Thursday Reads

Good Morning!!

We have passed another horrific milestone in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. One million Americans have now died from the virus. ABC News: ‘Unthinkable tragedy’: U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 1 million.

One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.

“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.” [….]

Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.

“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

The loss of 1 million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.

Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.

“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.

CNN: Biden mourns 1 million US Covid deaths as ‘irreplaceable losses.

The Hill: Hakeem Jeffries to Clarence Thomas: ‘Why are you such a hater?’

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) this week blasted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his stance on a number of issues facing the court, including abortion rights.

“Let me ask this question of brother Thomas,” Jeffries said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “Why are you such a hater? Hate on civil rights. Hate on women’s rights. Hate on reproductive rights. Hate on voting rights. Hate on marital rights. Hate on equal protection under the law. Hate on liberty and justice for all. Hate on free and fair elections. Why are you such a hater?”

Jeffries added the senior conservative justice “thinks he can get away with” his stances on those key issues and “escape public scrutiny.” [….]

Thomas is one of several conservatives on the court who has indicated, according to a leaked draft opinion published earlier this month, that they would rule in favor of a Mississippi state law on abortion that would directly overturn Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federally protected right.

“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said last week in response to public outcry over the court’s reported stance. “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”

Jeffries referenced Thomas’s comments, telling the justice to “start in your own home.”

“Have a conversation with Ginni Thomas. She refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Why?” the congressman said. “Because she didn’t like the outcome. Because the former twice-impeached so-called president of the United States lost legitimately to Joe Biden. How did she respond? Instead, she said the Bidens should face a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay on trumped-up charges of sedition. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Joe Biden sounds fired up too. 

This is from Politico: ‘The great MAGA king’: Biden sharpens midterm attacks.

The president traveled the country on Wednesday, sharpening his lines of attack against the Republican Party as primary season kicks into full gear. Throughout the day, he laid into the GOP and baited former President Donald Trump, even testing a new nickname for his predecessor: the great MAGA king.

“Look at my predecessor, the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,” Biden said in Chicago at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International convention, contrasting the deficit reductions during his tenure with Trump’s term.

With a little over six months to go until the November midterms — what is often a referendum on the president’s performance — Biden is moving into full-fledged campaign mode. The noticeable change in tone comes as economic concerns hover over Democrats’ prospects and the White House tests out a new strategy — painting a clear picture of the differences between Democrats and Trump and his followers.

With his MAGA king nickname, Biden was just getting started. At a DNC fundraiser later Wednesday, the president called his 2020 victory against Trump a “low bar,” and dug into his favorite phrase of late, “MAGA Republicans,” twice calling these politicians “petty,” “mean-spirited” and “extreme.”

“They are cowered by Trump,” Biden said, telling the audience that Democrats have to make their case in 2022. “The fact of the matter is, they run the show — the MAGA Republicans. … It really is beyond the pale.”

The president, speaking to roughly 40 guests, said the GOP has a “radical agenda” and said it isn’t “your father’s Republican Party.”

What’s on your mind today? What stories are you following?

Tuesday Reads

William Merritt Chase, Afternoon by the Sea

Good Afternoon!!

Chris Coons, so-called Democratic Senator from Delaware, worked with Texas Senator John Cornyn to introduce a bill to protect the families of Supreme Court justices from scary peaceful demonstrations against their efforts to turn American women into broodmares. Coons could be working to protect women from Republicans who want them to loose their constitutional rights, but apparently that’s not important to him.

The Hill: Senate passes security bill for Supreme Court family members.

The Senate on Monday easily cleared a bill to extend security protections to the immediate family members of Supreme Court justices.

The bill — spearheaded by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) — passed the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning all 100 senators had to sign off in order for it to pass without a formal vote.

It still now heads to the House for passage.

“Threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court Justices and their families are disgraceful, and attempts to intimidate and influence the independence of our judiciary cannot be tolerated,” Cornyn said in a statement.

“I’m glad the Senate quickly approved this measure to extend Supreme Court police protection to family members, and the House must take up and pass it immediately,” he added.

Coons, in a statement, said that he was “glad to see this bipartisan bill unanimously pass the Senate in order to extend security protection to the families of Supreme Court members.”

Have there been “threats to the physical safety” of SCOTUS justices and their families? I haven’t seen it reported in the media. It seems to me that the people whose physical safety is threatened are women of childbearing age and their families. Apparently not. WTF?!

Chris Coons on getting rid the filibuster and reaction after SCOTUS leak at Raw Story:

After supporting Harry Reid’s filibuster reform as a freshman senator, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) later wished he could take it back. But there are no take backs in Congress.

“I have come over time to regret…changing the rules,” Coons told his colleagues from the Senate floor back in 2017, right before McConnell and Republicans followed Democrat’s lead and destroyed the filibuster so they could swiftly seat Neil Gorsuch on the court.

Last week, after the leak-heard-round-the-world, Coons rebuffed Raw Story’s question about filibuster reform, regret, and Roe v. Wade.

“I’m sorry. I’m out of energy. I’m out of time. I’m tired. Leave me alone,” Coons said.

Fuck you Coons!! And this guy is supposedly close to President Biden.

https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1524059677457367040?s=20&t=tze7gAxvbQsLCJipFeUfPg

Here are the scary protesters on Sam Alito’s street.

Catherine Rampell usually writes about economic issues, but today she has a column on abortion rights.

The Washington Post: These GOP politicians aren’t pro-life. They’re pro-forced birth.

The United States has the highest maternal death rate in the developed world; Mississippi has one of the higher maternal death rates within the United States. The odds are worse for Black women, whose risk of death related to pregnancy and childbirth are nearly triple those for White women in the state.

