These heinous threats of violence have become routine in an environment in which the Justice Department is under attack like never before.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: June 12, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, birth control, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, War on Women | Tags: Department of Justice, Hunter Biden, Merrick Garland, Project 2025, Reproductive Health Care, Ryan Hamilton, Texas 7 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
There are lots of important stories today; it’s difficult to decide which of them is most important, so I’ll just begin with another reproductive health care horror story out of Texas. I don’t know if you’ve been following this one, but a few days ago, a man from Texas posted on Twitter about what happened to his wife when she sought help for a failing pregnancy. He expressed so poignantly what so many couples have been dealing with after the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Here is a portion of his first post about it. Read the whole thing at the link.
My heart is broken: As friends & family know, my wife was pregnant with our 2nd child, & about to begin her 2nd trimester. A few days ago she had severe pains, & bleeding, and had to go to the emergency room. There, it was discovered that our baby no longer had a heartbeat. Devastated doesn’t come close to what that feels like. Unfortunately for people like us, because of the current laws in the state of Texas, that was only the beginning of this nightmare. Jess (my wife) had an “incomplete miscarriage”, and what needed to happen, what was best for HER, and her health, was to terminate the pregnancy, and get the baby out.
Radio DJ Ryan Hamilton
The doctor gave her a medication that would move this process along, and sent her home. Where, apparently we would be handling it ourselves. We were told it might take a couple of attempts before it worked….
After a long, painful night of the equivalent of early labor, the baby was still with her. So, we went back to the Emergency Center to get the 2nd dose. A new doctor was on call. He was an older man. You could hear him in the hallway as he said, “I’m not giving her a pill so she can go home and have an ab*rtion!”. Being well aware that our baby no longer had a heartbeat. Then, he came into the room to say, and I quote: “Considering the current stance. I’m not going to prescribe you this pill”. Then, just sent us on our way.
The “CURRENT STANCE”?! Did he really just say that?! No one should ever have to hear their wife say: “Get this dead baby out of me!”.
Can you even imagine how that must feel?
The pain, and the bleeding continued. So, we decided to go to another hospital, about an hour away. There was a female doctor on call there, and we thought we might have better luck.
I should probably mention, the procedure to get the baby out is called a D & C. It’s scary, & traumatizing, but sometimes necessary in situations like ours. Especially in emergency circumstances.
So we get to the next hospital. They take Jess in, ask her a bunch of questions, do a new scan… confirm that the baby is still there, with no heartbeat, and then disappear… for hours. Only to come back in and keep asking the same questions over and over. It’s becoming clear that they’re primary concern is NOT my wife’s health. Instead, they seem to be worried about the legalities involved.
So, they decide it is not “enough of an emergency” to perform the D & C. They do, however, prescribe another, stronger, final dose of the medication for us to try again… at home.
So, we go home to try again. Another long day/night of early labor pains. Only to discover my wife UNCONSCIOUS in the bathroom. Having to pick my wife’s cold, limp body off of that bathroom floor, not sure if I was about to lose her, is something I will NEVER forget. She had to be rushed to the hospital.
By this point she had lost so much blood, and bodily fluid, her body gave out. They were able to stabilize her, give her the fluids she needed, and we came back home yesterday afternoon. We were also able to confirm that our baby was no longer with her.
Now, not only do we have to live with the loss of our baby… we have to live with the nightmare of what we just experienced because of political and religious beliefs. MY WIFE’S HEALTH SHOULD HAVE COME FIRST. PERIOD! God knows what mental and emotional damage this has done. If you consider yourself a staunch “pro-lifer” … 1) You’ve never been through what we just went through, and 2) You should take a long, hard look in the mirror and reevaluate your reasons for supporting such a cold, barbaric, ignorant point of view. It’s not that black & white, and it’s never going to be. If you think your “Pray To End Ab*rtion” sign in your yard is “Christian”, I suggest you revisit the teachings of Jesus and try again. If you support these laws that make ab*rtion illegal, and result in people being put through what we just were, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’ve never been so angry, or heartbroken… and the devastation I’m feeling must pale in comparison to what my poor wife is feeling.
