries, Alabama IVF ruling, Birth Control, Gaza, low quality polls, Niki Haley, polls, separation of church and state, Simon Rosenberg, uncommitted voters, voters concerned about extremism | 20 Comments

Good Morning!!

Henri Matisse, Three Sisters

I’m going to get this out of the way before I get to the real news. Last night President Biden won 81.1 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic primary, but it isn’t easy to find that out from the press reports. All of the focus is on the uncommitted votes, which got 13.3 percent. Here is one representative sample:

The Washington Post: Biden wins Michigan primary but faces notable showing by ‘uncommitted.’

President Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday but faced a notable challenge from voters selecting “uncommitted” to protest his handling of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, a potential sign of vulnerability for Biden among rank-and-file Democrats.

Democratic leaders in the state were bracing for tens of thousands of “uncommitted” votes, as Biden aides and allies sought to tamp down concerns about the strong showing by those aiming to warn the president he could lose the pivotal state in November if he does not change course and push for a cease-fire in Gaza.

With nearly 99 percent of the ballots counted, there were more than 100,000 “uncommitted” votes….

In the weeks leading up to the Democratic primary, Arab American and liberal activists launched a concerted push to get Democrats to vote “uncommitted” as a way to protest Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war, especially his decision not to call for a cease-fire. The group Listen to Michigan declared victory soon after polls closed, noting that it had surpassed its stated goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes.

manager and sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), said in a statement Tuesday. “Tens of thousands of Michigan Democrats, many of whom who voted for Biden in 2020, are uncommitted to his re-election due to the war in Gaza.”

She added: “We don’t want a Trump presidency, but Biden has put [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu ahead of American democracy. We cannot afford to pay the bill for disregarding Palestinian lives should it come due in November.”

They don’t want a Trump presidency, but they plan to try to enable one anyway, in the process ending American democracy. But here’s some history on uncommitted votes in Michigan:

Biden campaign officials, however, said the group’s goal of 10,000 votes was artificially low, as 20,000 people have voted uncommitted in each of Michigan’s past three Democratic presidential primaries, even without any organized effort urging them to do so. The president’s allies also cited comments by some of those who threw their support behind the campaign that despite their anger at Biden’s policies, they plan to vote for him in November. A campaign official also noted that there were several “uncommitted” delegates for Barack Obama in 2012, coming from North Carolina, Maryland, Alabama and Kentucky.

Family group reading, by Mary Cassatt

I don’t know any Democrat who doesn’t want a cease fire in the brutal Israel-Hamas war, including President Biden. But Biden can’t magically force either Netanyahu or Hamas to agree to one. Negotiations take place behind closed doors; making them public would defeat their purpose.

Other mainstream news sources also emphasize the uncommitted vote against Biden, but there is little attention to the fact that Trump underperformed the polls, just as he did in New Hampshire and North Carolina. He got only 68 percent of the vote in Michigan, while Niki Haley won nearly 27 percent, once again demonstrating that close to 30 percent of Republicans don’t want Trump as their nominee.

From Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles: Trump Is Not Strong, Or Winning – No Red Waving 2024 Please.

It Is Wrong To Say Trump Is Winning The Election, Or Is Somehow Favored. He Is Weak, Not Strong – In 2022 a narrative developed about the election – that a red wave was coming – that commentators just couldn’t shake even though there was plenty of data suggesting the election could end up being a close competitive one. I feel like that we are beginning to enter a similar moment in 2024 with the various assertions of Trump’s strengths. The “red wave” over estimated Republican strength and intensity, discounted clear signs of Democratic strength and intensity and was it would be ridiculous, given what happened in 2022, for us to do this all over again this year.

Let me say it plainly – Donald Trump is not ahead in the 2024 election. He is not beating Joe Biden. He is not in a strong position. Signs of Trumpian and broader GOP weakness is all out there for folks to see – if they want to see it. Let’s dive in a bit:

Trump is not leading in current polling – For Trump to be “ahead” all polls would have be showing that. They aren’t. The last NYT poll had Biden up 2, the new Quinnipiac poll has Biden up 4.

Given the spike in both junky, low quality polls and GOP-aligned polls the averages can no longer be relied on – this was a major lesson of 2022. Remember using the averages Real Clear Politics predicted that Republicans would end up with 54 seats. They have 49.

Stripping out GOP aligned polls, and less reliable polling, we find the race clearly within margin of error, which means the election is close and competitive. In a recent analysis, “Trump’s lead over Biden may be smaller than it looks,” The Economist broke down recent polling by pollster quality and found the race dead even among the highest quality pollsters [click the link to see the chart]….

Asserting that somehow Trump leads is pushing data beyond what it can tell you. With margin of error a 1-2 point lead is not an actual lead – it signifies a close, competitive election.

It is also early, and Democrats have not had a competitive primary. Lots of folks are not engaged. Look at this chart from Morning Consult. If the Democratic coalition starts coming home as Biden ramps up and Trump becomes the R nominee he will jump ahead by a few points….

We learned in 2022 that centering our understanding of American politics around wobbly polling and polling averages was risky. No reason we should be doing it again this cycle. Lots of other things we can throw into the strategic blender to understand where we are.

Read the rest at Hopium Chronicles. It’s quite interesting.

The mainstream press seems to want another Trump presidency, because that will make them more money. Biden is competent and doing a good job, but that’s so boring. They want the chaos back again–never mind that Trump would likely prosecute journalists in a second term.

Rene Magritte, The Subjugated reader

Apparently, Trump is a bit nervous about how many votes Niki Haley is getting in the Republican primaries.

Adam Wren at Politico: Trump tried to ignore Haley. He barely lasted a day.

For a full 24 hours on Saturday, Donald Trump did not mention Nikki Haley by name, ignoring her both in a freewheeling address to the Conservative Political Action Conference and after he won the primary in South Carolina.

His campaign said they were turning the page, focusing squarely on the general election. One aide, when asked about the absence of Haley, quipped: “Who?”

By Sunday, that strategic restraint was gone.

In a torrent of posts on Truth Social, just weeks before he is expected to clinch the nomination, Trump had no appetite for comity, blasting Haley as “BRAINDEAD” and “BIRDBRAIN.” He relished the news that Americans for Prosperity would stop spending on Haley’s presidential campaign. He touted a polling lead in Michigan’s primary. “When will Nikki realize,” he posted, “that she is just a bad candidate?”

Maybe when she stops getting 30 percent of the Republican primary votes?

This was not a magnanimous candidate looking to mend the intraparty fracture on full display in exit polls from each of the early electoral contests. This was not a competitor looking to pivot to going after President Joe Biden.

This was a former president entering the general election actively exacerbating divisions within the GOP — at a time when some Republicans are openly warning about the risk of alienating even a small segment of the Republican electorate. Trump has every rational incentive to make overtures to Haley and her supporters, who delivered her roughly 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina and who are the kind of voters Trump will need to turn out in Michigan and Pennsylvania in November. But he refused to do so — or, perhaps, was incapable of it — despite making head feints in that direction.

“In the exit polls in the three early states, roughly 20 percent are saying they’re not going to vote for Trump,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster and president of Bellwether Research and Consulting. “If that’s true, you need to have like 85 to 90 percent of your base. I do think that he’ll have some problems consolidating, particularly your well-educated, suburban Republicans.”

This is interesting, from Reuters: Exclusive: Extremism is US voters’ greatest worry, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.

Worries about political extremism or threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters and an issue where President Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Donald Trump ahead of the November election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.

Some 21% of respondents in the three-day poll, which closed on Sunday, said “political extremism or threats to democracy” was the biggest problem facing the U.S., a share that was marginally higher than those who picked the economy – 19% – and immigration – 18%.

Biden’s Democrats considered extremism by far the No. 1 issue while Trump’s Republicans overwhelmingly chose immigration.

Extremism was independents’ top concern, cited by almost a third of independent respondents, followed by immigration, cited by about one in five. The economy ranked third.

During and since his presidency, Trump has kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism of U.S. institutions, claiming the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated and holding to his false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.

