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MAGA Fans Drop Huge ‘Trump Or Death’ Banner At Yankees Game
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-07-1249/2024-presidential-election-maga-fans-drop-huge-trump-or-death-banner-yankees
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/07/maga-fans-donald-trump-or-death-banner-new-york-yankees-game-mlb/
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Chris Christie: I’m ‘Really Concerned’ for Trump’s ‘Mental Health’
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-07-1246/2024-presidential-election-chris-christie-i-m-really-concerned-trump-s-mental
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/09/06/chris-christie-im-really-concerned-for-trumps-mental-health/
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Chris Christie: I’m ‘Really Concerned’ for Trump’s ‘Mental Health’
0 seconds of 2 minutes, 50 seconds
PAM KEY6 Sep 20231,957
1:46
Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Balance” that he was “really concerned” for former President Donald Trump’s “mental health.”
Host Eric Bolling said, “Donald Trump was on with Hugh Hewitt, a radio host and took some shots at you. We have a little quote box up there. I think he called you a crazy lunatic.”
Christie said, “Well, look. I feel bad for Donald. I really do. You know, he’s on there saying that I’m not very smart, that I’m very deranged. Look, he didn’t think that, Eric, in 2018 when he offered me White House chief of staff. He didn’t think that in 2016 when he offered– when he made me chairman of his transition. He didn’t think that in 2017 when he made me chairman of his opioid commission. He didn’t think of that when he offered me Secretary of Homeland Security twice and Secretary of Labor.
He continued, “So, look. I disagree with the things that Donald Trump did in the 2020 election. I disagree with the way he’s conducted himself after the fact. I think it’s bad for the country. I think it’s beneath the office he held. But when he says stuff like that about somebody who you know, supported him in 2016, prepared him for the debates with Hillary Clinton, supported him in 2020, and prepared him for the debates with Joe Biden, if I was so useless and dumb and deranged, how did all that stuff happen?”
Christie added, “It’s sad. He’s under a lot of stress and a lot of pressure, and saying these things makes me really concerned for his mental health.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
ClipsMediaPolitics2024 Presidential ElectionChris ChristieDonald TrumpEric BollingNewsmax TVRepublican Party
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Pence: GOP Must Choose Between Conservatism And Populism
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-06-1538/2024-presidential-election-pence-gop-must-choose-between-conservatism-and
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/pence-gop-must-choose-between-conservatism-and-populism
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— NEWS —
Pence: GOP Must Choose Between Conservatism And Populism
By Hank Berrien
•
Sep 6, 2023 DailyWire.com
•
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Scott Eisen/Getty Images for SiriusXM
Speaking at a “SiriusXM Town Hall” at New England College on Wednesday, former Vice-President Mike Pence called for the Republican party to stop adopting populist policies and return to the kind of conservatism that former President Ronald Reagan espoused and typified the Republican Party.
“Here within the Republican Party, I think we have a choice to make, and that is whether or not we are going to offer the American people a candidate and a standard bearer that will carry forward the common sense conservative agenda of a strong national defense: American leadership in the world; fiscal responsibility and pro-growth policies; a commitment to traditional values and liberty and life, or whether or not we’ll follow the siren song of populism, unmoored to conservative principle,” Pence declared.
“Frankly, my former running mate and other candidates for the Republican nomination are beginning to move away from that conservative agenda, abandoning American leadership on the world stage, being willing to ignore the debt crisis that’s facing this future generations of Americans,” he continued.
In the eight years of the Obama presidency, the national debt increased $8.6 trillion. In the four years of the Trump presidency, the debt increased $6.7 trillion. Between President Biden’s inauguration and April 2023, the national debt has increased roughly $3.5 trillion.
“And of course, there are those who want to marginalize the cause of life to simply being a states-only issue,” Pence stated.
“But for me, all of those issues have been central to this movement,” he asserted.
Noting that he had been a Democrat when he was young, Pence noted, “It was the voice of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, it was the same common-sense principles that drew me to the Republican Party, and more importantly, haven’t just delivered victories for the GOP but they’ve actually delivered real prosperity and real security for the American people.”
“We’ve come to a Republican time for choosing, and we’re going to choose whether our party’s going to stay on that time-honored tradition of conservative principles or whether we’re going to slide in the direction of populism and be more like an echo, frankly, of the policies of the other party,” he said.
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2024 Primaries,Conservatism,Mike Pence,Populism
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Moms for Liberty co-founder appointed by DeSantis to Florida ethics commission
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-06-1536/politics-moms-liberty-co-founder-appointed-desantis-florida-ethics-commission
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/moms-for-liberty-co-founder-appointed-florida-ethics-commission
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RON DESANTIS
Moms for Liberty co-founder appointed by DeSantis to Florida ethics commission
by Jack Birle, Breaking News Reporter
September 06, 2023 03:59 PM
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) announced he will appoint one of the co-founders of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty to the Florida Commission on Ethics.
DeSantis said he will be appointing Tina Descovich and attorney Luis Fuste to the commission on Wednesday, weeks after the chairman of the commission resigned to maintain his post as the administrator of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which encompasses the Walt Disney World Resort.
EX-HOUSE INTEL CHAIRMAN MIKE ROGERS LAUNCHES RUN FOR SENATE IN MICHIGAN
Descovich called the appointment by the governor "a privilege" in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday.
"The Florida Ethics Commission is charged with serving as the guardian of the standards of conduct for public officers and employees as well as safeguarding public trust. It will be a privilege to serve the state I love as a member of this commission," Descovich said.
Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich, left, speaks at the Moms for Liberty meeting in Philadelphia, Friday, June 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Matt Rourke/AP
Moms for Liberty bills itself as a group that fights for parental rights, and members were major opponents of mandatory masking and the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Descovich's appointment is the latest instance of one of the co-founders of the influential conservative group being elevated by the governor of the Sunshine State. Bridget Ziegler, another co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was appointed to the board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District by DeSantis in February.
Appointments to the Florida Commission on Ethics are subject to confirmation by the Florida Senate, where Republicans hold a 28-12 majority.
Ron DeSantis Florida Ethics News
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I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-06-1048/voting-rights-and-voter-fraud-i-can-t-keep-trump-ballot
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2024 Presidential Election
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rights
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cant-keep-trump-off-the-ballot-georgia-sec-state-14th-amendment-c1017ede?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s
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By
Brad Raffensperger
Sept. 6, 2023 12:27 pm ET
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(2 min)
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Competing energy plans from GOP White House hopefuls would boost domestic oil, nuclear power
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-06-0918/energy-competing-energy-plans-gop-white-house-hopefuls-would-boost-domestic-oil
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/sep/6/competing-energy-plans-gop-white-house-hopefuls-wo/
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Trump supporters dismiss electability challenges, see him as best hope against Biden
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-05-1000/donald-trump-trump-supporters-dismiss-electability-challenges-see-him-best-hope
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/sep/5/trump-supporters-dismiss-electability-challenges-s/
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The Frozen Political Battlefield
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-05-0743/2024-presidential-election-frozen-political-battlefield
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-frozen-political-battlefield/
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THE MORNING JOLT
ELECTIONS
The Frozen Political Battlefield
President Joe Biden delivers remarks celebrating Labor Day and honoring America’s workers and unions at the Annual Tri-State Labor Day Parade at Sheet Metal Workers' Local Union 19, in Philadelphia, Pa., September 4, 2023. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
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By JIM GERAGHTY
September 5, 2023 8:41 AM
On the menu today: I’m back in the U.S., and the American political scene is . . . not all that different from when I left. A new Wall Street Journal survey finds that Americans still overwhelmingly think President Biden is too old to serve another four years, still believe the economy is doing poorly, still feel bedeviled by inflation and high prices, and are not itching to sign up for another four years of Biden. In fact, in normal circumstances, the incumbent would look doomed . . . except the same survey also finds that Republican primary voters remain hell-bent on nominating Donald Trump again, leaving the race a toss-up.
Stalemate in the States
Right now the Democratic Party is going all-in on the health, competence, and popularity of an incumbent president who turns 81 in a few months, who is seen favorably by only 39 percent of the voting public, and whose argument that “Bidenomics” is a modern-day success story has been thoroughly rejected by a majority of the electorate.
The new Wall Street Journal survey results released Monday paint a picture of a first-term president who, at first glance, looks like a long shot for a second term:
Although the candidates are only three years apart, 73 percent of voters said they feel Biden is too old to seek a second term, compared with 47 percent of voters who said the same of the 77-year-old Trump. Two-thirds of Democrats said Biden was too old to run again.
By an 11-point margin, more voters see Trump rather than Biden as having a record of accomplishments as president — some 40 percent said Biden has such a record, while 51 percent said so of Trump. By an eight-point margin, more voters said Trump has a vision for the future. And by 10 points, more described Trump as mentally up to the presidency. Some 46 percent said that is true of Trump, compared with 36% who said so of Biden.
Nor is this new WSJ survey out of line with the rest of the national public-opinion surveys; Biden’s job-approval rating remains around 40 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average of all polling. Public attitudes about Biden really haven’t changed much since they worsened in late summer and autumn of 2021, after the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
This summer, the president started touting the state of the economy and talking up “Bidenomics.” Usually, a president wants to take credit for an economy that people like; Biden is running around taking credit for an economy that Americans believe is getting worse. The survey found, “58 percent of voters say the economy has gotten worse over the past two years, whereas only 28 percent say it has gotten better, and nearly three in four say inflation is headed in the wrong direction.” Just 37 percent of registered voters said they approved of the job Biden was doing on the economy, and 59 percent disapproved. The numbers were even worse on inflation, with just 34 percent approving, and 63 percent disapproving.
Many Americans believe that inflation never went away. When this is pointed out, you’ll find some Democrats denouncing the electorate for perceiving the economy incorrectly. But credit-card debt recently hit a new record, which is an indicator that Americans are still having a hard time paying those new higher prices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture states, “Food prices are expected to grow more slowly in 2023 than in 2022 but still at above historical-average rates. In 2023, all food prices are predicted to increase 5.9 percent, with a prediction interval of 5.3 to 6.5 percent.” If people are paying about 6 percent more than they paid last year to eat, it is not surprising that they’re not rating the economy highly. And also note that gas prices are high by historical standards; last month, the national average for a gallon of gas was $3.95.
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In a normal political environment with a normal political opponent, Biden would be toast.
But Joe Biden doesn’t appear likely to face a normal political opponent.
The previous day, the WSJ released the portion of the same survey focusing on Republican primary voters across the country, and it showed that the 2024 GOP presidential race continues to be uncompetitive. The story of the race so far isn’t anyone else catching up to Trump; it’s that Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest competitor, appears to have slid back to the rest of the pack:
Trump, for now, has no formidable challenger. The former president is the top choice of 59 percent of GOP primary voters, up 11 percentage points since April, when the Journal tested a slightly different field of potential and declared candidates.
Trump’s lead over his top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has nearly doubled since April to 46 percentage points. At 13 percent support, DeSantis is barely ahead of the rest of the field, none of whom has broken out of single-digit support.
The standard defense of the trailing candidates is that it’s early and GOP primary voters aren’t tuned in yet. But at least some of them are. Since the beginning of the year, Trump has added about ten percentage points to his lead, DeSantis has lost ground, and Vivek Ramaswamy has climbed from nothing to about 7 percent in the nationwide polls. Some GOP voters are indeed paying attention.
The WSJ survey found Biden and Trump tied at 46 percent each. Biden and Trump have developed an oddly symbiotic dynamic — in that they are both erratic, old, factually challenged candidates with exceptionally high unfavorable ratings. (Biden’s disapproval rating is just under 55 percent, and Trump is knocking at the door of 57 percent.) Biden’s strongest argument for another term is the country’s reluctance to sign on for another four years of Trump. Trump’s strongest argument for a return to the Oval Office is the country’s reluctance to sign on for another four years of Biden.
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It may well be that the only man Biden could lose to is Trump, and vice versa. In a strange way, they need each other — or at least the threat of another four years of the other guy to make themselves look good by comparison.
Watch What They’ve Done, Not What They Promise
Here’s an observation about the Republican presidential primary: Every now and then, I’ll hear someone express a preference for a candidate with the words, “I like what he’s saying.”
I don’t want to disparage anyone’s criteria for picking a candidate, but I will note that saying things that you, the voter, like to hear is really just about the easiest part of running for president. You don’t have to actually do anything; you just toss out a bunch of ideas and repeat the ones that get the most applause.
Anybody can show up and promise, “I’ll do this,” or “I’ll do that.” And the candidates who are really unprepared for the job think it will be easy. There’s only so much a president can do with executive orders, given that the next president of the opposite party can rescind such orders with the stroke of a pen. To really enact lasting changes, a president must be able to persuade Congress to turn his agenda into law. The job of the president isn’t really to run around the country giving speeches that generate applause. The job is to run the executive branch and its 15 departments, and to persuade Congress to enact his ideas into law. Just staffing up the executive branch could be a full-time job; there are roughly 1,200 positions that require Senate confirmation.
The best way of measuring what a candidate can do in the Oval Office is looking at what they’ve done with their lives so far. Experience matters, if for no other reason than to demonstrate what this person is likely to do in the future.
ADDENDUM: Once again, thanks to everyone who read the past few weeks’ coverage from Ukraine. On yesterday’s edition of the Three Martini Lunch podcast with Greg Corombos, I elaborated a bit on the good, bad, and crazy of what I saw out there — extraordinarily brave and decent people, absolute horror stories about war crimes and the brutality of the Russian invasion, and sometimes just the most bizarre juxtaposition of the mundane and the astonishing in wartime.