If you go to Hamilton’s feed, you can read much more. Now here is a portion of his latest post from yesterday:
How is my wife? Lots of folks asking (thank you)….It’s been a little over 2 weeks since it happened, & we were told it would be a minimum of 6 weeks before her body recovered from all the blood she lost.
Ryan and Jess Hamilton
Because of the amount of blood loss, she still gets light headed & has dizzy spells. But those are getting less frequent. We are monitoring her HCG levels at home. As of now, she is still getting a positive pregnancy test. This is where it gets scary. If those levels don’t go down soon there is serious risk of infection, which can lead to a world of other very scary problems. Including sepsis. So, she’s not out of the woods yet, physically… and her incomplete miscarriage, is STILL potentially incomplete.
The likelihood of her still needing a D&C is looking increasingly likely. Which, if they would have just DONE THE PROCEDURE IN THE FIRST PLACE, WE WOULDN’T BE HERE! The barbaric way she was treated will forever infuriate me. We have no faith in the doctors, or the medical system here in Texas….So seeking care here is not something we are interested in. However, there are physicians in other states who have reached out. They have been caring, & kind, & very generous in their offers to get us the help we need, if we need it.
This is real life here in Texas. Denying my wife the care she needed. Sending her home on 3 different occasions to almost bleed out on our bathroom floor. Texas Abortion Law did that. My wife is strong. I am in awe of her strength as she recovers. I know she’s going to be ok. But, here we are, weeks later, and we STILL may have to leave the state to get the care she needs….
How many women in Texas and other red states have experienced these nightmarish results since the end of Roe? We know there are many. As we all know, women are once again second class citizens or worse. Right wing Republicans are calling stories like this “fear-mongering.” One anti-abortion site actually claimed that he is lying.
They say the same things about Republicans’ efforts to ban birth control. Anyone who votes for Republican this year is supporting their war on women.
Yesterday’s news was dominated by another family tragedy, the felony conviction of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Republicans seem almost disappointed in the outcome of the trial; they apparently hoped that President Biden would interfere to protect his son.
From Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Hunter Biden’s conviction destroys key MAGA conspiracy theory.
Yesterday, Hunter Biden, son of the president, was convicted on three charges of lying about narcotics use on a gun-purchase form.
In a sane world, this would not be great news for former president and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has been arguing for a year that President Joe Biden has subverted and weaponized the Justice Department. Are we to believe that Biden weaponized the the DOJ to prosecute his own son?
Apparently we are. Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt popped up gamely on Newsmax to insist that the Hunter conviction is just a “distraction from the real crimes of the corrupt Biden family crime family.” (RNC co-chair Lara Trump used the same talking point on Hannity as this newsletter was being finalized.) Trump advisor and right-hand ghoul Stephen Miller similarly tried to keep the conspiracies spinning; he insisted that the DOJ should have prosecuted Hunter not on gun charges, but for more serious crimes.
The hapless James Comer also got in on the act, tweeting that Hunter’s conviction is somehow evidence that the DOJ “continue[s] to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden.”
Of course, if Hunter had been exonerated, Comer and company would be insisting the verdict was rigged. You can’t shame conspiracy theorists. But for anyone who’s not inside the MAGA bubble, the verdict shows pretty clearly that Biden is doing anything but weaponizing the rule of law — even if the law in this case is neither thoughtful nor just.
What result did Republicans want? According to Berlansky:
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been convicted in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump is slated to be sentenced next month. He’s also facing a slew of other charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified material after he left the White House.
Hunter Biden leaves court after conviction, holding hands with Jill Biden and his wife Melissa Cohen Biden
Republicans have worked themselves into a rabid lather in defense of Trump’s rampant criminality. Shortly after Republicans took control of the House last year, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan created a Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government specifically to push false claims that Biden’s DOJ is engaged in political prosecutions of conservative figures, especially Trump.
Trump recently made the ludicrous claim that the DOJ is trying to kill him. Ultra MAGA Rep. Matt Gaetz floated another conspiracy theory in a hearing this month, charging Attorney General Merrick Garland with “dispatching” a former senior official at DOJ to work in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and push through a Trump conviction. This claim is, of course, baseless.