That rhetoric was central to his message to supporters ahead of their Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Overall, 34% of respondents said Biden had a better approach for handling extremism, compared to 31% who said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

The poll helps show the extent to which Biden’s re-election bid could rely on voters being motivated by their opposition to Trump rather than enthusiasm over Biden’s candidacy.

The fallout from the Alabama IVF ruling is still in the news.

Lisa Neeham at Public Notice: They’re coming for birth control next.

In brief, the reason the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion implicates and outlaws IVF is that the state has a Wrongful Death of a Minor statute, and the court decided this applies to “all unborn children, without limitation.” But there’s no language in the statute that says this. Rather, it’s just that over the last 15 years, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings saying that the undefined term “minor child” in the statute can be stretched to “unborn children” regardless of what state of development the embryo is at. Once the court created such an expansive definition, the decision that frozen embryos are people was inescapable.

By Utagawa Kuniyoshi

To be fair, though, the Alabama Supreme Court is entirely made up of conservative Republicans, they were a bit hamstrung in their decision. Alabama’s state constitution states that “it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court was required to, as it did here, extend that “unborn child” definition to what it calls “extrauterine children” — embryos frozen by people pursuing IVF….

For people not saddled with the misguided anti-choice belief that a tiny clump of cells is the same as a person, this is a non-controversial process. It enhances the chance of pregnancy and allows people to plan for future children without undergoing multiple invasive egg retrieval cycles. But if one subscribes to the notion of fetal personhood — that a fetus is quite literally a person, with all the attendant privileges that confers — then those frozen embryos are the same as babies.

This is, of course, a religious, not scientific belief. Chief Justice Parker, in his concurring opinion, made clear that his vote, at least, stems directly from his religious beliefs rather than being grounded in the law. Citing Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, the Ten Commandments, and the King James Bible, Parker concludes that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Notably, none of those things are legal precedent. Indeed, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, they shouldn’t inform a court holding. However, since religious conservatives dominate the US Supreme Court, that separation has largely collapsed. This has emboldened conservative litigants and conservative state and federal judges to take ever more anti-choice stances.

A bit more:

Reproductive health activists have been sounding the alarm about the anti-choice attacks on IVF for years, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. At least two prominent anti-choice groups, Americans United for Life and Students for Life, have railed against IVF. The chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, Steve Aden, called IVF “eugenics” and said that IVF created “embryonic human beings” that were destroyed in the process. Students for Life called IVF “damaging and destructive.”

These same anti-choice groups also hate birth control, and the Dobbs decision paved the way for them to mount a theocratic attack on it too. Christopher Rufo, who ginned up a panic over benign diversity initiatives and helped force out the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has already telegraphed that this is his next attack.

Over on Elon Musk’s increasingly Nazi-fied social media site, X, Rufo is spewing rhetoric about how “the family structure disintegrated precisely as access to birth control proliferated” and that recreational sex is bad and leads to single-mother households.

Rufo isn’t alone. The Heritage Foundation, which is also busy with a blueprint for a second Trump presidency that would destroy the administrative state and whose leader is still pushing the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election, has also called for the end of birth control. Also over on X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that “a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex” [….]

And there you have it. Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. To do this, however, they would need to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated restrictions on birth control.

There’s more at the link.

Sarah Lipton-Lubet at Slate: Republicans’ Absurdist Reproductive Policies Are Coming for Us All.

Nearly two years ago, late into the night on a Monday, I had the terrifying realization that I needed to move my embryos. Immediately.

A few hours earlier—just as I was starting to wrap up work for the day—my phone had lit up in what felt like one long, continuous stream of alerts. Politico had just obtained a leaked copy of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. As a reproductive rights attorney leading a Supreme Court reform organization, I knew my immediate next steps. Conference call. Media statement. Email to our supporters. I’d been preparing for this moment since Donald Trump was elected.

I am a child, by Gustav Adolph Hennig

But what I had spent less time thinking about was how this would affect me personally. I wasn’t at all prepared for what to do about my embryos. After years of miscarriages and egg retrievals, I did not have a baby. But I had my embryos. Sitting in nitrogen tanks. In a red state—a red state that had recently passed a draconian anti-abortion bill that, among other things, granted “an unborn child at every stage of development, all rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons.”

That legislation was being challenged in federal court, but now Roe would be gone by the end of June. Amid a swirl of unknowns (What would happen with the litigation? How would that law impact IVF? Would I somehow be prohibited from moving my embryos in the future?) I knew one thing with absolute certainty: If I wanted to control what happened to my embryos, I had to get them the heck out of Arizona, and fast.

Unfortunately, the clinics I called in my attempt to find a new home for the embryos didn’t seem to match my urgency. They couldn’t understand why we would move the embryos at all. Their pace and paperwork was business as usual. Even some of my like-minded friends understood my concern, but not my level of panic, and action. I’ll admit, I had momentary doubts about whether my alarm was misplaced.

Needless to say, the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision—effectively outlawing IVF by declaring that embryos are, legally speaking, children—put to rest any lingering questions about whether I was right to be concerned. As Mark Joseph Stern reported, embryo shipping services have already said they will no longer ship to or from Alabama.

And isn’t that the story of reproductive freedom in America in a nutshell? Time and again, advocates sound the alarm only to be told that we are being hysterical. Then we watch in horror as our worst fears materialize.

Read the rest at Slate.

One more on this topic, from Politico: Senate GOP poised to block IVF protection bill.

Senate conservatives are signaling they’ll block Wednesday’s planned Democratic bid to enshrine protections for in-vitro fertilization into federal law – and they’re calling IVF a states-rights issue.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) is planning to seek unanimous consent to pass her proposal to federally protect IVF, which means any one senator can easily block its passage. This isn’t the first time she’s brought up her bill — Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) objected when Duckworth tried to pass it unanimously in 2022.

But Duckworth’s bill is surging back to the forefront as Republicans face uncomfortable questions about an Alabama Supreme Court ruling restricting IVF.

Hyde-Smith’s office did not respond when asked if she would object again to Duckworth’s bill, and the GOP senator ignored Capitol hallway questions from reporters, as is her usual practice. Other Republicans are already expressing reservations about the bill, though – meaning its chances at slipping through the chamber are slim, at best.

“I don’t see any need to regulate it at the federal level,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an OB-GYN by trade, who would not say whether he’d block the bill. “I think the Dobbs decision puts this issue back at the state level, and I would encourage your state legislations to protect in-vitro fertilization.”

“It’s idiotic for us to take the bait,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who clarified he was referring not to Duckworth’s bill on its face but to Democrats’ attempts to use the proposal as an IVF messaging tool. Vance said he’s not yet reviewed the actual bill.

Regardless, Republicans’ hesitation over the IVF protection bill highlights their election-year jam: Democrats will continue trying to tie them to the Alabama ruling, which has shut down IVF facilities in the state.

And GOP statements supporting IVF — as the Senate Republican campaign arm and several candidates put out last week — might fall flat with voters if Democrats can point to specific instances when their opponents failed to protect the procedure. Exhibit A: Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently issued a statement supporting IVF but has previously supported legislation that could restrict access to the fertility tech.

That’s all I have for you today. What do you think? What other stories have captured your interest?

Lazy Caturday Reads: Republicans Escalate War on Women

Posted: February 24, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: abortion rights, cat art, caturday, just because, War on Women | Tags: Alabama, fetal personhood, In vitro fertilization | 14 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

Mireille Rolland, Lady with Ginger Cats

As everyone knows by now, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down an insane ruling–supposedly based on the Bible–that frozen embryos are children. From The New Republic: Alabama Supreme Court Cites the Bible in Terrifying Embryo Ruling.

A new ruling out of Alabama may spell the beginning of the end of the third-party fertility industry—and its reasoning partially relies on a verse from the Bible.

On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that embryos created through in-vitro fertilization would be protected under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, effectively classifying single-celled, fertilized eggs as children.

The case, known as LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc, rested upon an argument by several intended parents that their “embryonic children” had been victims of a wrongful death when an intruder broke into the IVF clinic, dropping trays containing some of the embryos and ultimately destroying them.

In a 7–2 decision, Alabama’s highest court ruled that the clinic had been negligent, allowing the parents to proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit. The court also ruled that it is “the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life,” referring to the Alabama Constitution’s Sanctity of Life Amendment, ratified in 2018.