In case you missed a day or two, here are the links to the coverage from Ukraine:
What It’s Like to Cross into Ukraine
‘Putin Will Not Stop’: Ukraine’s Civilian Fighters Prepare for Long War
What Makes Kyiv So Difficult to Conquer
How Ukraine’s Museums Memorialize a War That’s Not Over
When the Biggest Land War in Europe Since WWII Comes to Your Suburban Street
The Horror in Bucha
The Ukrainian Anti-Drone Rooftop Party with Machine Guns
‘The Front Line Starts at the Water’s Edge’: The War as Seen from Odesa
Related reporting from just outside Ukraine:
Poland’s Pivotal Role
The Spectacularly Strange Land of ‘Mini-Russia’
For the Washington Post:
In Ukraine, war reaches into every corner
Before the war, this Ukrainian rabbi was a quiet man. No longer
NEXT JOLT
The Spectacularly Strange Land of ‘Mini-Russia’
BACK TO THE MORNING JOLT
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JIM GERAGHTY is the senior political correspondent of National Review. @jimgeraghty
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Trump Remains Clear 2024 Frontrunner among GOP Voters: Poll
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-04-0935/2024-presidential-election-trump-remains-clear-2024-frontrunner-among-gop
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-remains-clear-frontrunner-among-gop-voters-poll/
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NEWS
ELECTIONS
Trump Remains Clear 2024 Frontrunner among GOP Voters: Poll
Former president Donald Trump delivers remarks following his arraignment on classified document charges, at Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, N.J., June 13, 2023. (Amr Alfiky/Reuters)
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By ARI BLAFF
September 4, 2023 9:16 AM
Donald Trump has almost doubled his lead against Florida governor Ron DeSantis since April among GOP voters, a new poll released by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday found.
According to the survey, Trump is the clear frontrunner with 59 percent of 600 registered Republican primary voters backing him as a “first choice” candidate. By comparison, DeSantis is the first choice candidate for only 13 percent of likely voters.
In April, a similar survey conducted by the same outlet found the gap between the two Republican presidential hopefuls to be just 13 percentage points in favor of Trump. At the time, DeSantis secured nearly a quarter (24 percent) of Republican primary voters.
Whereas 84 percent of Republican primary voters in April saw DeSantis in a positive light, by late August, that number had fallen to just 70 percent. Meanwhile, Trump’s favorability among core GOP members had experienced a marginal drop from 78 percent to 75 percent over the same time span.
“DeSantis collapsed,” Michael Bocian, a Democratic pollster, told the Journal. “The one candidate who back in April really seemed to be a potential contender, seemed to have a narrative to tell, has totally collapsed, and those votes went to Trump.”
The Journal poll also found a reordering of the GOP field with middle-of-the-pack candidates such as former vice president Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie all failing to grab at least 5 percent of first choice ballots.
Following the first Republican presidential debate in late August which found tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley widely touted for their performances, the poll showed the latter leading the pack after the two frontrunners with 8 percent of first choice ballots nipping at the Florida governor’s heels. Ramaswamy only grabbed 5 percent of such voters but is among the leading candidates in terms of “second choice” ballots.
Notably, when the Journal asked 1,500 registers voters across the political spectrum who they would likely vote for in 2024, Trump edged out President Joe Biden, by one percentage point.
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The Pope’s Reign and Ruin
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“They don’t know how to run the country like Trump knows how to run the country,” one respondent told the Journal. “The country was a whole lot better under Donald Trump.”
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
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ARI BLAFF is a news writer for National Review. His writing has appeared in Tablet Magazine, Quillette, City Journal, and Newsweek. He holds a Master's from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and writes from Toronto, Canada. @ariblaff
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Federal Judge Dismisses 14th Amendment Lawsuit Attempting to Keep Trump off Ballot
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-02-0103/donald-trump-federal-judge-dismisses-14th-amendment-lawsuit-attempting-keep
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/09/01/federal-judge-dismisses-14th-amendment-lawsuit-attempting-to-keep-trump-off-ballot/
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Federal Judge Dismisses 14th Amendment Lawsuit Attempting to Keep Trump off Ballot
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
JORDAN DIXON-HAMILTON1 Sep 20232,089
3:56
Judge Robin Rosenberg on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging former President Donald Trump’s presence on the presidential ballot under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Florida attorney Lawrence Caplan and two others filed the lawsuit one week ago as part of a growing effort nationwide to use the Fourteenth Amendment to remove Trump from the ballot, citing his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment says public officials are not eligible to hold office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States.
However, Rosenberg, an Obama-appointee, dismissed the case on standing grounds. Rosenberg ruled the plaintiffs did not have a “cognizable” injury that gives them standing to bring the lawsuit.
As the Palm Beach Post reported:
“Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge Defendant’s qualifications for seeking the Presidency,” Rosenberg wrote, adding that “the injuries alleged” from the insurrection on Capitol Hill more than two years ago “are not cognizable and not particular to them.”
Rosenberg also added that “an individual citizen does not have standing to challenge whether another individualis qualified to hold public office.”
She noted two prior court rulings against plaintiffs trying to keep candidates off the ballot because they participated in the Jan. 6 violence in Washington, D.C.
The Fourteenth Amendments’ “disqualification” clause has gained steam in recent months after elitist legal scholars from both the left and Never right have proposed using it to keep Trump off the ballot.
As Breitbart News reported:
[Former Clinton administration labor secretary Robert] Reich was recently joined by legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, both Never Trump members of the otherwise conservative Federalist Society, who wrote in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that Section 3 “disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.”
…
This weekend, legal scholars J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe joined the chorus, in The Atlantic. They cited the fact that Trump has been indicted at both the state and federal levels for various crimes, including a federal indictment in Washington, D.C., and a state indictment for Fulton County, Georgia, for his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
Secretaries of state nationwide have been addressing the issue in recent weeks as these challenges are raised.
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan (R) said earlier in the week he is “not seeking to remove any names” from the GOP primary ballot after Charlie Kirk urged his supporters to call Scanlan’s office following reports Scanlan was weighing the idea.
Arizona’s Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced this week state law prohibits the Fourteenth Amendment from being used to keep Trump off the Arizona ballot.
“Now, the Arizona Supreme Court said that because there’s no statutory process in federal law to enforce Section 3 of the 14th amendment, you can’t enforce it,” Fontes said. “That’s what the Arizona Supreme Court said, so that’s the state of the law in Arizona. Now, do I agree with that? No, that’s stupid What I’m saying is I’m going to follow the law. And the law in Arizona is what the law in Arizona is. Whether I like it or not, is irrelevant.”
The case is Caplan v. Trump, No. 0:23-cv-61628, in the United States District Court for Southern District of Florida.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter.
Law and OrderPolitics2024 Presidential ElectionDonald TrumpFloridaFourteenth Amendment
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Dana Perino, Stuart Varney to co-moderate second GOP primary debate hosted by FOX Business
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-01-1528/2024-presidential-election-dana-perino-stuart-varney-co-moderate-second-gop
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/dana-perino-stuart-varney-co-moderate-second-gop-primary-debate-hosted-fox-business
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MEDIA Published August 30, 2023 12:20pm EDT
Dana Perino, Stuart Varney to co-moderate second GOP primary debate hosted by FOX Business
'We are very proud to have Stuart Varney and Dana Perino co-moderating the second debate with Univision,' Jay Wallace said
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Voters choose their winners and losers from the first Republican debate
Brian Benstock and Pedro Rodriguez size up the GOP presidential field after the pivotal first primary debate on 'The Evening Edit.'
FOX News Media’s Stuart Varney and Dana Perino will co-moderate the second Republican presidential primary debate alongside Univision's Ilia Calderón on Sept. 27 on FOX Business Network.
"We are very proud to have Stuart Varney and Dana Perino co-moderating the second debate with Univision to provide Americans with a comprehensive view of the qualifying candidates vying for the Republican nomination for president," FOX News Media President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace said.
FOX Business will host the debate from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, California.
FOX News Media was tapped to host the first two debates of the critical 2024 election cycle. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum co-moderated FOX News Media's "Democracy 24: FOX News Republican Primary Debate" last week. The debate drew a staggering 12.8 million total viewers, making it the most watched non-sporting event cable telecast of the year to date.
FOX NEWS MEDIA DRAWS 12.8 MILLION TOTAL VIEWERS FOR ‘DEMOCRACY 24: FOX NEWS REPUBLICAN PRIMARY DEBATE’
Dana Perino and Stuart Varney will co-moderate the second Republican presidential primary debate alongside Univision's Ilia Calderón.
Univision Executive Vice President Maria Martinez-Guzman is eager to inform Hispanic voters ahead of the critical GOP primary.
"As the No. 1 source of news for the U.S. Hispanic community, Noticias Univision’s participation as co-host of the second 2023 Republican primary debate reflects the journalistic mission of TelevisaUnivision’s news division to provide our audience with fair and balanced information. As in past election cycles, we seek to inform Hispanic voters nationwide about their choices while representing our community’s issues during this election cycle," Martinez-Guzman said.
Varney, who has been in the television industry for 45 years, was one of FOX Business’ original anchors at its inception in 2007 and is the host of "Varney & Co.," the highest-rated market hours program on business television. He also hosts "American Built," a series that showcases the ingenuity behind some of the country’s most iconic landmarks.
Varney has interviewed titans from all walks of life and provides analysis for the network’s political coverage. He was part of FOX Business' midterm election programming in 2022 and has also contributed to the business team at FOX News Channel since 2004.
OUTKICK’S SIGNATURE PROGRAMS WITH CLAY TRAVIS, TOMI LAHREN, RILEY GAINES TO STREAM ON FOX NATION
FOX News Media’s "Democracy 24: FOX News Republican Primary Debate" drew a staggering 12.8 million total viewers, making it the most-watched, non-sporting event cable telecast of the year to date. (Getty Images / Getty Images)
Perino co-anchors FOX News’ "America’s Newsroom" and is a co-host on "The Five," the most watched program in cable news. She also recently launched a signature podcast on FOX News Audio called "Perino on Politics" and co-anchored the pre-show for the first Republican presidential debate alongside Bill Hemmer.
Perino, who has prominent role across all of FOX News' major political events throughout her 14-year tenure at the network, has conducted notable exclusive interviews, including with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, among others.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, left, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis participate in FOX News Media’s "Democracy 24: FOX News Republican Primary Debate." (Kamil Krzaczynski / Getty Images)
Calderón is the first Afro-Latina to anchor an evening newscast for a major broadcast network in the U.S. She has interviewed President Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many other political heavyweights.
Fox News' Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
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Nikki Haley calls Senate 'most privileged nursing home in the country,' says McConnell freeze-up was 'sad'
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MITCH MCCONNELL
Nikki Haley calls Senate 'most privileged nursing home in the country,' says McConnell freeze-up was 'sad'
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's freeze-up was the 2nd time the veteran GOP senator was unable to speak while holding a press conference
By Timothy H.J. Nerozzi Fox News
Published September 1, 2023 8:33am EDT | Updated September 1, 2023 10:08am EDT
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Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley mocked the U.S. Senate on Thursday as a "nursing home."
Haley made the comments in an interview with Fox News when asked about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's latest episode of freezing up while addressing the press.
"It's sad," she told Fox News. "No one should feel good about seeing that any more than we should feel good about seeing Dianne Feinstein, any more than we should feel good about a lot of what’s happening or seeing Joe Biden’s decline."
MCCONNELL CLEARED TO RESUME 'SCHEDULE AS PLANNED' FOLLOWING KY PRESS CONFERENCE FREEZE
Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations, speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa's annual Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa. (Rachel Mummey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"What I will say is, right now, the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country," Haley added. "I mean, Mitch McConnell has done some great things and he deserves credit. But you have to know when to leave."
McConnell has been cleared to resume his "schedule as planned" after he froze for more than 30 seconds while fielding questions from reporters in Covington, Kentucky, on Wednesday.
"I have consulted with Leader McConnell and conferred with his neurology team. After evaluating yesterday’s incident, I have informed Leader McConnell that he is medically clear to continue with his schedule as planned," Dr. Brian Monahan, Congress' attending physician, wrote in a note Thursday.
MCCONNELL FREEZES UP AGAIN DURING KENTUCKY NEWS CONFERENCE
"I think that we do need mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75, I wouldn’t care if they did them over the age of 50," Haley told Fox News in the interview.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., freezes while trying to answer a question from the press on Wednesday. (WXIX)
She continued, "But these are people making decisions on our national security. They’re making decisions on our economy, on the border. We need to know they’re at the top of their game."
The long-standing GOP lawmaker previously froze for about 30 seconds during a news conference alongside other Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., a month ago.
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At the time, an aide told Fox News Digital he "felt light-headed and stepped away for a moment."
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at [email protected]
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Trump says he may be open to future primary debates after all
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Trump says he may be open to future primary debates after all
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Former President Donald Trump suggested in an interview on Thursday that he may participate in future GOP primary debates, a change in tune from his past resistance to battling it out with his 2024 rivals onstage.
Trump snubbed the first Republican National Committee and Fox News-sponsored debate last week and instead released a prerecorded interview with ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
TRUMP'S GOP SUPPORT HAS ONLY CLIMBED SINCE THE INDICTMENTS BEGAN
But on Thursday, Trump appeared open to attending a future debate. "Do you anticipate at some point jumping into the debates?" Trump was asked during the Todd Starnes' radio show.
"I might. I mean, you know, it's possible. I liked debating. I guess I won because of the debates," he said. "You know, they've been very good to me. So I might. But at this moment, I'm leading by so much that it seems to be foolish to do it."
Earlier this month, a source familiar with Trump’s thinking told NBC News that his decision announcing he wouldn't participate in the first debate applies to only the first two debates, allowing him a chance to attend other debates if he changed his mind.
Trump's change in thinking also comes after an Emerson College poll released on Monday showed Trump dropped six percentage points after skipping the debate. A predebate poll showed Trump garnering 56% of Republican support, but in the wake of the debate, his support decreased to 50%.
However, Trump still remains the current front-runner in the primary race with 53.6% support, according to a RealClearPolitics poll average.
The former president went on to brag about the number of views his interview with Carlson received during his radio show interview. "It got good reviews. But more than anything, it got numbers that, the biggest numbers in history," he added.
The Trump-Carlson interview has more than 263 million views as of Thursday afternoon. But it must be noted that Twitter views are not held to the same standards as the primary debate on Fox News and Fox Business Network, which had 12.8 million viewers tune in.