In this climate, a Hunter Biden exoneration would be red meat. The right was already gearing up to spew gleeful conspiracy theories and blame the president if Hunter was not convicted. Just last week, Fox News host Jesse Watters pushed a racist conspiracy theory in which he claimed the trial had been stacked with Black jurors who would refuse to vote to convict.
With Hunter’s conviction, though, MAGA is facing the sad demise of their conspiratorial hopes. Gaetz, for instance, tweeted, “The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh.” But if Hunter had beaten the charges, you can bet everyone from Gaetz to Miller to Trump to Jordan to rabid MAGA twitter blue checks would all be on the same message. And it wouldn’t be that the charges are underwhelming.
Instead of attacking the judge, jury, and prosecution in his son’s case, President Biden made a graceful public statement:
“As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.”
“As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” the president added. “Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”
Biden also changed his plans for the afternoon to head home to Delaware to be with his son.
Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark: Joe Biden Won’t Give Up on Hunter or America. Who is the real tough guy in this race? It’s not Donald Trump.
WE GET IT, AMERICA. You think Donald Trump is tough and Joe Biden is compassionate, and therefore not tough enough. But you’ve got it exactly backwards. Trump whines so constantly about “what I’ve been through” that he should adopt “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” as his campaign song.
Don’t mistake Biden’s empathy for weakness. The major challenges he has confronted in his first term have required focus, discipline, and strength—from the death, destruction, and global destabilization of two raging wars to his own son’s prosecution on gun charges and the jury’s guilty verdict Tuesday.
Persistence, restraint, forcefulness, forbearance—these qualities speak to an underlying toughness, and Biden has demonstrated them all during his presidency. The Hunter Biden saga is no exception.
Here’s what I mean:
When he took office, Joe Biden retained Delaware’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, David Weiss, to finish an investigation into whether Hunter Biden falsified a gun form and evaded taxes while he was addicted to drugs. Joe Biden did not attack the justice system when a Trump-appointed judge—Maryellen Noreika—questioned Hunter’s plea agreement, which ultimately fell apart. Joe Biden didn’t comment or intervene when Attorney General Merrick Garland—his own appointee—elevated Weiss to special counsel status, allowing him broader authority to investigate and bring charges.
President Biden hugging Hunter after his conviction. The President traveled to Delaware to be with his son.
When his son went on trial in Wilmington, again in Noreika’s courtroom, Joe Biden did not attack the judge. He also said he would not pardon Hunter if he were convicted. After the guilty verdict Tuesday, the president said he was proud of “the man he is today” and added: “As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”
Although prosecutions in gun cases like Hunter’s are rare, as even some conservatives have noted, Biden did not call the system “rigged.” He did not howl about the unfairness of it all. And he left it to others to make a point that should be obvious: Trump’s convictions last month are not the same as Hunter’s. As filmmaker/TV producer Morgan J. Freeman joked shortly after the verdict, “How will this affect Hunter Biden’s campaign?” Exactly.
Patti Davis, a president’s daughter and a self-described former speed and cocaine addict, wrote this week that Hunter’s actions and illness forced Joe Biden “into a choice between the primal urge to protect a child and the public responsibility to uphold the law. That is a terrible place to be.”
BIDEN WAS STRONG ENOUGH AND TOUGH ENOUGH to choose upholding the law. He was also tough enough to keep a speaking engagement with gun-safety advocates, many of whom have experienced personal tragedy involving guns, a few hours after his son was convicted on all three gun charges. And he was tough enough to weather what happened at that event.
“Never give up on hope,” Biden told the audience at the conference hosted by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Then a protester began shouting at him about “genocide,” upset about deaths in Gaza amid Israel’s fierce response to last fall’s Hamas attack. The Biden-friendly crowd erupted into chants of “four more years,” drowning out the heckler. Biden’s response was remarkable: “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Folks, folks, it’s okay. Look, they care. Innocent children have been lost. They make a point.”
Read the rest at the Bulwark link.
Republicans repeatedly accuse President Biden and Democrats of “weaponizing” the DOJ and the justice system, but Donald Trump has made clear that he is the one who hopes to do that in another term as “president.”
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to those accusations in The Washington Post: Merrick Garland: Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end.
Last week, a California man was convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI field office where hundreds of agents and other employees work. In one of his threats to the FBI, the man wrote: “I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions.”