“Here, the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Jay Mitchell in the majority’s opinion. “It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

But the opinion also quotes the Bible as reasoning for functionally killing IVF access within the aggressively pro-life state, turning to an eyebrow-raising verse from Jeremiah 1:5 for guidance before deciding to make it harder for Alabamans to have a family.

“We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982),” the opinion read.

This decision ultimately stems from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision (which also originated in Alabama) that overturned Roe v. Wade. Will birth control be next? Or will it be same sex marriage?

Chris Geidner at Law Dork: This week, we faced all that the Dobbs justices unleashed.

The five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade 20 months ago Saturday gave a green light to a new brand of Republican extremism in hyperdrive — a hyperdrive that has been on full, frightening display this week.

Still Life, Quick Heart, by Ruskin Spear

Many of the most extreme legal developments since late 2020 have been advanced by far-right Christian legal advocates or authoritarian Trump backers. In turn, the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and other rulings since then have empowered those advocates to go further.

Three of the biggest stories in the news this week are, more or less directly, the result of Justice Sam Alito’s Dobbs opinion for the court — joined as it was by Justice Clarence Thomas and Donald Trump’s three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Mix in Gorsuch’s 2023 opinion for those five justices and Chief Justice John Roberts in the wedding website (that wasn’t) case that created a First Amendment exemption to public accommodations nondiscrimination laws, and we arrive at 2024.

The Alabama Supreme Court’s attack on in vitro fertilization (IVF), a pair of attacks on marriage equality, and the attack on Nex Benedict in Oklahoma and their death the next day all emerge from the ideology of, devices employed by, and cases decided by this Supreme Court majority.

We ignore their connections and danger at the peril of all who do not want this to become our national reality.

Analysis of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling:

On Feb. 16, the Alabama Supreme Court allowed wrongful-death lawsuits to proceed against a lab that allegedly negligently allowed the destruction of frozen embryos created for IVF purposes. In order to permit those lawsuits, the court first had to conclude that frozen embryos in a lab are children. The nine-member all-Republican court, with little difficult and only two dissenting justices, did so.

Much has been written about the first-of-its-kind decision, which has already led the state’s largest hospital to pause IVF treatments in the wake of the ruling. Significant attention has been given to Chief Justice Thomas Parker’s outright-theocracy concurring opinion, which it certainly deserves.

I’d like to focus instead on the majority opinion from Justice Jay Mitchell, which is extreme in its own ways — and highlights the dangerous faux-jurisprudence that the U.S. Supreme Court has encouraged.

In order to reach its ruling, the court needed to ignore its own past precedents that congruence between the state’s criminal-homicide statute and wrongful-death statute was needed. This is important because the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. The court had justified expanding that civil law to fetuses in utero based on an expansion of the criminal law to include fetuses in utero and the claimed need for congruence between the two laws. Now that the court wanted to go further than the criminal law, it just ignored those rulings — overruling them without saying so, as Justice Greg Cook stated in his dissenting opinion.

Or, as Justice Will Sellers wrote more bluntly, “To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain.”

The court also went far afield of what was necessary for its ruling. After claiming that “[t]here is simply no … ambiguity” about the word “child” in the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, the court then got into what ordinarily would then not have been a part of the opinion at all: An extended discussion of the “Sanctity of Unborn Life’ provision of the Alabama Constitution [quoted in previous article].

Arwah Madawi at The Guardian: Anti-abortion extremists in the US are waging a holy war against women.

The holy war on IVF

Friends, Romans, frozen extrauterine children, lend me your ears. Except for the extrauterine children, that is – they obviously don’t have ears. Nor do they have fully formed brains, nervous systems or organs. Nevertheless, according to Alabama’s supreme court – in a decision which has which paved the way for two wrongful death suits to proceed against a fertility clinic – frozen embryos are “children” and should be treated as such.

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Apatheosis of Cats

So what does this mean? Well, in the immediate term it means that if you’re going through fertility treatments in Alabama your life just got upended. Numerous embryos tend to be created and then frozen during the IVF process because it maximizes the chances of success, is more cost-effective and reduces the health risks of the procedure. Surplus embryos are then disposed of or donated. If every frozen embryo is suddenly deemed a child, it means that disposing of the embryo – or having a machine malfunction and accidentally ruin an embryo – would be a criminal act. It even throws into question the standard practice of freezing embryos. After all, you wouldn’t stick a child in a freezer, would you?

In short, a handful of Republican judges in Alabama have effectively made IVF too legally dangerous to practice in the state. Already at least three fertility providers in Alabama have said that they are pausing IVF because of the risks. This is unbelievably cruel to people currently going through fertility treatments that, even in the best of times, can take a major emotional, physical and financial toll.

While the Alabama decision is unprecedented and shocking, it’s far from surprising. It has been clear for a while now that IVF could be at real risk because of anti-abortion extremists. Several “personhood” bills, which define life as beginning at the moment of fertilization have been introduced across the US, resulting in a mess of thorny legal questions about what it means to treat fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people. For example: can you claim a fetus as a dependent on your tax return? In Georgia, which has a fetal personhood law, you can! Pregnant people can also drive in the high-occupancy lane, which requires two or more passengers, to be in the car. The Alabama ruling is a major victory for the growing fetal personhood movement: expect IVF to come under scrutiny in many more states.

Why is this happening, if Republicans want people to have more children?

There are a lot of answers to this question. The politest one is that many of the people arguing that embryos are people have zero understanding of reproductive medicine. Certainly the Alabama supreme court justices seem more concerned with theology than biology. Their ruling seems to have been heavily influenced by the Bible and repeatedly references God and biblical scholars. Chief Justice Thomas Parker, for example, wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God … even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.” (If this is true, by the way, then God must have incurred a lot of wrath towards Alabama: the state has one of the highest execution rates in the US and recently made headlines for executing a prisoner with nitrogen gas, an untested method that the UN has condemned as cruel.)

Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Alabama’s targeting of IVF is the Christian right’s attempt to control motherhood.

Former Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., gets a lot of glowing coverage simply because she occasionally criticizes Donald Trump in her fruitless presidential primary run against him. So it was rattling for many when, on Wednesday, Haley reminded everyone she’s ensconced in the fringe worldview of the Christian right. When asked about a recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that is expected to destroy in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state and threatens access across the country, Haley told CNN she agreed with the decision, claiming to believe frozen embryos are “babies.”

By Skadi Engeln

The Republican-controlled court in Alabama ruled on Friday that lab-created human embryos are “children.” Setting aside the odd details of this specific case, the ruling treats the loss of embryos, typically part of the IVF process, as the equivalent of child murder. The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility has already canceled all IVF treatment out of fear that “our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages.”

Haley, for her part, seems surprised by the blowback and has been scrambling with nonsensical claims that she was only talking about “parental rights” when she initially supported the extreme ruling, ignoring the fact that parents have no right to kill babies in any of the 50 states.

A lot of people are understandably shocked to learn that the anti-abortion movement also hates IVF. After all, the movement claims to be all about motherhood. One would think the people who are always yammering on about how a woman’s greatest purpose is giving birth would celebrate those who endure IVF, which is both painful and expensive, just so they can have a baby. But no, the Christian right wants to end IVF for two reasons: First, because of the bottomless misogyny and homophobia that fuels the movement. Second, because the end goal for the Christian right is to turn the U.S. into a theocracy, and banning IVF helps them get there.

It’s important to understand that what the Christian right really wants is not motherhood, per se, but a social order where women are second class citizens. They take a dim view of not just abortion and contraception, but all reproductive technologies that make it easier for women to exercise autonomy over their lives. There’s a widespread perception that IVF is primarily used by lesbians, single women, and women who waited until their 30s to get married. (In reality, there are many reasons, including male infertility.) Conservatives view IVF as a cheat code for feminists who want to have children on their own terms. They would prefer a system where the only path to motherhood is being trapped with a Trump-voting husband who controls your checking account so you can’t leave.

Read the rest at Salon.