Ep. 19 Debate Night with Donald J Trump pic.twitter.com/ayPfII48CO
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2023
Trump also criticized Fox News when Starnes asked him, “Mr. President, what the heck is going on at Fox News?” in reference to Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy claiming Trump had slipped in polling after snubbing the debate.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"Well, he’s incorrect because most of the polls, and I’m way ahead in Emerson, too, but most of the polls literally have me going up a lot since the debate, if you can call it that,” Trump said. "They’ll pick one poll where if you go down a little bit, they’ll use that one poll, but they won’t use 15 polls or a lot of the polls where you go up. But we’ve gone up very substantially, and we’ve gone up in just about every state."
The next Republican debate is scheduled for Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, California.
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Ron DeSantis super PAC halts door-knocking efforts in Nevada, Super Tuesday states
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Ron DeSantis super PAC halts door-knocking efforts in Nevada, Super Tuesday states
By Josh Christenson
Published Aug. 31, 2023
Updated Aug. 31, 2023, 5:33 p.m. ET
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A super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential run has ended door-knocking efforts in one key early-voting state and three Super Tuesday states, officials confirmed to The Post Thursday.
Never Back Down closed down its political canvassing operations in Nevada, California, North Carolina and Texas over the past few weeks, after having pledged to spend $100 million to promote DeSantis.
The shutdowns were first reported by NBC News.
“We want to reinvest in the first three,” said Never Back Down spokeswoman Erin Perrine, referring to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. “We see real opportunities in the first three. The first three are going to set the conditions for the March states.”
South Carolina has long been recognized by Republicans as the third primary state to vote for an eventual nominee, but Nevada’s GOP announced earlier this month it would move its caucus ahead of the Palmetto State.
A super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential run has ended door-knocking efforts in an early voting primary state and three Super Tuesday states.
AP
“Uh… Nevada is in the first 3?” Make America Great Again Inc. spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to Perrine’s remarks. “Never Back Down has some serious issues if they don’t even know the primary calendar.”
Nevada Republicans have set their caucus for Feb. 8, 2024, while the South Carolina GOP scheduled its primary for Feb. 24.
More than 250 field staff had been employed in the four states before operations ended, according to NBC.
Thursday’s news follows a series of summer shakeups in the DeSantis campaign, climaxed by the laying off of dozens of staffers and the replacement of his campaign manager amid persistent rumors of overspending.
Never Back Down closed down its political canvassing in Nevada, California, North Carolina and Texas in the past few weeks, NBC News first reported.
AFP via Getty Images
On Super Tuesday, March 5, 13 states will hold their Republican presidential primaries or caucuses: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia.
A day earlier, DeSantis’ main primary rival, former President Donald Trump, is due to appear in Washington, DC, federal court for the start of his trial on charges that he attempted to unlawfully overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The Nevada GOP, which was sympathetic to Trump’s fraudulent election claims, has since filed a lawsuit after the Democratic-controlled legislature adopted a state-run primary system.
Republican leaders say the change was made without putting in certain voting integrity measures, such as enforcing voter ID and doing away with same-day registration and mail-in ballots.
A local judge ruled against the Nevada Republican Party, but they have since appealed to the state Supreme Court.
“When you have that kind of uncertainty about how the election’s going to be conducted, that becomes a pretty unstable environment to be investing the kind of resources that we’re investing,” Perrine told The Post, referring to Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald as a “Trump puppet.”
Never Back Down spokeswoman Erin Perrine told The Post that Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald was a “Trump puppet.”
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Currently, the state-organized Nevada Republican primary is set for Feb. 6, while the party-organized caucuses are scheduled for two days later.
McDonald told The Post in response to Perrine that the primary changes were not intended to give any candidate the upper hand but to push back against Democratic efforts to undermine election integrity.
“I’m nobody’s puppet, never have been, never will be. I’m too old to be a puppet,” McDonald said. “This isn’t about President Trump, this isn’t about DeSantis … this is about bringing it back to Nevada voters.”
McDonald was one of several Trump allies federally investigated this year for being part of an alleged fake elector scheme meant to reverse the former president’s electoral loss.
Perrine noted that there was a “similar situation in California,” where new rules will allow the primary candidate with the most votes to be awarded all 169 state delegates, or a proportion of them equal to their statewide voter tally.
“I’m nobody’s puppet, never have been, never will be. I’m too old to be a puppet,” McDonald told The Post.
AP
Delegates were previously awarded through a tally of primary votes in each of the Golden State’s congressional districts.
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“When they changed it to a proportional, statewide winner-take-all, that completely eliminated the opportunity for grassroots campaigning,” Perrine said, adding that it was a “Trump-inspired rigging.”
“And so with neither state having a fair process, the door knockers that were in Nevada and California, we decided to make them kind of refocus into the first three,” she added, repeating: “The first three are going to set the conditions for the March states.”
FILED UNDER CALIFORNIA NEVADA RON DESANTIS SUPER PACS 8/31/23
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DeSantis built a massive network of big donors. Many have ditched him.
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A POLITICO analysis shows just a substantial drop off in giving.
The inability of Ron DeSantis to convert more of his gubernatorial donors into presidential ones is emblematic of a larger shortcoming of his current campaign. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
By ALEX ISENSTADT and JESSICA PIPER
09/06/2023 05:00 AM EDT
Former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner was among Ron DeSantis’ biggest boosters during the 2022 midterm election, giving nearly $1 million to his reelection bid. But as he has surveyed the field of GOP candidates for president, Rauner — a wealthy former private equity executive who was DeSantis’ fifteenth biggest donor in last year’s election — has not given any more money to the Florida governor. Rauner told POLITICO he thinks another candidate, former U.N Ambassador Nikki Haley, has a better shot of defeating President Joe Biden than DeSantis.
“I think he’s done a terrific job as governor of Florida, and I’ve been, as I think you know, a big supporter of him in that role,” Rauner said of DeSantis. But, he added, “I think Nikki Haley probably has the best chance to win the general election ... I think everyone is trying to sort things out. We gotta win, we gotta win the general.”
Rauner isn’t the only former mega-DeSantis donor who’s refused to open his wallet for DeSantis. Of the 50 donors who gave at least $160,000 in the years leading up to his 2022 reelection campaign, only 16 — less than a third — provided funds to the super PAC Never Back Down, which can receive unlimited contributions, through the end of June. Eight other major donors gave directly to his presidential campaign but not the super PAC.
The top 50 list includes five donors who are now financially supporting rival presidential candidates. And of those who are giving money to the DeSantis campaign or his super PAC, five are splitting their funds with other candidates.
The inability of DeSantis to convert more of his gubernatorial donors into presidential ones is emblematic of a larger shortcoming of his current campaign. And it presents particular problems for the governor precisely because his operation has leaned so heavily on the super PAC to perform basic campaign functions.
Trailing former President Donald Trump by wide margins in Republican primary polls — some of which show him struggling to keep his second-place status — many former contributors to the Florida governor are looking to other candidates or keeping their wallets shut entirely.
DeSantis still has a well-funded effort. Never Back Down had nearly $97 million available to spend as of the end of June, according to the second quarter filings — a figure that far surpasses the super PACs supporting his rivals. That includes the outfit supporting Trump, which reported just short of $31 million in cash on hand.
“Ron DeSantis outraised both Biden and Trump last quarter, and we continue to see overwhelming enthusiasm from grassroots and major supporters chipping in to help our campaign,” said Andrew Romeo, a DeSantis campaign spokesperson. “We look forward to continued fundraising success this quarter as we capitalize on his strong debate performance and momentum in the early states.”
The funds Never Back Down has raised, however, are overwhelmingly drawn from an $82 million transfer from the Florida-based political committee that backed DeSantis’ reelection bid.
And in recent weeks, some of DeSantis’ biggest past donors have come out publicly to say they are holding back on writing checks to the super PAC. That includes hotel and aerospace executive Robert Bigelow, by far the biggest individual contributor to Never Back Down and to DeSantis’ reelection campaign. Last month, Bigelow told Reuters that he would not give further donations to the super PAC unless DeSantis adopted more moderate policies and “until I see that he’s able to generate more [contributions] on his own.”
Billionaire investor Ken Griffin, the second biggest donor to DeSantis’ 2022 campaign, has also withheld his money. Griffin said in a statement that he was “assessing how the policies of each candidate will address the challenges facing our country.”
And this spring, businessman Thomas Peterffy, who gave $3.6 million to DeSantis’ reelection effort — making him the governor’s twenty-fifth biggest contributor — told the Financial Times that he and “a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry” because of positions the governor had taken on social issues. Peterffy has since wired $2 million to a political committee aligned with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who some donors would like to see enter the Republican primary.
DeSantis’ decision to sign a six-week abortion ban has alienated some big donors, many of whom embrace more moderate positions on social issues. Walter Buckley, a retired venture capitalist who was DeSantis’ tenth-biggest donor in 2022, said the governor’s decision to sign one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country had weakened his political standing. Buckley had given $6,600 to DeSantis’ campaign through the end of June but nothing to Never Back Down. He has given far more — over $500,000 — to support a DeSantis rival: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“If it becomes apparent that Ron has boxed himself into a corner … in Florida, and is not going to win because of the consequences, I may not support him. It’s that simple,” Buckley said. “That at this point is really my consternation because I like DeSantis. I think he’s talented, hardworking as hell and smart. But I cannot understand why he took such a hard position in Florida. I think it’s a mistake.”
Griffin, meanwhile, has expressed reservations over DeSantis’ high-profile fight with Disney, according to a person briefed on the investor’s thinking. DeSantis targeted the corporation’s governance board and tax status after it came out against his initiative to restrict discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in the state’s schools.
Other donors have taken issue with DeSantis’ positions on foreign policy; namely his decision to describe the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” Businessman Chris Reyes, the fifth-biggest donor to DeSantis’ reelection campaign, has privately criticized DeSantis’ posture on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, according to a person familiar with his remarks. So too has Griffin, said the person briefed on his thinking.
ELECTIONS
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A Griffin spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Reyes, who through the end of the second quarter had not financially backed DeSantis presidential campaign or super PAC, did not respond to a text message requesting comment.
There are indications that the DeSantis team is hurting for resources. Jeff Roe, Never Back Down’s lead strategist, gave a presentation to donors prior to last month’s Republican primary debate in which he pleaded for $50 million to fund the super PAC’s efforts. Roe’s remarks were first reported by CNN and The New York Times.
But any challenges DeSantis faces financially, those close to him say, can also be seen in a positive light: a reflection of his willingness to buck the interests of big donors who are used to getting their way.
“Gov. DeSantis wouldn’t let $1 or even $1 billion drive him in a political direction that he doesn’t believe in,” said Roy Bailey, a Republican fundraiser who is helping the candidate. “No amount of political contributions could erode his core values.”
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DeSantis-aligned super PAC asked for $50 million from donors on day of first GOP primary debate, leaked audio shows
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Republican presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Speaks to guests at Ashley's BBQ Bash hosted by Congresswoman Ashley Hinson on August 6, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
CNN
—
In an urgent appeal to wealthy Republicans who had assembled in Milwaukee ahead of the first GOP presidential primary debate, top brass for the super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told donors they needed an injection of $50 million over the next four months, according to leaked audio obtained by CNN.
“We just need your help getting $50 million more by the end of the year, and $100 million more by the end of March,” Never Back Down CEO Chris Jankowski told donors hours before DeSantis stepped on the stage Aug. 23, according to the audio. “I’m not worried about the second 50. We need the first 50.”
Throughout an hour-long presentation, Jankowski, chief operating officer Kristin Davison and chief strategist Jeff Roe walked donors through their inside view of how DeSantis is faring just five months before the Iowa caucus kicks off primary season. Their frank but upbeat assessments touched on perceived shortcomings in media exposure compared to the Trump campaign, their push to lean more heavily on Florida first lady Casey DeSantis and their goal of getting more than 100,000 Iowans to caucus for DeSantis.
Among the information shared was the “DeSantis index,” an in-house metric that measures the likelihood someone will back the Florida governor.
“If you have an education, if you have higher income, if you read the Bible and if you go to church regularly, you happen to be a DeSantis supporter,” Roe told the room.
The audio provides an inside look at the strategy behind a super PAC that has assumed an unusually outsized role in DeSantis’ presidential campaign – one that has attracted the attention of campaign finance watchdogs and has, at times, led to friction with DeSantis’ official operation. The tension spilled into the open just days before the Milwaukee event, when the super PAC released a memo with debate pointers for DeSantis. The unsolicited advice was poorly received.
Never Back Down – initially funded in large part by $82.5 million transferred from DeSantis’ state political committee – has operated as a de facto shadow campaign for the governor. It has assumed traditional campaign duties, including building out an extensive field operation in early nominating states, training operatives, enlisting endorsements from local leaders and planning DeSantis’ travel and staging his events. Last week, DeSantis toured northwest Iowa on a bus operated by Never Back Down.
Roughly 60 donors attended the fundraising lunch, hosted at a DoubleTree hotel blocks away from the debate venue, sources familiar with the event details told CNN. Among the attendees was Dallas businessman Roy Bailey, the former co-chair of the Trump campaign’s finance committee who has since changed allegiances.
Davison told CNN Thursday “every investor wants to see how you get to the final round and how you win, and almost all the donors left confident that that we had a clear path to victory to help the governor win.”
The super PAC arranged the pre-debate fundraiser at a critical juncture in the campaign for DeSantis. After a month-long shakeup of his political operation to address stalled poll numbers and cost overruns, the debate was seen internally as a moment for the Florida governor to rally fundraisers and supporters for its aggressive fall campaign.
While it was up to DeSantis to deliver a performance that could quell outstanding concerns fears about his viability, his super PAC was privately working to reassure a room of wealthy individuals – described on the recording as a mix of DeSantis’ loyal backers and longtime GOP donors – of its long-term strategy.