In recent weeks, we have seen an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work. They are baseless, personal and dangerous.
These attacks come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president.
Merrick Garland
They come in the form of conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself. Those include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.
They come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI’s law enforcement operations that increase the risks faced by our agents.
They come in the form of efforts to bully and intimidate our career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out.
They come in the form of false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election. Such claims are often made by those who are themselves attempting to politicize the department’s work to influence the outcome of an election.
And media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees.
We will not be intimidated by these attacks. But it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Finally, here’s a powerful piece at Slate by Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein: The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves. The system will not inevitably “hold.”
Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.
Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.
Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025
He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.
The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless.
In general, the mainstream media have shrugged at these overt plans and troubling actions, and most voters either have not focused on them or have dismissed them as exaggerations or impossibilities. After all, our constitutional system has endured for almost 250 years, and the web of checks and balances is strong. There is evidence to support that optimism. We have just seen a historic moment in the rule of law: A unanimous jury of his peers found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying financial documents to influence the outcome of the 2016 election….
But conviction notwithstanding, there is reason to be alarmed—deeply alarmed. This one felony conviction was hardly a vindication of the American justice system. The system “held” only insofar as it was capable of somewhat muzzling the ongoing threats leveled by the defendant against the presiding judge and his family, the jurors and the witnesses, and the team of prosecutors who brought the case. The system held only insofar as efforts to bully and terrorize and bribe witnesses who have helped Donald Trump commit crimes with impunity for decades didn’t quite manage to silence all of those witnesses.
And, depressingly, the system only “held” insofar as it doesn’t collapse upon appeal, say if a someday–Supreme Court, summoned by Speaker Mike Johnson, decides, for no reason law would ever permit or condone, to step in and somehow scupper the whole conviction while giving Trump free rein to act with impunity.
We live in scary times. Anyone who isn’t voting for President Biden is voting for the 2025 Plan and a U.S. dictatorship.
But, as Biden said about gun laws, we can’t give up hope. It’s not over yet, and I do believe Biden can and will win. Then we will have to deal with whatever comes when Trump and his MAGA goons refuse to accept the outcome of another election.
Take care, and hang in there Sky Dancers.
Lazy Caturday Reads: Republicans Escalate War on Women
Posted: February 24, 2024 Filed under: abortion rights, cat art, caturday, just because, War on Women | Tags: Alabama, fetal personhood, In vitro fertilization 14 CommentsHappy 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?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 15, 2023 Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Crime, just because, Violence against women, War on Women | Tags: escorts, Florida, Florida state guard, Long Island serial killer, natural disasters, prostitutes, Rex Heuermann, Ron DeSantis, sex workers 11 Comments
Happy Caturday!!
There’s not a lot of exciting political news today, so I’m going to share a bit about the apparent solving of a high-profile cold case crime. After that, some articles about Ron DeSantis and what he’s done to Florida.
Police in Long Island announced yesterday that they have identified the man popularly known as the Long Island serial killer.
I wrote a post in April, 2011, about the series of bodies that had been found on Long Island. The women were identified as working in the sex trade. I have often argued that the massive number of murders and rapes of women in the U.S. should be a political issue. Often the women who are targeted are seen by both the criminal and the police as throwaways–poor women, women of color, and sex workers. In that post I quoted from a Salon article: Why do serial killers target sex workers? Read the rest of this entry »
Finally Friday Reads: A Neoconfederacy of Elephant-riding Corrupt Dunces
Posted: April 14, 2023 Filed under: A thread for Ranting, abortion rights, American Fascists, Donald Trump, double-speak, fundamentalist Christians, Psychopaths in charge, Right Wing Angst, Uncle Clarence Thomas, War on Women, White Christian Nationalism, white nationalists 13 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
So what does a Florida-based Dotard Ex-President have in common with a Massachusetts-based Computer Geeky Junior Airman? They both have a need to share Top-Secret Documents to impress their friends.
The biggest difference is that the Geek was frog-marched into court and arrested for posting them on Discord. He was charged under the Espionage Act. The Dotard is still at large, and likely so are some Top Secret Documents. We know he flaunted them around The Donny Dotard Clubhouse, but what other things happened with them? There are so many questions about our classified documents processes now that we’re an international embarrassment.