Now that Republicans realize how unpopular this decision is, they are running away from it as fast as they can, claiming they support IVF and always have.

Politico: Alabama said frozen embryos are kids. The GOP isn’t sure what to do about it.

Republicans have spent five decades coalescing around the idea that life begins at conception.

They’ve spent the last week scrambling to figure out whether they really believe that includes frozen embryos.

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, A Cat and Her Kitten

Republican divisions over how to respond to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling granting personhood rights to embryos is a striking change after a generation where the party moved solidly to the right on abortion and all but rooted out any opposition to its anti-abortion platform.

IVF — and specifically how to handle unused, frozen embryos — was rarely, if ever, discussed outside of the rightmost fringes of anti-abortion and religious circles.

As Republicans rush to understand what the procedure entails and the ripple effects from the Alabama ruling, conservative leaders warn that a failure to quickly reach a consensus will open up candidates to more attacks from Democrats, who are eager to recycle playbooks from recent electoral successes and paint Republicans as extreme and out of touch with most Americans.

“My best advice for Republicans, if they don’t want to deal with Democrats doing unfair attacks, is to come up with a reasonable policy,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-leaning think tank. “They should come up with what they actually believe and support and stand for, and it should be popular and in line with where the American people want to go.”

If they actually did that, they would be Democrats or Independents.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Friday released talking points instructing Republicans to voice support for the procedure, a process millions of people who might oppose abortion support and that some, like former Vice President Mike Pence, have used. But they’ve eschewed the thornier details amid private disagreements among those in the anti-abortion movement about whether viable but unimplanted embryos count as life — and, by extension, whether destroying them is tantamount to abortion.

“I’m hearing disagreement among various groups. There’s an attempt to come to a resolution on an agreeable policy for everyone, and in my experience, that’ll never happen,” said a longtime GOP strategist who works with anti-abortion groups, who was granted anonymity because he did not have authorization to speak publicly. “I’ve heard firsthand or secondhand from a number of different House and Senate members, and everybody’s like, ‘What should we be saying right now?’”

Even Trump is saying he loves IVF and wants Alabama to make it possible–even though he probably has no idea what IVF entails. But don’t believe what Republicans are saying. Check this out:

Business Insider: 125 House Republicans — including Speaker Mike Johnson — back a ‘life at conception’ bill without any IVF exception.

Most House Republicans have cosponsored a bill declaring that life begins from the moment of conception, a position under increased scrutiny after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children.”

This Congress, 125 House Republicans — including Speaker Mike Johnson — have cosponsored the “Life at Conception Act,” which states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

The bill does not include any exception for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a reproductive treatment that allows mothers to fertilize several eggs outside the womb in order to increase the chances of a viable pregnancy.

Several healthcare providers in Alabama have already halted IVF programs in the wake of the ruling, given that IVF treatments may include the discarding of fertilized eggs, which may now violate the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act….

[Mike] Johnson, one of the cosponsors of the bill, largely controls the House floor. His evangelical Christian views have entailed staunch opposition to abortion in the past.

“When a woman is pregnant, science tells us the new life she carries is a completely separate and fully new human being from the moment of fertilization,” Johnson said during a 2021 hearing on Texas’s 6-week abortion ban.

But in a statement on Friday night after the initial publication of this article, Johnson stated that he supports IVF treatment and applauded Alabama lawmakers for moving to protect the treatment in the wake of the ruling.

“I believe the life of every single child has inestimable dignity and value,” said Johnson. “That is why I support IVF treatment, which has been a blessing for many moms and dads who have struggled with fertility.”

Sure, Mike.

Meanwhile, Alabama is struggling to deal with the crisis caused by their Supreme Court.

CNN: Alabama attorney general’s office says it has ‘no intention’ to prosecute IVF families, providers.

A bipartisan effort is underway in the Alabama House and Senate to draft “clarifying” legislation that would “protect” in vitro fertilization treatments following the court’s ruling, state legislative sources told CNN.

Alabama House Democrats introduced a bill Thursday that would establish fertilized human eggs stored outside a uterus are not considered human beings under state law.

Republican state senators are soon expected to file similar legislation, one source said, but they were unsure of the exact timing.

The lawmakers’ efforts come as medical experts and critics fear the court’s first-of-its-kind decision – which can put those who discard unwanted embryos at risk of being held liable for wrongful death – could have a profound effect on fertility treatment operations in the state and devastating ramifications for people hoping to build their families through IVF….

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall weighed in on the issue on Friday. Marshall said he “has no intention of using the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision as a basis for prosecuting IVF families or providers,” in a statement from Chief Counsel Katherine Robertson.

Marshall’s statement comes a week after the state Supreme Court ruling embryos – whether they’re within or out of a uterus – are children and would be protected under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which allows parents to sue for punitive damages when their child dies.

Cat and Flowers, by Ruskin Spear

Finally, from The Guardian: ‘Outrageous and unacceptable’: Biden and Harris decry Alabama court ruling on IVF.

The decision of the Alabama supreme court on in vitro fertilization, granting legal protections to frozen fertilized eggs, drew fire from President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders on Thursday, laying responsibility for the decision on the US supreme court’s ruling overturning Roe v Wade in 2022.

“A court in Alabama put access to some fertility treatments at risk for families who are desperately trying to get pregnant,” Biden said in prepared remarks on Thursday. “The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable.” [….]

Biden said he and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, are “fighting for the freedom of women, for families and for doctors who care for these women”, pledging to restore protections previously afforded under Roe v Wade.

Harris has been on a multistate Fight for Reproductive Freedoms tour since December. She took it to Grand Rapids, Michigan, today, 12 days before the state’s presidential primary. Michigan added protections for abortion to its state constitution with a ballot measure last year.

Harris met with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and Senator Debbie Stabenow to discuss abortion rights.

Harris described the ruling as an attack on people trying to start families. “On the one hand, proponents are saying an individual doesn’t have a right to end an unwanted pregnancy, and on the other hand, the individual does not have a right to start a family,” she said. “And the hypocrisy abounds on this issue when you also consider that in the top 10 states with maternal mortality, there are abortion bans.”

I really think Republicans could lose in 2024 over these issues. What do you think?

Wednesday Reads

Posted: February 21, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, religion, Russia | Tags: Alexander Smirnov, Christian nationalism, FBI, Hunter Biden, Judge Aileen Cannon, Russian intelligence, Save America PAC, Special Counsel David Weiss, Special Counsel Jack Smith, stolen documents case | 13 Comments

Good Day!!

Portrait of Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold, by Pytr Konchalovsk, 1938

Today’s big political story: House Republicans’ efforts to impeach President Biden for supposed corruption involving his son Hunter is in deep trouble. You probably heard that their star witness has been indicted and arrested for lying to the FBI. On top of that, his “evidence” came from the Kremlin. Republicans are the Putin Party. Here’s the latest:

Hannah Rabinowitz and Cheri Mossburg at CNN: Indicted ex-FBI informant told investigators he got Hunter Biden dirt from Russian intelligence officials.

The former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine told investigators after his arrest that Russian intelligence officials were involved in passing information to him about Hunter Biden, prosecutors said Tuesday in a new court filing, noting that the information was false.

Prosecutors also said Alexander Smirnov has been “actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections” after meeting with Russian spies late last year and that the fallout from his previous false bribery accusations about the Bidens “continue[s] to be felt to this day.”

Smirnov claims to have “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intelligence officials, prosecutors said in the filing. They said he previously told the FBI that he has longstanding and extensive contacts with Russian spies, including individuals he said were high-level intelligence officers or command Russian assassins abroad.

Prosecutors with special counsel David Weiss’ team said Tuesday that Smirnov has maintained those ties and noted that, in a post-arrest interview last week, “Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about Businessperson 1,” referring to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The revelations about Smirnov’s alleged foreign contacts were disclosed as part of prosecutors’ arguments to keep him jailed ahead of trial – though a federal judge later granted Smirnov’s release with several conditions, including GPS monitoring and the surrender of his two passports. Smirnov declined to answer questions as he left the courthouse Tuesday evening.

Prosecutors alleged that Smirnov “claims to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies,” including in Russia, and that he could use those contacts to flee the United States.