The pitch appeared structured to convince donors the super PAC had a plan for their dollars if they would open up their pocketbooks. A fundraising goal of $50 million by the end of the year would exceed the $47 million the super PAC raised on its own between its March launch and the end of June. Almost half of that money came from one source, Nevada businessman and space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, who recently told Reuters he intended to refrain from further contributions until DeSantis could demonstrate he’s “able to generate more on his own.”
The additional resources would help cover $25 million in airtime Never Back Down plans to purchase after Labor Day through Halloween in New Hampshire and Iowa, according to a source with understanding of the super PACs strategy. The fall television advertising – likely to be extended to Thanksgiving – is an unexpected expense that Never Back Down has nevertheless taken on, the source said.
Jankowski, Davison and Roe spent much of their presentation hyper-focused on former President Donald Trump and his inherent ability to out-gain all other GOP candidates in earned media, meaning organic and free coverage on television, online and in newsprint. Both Davison and Roe emphasized the positive impact Trump’s indictments are having on the former president’s White House bid, something they used to try and persuade donors to help them overcome.
“Donald Trump probably gets roughly at least $30 million of earned media every single day. We’re number two, with roughly $5 (million) to $6 million every single day. Where you see the spikes are after every indictment,” Davison said. “After every indictment, it goes up to $100 million of earned media, and in a presidential race, no news is bad news. What we really learned in 2016 is that Donald Trump dominated earned media and we see it happening now.”
Roe, meanwhile, made very clear how problematic this is for DeSantis, arguing that Trump is not only a major threat to DeSantis, but to the GOP at large.
“We can’t lose to Trump. If Trump’s the nominee, we’re gonna lose the White House. If we lose the White House, we’re gonna lose the Senate. And if we lose the Senate, we’re gonna lose the House. And [Democrats] are going to be in charge of the full House, Senate and White House for at least two years,” Roe told the audience.
Roe further suggested Democrats would add two new states if given the chance, including Puerto Rico. DeSantis while serving in the US House co-sponsored a bill authored by Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress to provide the US territory with a path to statehood.
Though Never Back Down officials warned Trump’s legal troubles present a challenge, they insisted it had not hardened Republicans’ resolve to nominate him once again.
“Trump gets a bump every time he gets indicted. But there are fewer and fewer and fewer people that will support him in the party,” he added.
The PAC representatives walked the crowd through their internal plans for improving DeSantis’ likeability with voters who remain on the fence. One of the key takeaways from their data, they said, is how messaging around DeSantis’ “bio” — mainly his military record, his family and his background as “a blue-collar worker” — plays better with voters than other topic areas. Super PAC advisers acknowledged many Republicans were unaware DeSantis is the only veteran in the race or that he was a father.
DeSantis mirrored that biographical emphasis later that night at the debate. He called himself a “blue collar kid” who “worked minimum wage jobs to be able to make ends meet” and he touched on his personal responsibilities as a husband and dad to three young kids. He emphasized his military experience at several points, noting that he was “assigned with” and deployed “alongside” Navy SEALs — leaving out that he was a JAG lawyer.
Enlarging Casey DeSantis’s role, specifically, is something super PAC officials said they view as a crucial way to boost the governor’s campaign. “With her help, they convert an entire room,” Davison said of the governor’s wife. “She just brings a level of humility and warmness.”
The group also spent much of their presentation boasting that Never Back Down has undertaken an unprecedented operation, arguing they will change the way presidential politics rely on PACs for decades to come.
In recent presidential cycles, super PACs have leveraged their ability to raise unlimited sums to pay for digital and television advertisements, one of the costliest expenses for a political operation.
“Our role is really new and it’s even grown to play a role like no other PAC in a presidential race,” Jankowski said. “We are hosting events. We’ve been doing fundraising online. We are doing advertising. We have built a political program in the early states and beyond like none other. And, you know, simply put, Never Back Down is changing the game.”
Roe claimed the super PAC’s data operation had developed extensive knowledge of Republican primary voters and caucus goers. That data told them Georgia was “our best state” given the demographics and that “79% of the people tonight are going to watch the debate and turn it off after 19 minutes.”
“We’re tracking these people all the time,” he said.
Federal rules prevent presidential candidates and their campaigns from coordinating with supportive super PACs. Many Republican strategists and campaign veterans have questioned the arrangement between DeSantis’ campaign and the super PAC, pointing to the limitations of running a political operation from the outside. It is also the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission by the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, which alleged a violation of campaign finance laws.
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Yang urges Biden to break precedent and debate RFK Jr.
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Trump Could Clinch the Nomination Before the G.O.P. Knows if He’s a Felon
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Trump improves lead over Republican primary rivals after mugshot release
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Donald Trump in Atlanta, Georgia, on 24 August. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
Donald Trump
Trump improves lead over Republican primary rivals after mugshot release
Former president has also seen polling and fundraising boosts with each indictment this year
Hugo Lowell
@hugolowell
Wed 30 Aug 2023 10.00 CEST
Last modified on Wed 30 Aug 2023 10.17 CEST
Donald Trump extended his lead over his Republican nomination rivals in a series of polls conducted since the release of his mugshot in Fulton county after he surrendered on charges that he conspired to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia and his absence from the first GOP primary debate.
The former US president held commanding advantages across the board in recent surveys done for the Trump campaign and for Morning Consult, leading his nearest challenger, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, in the overall race, in a head-to-head matchup, and in favorability ratings.
Trump has ‘moral compass of an axe murderer,’ says Georgia Republican
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That outcome has been a trend for Trump who has seen polling and fundraising boosts with each indictment this year – in the hush-money case in New York, in the classified documents case in Florida, and in the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington.
It also suggests that some of DeSantis’s principal campaign arguments – that he is more electable than Trump – have failed to cut through with likely Republican voters even after he had the opportunity to establish himself last week in Trump’s absence on the debate stage.
The polling commissioned and touted by the Trump campaign in the days after Trump surrendered at the Fulton county jail suggests the release of his mugshot that underscored his legal jeopardy and skipping the first GOP debate has not weakened him among likely Republican primary voters.
Overall, Trump polled at 58% compared with DeSantis at 13% among roughly 2,700 likely Republican primary voters surveyed by Coefficient, improving his lead by three points since the start of the month. No other candidate topped 10%.
The Trump campaign polling was consistent with a Morning Consult poll which found Trump’s lead unshaken in the immediate aftermath of the release of his mugshot and the first Republican primary debate, with Trump at 58%, DeSantis at 14% and no other candidate again above 10%.
The survey found that even if all the other candidates withdrew for a unified opposition against Trump, the former president would win the hypothetical head-to-head race against DeSantis by almost a two-to-one margin, 62% to 23%.
Notably, in the days after Trump’s surrender in Fulton county, the share of voters who believed Trump is guilty of the charges dropped by 11%, while the share of voters who believed Trump was being indicted as part of an effort to stop him running for president held at 74%.
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The survey comes less than six months before the first 2024 primary contest and the political landscape for Trump could still change as he spends more time in courtrooms across the country and off the campaign trail.
On Monday, the federal judge presiding over the special counsel prosecution of Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, scheduled the trial to commence on 4 March 2024, one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries or caucuses.
Both Trump and DeSantis are viewed favorably among likely Republican primary voters, 75% to 62%. But the intensity of the approval split for Trump, as 54% held a “very favorable” opinion for the former president compared with 19% for DeSantis.
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Trump open to Vivek Ramaswamy as vice president
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Conservatives are on a mission to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision
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Kristen Eichamer, right, talks to fairgoers in the Project 2025 tent at the Iowa State Fair, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump. The Project 2025 effort is being led by the Heritage Foundation think tank. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
WASHINGTON (AP) — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.
Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.
“This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”
The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.
Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.
FILE - Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.
“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.
Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.
Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.
As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.
“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.
The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s often sprinkled with apocalyptic language.
A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement ability into the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”
At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps and ensure the White House counsel is “deeply committed” to the president’s agenda.
Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting Republican agendas.
But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the enemy,” she said.
While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.
To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.
John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”
In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.
Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about the president’s capabilities.
“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.
At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone in the city, dirt streets in all directions.
It’s an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.
The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road, crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Dans acknowledged — the idea of joining government to shrink it — but he said that’s the lesson learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain control.”
This story has been corrected to show the name of the university is the University of Colorado Denver, not the University of Colorado.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
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How Vivek Ramaswamy has changed his characterization of Jan. 6
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Most candidates at the first GOP primary debate said former Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing by certifying the 2020 election results while also suggesting it's time to move past Jan. 6. The question was not posed to Vivek Ramaswamy though, who has been vocal in his condemnation of alleged government lies that he says have fueled national division around former President Donald Trump and his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In a contentious interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Ramaswamy echoed earlier statements he made to the National Review by saying Pence missed “a historic opportunity … to unite this county” when he certified the results of the 2020 presidential election. During his appearance on the show, he also said that if he had been in Pence’s position, he would have implemented his voting reform proposal by Jan. 7, the day Pence certified Biden's win, before “declaring a reelection campaign” and certifying results.
His proposal: single-day voting via paper ballots requiring a government-issued I.D. "matching the voter file.”
Entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy gestures as he arrives to take part in the first Republican Presidential primary debate at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisc...
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Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images
MORE: 14th Amendment, Section 3: A new legal battle against Trump takes shape
"If we achieve that, then we have achieved victory, and we should not have any further complaint about election integrity,” he said.
Ramaswamy has said that he would extend limited accommodations for absentee voting to people with disabilities, for example, but he does “not think that is an excuse for creating [a] multi-week voting processes with ballot harvesting, and mail-in voting that undermines public trust in our elections,” he told reporters recently during a campaign stop in Pella, Iowa.
Ramaswamy’s views on Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s role in it have evolved since 2021. The presidential candidate once called Trump’s actions on the day “downright abhorrent” and criticized “stolen election” claims in his second book, “Nation of Victims.”
"It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again,” he wrote in the book. "I'm referring, of course, to Donald Trump."
MORE: Trump's indictments: Polling shows half of Americans want him to suspend his campaign, and more takeaways
Now, two and half years later, Ramaswamy seems to give the claims slightly more credit, focusing on public distrust stemming from the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol and standing on his commitment to pardon Trump and those now facing federal charges related to that day to “move the country forward," he said in a live town hall with NewsNation in mid-August.
Ramaswamy, who has said that he would have made different decisions than Trump on Jan. 6 but does not consider Trump’s actions criminal, told ABC News that his comments condemning Trump in the days after the riot were about how he handled Jan. 6.
"What I would have done? ... Starting that day under the same circumstances, I would have said, as soon as there are people violently approaching the Capitol, 'Stand down,’” he said in an interview with ABC News.
"Standing by while protesters turned violent, I think, was a bad mistake of leadership," he added while reiterating, "I don't think Donald Trump was the cause of Jan. 6."
Although he says he stands by his writings, maintaining as he wrote a year ago that he has not seen evidence of mass ballot fraud, he attributes his new views in part to skepticism over “the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop story,” he said on the Sunday news program. What has remained the same, however, is Ramaswamy's assertion that higher powers are at play, whether it be Big Tech and censorship, as he wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2021, or what he calls the “administrative state,” which he defines as an unofficial fourth shadow branch of government that has influence over political and civic action.
The supposed nuance of Ramaswamy's views, however, does not always appear to come across as he may hope, something that played out in real-time at a campaign event in Newton, Iowa, after Ramaswamy answered a question about how to restore faith in the U.S. voting system due to ongoing debate over the validity of Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump.
“So many Republicans have lost faith in our voting system. And they say they're not going to vote because it doesn't matter. How are we going to change that?” one voter asked.
Explaining his proposal, Ramaswamy asked that attendees join him in “dropping our complaints about ballot fraud or election integrity” if it were to be enacted. Though many applauded, another voter called his stance “offensive.”
“I just want to be honest, and your answer was slightly offensive. We … the United States of America has the most secure elections,” she asserted. “I don't think you've ever actually worked an election.”
Ramaswamy told ABC News on Friday that he sees his voting reform proposition as an appropriate common ground for bipartisan efforts to resolve a pressure point in the country. Asked by ABC News as he met with a group of press after the Newton, Iowa event later if he thinks the U.S. has secure elections and if Trump or the indictments against him have affected public opinion of election security, Ramaswamy said: “I think the indictments have shaken public trust in our institutions, in our government more generally, to a pretty bad place.”
“I've laid out a very practical, a deeply pragmatic, and I believe noncontroversial approach to restore that public trust," he said.
ABC News' Will Steakin contributed to this report.
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‘Bring them to justice’: Georgia town residents demand answers in Trump election plot
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The Georgia state capitol in Atlanta. Fulton county is the epicenter in the election subversion case against Donald Trump, but neighboring Coffee county is also involved. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
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‘Bring them to justice’: Georgia town residents demand answers in Trump election plot
People from Douglas say accountability is lacking for local officials involved in election machine data breach in 2021
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Timothy Pratt in Douglas, Georgia
Mon 28 Aug 2023 12.00 CEST
Last modified on Mon 28 Aug 2023 19.58 CEST
O
n Saturday afternoon, roughly 70 people gathered on folding chairs in a sweltering church meeting room in the small town of Douglas, about 200 miles (322km) south-east of Atlanta, Georgia. Less than a week earlier, Donald Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in Fulton county for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including allegedly entering the Coffee county elections office less than a mile away and copying the state’s voter software and other data.
County residents at the town hall raised concerns about the lack of accountability for those who played a role in copying software and other data, and said they felt insecure about the safety and integrity of future elections.
Fury at Michigan officials charged in 2020 false electors scheme: ‘This isn’t who we are’
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“People think, ‘He’s been indicted in Atlanta, so it’s over,’” 80-year-old county resident Jim Hudson said to the room, referring to Trump. “[But] how do we regroup? How do we become a county not referred to as ‘Crooked Coffee’?”
The Rev Bruce Francis read a message from Bishop Reginald T Jackson, who oversees 500 Black churches in Georgia, referring to “troubling improprieties” that had brought this town of about 12,000 residents to the world’s attention.