There’s other news too. Ron DeSantis quietly–and in the dead of night– signed a six-week ban on abortion in Florida. Florida used to have abortion access making the South a death zone for fertile women. Attorney General Garland has asked the Supreme Court to block the order by the Texas Grand Inquisitor on the status of mifepristone. Regulatory chaos is likely to result in the FDA and could spread to other agencies, given the implications of the judge’s lunatic rationale. It’s the one day you can be happy there is such a thing as Big Pharma. The manufacturer of the pill has also filed for an immediate stay. We’re on Supreme Court Watch now. If they do nothing, the chaos will start at midnight with this decision and the conflicting one from Washington State. All of these restrictions are highly unpopular with voters.
Oh, and have I mentioned Uncle Clarence Thomas sold his mother’s house to his billionaire buddy without reporting it, so he broke the law? She still lives in the house, and her new landlord takes care of the place.
Welcome to the Neoconfederacy of Dunces or, as JJ mentioned yesterday, the Dawning of the Age of Idiocracy.
This one comes pretty directly out of some weirdo world. This is from Hans Nichols, writing for AXIOS. “Conservatives plot text warnings on “woke” products.” Yes, this does seem like a direct assault on the first amendment rights of businesses granted by Scalia et al. not that long ago.
A conservative group is offering a new service that texts “Woke Alerts” straight to the phones of grocery shoppers who want to know which brands are accused of taking political positions that are offensive to the right.
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
So, there are a lot of links up top. Let me just highlight a few things.
Here is more detail on the Supreme Court Watch for the ruling on mifepristone. This is from NBC News.” The Justice Department and the drugmaker are asking the Supreme Court to block the abortion pill ruling. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories want to freeze a court decision that curbs access to the abortion pill mifepristone.”
The Biden administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block part of a court decision that prevents pregnant women from obtaining the key abortion drug mifepristone by mail.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Food and Drug Administration, urged the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to put on hold the entirety of a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Prelogar wrote in court papers.
Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the brand version of the pill, filed a similar request on Friday.
Danco said it would be “irreparably harmed” if the decision goes into effect because it “will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations.”
This is the latest set of witnesses to discuss Trump’s Classified Documents theft. This is from the New York Times. “Witnesses Asked About Trump’s Handling of Map With Classified Information. The map is just one element of the Justice Department’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s possession of sensitive documents and whether he obstructed justice in seeking to hold onto them.”
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
One person briefed on the matter said investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing the map while aboard a plane. Another said that, based on the questions they were asking, investigators appeared to believe that Mr. Trump showed the map to at least one adviser after leaving office.
A third person with knowledge of the investigation said the map might also have been shown to a journalist writing a book. The Washington Post has previously reported that investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing classified material, including maps, to political donors.
The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.
Hannah Knowles writes on “How DeSantis backed a six-week abortion ban — while barely talking about it. The Florida governor went from signing a 15-week ban last year to signing a six-week ban late at night on Thursday.”
The governor’s quiet embrace of the six-week ban reflects his team’s political calculations heading into 2024, as he gears up for a presidential primary where hard-line activists and voters wield influence. It underlines the continued pressure in the GOP for politicians to embrace tighter laws — even as numerous Republicans, including some DeSantis allies, worry that abortion bans have helped sink their candidates in critical general elections. And it highlights DeSantis’s longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile, though he has enacted major changes to laws on the procedure.
“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.”
DeSantis has generally avoided talking about abortion, even as he tours the country touting other legislation he’s signed. Rather than roll out the six-week bill as a major agenda item, he gave vague endorsements: “I’m willing to sign great life legislation,” he told one reporter who put him on the spot. A six-week ban has proved divisive in his orbit, with some donors strongly opposed and other Republicans eager to simply move on.
President Biden has put out a statement on the arrest of the Leaker and his plans to review the classified documents processes. Not let’s see hin do something about getting White Christian Nationalists out of the Military.
I’ll leave you with this from the High Priestess of QAnon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads
Posted: September 23, 2022 Filed under: campaign financing, corporate money, corruption, court rulings, executive privilege, misogyny, Republican politics, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, tRump crimes against humanity, War on Women 22 Comments
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, c. 1809,
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The headlines are filled with Republican Shenanigans. Holding them accountable for illegal actions appears difficult. This highlights the difference in treatment for everyone else and white men.