The explosive revelation comes amid backlash over how Smirnov’s now-debunked allegations played into House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president.

The latest legal and political Trump news

Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast: Donald Trump’s Cash Crunch Just Got Much, Much Worse.

As Donald Trump’s legal troubles consume more and more of his time, they’re also consuming more of his donors’ money—and there’s a huge hole in the bucket.

On Tuesday, Trump’s “Save America” leadership political action committee reported raising just $8,508 from donors in the entire month of January, while spending about $3.9 million, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission.

Nearly $3 million of that overall spending total was used for one purpose: to pay lawyers.

At the same time, the Trump campaign itself reported a net loss of more than $2.6 million for the month of January. It raised about $8.8 million while spending around $11.5 million, according to a separate filing made public on Tuesday.

The filings reveal that Trump is continuing to burn through his donors’ funds as he struggles to feed two massive cash drains—astronomical legal bills stemming from numerous civil cases and four criminal indictments, plus the costs of a national presidential campaign….

Jean-François Millet, Shepherdess and Her Flock (1862–63).

Despite reporting almost no donations in January, the Save America PAC—a group Trump launched days after the 2020 election, ostensibly to fund legal challenges—actually increased its bottom line by more than $1 million, ending the month with nearly $6.3 million on hand.

However, that increase can’t be chalked up to new donations. It’s entirely due to a $5 million transfer from a different pro-Trump super PAC, which is still in the process of refunding $60 million that the former president demanded back last year, as his legal bills threatened to put Save America, his legal slush fund, into bankruptcy.

Despite reporting almost no donations in January, the Save America PAC—a group Trump launched days after the 2020 election, ostensibly to fund legal challenges—actually increased its bottom line by more than $1 million, ending the month with nearly $6.3 million on hand.

However, that increase can’t be chalked up to new donations. It’s entirely due to a $5 million transfer from a different pro-Trump super PAC, which is still in the process of refunding $60 million that the former president demanded back last year, as his legal bills threatened to put Save America, his legal slush fund, into bankruptcy.

Read more bad news for Trump at the link above.

At Slate, Norman Eisen and Joshua Kolb speculation on the possibility that: Aileen Cannon Might Actually Get Herself Kicked Off the Trump Classified Docs Case.

The recent news about possible Russian space nukes reminds us that we live in a very insecure world. That is why perhaps none of Donald Trump’s four criminal cases is more troubling than the federal prosecution brought by special counsel Jack Smith for mishandling classified documents. Unfortunately, the judge handling the case, Aileen Cannon—a last-minute appointment rushed through in the waning days of the Trump administration—has proved herself to be by far the worst of the jurists overseeing these momentous cases. Her decisions during the investigative phase of the case strayed wildly from precedent, leading to brutal reversals by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit. Now Smith appears to be preparing to ask that body to overturn at least one and possibly two of her decisions. In our view, while he is there on those other issues, he should also petition them to remove her from the case.

Why do we think Smith might be headed to the court of appeals? In part because he has already sought reconsideration for the latest of Cannon’s unlawful orders. This is a step that is warranted only in rare circumstances, including when a judge has made a “clear error” that led to “manifest injustice.” In this instance, at Trump’s behest, Cannon has decided to unseal the identities of two dozen potential witnesses, along with sensitive information they provided to the government. The “clear error” Smith identifies is striking: He alleges that Cannon applied the wrong legal standard in making this decision, requiring him to make a far more stringent showing than should be needed to protect these names. In his motion for reconsideration, Smith shows that the case law—including the very cases Cannon herself cited in her order—does not establish the unreasonable hurdles she wants him to clear.

The recent news about possible Russian space nukes reminds us that we live in a very insecure world. That is why perhaps none of Donald Trump’s four criminal cases is more troubling than the federal prosecution brought by special counsel Jack Smith for mishandling classified documents. Unfortunately, the judge handling the case, Aileen Cannon—a last-minute appointment rushed through in the waning days of the Trump administration—has proved herself to be by far the worst of the jurists overseeing these momentous cases. Her decisions during the investigative phase of the case strayed wildly from precedent, leading to brutal reversals by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit. Now Smith appears to be preparing to ask that body to overturn at least one and possibly two of her decisions. In our view, while he is there on those other issues, he should also petition them to remove her from the case.

Why do we think Smith might be headed to the court of appeals? In part because he has already sought reconsideration for the latest of Cannon’s unlawful orders. This is a step that is warranted only in rare circumstances, including when a judge has made a “clear error” that led to “manifest injustice.” In this instance, at Trump’s behest, Cannon has decided to unseal the identities of two dozen potential witnesses, along with sensitive information they provided to the government. The “clear error” Smith identifies is striking: He alleges that Cannon applied the wrong legal standard in making this decision, requiring him to make a far more stringent showing than should be needed to protect these names. In his motion for reconsideration, Smith shows that the case law—including the very cases Cannon herself cited in her order—does not establish the unreasonable hurdles she wants him to clear.

Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878).

In his motion for reconsideration, Smith also argues that Cannon minimizes the risk of real-world harm and witness intimidation these individuals would face. He notes that there is a “well-documented pattern in which judges, agents, prosecutors, and witnesses involved in cases involving Trump have been subject to threats, harassment, and intimidation.” Cannon’s cavalier attitude is dangerous for the potential witnesses whose identities could be revealed. As Smith asserts in his brief, “a court’s duty is to prevent harms to the witnesses or the judicial process ‘at their inception.’ ” Cannon appears willing to abdicate that duty.

In response to Smith’s reconsideration motion, Cannon ordered Trump to respond by Friday. That will set up a dramatic ruling by Cannon: Either she reverses her position—which would be an admission that she was fundamentally mistaken about the law in a way that caused “manifest injustice”—or she leaves her ruling in place, putting individuals in jeopardy and twisting the law to help Trump. At that point, Smith may have enough ammunition to seek her reassignment from the 11^th Circuit.

Beyond that contretemps, there is a second possible dispute that may be headed to the court of appeals shortly. Earlier this month saw two days of hearings on whether the defendants in the case will get access to highly classified documents under the Classified Information Procedures Act. That statute allows the government to petition the court to redact, summarize, or even withhold classified information in a criminal case. Notably, the CIPA provides the government with the ability to immediately and swiftly appeal. Thus, even if Smith loses a ruling related only to a single document, the statute allows him to go straight to the 11^th Circuit.

Some stories out today provide details on Trump’s plans for the U.S. if he somehow gets back into the White House.

Politico’s Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla on Trump’s plans for our country: Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration.

An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.

Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.

One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.

CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.

The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”

Read the rest at Politico, if you can stomach it.

At Salon, Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on the Politico story: Donald Trump may not believe in God, but he still plans to turn America into a Christian theocracy.

If there were only some way to prove it, I would happily bet everything I own that Donald Trump does not believe in God. Not because he’s carefully engaged the many philosophical proofs for atheism that are out there, of course. He’s simply too much of a sociopathic narcissist to believe in anything higher than himself. He also, as recent court verdicts regarding sexual assault and massive fraud demonstrate, has no moral compass. He’s only too happy to be party to attempted murder, in fact, as long as it’s someone else who takes the risk of prison for it.

Alas, there’s no way to force Trump to tell the truth about his lack of belief in God, but there are plenty of signs of his deep contempt for religion. Multiple witnesses have described how he laughs at Christians behind their backs, calling their faith “bullshit.” When he play-acts belief in public, he struggles to hide his scorn, failing to acknowledge basic precepts of Christianity that even most non-believers understand.

I suspect most Americans, even Republican voters, understand that Trump is not a believer. (He does seem to think he’s a god himself, a view his voters are all too willing to endorse.) Unfortunately, this can incline folks to feel that, if re-elected, Trump will govern as a secularist. Focus groups, for instance, regularly show that voters disregard the threat Trump poses to legal abortion, even though he’s the reason Roe v. Wade was overturned. They correctly surmise that Trump would be fine with any woman he has sex with aborting an inconvenient pregnancy, but forget that, for Trump, rules are for other people. He’d only be too happy to send every woman who got an abortion to prison, so long as he personally is off the hook.