“The nation is now aware of the travesty that happened in 2020,” he read. “What do we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
The “travesty” was what Marilyn Marks, the town hall’s main speaker, called “the largest voting system breach in US history”. It happened in January 2021, when multiple people working on behalf of Donald Trump allegedly entered the Coffee county elections office and copied software and other digital information from the agency’s computers, gaining access to the entire elections system of the state of Georgia, home to about 7.9 million registered voters.
The digital information obtained is now in an unknown number of hands, meaning that future elections could be affected in Georgia and in other states that use Dominion Voting Systems and other equipment made by partner companies. The breach has been publicly reported for more than a year, but was launched into a global spotlight on 14 August, when the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, issued indictments to Trump and 18 others. Several people were indicted for their direct role in the Coffee county breach, and nearly half the group had some kind of involvement in the incident, according to Marks.
It wasn’t federal, state or local investigators who turned up evidence of the incidents, but Marks’ nonprofit organization, the Coalition for Good Governance. The group obtained video, text messages and other information about what happened in Douglas as part of a lawsuit against Georgia, now in its sixth year, that seeks to force the state to switch from computers to hand-marked paper ballots in elections, due to vulnerabilities in digital voting systems. Seventy percent of US voters mark ballots by hand.
The Coffee county elections and registration office in Douglas, Georgia. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
The town hall was the first occasion for residents of Douglas to hear a detailed explanation of how events that took place in their own back yard had become headlines, what those events mean for future elections and, perhaps most important, who among their neighbors had not been held accountable, what can be done to change that and how to prevent such a breach from happening again.
Local residents wanted to know whether their personal information was “floating around in cyberspace”, if poll workers in Coffee county would be safe in future elections, and whether “money was exchanged for favors” during any of the visits to the local elections office by Trump’s associates.
Hanging over the room were not just the challenges members of small communities face when their own neighbors are implicated in serious wrongdoing, but, also, the issue of race.
Coffee county is about 68% white, but most of the attendees at the town hall were Black. One white woman said she had urged other white locals to attend, but was met with indifference.
Many were also aware that one of the more prominent locals present – city commissioner of 24 years and voting rights activist Olivia Coley-Pearson – was persecuted for years by the state for helping disabled and illiterate voters, while state election officials have shown little interest in investigating the breach, according to Marks. Coley-Pearson is Black; Trump’s associates involved in the breach here have all been white.
Screen shot from a Coffee county, Georgia, security camera at the Coffee county elections office showing a county Republican official, Cathy Latham, in a long light blue shirt, with a team of computer specialists that created copies of voting equipment data in January 2021. Photograph: Alamy
Before Marks began her talk, titled, “What the hack happened in Coffee Co?”, Hudson, a retired lawyer, addressed the room. A thin, soft-spoken man, Hudson told those gathered how, as a seventh-generation Georgian and county resident, he felt had “skin in the game” when it came to the breach. “That’s why, when I discovered what happened, I was so disappointed,” he said.
He lamented there had been “no independent investigation by our officials … [and] almost no local press coverage”.
Hudson suggested there needs to be an independent, local investigation and a plan for the future – “So this never occurs again in our county,” he said. The first reform, he said, should be that “the elections department office should never be used for a partisan meeting again”. The crowd applauded.
Marks took the stage. “Coffee county is the central foundation for this incredible indictment that the world is watching,” she said. The nonprofit director recounted how Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall called her on 7 March 2021 and told her that he and others had been to Douglas and “scanned all the equipment … imaged all the hard drives, scanned every ballot … all the poll pads – everything”.
On Tuesday morning, Hall became the first defendant named in last week’s indictments to surrender to authorities in Fulton county. He was shortly thereafter released on $10,000 bond.
Marks went on to detail how local elections director Misty Hampton – also indicted last week – communicated with people in Trump’s orbit, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has repeatedly backed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Later, Hampton’s replacement found the business card of Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the group that performed a discredited audit of Arizona’s votes, in the county elections office, according to information Marks uncovered. Lindell and Logan remain unindicted.
She pointed the room to “unanswered questions”: what happened to Hampton’s emails and laptop, which state investigators say they haven’t been able to obtain, and when did local election board members and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, learn of the breach? Also, why did local elections board member Eric Chaney, seen on video obtained by Marks welcoming Scott Hall and others into the elections office, remain on the board until September of last year? Chaney is also unnamed in Willis’s indictments.
“You can’t wait on the state,” Marks told the room. “It’s up to local people to demand accountability.”
Residents wait in line to vote early outside a polling station on 29 November 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the national group Black Voters Matter, took the stage and told the audience that he knew what it was like to be dealing with political controversy in a small town in the south, “where everybody knows what car you drive, and whether you’ve been at a meeting”.
Albright also reminded the audience what was at stake, pointing to Coley-Pearson, who faced multiple felony charges for allegedly breaking election laws. Coley-Pearson was never found guilty, but has suffered greatly from years of legal battles, she told the Guardian.
“They put all this money and time into investigating one woman?” Albright asked the room, again bringing applause. “And then you’re talking about the largest breach in US history? My message to the secretary of state and the county … is ‘Act like you care about it!’”
Then Coley-Pearson addressed her neighbors. “This is so important,” she said. “This is a threat to our democracy.” She noted that she had invited local elected officials from the county commission, the city commission and the board of elections – and only two came.
Referring to the breach, she said: “They felt like they could come to Coffee county because ain’t nobody gonna get involved except for Olivia and her few folks … [but] we’ve worked too hard … to let them take our rights away!”
Afterward, 70-year-old Alphermease Moore, who is Black and a Coffee county resident, noted that she was part of the local high school’s first integrated graduating class, in 1971.
“I was in Coffee high school’s first integrated group and was hoping, 50 years later, that things would be different. But the same things happening then are happening now,” she said, referring to Coley-Pearson’s prosecution on the one hand, and the lack of accountability for local white officials on the other. “It’s a constant climb.”
Those responsible need to be held accountable. Bring them to justice. Don’t let them walk away!
Douglas resident Larry Nesmith
Standing outside the church, Hudson was emotional. He had learned about the breach months ago, after reading about it in the national press. “I was stunned. I could not believe it.”
Hudson, a well-known, longtime white resident of Coffee county, has been writing the county commission and board of elections, seeking an independent investigation. He attended an elections board meeting this spring and remarked, “If this was Olivia Coley-Pearson [who breached the elections system], she’d be in jail already.”
Douglas resident Larry Nesmith has been active in local Democratic party politics for 14 years. He said he would have been at the board of elections office on 7 January 2021, when the first visit by Trump’s associates occurred, but Hampton “told me not to come”.
Months later, he said, “I found out what happened on TV. I was shocked to find out. I feel our board of elections tried to cover [it] up. There’s no way they didn’t know.”
“Those responsible need to be held accountable,” he added. “These are people I know. Those who haven’t been indicted need to be. Bring them to justice. Don’t let them walk away!”
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Team Trump demands dibs on mug shot windfall
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Untangling Ron DeSantis’ debate anecdote about an improbable abortion survival story
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis listens as former Vice President Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy cross-talk during a Republican presidential primary debate Aug. 23, 2023, in at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. (AP)
When the topic of abortion came up during the first Republican primary presidential debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shared a perplexing anecdote about a woman he met who he said had survived the procedure.
"I know a lady in Florida named Penny," DeSantis said. "She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital."
Some accused the governor of fabricating the story.
"Let me see if I understand this correctly. Doctors tried to abort ‘Penny’ multiple times and discarded her in a pan, and then her grandmother took her to another hospital? DeSantis lies like a toddler," one person posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Our research found that a woman named Penny, who tells an unusual birth story about an attempted abortion, does exist.
We asked DeSantis’ campaign for evidence or more information. The campaign replied via email, sending only a link to a Daily Signal article that identified "Penny" by her full name and recounted her story.
The woman DeSantis referred to is Miriam "Penny" Hopper, an anti-abortion activist who said she survived an abortion attempt in Florida in 1955. Her claim, which is uncorroborated, has been featured online by Protect Life Michigan, an anti-abortion advocacy group.
In a video and in interviews, Hopper said she had been delivered around 23 weeks gestation after her mother went to a hospital in Wauchula, Florida, while experiencing bleeding. In a 2013 interview with radio station WFSU, Hopper said she believes an abortion had been attempted at home before her parents went to the hospital, which also could be why DeSantis referenced "multiple" abortion attempts.
Hopper said the doctor at the hospital induced labor, and she was born at 1 pound, 11 ounces and was left in a bedpan. She told WFSU her grandmother found her alive the next day and was enraged about her being abandoned. Then a nurse volunteered to transport Hopper to what was then Morell Memorial Hospital in Lakeland, Florida, now the site of Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center. That’s about 40 miles north of the hospital where Hopper says she was born.
Her story has been used to support "born alive" bills in state legislatures, which aim to protect infants that survive an abortion, even though there are federal laws for that purpose.
We were unable to gauge the accuracy of Hopper’s account. We couldn’t find records, such as news reports, dating to the 1950s, and people who could corroborate the story, such as her grandmother, are no longer living. Hopper did not respond to requests for comment.
Medically speaking, the scenario is dubious.
From the 1950s through 1980, "newborn death was virtually ensured" for infants born at or before 24 weeks of gestation, The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology says on its website.
Recent studies have shown wide variation in modern-day survival rates for infants born around 23 weeks, partly because of improved hospital practices for resuscitation and active treatment.
A 2022 University of Rochester Medical Center study found that babies born at 23 weeks — who were "actively treated" at academic medical centers in the National Institutes of Health-funded Neonatal Research Network — had a 55% chance of survival.
This is considerably higher than the 23-week survival rate at many other institutions, as well as a previous study conducted from 2008 to 2012 in the same network, which put the rate at 32%. (Lifesaving care for babies born at 22 and 23 weeks varies by hospital policy and physician opinion, according to a New York Times story.)
Before the 1970s, most babies born before 28 weeks gestation died because they lacked the ability to breathe on their own for more than a short time, and reliable mechanical ventilators for these infants did not yet exist. That also makes it improbable that Hopper could have survived overnight without medical intervention when born at 23 weeks in the 1950s.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
RELATED: Fact-check: What Republican candidates got right, wrong in first debate on Fox News
RELATED: Ron DeSantis’ False claim that some states allow ‘post-birth’ abortions. None do.
Facebook video, YouTube archive, Sept. 16, 2022; Feb. 2, 2020
WFSU Public Media, For pro life advocates, the issues are both personal and political, April 18, 2023
Jezebel, Asked about abortion, Ron DeSantis tells bizarre story about a fetus in a pan, Aug. 23, 2023
The Lakeland Ledger, 100-year timeline: Lakeland hospital grew from 65 to nearly 900 beds
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Periviable Birth, October 2017
PubMed, Neonatal mortality rate: relationship to birth weight and gestational age, October 1972
PubMed, Neonatal mortality risk in relation to birth weight and gestational age: update, December 1982,
University of Pennsylvania Nursing, Care of Premature Infants, accessed Aug. 23, 2023
University of Rochester Medical Center, New research shows survival rate improvement for extremely pre-term infants, March 3, 2022
The New York Times, Parents of extremely premature babies face an impossible choice, April 16, 2020
Email interview, American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology press office, Aug. 24, 2023
The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter
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Chris Christie Has A Blunt Comeback To Being Booed At The Debate
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested he was unfazed by boos during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential primary debate.
The presidential candidate told CNN on Thursday that his best debate-stage moment was when he “told the truth about Donald Trump.” Christie is Trump’s loudest critic in the primary field, and one of few candidates willing to denounce the former president at all.
“Why do you think that was your best moment to get Republican primary voters to vote for you, when you had really loud boos every time you did that?” CNN’s Poppy Harlow asked Christie.
“Well, because not every Republican primary voter in America was in the arena,” Christie answered. “And because you can’t be looking to play to the grandstands, Poppy, when I was truly was talking to the people, the tens of millions of people who were watching in their living rooms.”
“The fact is, if you’re not going to talk about that, then then then why bother running? You should just concede the race to Donald Trump, which is what a lot of people did on the stage last night,” he added.
Of the eight candidates who participated in the debate ― which Trump skipped ― Christie was one of two who said they would not support former president as a nominee even if he was convicted in any of the four indictments he faces. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson was the other.
“Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States,” Christie said after the audience booed him.
On Thursday, Trump surrendered to authorities in Georgia, where he faces racketeering and conspiracy charges over an alleged “criminal enterprise” to change the state’s 2020 election results.
Watch the CNN interview below.
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Actual SEALs Fume at Ron DeSantis’ Navy Service Claims
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ELECTIONS
Actual SEALs Fume at DeSantis’ Navy Service Claims
‘MISLEADING’
DeSantis made a point during Wednesday night’s Republican debate to say he was “assigned with” and “deployed alongside” Navy SEALs.
Justin Rohrlich
Reporter
Updated Aug. 26, 2023 5:07PM EDT
Published Aug. 24, 2023 5:52PM EDT
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters
On Wednesday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had an important message for those watching him participate in the first Republican debate of the presidential primary season.
“I learned in the military—I was assigned with the U.S. Navy SEALs in Iraq—that you focus on the mission above all else, you can’t get distracted,” DeSantis said. “So Republicans, we’ve got to look forward and we’ve got to make sure that we’re bringing the message that can win in November 2024.”
DeSantis moved on without further explanation, leaving some observers extremely impressed. Others, however, were far less moved.
“He was never a Navy SEAL,” Billy Allmon, a former member of SEAL Team 1, told The Daily Beast. “It’s a misleading statement.”
DeSantis again said during the debate that he “deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs,” mirroring the backstory shared earlier this month on a podcast hosted by former Trump counsel-turned-co-defendant Jenna Ellis. During the show, DeSantis campaign surrogate Carly Atchison described her boss’ path through life in deeply inspirational terms.