Mississippi also has the country’s highest infant mortality and child poverty rates.

Mississippi’s legislature recently considered whether to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full year after birth, as federal law newly allows states to do. If you care about the lives of new moms (and, by extension, their kids), this is a no-brainer. Roughly 6 in 10 births in the state are covered by Medicaid; 86 percent of the state’s maternal deaths occur postpartum. Pregnancy and delivery raise the risk of many health complications, including infections, blood clots, high blood pressure, heart conditions and postpartum depression. Giving low-income moms access to health care a full year after birth would save lives.

But Mississippi’s Republican leadership rejected the proposal. Not because the state lacks the funds (which would be partly covered by the federal government); one thing state pols did manage to get through this session was the state’s largest-ever tax cut.

Janet Yellen has weighed in on the abortion issue.

Politico: Yellen: Banning abortion would be ‘very damaging’ to U.S. economy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday argued that banning abortion would be “very damaging” for the economy by reducing women’s ability to balance their careers and their families.

“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

In her comments, Yellen said the 1973 ruling helped allow women to finish school and increase their earning potential, leading to higher participation in the workforce.

Research also shows that it had a favorable impact on the well-being and earnings of children,” she said. “There are many research studies that have been done over the years looking at the economic impacts of access or lack thereof to abortion, and it makes clear that denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.”

According to a new poll by Yahoo News/YouGov: Confidence in Supreme Court has collapsed since conservatives took control.

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has collapsed over the last 20 months — a period that began with former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans installing a 6-3 conservative majority ahead of the 2020 election and culminated last week with the leak of a draft opinion signaling that five GOP-appointed justices plan to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a few days before Trump nominated conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.

Back then, 70% of registered voters said they had either “some” (50%) or “a lot” (20%) of confidence in the court, and 30% said they had either “a little” (23%) or “none” (7%).

But the new survey of 1,577 U.S. adults, which was conducted immediately after the leak, found that registered voters have swung from mostly having confidence in the Supreme Court — by a colossal 40-point margin — to being evenly split on the question.

Today, just half of voters still express some (37%) or a lot (14%) of confidence in the court, while the other half now expresses either a little (24%) or none (26%).

And among all Americans — as opposed to just registered voters — most (53%) now say they have either no confidence in the Supreme Court (28%) or only a little (25%).

Mother and Child, Pablo Picasso

As usual, Trump’s negative influence on U.S. politics is in news. A journalist whose family arrived in Nebraska in 1856 weighs in on the damage Trump has done to the state.

Ted Genaways at The New York Times: How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland.

LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.

But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.

Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.

It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”

Read more at the NYT link.

Woman and child on the balcony, Berthe Morisot

Former acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is still making the rounds to sell his book. Here are his latest revelations about Trump.

Business Insider: Trump wanted to court-martial the retired Navy SEAL who led the bin Laden raid for criticizing him, former defense chief says.

Former President Donald Trump wanted to take the extraordinary step of reactivating retired US Navy Adm. William McRaven so that he could court-martial the former Navy SEAL commander for criticizing him, Trump’s former Pentagon chief claims in his new book.

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper writes that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had to talk then-President Trump out of a plan to recall both retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and McRaven to active duty as a way to open the two former senior military officers up to court-martial proceedings.

“Doing this ‘will backfire on you, Mr. President,’ we said,” Esper wrote of a May 2020 meeting in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” which is out today.

Trump told Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were “so disloyal” because of what he thought they were doing and had said about him. Esper writes that Trump “was spun up” by media stories in Breitbart claiming that McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to “track down and counter Trump supporters.”

Also from Business Insider: Trump was the ‘biggest leaker of all’ in his administration and it was ‘generally bad’ for the country, his former Pentagon chief says.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in his new book said that “leaks were a chronic problem” in the Trump administration and former President Donald Trump was the “biggest leaker of all.”

“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker’s own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country,” Esper wrote in “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.”

Esper said the leaks “damaged trust” and made people “far more reluctant to speak up and share their views.”

“Nobody wanted to see their name in the morning news, especially when the words were so often twisted, misinterpreted, and taken out of context,” he added. “In the Trump administration, this could get you blacklisted or fired.” 

One more Trump-related story from The Daily Beast: OAN Finally Admits ‘No Widespread Voter Fraud’ After Settling Defamation Suit.

The right-wing cable network One America News Network on Monday ran a pre-recorded 30-second segment acknowledging that there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election workers in the 2020 presidential election. The segment appears to be part of a recent settlement relating to a defamation lawsuit brought against the network by two such workers.

The segment notes that an investigation by state officials into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud made by ex-President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani turned up nothing. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct,” a narrator states.

“A legal matter with this network and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the voiceover adds.

Mother and children, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Freeman and her daughter, Moss, say they were harassed online and in person after baseless rumors began circulating online, due in part to content published by the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit, which the pair also sued.

In January 2021, when Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to “find” votes to overturn the state’s election results, he mentioned Freeman’s name 18 times. Freeman was also visited by a publicist for Kanye West, who threatened her in an effort to extract a confession about committing election fraud.

And if that weren’t enough, video of the pair doing their jobs was hyped up by Rudy Giuliani—and Sean Hannity—who falsely claimed that it showed “blatant, clear, obvious” fraud. While speaking to Georgia State House Republicans about the video during a Zoom meeting in December 2020, Giuliani at one point can be heard saying, “We should try to get this on Newsmax and OANN.”

Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani as well, and that case is ongoing.

That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?

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.