The grim reality, however, is that should Trump win (or steal) the White House this November, he will govern as a theocrat. There’s a reason that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has attached himself like a suckerfish to Trump’s rear end. Johnson wants the U.S. to abandon freedom of religion, and instead run it according to his far-right view of a “biblically sanctioned government.” He sees Trump as the single best route to turning the country into a Christian dictatorship.

On Tuesday, Politico published an exposé of the secret plans of The Center for Renewing America think tank, described as “a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.” Led by Russell Vought, who once worked as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, the group has drafted a blueprint to turn the U.S. into a “Christian nationalist” country. The group argues that “freedom is defined by God, not man,” which is a fancy way of saying that they oppose most human rights. Subsequently, they are calling for an end to free speech, by using the Insurrection Act to quell protests. The coalition also expressed support for “overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.”

One more outrageous/WTF Trump story before I bring this post to a close. Politico: Trump calls his civil fraud verdict a ‘form of Navalny.’

Former President Donald Trump likened the $355 million judgment against him in a New York civil trial to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny during a Fox News town hall on Tuesday evening.

“It is a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism,” he said, before going on to attack the judge in the case, Arthur Engoron, who he called a “nut job.”

Trump compared himself to Navalny, the outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who died in prison on Friday, on several occasions during the event. Earlier in the town hall, Trump praised Navalny as a “very brave guy” because he chose to return to Russia, where he had been jailed since 2021, though Trump said he “probably would have been a lot better off staying away and talking from outside.”

“People thought that could happen and it did happen,” Trump said, referring to Navalny’s death. “And it’s a horrible thing.”

Asked about outrage over Navalny’s death, Trump said, “It’s happening here.” He said his indictments are “all because of the fact that I’m in politics.”

Trump refrained from blaming Putin for the death, as President Joe Biden and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump’s sole remaining credible primary opponent, have done.

Trump’s remarks amounted to a doubling down on his controversial post on Truth Social on Monday that “the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country.”

Lock him up.

That’s all the news I have for you today. What are your thoughts? What other stories are you interested in?

Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump is in Serious Trouble This Time.

Posted: February 17, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: Allen Weisselberg, Barbara Jones, Donald Trump Jr., E. Jean Carroll case, Eric Trump, Judge Arthur Engoron, Trump NY fraud trial | 5 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

db84f474e2a1f1bef266231e4bc86b5c Yesterday was truly a momentous day in the Trump saga. Trump has been hit a damaging blow to his identity as a successful businessman.

Judge Arthur Engoron ordered him to pay $355 million dollars penalty for defrauding banks, insurance companies, and taxpayers. In addition, he will have to pay 9 percent interest on the disgorgement. Nearly $100 million in interest is already owed and the interest will continue to accrue as long as he hasn’t paid up.

On top of the financial judgement, Trump will not be able to do business in New York, including borrowing from banks, for 3 years.

Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Protess at The New York Times: Trump Fraud Trial Penalty Will Exceed $450 Million.

A New York judge on Friday handed Donald J. Trump a crushing defeat in his civil fraud case, finding the former president liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth and ordering him to pay a penalty of nearly $355 million plus interest that could wipe out his entire stockpile of cash.

The decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron caps a chaotic, yearslong case in which New York’s attorney general put Mr. Trump’s fantastical claims of wealth on trial. With no jury, the power was in Justice Engoron’s hands alone, and he came down hard: The judge delivered a sweeping array of punishments that threatens the former president’s business empire as he simultaneously contends with four criminal prosecutions and seeks to regain the White House.

Justice Engoron barred Mr. Trump for three years from serving in top roles at any New York company, including portions of his own Trump Organization. He also imposed a two-year ban on the former president’s adult sons and ordered that they pay more than $4 million each. One of them, Eric Trump, is the company’s de facto chief executive, and the ruling throws into doubt whether any member of the family can run the business in the near term.

The judge also ordered that they pay substantial interest, pushing the penalty for the former president to $450 million, according to the attorney general, Letitia James.

In his unconventional style, Justice Engoron criticized Mr. Trump and the other defendants for refusing to admit wrongdoing for years. “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he said.

He noted that Mr. Trump had not committed violent crimes and also conceded that “Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff.” Still, he wrote, “defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.”

Mr. Trump will appeal the financial penalty but will have to either come up with the money or secure a bond within 30 days. The ruling will not render him bankrupt, because most of his wealth is in real estate, which altogether is worth far more than the penalty.

Mr. Trump will also ask an appeals court to halt the restrictions on him and his sons from running the company while it considers the case. In a news conference from his Palm Beach, Fla., home, Mar-a-Lago, on Friday evening, he attacked Ms. James and Justice Engoron, calling them both “corrupt.”

The bond he has to post would be greater than the total judgment plus the interest. The same requirement holds if Trump wants to appeal the $18.3 million judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case.

Trump will also be under the thumb of Barbara Jones, the independent monitor the judge appointed to oversea the Trump Organization’s business. He will have get her permission for any large transfers of money.

But there might be little Mr. Trump can do to thwart one of the judge’s most consequential punishments: extending for three years the appointment of an independent monitor who is the court’s eyes and ears at the Trump Organization. Justice Engoron also strengthened the monitor’s authority to watch for fraud and second-guess transactions that look suspicious.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have railed against the monitor, Barbara Jones, saying that her work had already cost the business more than $2.5 million; the decision to extend her oversight of the privately held company could enrage the Trumps, who see her presence as an irritant and an insult.

Mark Joseph Stern and Alexander Sammon at Slate: Trump and His Family Are Fined $355 Million for Fraud—and a Lack of Remorse That “Borders on Pathological.” The ruling, if upheld, marks the end of the Trump Organization as we know it.

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to pay $355 million in fines for business fraud in an excoriating decision on Friday that also imposes major penalties on the former president’s family and business associates. Both Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are each liable for $4 million, while former CFO Allen Weisselberg is on the hook for $1 million.

The ruling, if upheld, marks the end of the Trump Organization as we know it: Engoron barred Trump from serving as an officer in any New York corporation or legal entity for three years, and prohibited him from applying for loans from any financial entity in the state. The judge has effectively hobbled the entire Trump corporate empire….

During trial, members of the Trump family took the stand to defend their father’s business dealings, with little success; Engoron declined to credit their testimony in his Friday opinion, noting that Eric Trump actually reversed himself on the stand after evidence emerged that he had lied under oath. Trump himself took the stand, as well, assuming a combative and antagonistic pose toward the judge, whom he publicly derided as a partisan hack. The former president, Engoron wrote in his Friday opinion, “rarely responded to the questions asked, and he frequently interjected long, irrelevant speeches on issues far beyond the scope of the trial. His refusal to answer the questions directly, or in some cases, at all, severely compromised his credibility.”

This theme of mendacity and impenitence ran throughout Engoron’s ruling. In a remarkable passage, he wrote that the Trump family’s “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. … Defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.” This refusal to admit to their unlawful misdeeds persuaded Engoron that they “will engage in [fraud] going forward unless judicially restrained.” He therefore affirmed his earlier decision to have an independent monitor, the retired judge Barbara Jones, oversee the business’s finances and assets.

The $355 million penalty is, to put it mildly, substantial, and not the first time this year Trump has been ordered by a court to cut a check with two commas and at least seven zeroes on it. Just last month he was ordered to pay out over $83 million after losing the defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. That was actually the second penalty Trump was compelled to pay her: A New York jury previously found that Trump sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math here shows just how dire the self-proclaimed multibillionaire’s financial situation is getting. Reporting from late October pegged Trump’s cash holdings at $425 million. This most recent penalty from New York state, combined with the two verdicts in the Carroll cases, tally to $438 million. And actually, it’s worse than that, since Engoron stipulated that Trump is prohibited from borrowing money from any New York bank for the next three years. That ban will handicap his attempt to appeal. Moreover, New York law could force him to pay a hefty 9 percent interest rate on the judgment, which would push the original $355 million north of $450 million.

Trump will undoubtedly appeal Friday’s decision, and he is not required to post bond while he does so. However, if he fails to post bond, the state can begin collecting on the judgment in 30 days’ time. At that point, Attorney General James can seize Trump’s assets, including real property; in other words, his real estate holdings in New York, like Trump Tower, are vulnerable to seizure and potential sale.