An actual text from right leaning civilian last night. They think he's a SEAL. pic.twitter.com/IPco12Bt2I
— Brandon Sparks (@BrandonMSparks) August 24, 2023
DeSantis grew up blue-collar, then worked his way through Yale and Harvard Law, Atchison said. But rather than using his pair of Ivy League degrees to “make six-figures doing whatever, after 9/11 he raised his hand and said, ‘I want to serve my country.’”
So, Atchison continued, “He went out to Coronado, he trained, and was deployed, ultimately, with SEAL Team 1, in some of the most dangerous parts of the world at the time—Fallujah and others. Served his country out of this need for service. Then he went on to run for Congress. He obviously became governor, and now he’s running for president of the United States because he wants to reverse the decline of this country.”
The next day, Atchison appeared on another show, again lauding DeSantis over his decision to forsake a life of riches for a hitch with the SEALs. He “trained at Coronado with the SEALs, and he was ultimately deployed to Iraq with Navy SEAL Team 1,” Atchison told host Bill Mitchell, emphasizing that DeSantis spent time in “some of the most dangerous parts of the world.”
That’s “just the kind of person he is,” Atchison went on, before launching into a rundown of DeSantis’ poll numbers and complimenting his “bold, conservative leadership.” A day later, Atchison gave another interview, again describing the way DeSantis “went out to train in Coronado and was ultimately deployed with Navy SEAL Team 1 to Iraq… He earned a Bronze Star.”
In fact, DeSantis was a Navy lawyer, known in military parlance as a JAG. And in 2007, three years after his commission, he did serve as a legal adviser to a SEAL commander in Iraq. His role was to ensure the SEALs and Army Green Berets in the region abided by the rule of law and that captured enemy troops were treated humanely, in line with the Geneva Conventions.
“He did a phenomenal job,” Capt. Dane Thorleifson told the Miami Herald in 2018.
Nonetheless, while it may be technically true that DeSantis deployed “with” or “alongside” a SEAL team, which was based in Coronado, California, Allmon, who went through SEAL training in 1970 (BUD/S class 58), sees the governor’s narrative as something more akin to a lie by omission.
“I mean, I could go onboard the USS Constellation for a tour, and I can then go around saying, ‘I was on the USS Constellation,’ and just leave it at that,” Allmon told The Daily Beast. “And people would think, ‘Hey, he was on the Constellation.’ It just leaves an open forum, and he should have clarified it a lot better.”
I was on the Navy Staff at the Pentagon with a Navy SEAL.
So I, too, am a Navy SEAL. https://t.co/B9GY75YATE
— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) August 24, 2023
Don Shipley, another former SEAL (SEAL Teams 1 and 2; BUD/S class 131), has made a second career out of exposing fakers. He told The Daily Beast that he has “verified Ron so many times, for so many people,” and that he doesn’t think DeSantis is trying to purposefully mislead anyone. Yet, like Allmon, Shipley noted the distinct lack of follow-up by DeSantis to clarify his service.
“With DeSantis, ‘I was with SEAL Team 1,’ well, it’s the truth,” said Shipley. “But without going into a lot of detail, people [naturally] think, ‘Ah, you were a SEAL.’”
Still, in certain instances, a JAG can be more valuable than additional firepower, according to Shipley.
“They deploy with SEAL teams to keep them out of trouble,” he said. “[DeSantis] wasn’t a shooter, he wasn’t a door-kicker—but they do get some weapons training… [H]e deployed with Team 1 to keep them out of trouble… There’s a saying, ‘If you can take an extra shooter with you, or you can take a lawyer, take the lawyer.’”
DeSantis’ squishy descriptions of his “SEAL” service can be equally irritating for American vets who served in other branches of the service. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a onetime Air Force pilot who continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, said on Thursday that he has “had people tell me that DeSantis was a Navy SEAL.”
“It bothers me,” Kinzinger told The Daily Beast. “I deployed to support SEALs, Delta, etc, and never once have [I] tried to pretend I was one. And never once said I ‘deployed with the SEALs.’”
Reaction online to DeSantis’ SEAL story was swift, with radio host and former Navy pilot Kai Ryssdal tweeting, “I was on the Navy Staff at the Pentagon with a Navy SEAL. So I, too, am a Navy SEAL.”
“He was just a fucking Navy lawyer, never a SEAL,” former Navy officer Scott Mettler posted. “The SEALs were merely his clients.”
“An actual text from [a] right leaning civilian last night. They think he's a SEAL,” another vet tweeted.
Ron DeSantis in Iraq.
DeSantis for Governor
And in response to Kinzinger, Allmon tweeted, “Let me assure everyone that DeSantis was NEVER a U.S. Navy SEAL! Adam, though we may disagree on political issues, I thank YOU for your Honorable Service to our country! God Bless you and keep you safe.”
DeSantis also spent time during his JAG career stationed at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was an assistant urinalysis coordinator.
Some former SEALs weren’t even aware until a couple of years ago that DeSantis served at all, and his name was not well-known in the SEAL community, Kevin Kent (SEAL Team 5; BUD/S class 200) told The Daily Beast. Kent said he has not heard “anything positive or negative from the community,” and doesn’t know “of anyone that feels like [DeSantis] is stealing valor or banking on the [Naval Special Warfare] community.”
A little embellishment here or there by someone who may have been “SEAL-adjacent,” such as a support technician or, ahem, a JAG, “usually starts out being harmless, and then it snowballs and you just can’t stop,” according to Shipley. “Not everybody in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt was a Dallas Cowboy, but when you’re wearing a SEALs shirt in Walmart and somebody walks up to you and asks if you were a SEAL, nine times out of 10 they’ll say no. But that tenth time, they say yes—and they like the reaction they get.”
Making a broader point, U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Tom Schueman said he thinks it’s “unfortunate that the Global War on Terror generation has created a taxonomy of service.”
“Service always comes at a cost, and everyone who wears the uniform makes a sacrifice,” Schueman told The Daily Beast. “We should be proud of our service, and honest in our characterization of it.”
The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
With additional reporting by Zach Petrizzo and Jose Pagliery
Justin Rohrlich
Reporter
@justinrohrlich
[email protected]
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.
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The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-01-0915/2024-presidential-election-articulate-ignorance-vivek-ramaswamy
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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee Says if Trump Loses, 2024 Could Be Last Election ‘Decided by Ballots Rather Than Bullets’
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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee Says if Trump Loses, 2024 Could Be Last Election ‘Decided by Ballots Rather Than Bullets’
The conservative pundit and former judge said tactics are being used against the ex-president similar to 'Third World dictatorships'
Published |Updated
Zachary Leeman
JWPlayer
Mike Huckabee made an extreme prediction about 2024 when discussing the possibility of Donald Trump losing or being prevented from running due to his legal troubles.
In a segment over the weekend on his Trinity Broadcast Network series, the former Arkansas governor suggested the four sets of criminal charges Trump is facing is an attempt to keep him from office, comparing the tactics to those used in "Third World dictatorships."
Mike Huckabee in the Fox News Channel Studios in New York CitySteven Ferdman/Getty Images
Huckabee, who has already endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, said if former president is kept from office in 2024 because of his legal troubles, it'll be the last election in the country decided by ballots instead of bullets.
"If you're not paying attention, you may not realize that Joe Biden is using exactly those tactics to make sure that Donald Trump is not his opponent in 2024," he said. "Here's the problem, If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets."
Read More
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Ramaswamy supports full UFO disclosure: ‘We can handle the truth’
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Ken Thomas
and
Sabrina Siddiqui
Updated Aug. 29, 2023 7:14 am ET
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Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis outlined key points of his broad economic policy in late July, including replacing the Federal Reserve chair and revoking China’s trade status relations. Photo: CJ Gunther/Shutterstock
High-profile Democratic governors are stumping for President Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and simultaneously auditioning to become the party’s next standard-bearer.
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Fox News pundit calls Ramaswamy proposal ‘criminally stupid’ and ‘like a freshman foreign policy paper’
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Jacksonville shooting: DeSantis booed at vigil for victims of racist attack
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Jacksonville shooting: DeSantis booed at vigil for victims of racist attack
Published
28 August
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Media caption,
Watch: Ron DeSantis is booed at a vigil after a racially-motivated shooting in Jacksonville
By Gareth Evans
BBC News
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been loudly booed at a vigil for victims of a racially motivated shooting.
The Republican candidate for president was heckled in Jacksonville, where hundreds gathered on Sunday to remember the three victims of the attack.
He was forced to step back from the microphone before a member of the city council asked the crowd to listen.
"It ain't about parties today," Ju'Coby Pittman said, adding: "A bullet don't know a party."
Mr DeSantis, 44, who has loosened gun laws in the state and faced criticism from civil rights leaders for targeting what he calls "woke ideology", eventually spoke and called the gunman a "scumbag" which prompted applause from some of the crowd.
Around 200 people attended the vigil, which took place in a predominantly black area just yards away from the Dollar General shop where the shooting happened the previous day.
Twenty-one year old Ryan Christopher Palmeter fired eleven rounds at 52 year-old Angela Carr who was sitting in her vehicle, before entering the shop and shooting another two people dead.
Anolt Laguerre Jr, 19, worked at the Dollar General and was killed as he tried to flee.
Jerrald De'Shaun Gallion, 29, was shot dead as he entered the premises. Another woman was chased but managed to escape.
As police arrived, the attacker turned a gun on himself and died at the scene. An AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun, both legally obtained, were used in the shooting.
IMAGE SOURCE,
GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
The deadly shooting happened at a Dollar General in Jacksonville on Saturday
Police have said the gunman was motivated by racist hatred.
"He knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid," Sheriff T K Waters told reporters. "Finely put: this shooting was racially motivated and he hated black people."
He left behind racist messages, police said, which read like "the diary of a madman".
The gunman was detained for 72 hours in 2017 under mental health legislation that allows the involuntary detainment of an individual for treatment. He was released after the examination, police said, which is why it did not appear on his background checks when purchasing the guns.
More on US gun violence
The numbers behind the rise in mass shootings
America's fastest-growing gun problem
How gun violence is reshaping American lives
Parents' unimaginable grief a year after US massacre
Mr DeSantis said financial support would be provided to bolster security at the historically black Edward Waters University, near to where the shooting happened.
The gunman first went to the university campus, where he was asked to identify himself by a security officer. When he refused, he was asked to leave. He was then seen putting on a bullet-resistant vest and a mask before leaving the area.
"What he did is totally unacceptable in the state of Florida," Mr DeSantis said. "We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race."
Bishop John Guns, referring to Mr Gallion, told the crowd: "In two weeks I have to preach a funeral of a man who should still be alive. I wept in church today like a baby because my heart is tired. We are exhausted."
The shooting fell on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for civil rights, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous 'I have a dream' speech.
President Joe Biden, during remarks on the anniversary on Monday, called the shooting an "act of domestic violence extremism".
"Domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat we face in the homeland," Mr Biden said.
The president also renewed calls for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier said the shooting was being investigated as a hate crime.
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Georgia: in the eye of the Trump storm
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Weekend Dispatch
Will Georgia survive Storm Trump?
The state is readying itself for a furious political battle
BY MATTHEW TEAGUE
. Trump, possibly for the last time, moved through the world like a head of state.(Raedle/Getty Images)
Matthew Teague is a journalist and co-author of The Steal.
MatthewTeague
August 28, 2023
Filed under:
Flyover country Donald TrumpGeorgiaindictmentStop The Steal
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Coffee County, Georgia
Coffee County, Georgia, seems an unlikely setting for espionage. It sits far from the intrigues of Washington, far from the coming politico-criminal trials in Atlanta. Far, in a sense, from anywhere.
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As they jetted in in January 2021, the team working on Trump’s behalf might have noticed the openness — the emptiness — of the landscape: now the gold of hay fields, now the green of peanuts. They touched down at the tiny airport where, just outside the runway fence, an apparently crashed passenger plane sits decaying, nose in the soil. On the main road they passed Harvey’s grocery, and The Painted Lady antiques shop. In downtown Douglas, the county seat, they met the Coffee County elections director, Misty Hampton. And today they’re under indictment for tampering with the literal machinery of democracy; for conspiring, in the end, to overthrow the will of the American people.
“It would seem like a lot to clean up,” Hampton’s successor, Christy Nipper, said this week. She sat in a small and spartan office, bristling with determination to restore the public trust. She’s had the job a little over three weeks. “I’m learning a lot.”
Over her shoulder, like a portrait of the Pope in a Catholic home, a picture of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger surveyed the room. The Secretary sent someone recently to do what Nipper called a “health check”, making sure Coffee County’s voting machines are maintained and kept secure.
“I do my best to be completely honest and transparent,” Nipper said. She meant that figuratively, in the sense that when her assistant is out she answers the phone herself, and will listen to anyone’s concerns. But she also meant it literally.
She jumped up from behind her desk and strode outside her office, where she faced a blank wall. In a room on the other side is where the business of modern vote counting — memory cards and flash drives and secured computers — happens. And in two days, the day before Trump surrenders himself to authorities in Georgia, Nipper will knock a hole in that wall to install an enormous window for the public.
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“It’s gonna be four foot, top to bottom, and six foot wide,” she said. “They can stand here and watch.”
I’m reminded of an election worker named Lawrence Sloan, with whom I had spoken in Atlanta. Late on election night, 2020, he had been feeding ballots into an envelope-opening machine. When a tiny blade in the machine nipped his fingertip, he sat back and raised a middle finger in a salute to the machine. It had nipped him because a voter had left the voting instruction sheet in the envelope, so Sloan balled that up and tossed it aside. Then he leaned in close to the machine and whispered. “Oh, fuck you,” he said. “Do not do this to me right now; it is too fucking late. We have a better relationship than this.”
Several hours later he got a message from a friend: Have you seen this video? The link showed Sloan arguing with the machine and tossing away the paper. Someone had recorded it, added narration, and posted it. “I wonder what’s going on here,” the narrator says. “If that’s not voter fraud, I don’t know what is.”