The case against Rep. Matt Gaetz has now been considered too difficult to prosecute because all of the witnesses are not upstanding citizens. What do you expect from a gang of sex traffickers of underage women? Devlin Barret, writing for The Washington Post, states: “Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in the sex-trafficking probe. Investigators see credibility challenges for two of the main witnesses in the probe of the congressman’s past dealings with a 17-year-old.”
Career prosecutors have recommended against charging Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in a long-running sex-trafficking investigation — telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions with the two central witnesses, according to people familiar with the matter.
Senior department officials have not made a final decision on whether to charge Gaetz, but it is rare for such advice to be rejected, these people told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. They added that it is always possible additional evidence emerges that could alter prosecutors’ understanding of the case.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that federal authorities will charge Gaetz with a crime in an investigation that started in late 2020 and focused on his alleged involvement with a 17-year-old girlseveral years earlier. Gaetz,40, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying he has never paid for sex. He has also said the only time he had sex with a 17-year-old was when he was also 17.
Chase William Merritt, Idle Hours .1894
The congressman is likely a role model for these guys. Again, this is from The Washington Post, written by Taylor Lorenz. “The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says. The Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed more than 1 million posts showing a rise in advocacy of rape, mass killings.”
The most prominent forum for men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or “incels” has become significantly more radicalized over the past year and a half and is seeking to normalize child rape, a new report says.
The report, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is the culmination of an investigation that analyzed more than 1 million posts on the site. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls.
The report also says that platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare are facilitating the growth of the forum, which the report said is visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.
“This is a novel, new violent extremist movement born in the internet age, which defies the usual characteristics of violent extremist movements that law enforcement and the intelligence community are usually used to,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, a US-based nonprofit. “Our study shows that it is organized, has a cogent ideology and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women, and raping children is a clear part of the practice of their ideology.”
Incels blame women for their failings in life. The term originated decades ago, and while the first incel forum was founded by a woman in the mid 1990s, incel communities have since become almost exclusively male. Incel ideology has been linked to dozens of murders and assaults over the past decade, the most prominent one involving Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old self-described incel who murdered six people in a stabbing and shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014. Before killing himself, he posted a long manifesto and YouTube videos promoting incel ideology.
In March, the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report warning that anti-woman violence was a growing terrorism threat.
According to the CCDH analysis, members of the forum post about rape every 29 minutes, and more than 89 percent of posters support rape and say it’s acceptable. The CCDH analysis also found that posters on the forum are seeking to normalize child rape. More than a quarter of members of the forum have posted pedophilia keywords, the analysis found, and more than half of the members of the forum support pedophilia.
I don’t believe this is necessarily a new thing. This is the problem with the internet. It lets the worst of society hang together and leads to an evil gestalt. These men gain confidence and ideas from their online cult. Also, they can see how easy it is for certain types of men to avoid legal entanglements.
On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James compounded Trump’s legal woes, announcing that the state was suing Trump, his three adult children, the Trump Organization, and senior management in the company, alleging business fraud involving the value of assets to banks, insurance companies and the state tax authorities.
The sheer number of investigations and the increasingly tangled defenses his legal team is having to put on paper and argue in court amount to a stress test of Trump’s standard strategy to deny, deflect, delay, and not put anything in writing.
“I don’t think there’s any other president who was in a similar legal jeopardy” after leaving office, says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Warren Harding was investigated by his own vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge. Nixon would have been the target of investigations for years if Gerald Ford had not pardoned him in September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned from office.
“Even Nixon pales by comparison,” says Norman Eisen, an anti-corruption expert at Brookings Institution and the former special counsel to the Democrat’s House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020 during Trump’s first impeachment. “Nixon just had one Watergate scandal. Trump has had a succession of them, each one more concerning than the last.”
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is looking into how Trump pressured election officials to swing the 2020 presidential election in his direction. The House Jan. 6 Committee and the Department of Justice are both looking at what role Trump played in the lead up to the deadly attack on the Capitol Building to stop the lawful counting of electoral college votes. Federal prosecutors have an active criminal investigation into how and why Trump took thousands of government documents—many containing state secrets—to his residence at Mar-a-Lago and why he refused repeated requests to return them.