Can Trump raise this kind of money without selling one of his properties? From Erica Orden at Politico: Can Trump pay? What if he doesn’t? Here’s what to know about Trump’s massive civil judgments.

A seven-figure verdict, an eight-figure verdict and, now, a nine-figure verdict.

Donald Trump has been hit with all three in the past nine months, with Friday’s $354 million penalty for New York business fraud by far the most massive.

He is now on the hook for over $440 million in civil judgments as he heads toward the Republican nomination — and as he prepares for one or more criminal trials this year….

Trump’s company isn’t public, and he has famously refused to disclose his tax returns, so his cash flow situation is shrouded in mystery.

Even if he has $440 million in cash on hand — and it’s far from clear that he does — paying the judgments could wipe out his accounts, since Trump himself has placed his cash reserves in the ballpark of that amount.

Trump claimed in a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess” of $400 million in cash on hand….

But it’s unclear whether that number is accurate. That deposition, after all, was part of the very lawsuit in which a judge found that Trump has repeatedly inflated his net worth.

If he doesn’t have enough cash on hand, would he have to sell properties?

Trump would likely have to sell something, although it wouldn’t necessarily have to be property. He could sell investments or other assets.

But what if he outright refuses to pay up?

In the civil fraud case, which is in New York state court, if Trump can’t post the funds or get a bond, then the judgment would take effect immediately and a sheriff could begin seizing Trump’s assets.

The rules are slightly different in federal court, which is the venue for the $83.3 million judgment that Trump owes for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of raping her. (He also owes Carroll an additional $5 million from a separate verdict last year.) Carroll could pursue post-judgment discovery under the jurisdiction of the judge who oversaw the trial. Through that process, the judge could order Trump to produce his bank account records, place liens or garnish his wages.

“I think he’s going to have to pay. And whether it requires him to sell or to put a lien on something to get a loan, that’s his problem, not ours. He’s going to pay,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said on CNN last month.

The judge, Kaplan added, will use “judgment enforcement mechanisms” to “make sure that he pays.”

If Trump truly can’t afford the judgments, he would have to declare bankruptcy.

He also can’t postpone payments while he appeals. He would have to post bond of 120-125 percent of the total owed first. In other words, Trump is totally screwed. The only thing that could help him is that he can use PAC money to pay. But can his MAGA morons afford that much?

What does this financial disaster mean for Americans? After all, Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination. Abdallah Fayed at Vox: Trump is suddenly in need of a lot of cash. That’s everyone’s problem.

Two recent verdicts have now left Donald Trump on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars….

For a well-connected billionaire, that might usually amount to nothing more than a temporary inconvenience; after all, Trump could always liquidate some of his assets or borrow even more money to cover his short-term obligations.

But Trump isn’t just one of the country’s richest men, with an estimated net worth in the low billions; he’s also running to serve a second term as president of the United States. And for any candidate for public office — let alone the presidency — being cash-strapped while owing such significant amounts of money could be a serious liability.

“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him.

You don’t have to look far to find the reasons why. Trump’s first term was riddled with conflicts of interest, and that’s in no small part because of his financial well-being (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). At the time that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, largely stemming from loans to help rehabilitate his struggling businesses, and most of which would be coming due over the subsequent four years. Throughout his presidency, he refused to divest from his businesses, which made millions of dollars in revenue from taxpayers and continued to do work with other countries while he was in office — a practice he indicated he would repeat in a second term.

The fact that he has so many entanglements with big businesses and other nations leaves plenty of room for things to go awry. That’s why a 2020 New York Times exposé uncovering his staggering debt during his first term wasn’t just embarrassing for Trump, who has a tendency to claim he’s richer than he actually is. It also raised fears about how his debt could implicate national security.

As the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division told Time magazine in 2020, “For a person with access to U.S. classified information to be in massive financial debt is a counterintelligence risk because the debt-holder tends to have leverage over the person, and the leverage may be used to encourage actions, such as disclosure of information or influencing policy, that compromise U.S. national security.”

Read the rest at Vox.

Finally, if you’d like a deep dive on Trump and how he took the vast fortune his father left him and fucked up so badly, there’s a fascinating article at The Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal: Trump’s hubris has brought about the downfall of his family’s business empire.

Wednesday Reads

Posted: February 14, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 Elections, just because | Tags: Alejandro Mayorkas, Donald Trump, immigration, Jim Prokopiak, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham, Merrick Garland, NATO, Pennsylvania state house, snowsstorms, special elections, Tom Suozzi, Ukraine, weather | 7 Comments

Good Morning!!

Winter landscape, by Pablo Picasso

Yesterday, the Boston area was supposed to get up to a foot of snow. For several days, meteorologists predicted a huge winter storm was on the way. They were confident it would happen. But at the last minute, Mother Nature changed her mind. There was a big storm, but its path shifted to the South, and guess what we got where I live? Nada. Some sleet and rain.

I really love snowstorms, and I was looking forward to this one. In addition, the entire Boston school system was shut down and many businesses closed for the day. That has to be expensive, right?

We’ve had several of these failed predictions this winter. What is the problem? Are meteorologists predicting these storms too many days ahead? I don’t know. But I’m disgusted. I’m never believing their forecasts again. There is supposedly another snowstorm on the way. I’ll believe it when I see it.

On with today’s reads.

Yesterday’s Special Elections

Democrats got some good news last night as they won special elections in New York and Pennsylvania.

The Washington Post: Suozzi wins New York special election, replacing George Santos.

Democrat Tom Suozzi won a hotly contested special election for Congress on Tuesday, the Associated Press projected, retaking a seat in suburban New York and offering his party some reassurance amid high anxiety about President Biden’s political vulnerabilities.

Suozzi beat Republican nominee Mazi Pilip to replace Republican George Santos, who was indicted on a charge of fraud and then expelled from Congress late last year amid revelations that he fabricated much of his life story. The race for New York’s 3rd District — long viewed as a dead heat — played out in a suburban part of Long Island that favored President Biden by eight points in 2020 but then swung toward Republicans, backing Santos by the same margin.

With more than 93 percent of the vote counted early Wednesday, Suozzi led Pilip by nearly eight percentage points.

National issues dominated the campaign, making Tuesday’s vote this year’s first high-profile test of the parties’ messages on abortion, the economy and, above all, immigration. Suozzi represented the area for six years previously and campaigned as a moderate who wanted to work across the aisle. But with New York City struggling to absorb more than 100,000 migrants arriving from the southern border, much of the campaign centered on what polling suggests is Democrats’ toughest issue….

In New York, Suozzi’s victory capped a long list of Democratic wins in recent special elections, which have showcased the party’s ability to turn out its base and tap into anger at GOP-backed abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Democrats spent millions of dollars attacking Pilip’s “pro-life” stance even though she said she would not support a national ban on abortion.

road-in-the-village-of-baldersbronde-winter-day-1912-laurits-anderson-ring

Road in the Village of Baldersbronde, Winter Day 1912, by Laurits Anderson Ring

I’m not sure immigration will be the Democrats’ “toughest issue” anymore, since Republicans in Congress refused to pass an immigration bill that was supported by the Border Patrol Union and the U.S. Chamber of Congress simply because Donald Trump order them to vote no.

Gregory Krieg at CNN: Takeaways from New York’s high-stakes special election.

Democrat Tom Suozzi is heading back to Congress after defeating Republican Mazi Pilip in the special election to replace serial fabulist and expelled former GOP Rep. George Santos. The result will further narrow the GOP’s already thin House majority and hand President Joe Biden’s party a boost as the general election campaign comes into focus….

Both parties poured cash into the race for New York’s 3rd congressional district, but Democrats’ fundraising and registration advantage combined with Suozzi’s brand – he’s spent most of the last 30 years at or around the center of Long Island politics – and a fired-up base, angry over the Santos fiasco, delivered a victory that means the House GOP will now become even harder to corral.