In the hours that followed, more than five million people watched the video online, television news showed it, and threats rolled in from around the world. Sloan fled the count across downtown Atlanta, and ended up in hiding for weeks. All because someone could view and record him doing mundane envelope work. So in an electorally crucial state like Georgia — and beyond it the full United States — is transparency enough?
Nipper returned to the desk. Her short hair is the colour of steel, and she wore her plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Trump would arrive soon in Georgia, she knew. The coming trial will mark one of the most furious political battles in the history of the United States. She knew that, too.
“The world is watching,” she said. “I’ll let ’em see it all.”
***
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, satellite trucks surrounded the Fulton County Courthouse. Television reporters camped under tents, sweating, struggling to keep hair and makeup from wilting in the heat. The sun conspired against them with the pavement and granite of downtown Atlanta. Temperatures on the streets reached more than 43 degrees Celsius.
In a culture that wrings every salty droplet from its political news, this is something unprecedented: a former American president indicted by a state for election meddling. His attorney and alleged co-conspirator, Rudy Giuliani, pioneered the anti-racketeering techniques that now ensnare both of them and 17 other defendants. Fulton prosecutor Fani Willis has assembled a case that sweeps from the heights of American power down to those humble peanut fields.
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Trump’s own trial is likely to centre on his famous phone call to Secretary of State Raffensperger. In that conversation, Trump leaned on Raffensperger — whose office oversees elections in Georgia — to “find” more than 11,000 votes that he needed to win the state.
The indictment also accuses lesser-known figures, such as Trevian Kutti, whose story Mark Bowden and I revealed in The Steal, about efforts to overturn the election. She’s a Chicago publicist who had worked for Kanye West, but travelled to Georgia and pressured an election worker — a grandmother named Ruby Freeman — to confess fabricated election crimes. Freeman refused, and suffered a campaign of harassment online and on her doorstep.
In a twist unique to the American electoral system, the indictment also includes several “fake electors”: people such as David Shafer, former chair of the Georgia Republican Party, who met at the state capitol with other Republicans and signed a false Electoral College document. That is, they certified to the US Congress that Trump had won their state, instead of Biden. The indictment charges him with forgery and impersonating a public officer, among other things; Shafer has since claimed he was acting at Trump’s behest.
The indictment is a vast, wide-ranging thing that feels difficult to see all at once. But viewed as a whole it presents Georgia as a prize to which Trump felt entitled. For decades the state has voted Republican, and in 2020 its flip from red to blue shocked anyone — maybe including Trump — who wasn’t familiar with its deeper history. But for many years Georgia has undergone a demographic shift that made the flip inevitable, and that same shift has now culminated in a unique threat for Trump.
Georgia’s trajectory started at the very beginning, with an Englishman. Early in the 18th century, James Oglethorpe sailed from Kent to found the new colony according what was then a radical set of principles: Georgia should provide a haven for the oppressed and “unemployable”. Colonists should deal fairly with Native Americans. There should be no slaves.
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Oglethorpe’s vision was imperfect, and generations of economic pressures corrupted it. Even so, Georgia carried a strand of plurality in its DNA that its neighbouring states never had. And after the upheaval of the Civil War, that strand emerged. “Georgia saw the emergence of a strong black community during Reconstruction and afterwards,” according to Audrey Haynes, a professor of politics at the University of Georgia. Black universities came to life. Black businesses thrived. Black citizens rose to power in government — including the district attorney’s office.
Atlanta calls itself Black Mecca, but Georgia has expanded beyond that now, to become a beacon for immigrants of all types. In 1990 about 170,000 Georgians were born overseas; by 2021 more than a million were. The state has become, according to Haynes, “a place where, despite national politics and the conflicts that have emerged, most of these communities work together”.
Some of the state’s politicians have fallen to the temptation of polarising, tribal national politics, she said, where victory matters more than principle. But just enough haven’t: just enough leaders, conservative and liberal, have held on to Oglethorpe’s vision of cooperation over conquest.
***
The heat continued to rise throughout the week, in Georgia.
Two days before the former president’s arrival, two conservatives — both key figures in Georgian politics — met at a coffee shop in Vinings. Jordan Fuchs and Gabriel Sterling sat outside, tucked into the shadow of the cafe. They spoke in the confidential tones of people who have survived a war together.
“I’m starting to enjoy that we played a part in these — these events,” Fuchs said.
“You are now,” Sterling shot back, grinning. “You weren’t, then.”
Fuchs is the deputy Secretary of State, and was present for Trump’s fateful phone call to her boss, Brad Raffensperger. Sterling is the chief operating officer for the Secretary, overseeing elections. Back in December 2020 — during the strange twilight after the elections and before the January 6 riots in Washington — the pair had sat at a different table, having lunch together when someone forwarded Sterling a social media post. In it a Trump supporter claimed a young election worker had been “caught committing treason”, and named him. The post included a video of a noose slowly swinging in the wind.
“I’ve got to do something,” Sterling had told Fuchs, at the time. They called a press conference on the capitol steps, and Sterling spoke. “I am going to do my best to keep it together,” he said, drawing out each word, “because—it—has—all—gone— too—far. All of it!” He cited multiple instances of violent rhetoric, including from people working on Trump’s behalf. “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a DAMN WORD are complicit in this. It’s too much.”
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Then Sterling addressed the president directly, in words that would prove prophetic on January 6: “Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We’re investigating. There’s always a possibility, I get it, and you have the rights to go through the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do, and you need to step up and say this, is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right… It’s un-American.”
His voice rang against the walls of the capitol atrium: the sound of divisive national politics crashing into the bulwark of Georgia. After the press conference, Raffensperger called Sterling and Fuchs. “Well,” he said, “You didn’t tell me you were going to say that.” Afterward threats from around the world escalated until members of the Secretary’s staff kept bullet-proof vests within reach, at the office.
Now, over their coffees, Fuchs and Sterling ponder how to avoid disaster in 2024. “The problem with transparency without education is that people see things they don’t understand,” Sterling said.
But the problem runs deeper, he said. You can’t educate people out of bad intentions. “We’re more disconnected than ever before. Covid exacerbated that. People don’t go to church as much. That used to be a great balancer. You could be a bricklayer, a butcher, a lawyer, a doctor — you went to a church together,” he said. “Now it’s easier to be meaner.”
That quality — the meanness — makes any civic undertaking, like an election, feel impossible. “There is a flaw in this,” Fuchs said. Lying pays. Politicians can turn a loss into a cascade of donations, if they persuade voters an election was stolen. “You can be the most transparent. You can do the best job in the world. But still.”
Audrey Haynes, the professor, later agreed with Fuchs’s sentiment. “You will never generate trust among those who do not want to believe,” she said. James Madison, the architect of the US Constitution, “understood that institutional design was important to keeping any governing or related body operating with integrity. But it also requires that we pledge ourselves to principled behaviour. If leaders do not then they may gain in the short run but we all lose in the long run.”
Fuchs and Sterling emptied their coffee cups. The heat drained away conversation, and the old friends parted ways.
As he walked away Sterling mused on whether Trump would pose for a mug shot. “If they do, he’ll make a t-shirt of it.”
***
The former president has many opponents, but none has ever accused him of anticlimax. On Thursday, he arrived in Atlanta somehow embodying both gravity and bombast, like a monarch landing in hostile territory.
“Thank you very much,” he told the press, as he descended the stairs from his plane.
From the airport his motorcade forayed into a different Georgia, far from the open fields of Coffee County, or the granite cleanness of downtown Atlanta, and an infinite distance from the decorum of the White House or even the golden crust of Mar-a-Lago. The once-president visited a neighbourhood dominated by chain link fences and liquor stores, loops of barbed wire and payday lenders. At the centre of it loomed the Fulton County Jail, although no one here uses that name. They know it as Rice Street Jail, one of the worst in the nation. The US Department of Justice recently opened an investigation into the jail, after an inmate’s dead body was found infested inside and out by insects.
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Trump’s arrest — in that neighbourhood, at that jail, submitting to fingerprints and yes, the mug shot — is singular in American history. A sordid moment, regardless of party. But the expectedness of the situation — moving a former president in and out of a known location, at an anticipated time — required a massive display of Secret Service, state police, local sheriff’s deputies, SUVs and motorcycles, two ambulances, drones overhead, lights and sirens: a spectacular eruption of power and protection. Trump, possibly for the last time, moved through the world like a current head of state.
Atlanta, though, also prepared for the moment. The mood on the street, as Trump surrendered himself, seemed festive. A nearby nightclub called Suite Lounge had created a flyer featuring Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit. “Free hookah for ladies,” it read. The club posted the flyer on Instagram, set to a song by rappers Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris:
“Welcome to Atlanta.”
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122 COMMENTS
Most Voted
Steven Carr
26 days ago
If somebody other than Trump is the Republican candidate, he or she will also be hit by spurious charges, or people will suddenly appear claiming racist behaviour or sexual assaults from 15 years ago.
Remember how the media went after totally moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney?
And how the media dredged up rumours of McCain’s affairs? (He sued)
And how the media buried all mention of Hunter Biden’s laptops?
Last edited 26 days ago by Steven Carr
95
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JJ Barnett
25 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
I agree, we already saw this with DeSantis.
There is a good chunk of the GOP donor class that think Trump is the issue, and they should push him out of the way and then they’ll definitely win with a DeSantis or similar. I’m not sure that’s true, actually.
It is true that Trump seems to cause a very unique sort of radical derangement in bourgeois folks — they literally cannot think straight if his name is mentioned, they just start frothing at the mouth. But when Trump was quiet for a while 2021 and 2022, look what happened to DeSantis… he became the next most visible conservative (because of his governance in Florida) and the left and the major media immediately started setting up the narratives that he was a fascist, a racist, and a homophobe.
They’re starting to do it to Vivek now, because he did well in the debate this week and his profile is rising. Republicans have to understand that Trump declared war on the left and the ‘deep state’ / administrative state (whatever you want to call that permanent power base), and they’re still in war mode. This fight is existential for them. They’ve pushed the boat out really far — look at how they’re weaponising the justice system, the education system, the open border etc…
All bets are off, they’re going for broke. They’re going to try to put this ‘Trumpy’ anti-establishment movement down so hard that nobody ever even thinks about confronting this power base again. Republicans don’t get what’s happening here. The power base flexing it’s muscle right now is in a fight for it’s very survival, that’s why the gloves have come off. Once they dispatch Trump, they won’t put the guns away, they’ll immediately turn them on the next challenger. That’s how cultural revolutions play out.
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Philip LeBoit
25 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
Lee Atwater, W’s campaign manager was behind the McCain illegitimate daughter story in the South Carolina primary. Michael Schnidt of the New York Times broke the Hillary email story, March 2, 2015. Trumps encouraging Russian hacking, and violence if he continues to be prosecuted has been public. Please don’t rush to his defense.
-17
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Cho Jinn
25 days ago
Reply to Philip LeBoit
So neoliberals are just awful, got it. What does this have to do with political persecutions, and why is it ok this time?
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Andrew Fisher
23 days ago
Reply to Cho Jinn
“Neoliberals”? Let’s just label anyone who doesn’t agree with my preferred conspiracy theory. Apart from being irrelevant to the argument, this is made even more absurd by the way that many Trump supporters were previously enthusiastic supported of G W Bush!
It isn’t “political persecution” to object to someone trying to influence election officials to find votes in his favour and then even to publish their names, so that they can be fair game for his unhinged supporters issuing death threats. Whatever else Trump may be, he is a bullying sleazeball.
I don’t support the progressive Left, but Trump did not win the 2020 election, or come anywhere near to doing so. Numerous court decisions do not support the motion of widespread and decisive electoral fraud.
1
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Steven Carr
26 days ago
Of course, in 2016 there were faithless voters in Electoral College who did not vote for Trump. Nobody thinks they did anything illegal.
In Hawaii in 1960, the Democrats decided that , although the Republicans had won the count at the time of the finalisation of the electors (Dec 13), they were going to have their fake electors Jennie K. Wilson, William H. Heen, and Delbert E. Metzger vote for Kennedy.
Nobody thought they did anything illegal.
In fact, the Democrats pressed to overturn the result even after the ‘safe harbour’ deadline had expired. Nobody threw them in prison.
The charges against the Republicans are purely political, as shown by the way the media are desperate to ensure that the charges have a political impact.
Last edited 26 days ago by Steven Carr
79
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j watson
26 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
No doubt you’ll get some ticks from readers who want to believe firstly that something as malign happened in 60, and that here in 23 facts irrelevant now and it’s all political. However it’s utter cobblers on both elements.
Your reference to 60 of course is deliberately limited. Hawaii recounted Initial result as Nixon won by 140 votes – so a recount was of course inevitable. It’s not 11k like in Georgia 20 is it, where nonetheless they recounted 3 times. Kennedy won after the recounts. Courts confirmed that. A key difference is what Nixon then said essentially ‘,,,America cannot afford a Constitutional crisis’ and he did not contest the Court’s conclusions. He went on to say ‘In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win’
Much the same as Gore in 2000.
You’re beginning to notice a major difference I suspect.
Separately in 60 some Southern Republicans tried to get their electoral college reps to change their votes and exerted considerable pressure with false legal arguments why it was legit, but it came to nothing and those reps felt obliged to respect the vote of the people in those States. Strange how you don’t mention that endeavour. Any reason?
I suggest you read through the multiple indictments now and then re-assess your view. It takes some time but it is overwhelming and given the importance of issues at stake beholds anyone interested in such issues to read, or really recognise one views not of great value. I strongly suspect many will not because many of us can cling to our beliefs way after logic and fact points elsewhere. The Sunk Cost fallacy never better demonstrated.
Last edited 26 days ago by j watson
-19
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Steven Carr
26 days ago
Reply to j watson
So you have no problem with people setting up fake electors pending the results of a challenge (there were lawsuits pending in Georgia)
‘ Kennedy won after the recounts’
The recounts were after the safe harbour date.
And you have no problem with the result being changed after the ‘safe harbour’ date….
Provided, of course, it is changed after the safe harbour date in favour of the Democrats…..
That must be the ‘major difference’ I am meant to notice…..