And New York’s civil lawsuit announced by James on Wednesday is on top of a separate criminal investigation out of the Manhattan District Attorneys’ Office into the Trump Organization that is set to go to trial in October.
In all of the ongoing cases, Trump is employing the tried-and-true playbook he first learned all those years ago from Cohn for staying out of prison and staying in business, according to Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law who has tracked the ways that Trump had evaded accountability for decades.
Beach in Pourville, Claude Monet, 1882
This exclusive headline from CNN really is fascinating. I imagine the move is to stop the prosecutors from being able to find and flip associates. “Exclusive: Trump’s secret court fight to stop grand jury from getting information from his inner circle.”
Former President Donald Trump‘s attorneys are fighting a secret court battle to block a federal grand jury from gathering information from an expanding circle of close Trump aides about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people briefed on the matter told CNN.
The high-stakes legal dispute — which included the appearance of three attorneys representing Trump at the Washington, DC, federal courthouse on Thursday afternoon — is the most aggressive step taken by the former President to assert executive and attorney-client privileges in order to prevent some witnesses from sharing information in the criminal investigation events surrounding January 6, 2021.
The court fight over privilege, which has not been previously reported and is under seal, is a turning point for Trump’s post-presidency legal woes.
How the fight is resolved could determine whether prosecutors can tear down the firewall Trump has tried to keep around his conversations in the West Wing and with attorneys he spoke to as he sought to overturn the 2020 election and they worked to help him hold onto the presidency.
This dispute came to light as former Trump White House adviser and lawyer Eric Herschmann received a grand jury subpoena seeking testimony, the people briefed said.
Other former senior Trump White House officials, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin, appeared before the grand jury in recent weeks, after negotiating specific subjects they would decline to answer question about, because of Trump’s privilege claims.
Have you ever seen anyone claim privilege this many times? Nixon didn’t get away with it, so what’s the deal with the Trump claims? This Trumper candidate seems pretty audacious with the lies too. Uh, that’s not how this works JR, this is not how any of this works.
But these folks will be bankrolled! Check out these links!
Alex Isenstadt / Politico: Trump to unleash millions in the midterms in possible prelude to 2024
Peter Stone / The Guardian: Alarm as Koch bankrolls dozens of election denier candidates
Former Justice Stephan Breyer warns the current Supreme Court Cartel not to take its backward-facing privilege too seriously. This is also from CNN, and then I am done with all these bad boys. “Breyer warns justices that some opinions could ‘bite you in the back’ in exclusive interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace.”
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is warning his colleagues against “writing too rigidly” in their opinions, saying that such decisions could “bite you in the back” in a world that is constantly changing.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” which debuted Friday on HBOMax and airs Sunday night on CNN, Breyer also bemoaned his position in the court’s minority liberal bloc during his final year on the bench, addressed the court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and spoke about the ongoing controversy regarding Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Breyer said it was a “very frustrating” spot to be in as he found himself in dissent in a number of historically consequential cases where he said the majority side (conservatives — although the retired justice did not use that description) was unwilling to bend.
“You start writing too rigidly and you will see, the world will come around and bite you in the back,” Breyer said in his first televised interview since leaving the bench earlier this year. “Because you will find something you see just doesn’t work at all. And the Supreme Court, somewhat to the difference of others, has that kind of problem in spades.”
“Life is complex, life changes,” Breyer added. “And we want to maintain insofar as we can — everybody does — certain key moral political values: democracy, human rights, equality, rule of law, etc. To try to do that in an ever-changing world. If you think you can do that by writing 16 computer programs — I just disagree.
The comments from Breyer come days before the Supreme Court begins its first term without him in nearly 30 years. In the new term, the justices will consider issues including voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty — areas where the solid conservative majority can easily control the outcomes.
Okay, that’s “all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.” (To quote my childhood hero.)
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
The great nations of Europe were standing on the shore.
They’d conquered what was behind them
And now they wanted more
So they looked to the mighty ocean
And took to the Western sea
The great nations of Europe in the 16th century
Hide your wives and daughters, hide the groceries too
The great nations of Europe comin’ through
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