For Pilip, who has vowed to run again in the fall, defeat meant an almost immediate rebuke from Trump, who called her a “very foolish woman” in a social media post Tuesday night. Pilip refused until the final days of the campaign to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020, though she did follow his lead in dissing a highly touted bipartisan Senate border bill – a decision that helped Suozzi tie her more tightly to the former president over the last week….

The campaign was staked on a series of issues from the beginning: immigration, inflation, Israel and abortion. Suozzi talked about reproductive rights but didn’t make it a centerpiece of his campaign. Inflation has mostly leveled out. And there was no political or policy space to speak of between the candidates who both fully backed Israel.

On the immigration issue:

Understanding this, Pilip and Republicans set about hammering Suozzi over the migrant crisis in New York City, claiming he caused it along with Biden – a line that ultimately didn’t quite wash with voters who have long recognized Suozzi as a moderate or centrist. When Pilip suggested he was in league with the progressive “squad,” Suozzi at their debate was prepared.

“For you to suggest I’m a member of the squad,” he said, “is about as believable as you being a member of George Santos’s volleyball team.” (And that was before a knowing reference to Rick Lazio, which only seasoned New York voters would appreciate.)

Most notably, though, Suozzi and state Democratic leaders didn’t repeat their mistakes from 2022. They aggressively countered Pilip’s migrant message and it never felt like the issue, typically a winner for the GOP, put Suozzi on the backfoot.

The weather was a factor in this election. Many Democrats vote early or by mail, while Republicans mostly vote on election day. The snowstorm may have kept Republicans from getting to the polls.

If you’re interested, there’s another good analysis of the NY 3 election by Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: NY-03 gives Republicans lots to worry about.

Super Moon, by Jef Bourgeau

NBC News on the Pennsylvania special election: Pennsylvania Democrats pad narrow state House advantage with special election win.

Democrats won a state House special election in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, preserving the party’s narrow majority in the closely watched battleground state, The Associated Press projected.

In the race for the open seat in the 140th state House District, Democrat Jim Prokopiak, a school board member in Bucks County, defeated Republican Candace Cabanas.

Prokopiak’s victory gives Democrats a narrow 102-100 majority in the state House, preventing another tie in the chamber.

The party had a one-seat majority, 102-101, before Democratic Rep. John Galloway resigned after he won a judgeship in November.

His departure created a tie. But another resignation Friday, by Republican Joe Adams, gave Democrats a fresh 101-100 advantage.

Republicans control the state Senate, while Democrats hold the governorship.

The win in Bucks County — a purple slice of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia — was hailed as positive news by national Democrats, some of whom had viewed the contest as an early bellwether of the party’s fortunes among suburban voters ahead of the 2024 election.

Even the Biden campaign weighed in on the victory, touting it as evidence that Bucks County voters would reject Donald Trump in the fall.

“With control of the state House on the line, Pennsylvanians again defeated Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda and voted for Jim Prokopiak, a Democrat who has stood up for women and working people,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

More News:

House Republicans spent yesterday impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas based on zero evidence.

David Kurtz at TPM Morning Memo: Congrats On Your Bogus Impeachment, Champ.

The GOP-led House finally got its act together enough to stage an impeachment performance last evening, claiming the scalp of Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The same three Republican members who stymied the effort last week voted against impeachment again, but Rep. Steve Scalise’s return from cancer treatment gave the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) the critical vote he needed to complete the flimsiest impeachment in history:

no claims of high crimes or misdemeanors;

no evidence of wrongdoing or graft;

no shame in using impeachment to salve the hurt feelings of Donald Trump over his two impeachments and to boost Republicans’ signature election year issue: ~~immigration~~ xenophobia.

It’s totally appropriate to categorize these kinds of maneuvers by Republicans as performative or as playing politics or as engaging in political stunts. All true. But it’s also fundamentally an abuse of power. House Republicans are hikacking the levers of power that come with the offices they hold to advance their own partisan political aims and hold on to that power.

Not every example of an alignment between official acts and partisan political advantage is an abuse of power. But when you strip away any ostensibly objective motive for the official act, when you offer no pretense for the official act, when you’re only using the powers of the office to further your own political aims, when you stretch the law and the rules and bend them to your own grubby ends, you’re engaged in abuse of power. When, at the same time, you’re engaging in the wholesale breaking of government and institutions for the sake of it, all you’re left with is politics of the grimy, self-serving, and self-perpetuating variety.

There will have to be a trial in the Senate, but the “impeachment” is dead there. This is disgusting.

Sven Kroner, Hocuspocus

President Biden condemned Trump’s attack on NATO and his encouragement to Russia to attack our European allies.

BBC News: Biden slams Trump criticism of Nato as ‘shameful.’

President Joe Biden has blasted criticism of Nato by his likely 2024 election challenger, Donald Trump, as “dumb”, “shameful” and “un-American”.

The Democrat assailed Mr Trump for saying he would “encourage” Russia to attack any Nato member that did not meet its defence spending quota.

Mr Biden said the remarks underscored the urgency of passing a $95bn (£75bn) foreign aid package for US allies.

The bill just passed the Senate, but it faces political headwinds in the House.

At the White House on Tuesday, Mr Biden said a failure to pass the package – which includes $60bn for Ukraine – would be “playing into Putin’s hands”.

He said the stakes have risen because of Mr Trump’s “dangerous” remarks over the weekend.

“No other president in history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator,” Mr Biden said.

“Let me say this as clearly as I can. I never will. For God’s sake. It’s dumb. It’s shameful. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American.”

Lindsey Graham, to his everlasting shame, voted against aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza.

The Washington Post: Lindsey Graham, a longtime foreign policy hawk, bows to Trump on Ukraine.

Last May, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, warmly embracing the embattled leader and later urging President Biden to “do more” to help the nation as it fights off Russia’s invasion.

But this week, Graham voted repeatedly against sending $60 billion in aid to that nation as well as against other military funds for Israel and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The longtime hawk dramatically announced on the Senate floor that he also would no longer be attending the Munich Security Conference — an annual pilgrimage made by world leaders to discuss global security concerns that’s been a mainstay of his schedule.

“I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package,” Graham said on the Senate floor on Sunday, a day after the former president said at a rally that he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that did not spend enough on defense. “He thinks that we should make packages like this a loan, not a gift,” Graham said.

Claude Monet, A Cart on the Snowy_Road at Honfleur, 1865 or 1867

Graham’s about-face on Ukraine aid sends a stark warning signal to U.S. allies that even one of the most aggressive advocates for U.S. interventionism abroad appears to be influenced by the more isolationist posture pervading the Republican Party.

It marked a departure for the senator who was harshly critical of Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy when he ran against him for president in 2015, in part on a message of launching a U.S. invasion of Syria. And even as he cozied up to Trump once he became president on numerous other issues, the Air Force veteran continued to criticize Trump on foreign policy, including for wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria….

The episode has also eroded Graham’s credibility among colleagues who worked closely with him to shape a bipartisan package of border policy reforms that Republicans demanded be attached to the foreign aid in exchange for their votes — only to backtrack and help kill it in the end.

What an asshole.

According to Newsweek, Merrick Garland’s Future Looks Bleak.

Merrick Garland is highly unlikely to serve a second term as attorney general amid mounting criticism of the Biden classified documents report, a law professor has said.

Professor Anthony V. Alfieri, a law professor at the University of Miami in Florida, was reacting to Garland’s appointment of Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate President Biden’s handling of the documents.

Garland has been under pressure for the perceived unfairness of the report and his silence in its aftermath.

The report said that Biden claimed he couldn’t remember details of classified documents he held after leaving the White House as vice president, and would likely claim forgetfulness if put on trial.

“Garland’s lack of fairness in this case, and the ensuing political fallout, renders a second term of service highly unlikely,” Alfieri told Newsweek.

“Attorney General Garland’s appointment of Robert Hur as Special Counsel, despite a notably conservative pedigree and record, is less controversial than Garland’s conclusion that Hur’s report was neither ‘inappropriate’ nor ‘unwarranted’,” Alfieri said.

“That conclusion and his release of the report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees without addition, redaction, or modification, both explicitly and implicitly approves formally descriptive but substantively gratuitous, ad hominem and politically charged language prejudicial to Mr. Biden.”

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