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Andrew Fisher
23 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
None so blind….
Apart from the rather desperate fact that you are going back to 1960 for an example, and that Democratic Party was very different from today’s, the major difference is that neither the Democrats nor Republicans were previously going to risk a constitutional crisis while Trump and his fanatical supporters are. Otherwise we would have heard of previous “January 6th” incidents.
1
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Steven Carr
26 days ago
Reply to j watson
As for the multiple indictments, here is how they were described.
New York Times: “Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted late Monday in a sprawling racketeering investigation…”
Washington Post: “A sprawling investigation…”
Wall Street Journal: “The sprawling indictment…”
Associated Press: “A sprawling case in Georgia…”
CNN: “A sprawling indictment…”
MSNBC: “The sprawling case…”
‘Sprawling’ is media-speak for ‘They are just throwing mud, but we can’t say that out loud’.
Even the Washington Post was running articles headlined ‘Is Georgia’s case against Trump one case too many?’
The indictment even says it was a crime for Trump to have declared victory on Election Night when he was leading in so many states, like Pennsylvania and Georgia….
And you are actually defending this garbage indictment – an indictment which says it is a crime for a candidate to say he is winning just because the count of votes is in his favour.
Wow! Have you no shame?
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
Ah! So the media use the word ‘sprawling’ therefore he’s innocent. You should be a lawyer.
-16
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
In order to have standing, you have to have alternate electors. To allege fraud, you have to pretend that nobody understood what the electors were there for, when in fact everybody understood the legal status fo the alternate electors. This is an effort to make Republicans objecting to elections illegal. It’s a direct attack on the rule of law and the Constitution.
Last edited 25 days ago by Douglas Proudfoot
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j watson
25 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
Not sure your definition of ‘sprawling’ implies ‘throwing mud’, but those were media headlines and a judge will decide of course.
Having read the Indictments I can tell from the comments below many haven’t. They jumped straight to counter arguments and missed out the bit in the middle. Inevitable though I guess.
What I’d add while we on it is Trump has to defend a number of civil claims this Autumn too. These relate to his sexual predator behaviour and fraudulent business dealings. It’ll stretch further his supporters belief this is the sort of Man who should lead any Nation. So be ready to pull further contortions.
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Michael Coleman
25 days ago
Reply to j watson
So please tell us exactly what was Trump’s greatest crime in GA. Was it his statement to GA Sec. State to “find” the 11k votes? That is not a crime and clearly Trump didn’t think it was as there were many people on the call – he may not be bright but he is not that stupid.
There are numerous historical, national examples of votes from districts being lost or initially tallied incorrectly. Suggesting the governor “find” votes would be very suspect if Raffensperger was a co-conspirator, but his actions throughout the episode made clear he was not beholden to Trump.. Given their relationship, “find” clearly means find through legal means – why on earth would someone not beholden to Trump (and obviously not a fan) commit a major crime for him? It’s absurd and legally invalid in this context to claim find means commit fraud.
Again, strip away the RICO and conspiracy icing on this BS cake and tell us (since you read the indictment) what exactly was the crime Trump committed?
FYI – I want Trump gone ASAP but not by any means.
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to Michael Coleman
“State to “find” the 11k votes? That is not a crime and clearly Trump didn’t think it was as there were many people on the call – he may not be bright but he is not that stupid.”
That’s an interesting point. Hitler thought that murdering all the Jews in Europe wouldn’t be a crime either. You’d say that absolves him?
Secondly, a case could be made that Trump’s narcissism is so total that he really believes the things he says. He ‘knows’ he won, irrespective of mere, vulgar vote counting, and thus he merely wants the lost votes found. What’s wrong with that? — you ask. Do you really need it explained?
-20
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
So if Trump is really Hitler, then any means necessary are just fine, including outlaw moves, right? However, your assumption, that Trump really is Hitler, remains at best unporven. Since Tump’s son-in-law and daughter are Jewish, it’s a pretty big stretch. So in my fact cheking capacity, I give you 4 Pinocchios. Since My grandfather was Jewish, and my wife and 5 of my 6 grand children are Jewish, I think I’m qualified to rule on this issue.
18
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
I didn’t say Trump was Hitler — that would be an insult to an evil genius — I said that one is not excused for one’s evil simply by claiming that one thought it was the right thing to do. My point is that there would have been zero convictions at Nuremberg if the nazis only had to claim that they thought they were doing the right thing. “Well then Herr Goering, you thought that what you were doing was admirable, so you’re free to go.” Yes?
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Andrew Fisher
23 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
He didn’t actually say that!.The quality of many of the arguments on here is truly abysmal.
1
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C Yonge
25 days ago
Reply to Michael Coleman
Exactly, like when Trump quipped that if Russia was so good at hacking that maybe they could find Hillary’s emails in front of thousands they suggest he was seriously requesting that from the Russians. I mean that was a classic riposte and they act like he was subverting democracy
4
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j watson
25 days ago
Reply to Michael Coleman
As you know already the Indictments provided examples to support – efforts to pressure Georgia officials to undo the election results; a scheme to assemble false electors claiming to represent the state in the Electoral College, submission of documents that contained lies about ballot fraud and attempts to enlist the Justice Department to aid his pressure campaign; as just some. And one assumes not all evidence disclosed as yet. And that’s just Trump. Many of the other alleged conspirators have just as damning, if not more so, positions to try and defend. Why he’s already trying to distance himself from many of them. Watch them start to flip.
What’s important too is he had a right to context the results through the Cts, just as Gore contested Florida in 2000. When the Cts ruled, with many judges appointed under Trump and Republicans, he did what no other President has done – continued to seek ways to overturn. As you also well know if a Biden had phoned up a Democrat Governor after losing in the Courts asking him to find 11k votes you’d have been foaming at the mouth ‘lock him up’.
-6
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to j watson
Thank you sir. Ironic that even such an outright criminal as RMN yet had enough patriotism in himself that, tho he might be the sort of person who would order a burglary of a shrink’s safe, he would not stoop to treason. Didn’t he say something to the effect that: “They stole the election fair and square.”?
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
So Nixon said vote fraud in Chicago was OK in 1960. The vote fraud in Chicago got more and more blatant. In the 1982 Election, the Chicago Machine cast 100,000 fraudulent votes in the race for Governor of Illinois. The Republican, Jim Thompson won anyway, by just under 9,000 votes. Reagan’s DOJ successfully prosected 63 Machine Democrats for vote fraud. It held down the vote fraud in Chicago for a few elections.
12
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
He didn’t say it was OK, but he understood that once Kennedy was Confirmed, it would do more harm than good to attempt to reverse the election. He got his revenge later, did he not? Every student of American history should know that, historically, the Rats have been far and away the more corrupt party. But that hardly justifies the GOP behaving in the same way.
-1
REPLY
Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to j watson
All 4 of Trump’s indictments have one thing in common. They are all novel legal theories.
In the New York case, Bragg is using an unprosecuted alleged federal campaign violation of misreporting the payoff of Stormy Daniels to build it into a state felony of business reporting fraud. The statute of limitations on the federal election violation has expired, hence the state charges. Nobody has ever been charged like this before.
In the federal case in Florida, Smith is charging Trump with violating the Epionage Act by fighting with the National Archives over whether he can keep 100 classified documents from his presidency. No other former president has ever been harassed like this by NARA. No other president, vice president or even cabinet level official has ever been charged with violating the Espionage Act.
The “Jan 6” indictment is that protesting possible election fraud and asking for Congress to take a look at it is obstructing a government proceding and treason. The government’s case assumes that the 2020 election was immaculate, or at least there wasn’t enough obvious fraud to change the outcome, and that any statement to the contrary is obviously misleading fraud on the federal government. Trump has no 1st Amendment right to petition Congress for redress of grevienaces, as provided in election law and the Constitution. Pay no attention to the millions of people, like me, who think there were a lot of things that were off about the 2020 election. The government position is that there’s no room for doubt here. The indictment assumes they don’t even have to prove there was an insufficient amount of fraud to change the outcome. It’s supposed to be obvious.
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
In the latest mug shot opportunity, the Constitution doesn’t seem to apply in Georgia, the state in the US, not the country near Russia. Trump doesn’t have the 1st Amendment right to petition Georgia State Government officials for redress of grievances, and he also doesn’t have the 6th Amendment right to counsel about election law, either. That’s why Trump’s election protests in Georgia are being prosecuted as racketeering , and his lawyers have been indicted with him.
I ain’t a lawyer, but this is the first time I’ve heard of that politics protected by the Constitution have been prosecuted as racketeering. The fact that it’s GOP politics, and not Chicago Machine politics, surprises me, but probably not the ghost of Mayor Richard J Dailey.
If this was a normal jurisdiction, not a political partisan proceeding, the charges would be dismissed in a pre trial hearing on Constitutional grounds. Since the judge, and likely the jury, will be politically partisan, the guilty verdict is certain. They will vote at the Party’s call, to expand the Party’s power, with no thought of what precidents they set.. After all the Party’s power is all important. Without it, how can we preserve “our democracy,” read as their hold on power.
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Michael Coleman
25 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
No 1st amendment right to petition? Tell me you’re a Democrat without telling me you’re a Democrat.
0
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Cal RW
25 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
The Florida classified documents case is a bit off topic here but I do have to take exception to your characterization of it. There have been numerous cases of government officials taking classified material home and being prosecuted for it. An example is when David Petraeus was CIA director he took classified home and showed it to a mistress (a military reservist with a clearance). He was charged, pled guilty to the crime, paid a fine, and was forced to resign his position. Another is the young enlisted military member, Jack Texeria who took classified materials home and posted them on-line to friends in a private web site. He was arrested, taken away in handcuffs, and has been in jail since his arrest. He is facing felony charges. There are literally countless examples of these kind of cases. There are also countless cases where people mishandle classified and are let off with mere reprimands. My experience (over 40 years working in this arena with these kind of documents) is that accidents happen, people get sloppy on occasion, sometimes knowingly break the rules to cut corners, but when confronted they usually acknowledge their error, admit to their mistakes, and take their lumps. Trump’s case is clearly different than the typical “administrative security deviation”. He doesn’t see it that way, and we can let the jury sort it out after hearing the evidence.
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
“No other former president has ever been harassed like this by NARA.”
No other former president has needed to be ‘harassed’ like this. He is going to be proven to have lied to the NARA, that’s the felony. Sheesh, Biden had, what was it? four separate sweeps for classified documents? Some in the closet, some in the trunk of his car. Embarrassing. But he didn’t obstruct their return to the government.
“The government’s case assumes that the 2020 election was immaculate”
The government’s case doesn’t even mention that. The case is that, once legitimate means have been exhausted, sending a mob to sack the Capitol to prevent the certification of the election — and hang Pence — is treason, which it is. Trump can claim that he’s Jesus Christ if he wants to. He can claim he won the election. He can’t incite a mob however, and he can’t conspire to send phony electors to the Certification. Nor can he phone Brad R. asking for non-existent votes to be ‘found’.
Is Trump really the best the right can do? Is this what the Party of Lincoln has become? God, that’s sad.
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to j watson
Dershowitz disagrees, and I suspect he knows more about the law than you do.
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Hugh Bryant
24 days ago
Reply to j watson
I don’t have the impression that you are somebody who would change his beliefs when ‘logic and facts point elsewhere’. You’d challenge the facts and deny the logic just like everyone else. But you should at least be able to see how damaging it is to the rule of law when prosecutors bring cases that they know will be overturned on appeal in order to gain a political advantage. What will you say when actors you don’t approve of start doing it too? You won’t have any grounds to complain.
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David Barnett
23 days ago
Reply to Steven Carr
I have looked up the Hawaii 1960 business. It’s not really how you have described it. The election was extremely close and there was more than one recount, with Kennedy finally being declared the winner by 115 votes. Accordingly the Democratic electors were certified.
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Steven Carr
23 days ago
Reply to David Barnett
It was exactly as I described it. Exactly.
The recount was after the ‘safe harbour’ date for the choosing of delegates to the Electoral College, and the Democrats produced a list of fake electors , pending the results of their challenge to the count.
The procedure of choosing fake electors pending the results of a challenge is now being called ‘racketeering’ by Democrats.
Last edited 23 days ago by Steven Carr
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JJ Barnett
25 days ago
There is one thing I take exception to in this article, because I got tricked by this particular framing by other media, and have since found out that the context (deliberately removed) matters a great deal here…
Trump’s own trial is likely to centre on his famous phone call to Secretary of State Raffensperger. In that conversation, Trump leaned on Raffensperger — whose office oversees elections in Georgia — to “find” more than 11,000 votes that he needed to win the state.
This presentation; instead of giving us the full quote, makes it seem very clear that Trump is asking Raffensperger to commit fraud. I admit to having been taken in by it, as I’ve read it in multiple media articles and heard it in more than 3 news segments.
But the tape is out now, and when you hear these words in context of the sentences that surround it, it has almost the opposite meaning — Trump was convinced (and others in his circle were too) that they had already won Georgia, and that a recount would show it. The full tape appears to be Trump saying ‘No, we won this state, for sure — we need to do the recount, we only need 11,000 [which we definitely will have, I’m sure of it’].
That’s very different than how media are presenting it, which is more like Trump knew he lost, and was requesting that they go and commit fraud on his behalf, faking votes.
Trump is a man of many flaws, I don’t think his actions need this level of embellishment. Personally I think the NY case is BS, and so is the DC case (…that one will have also have 1st and 14th Amendment issues). However the Florida documents case does now appear more solid, if recent reports on the State’s evidence are accurate.
This Georgia case seems the most dangerous, when you consider what they’re trying to do here. The evidence is weak, so they hope to use RICO to pressure a large numbers of “co-conspirators”, and using the power of numbers to get some to flip on Trump and confess to a ‘conspiracy’ in exchange for immunity or some other plea. Given the stakes, this seems utterly reckless. There are things the Democrats have done in the past few years that are just beyond my comprehension.
This case does not have the appearance of propriety, it looks like a communist style hit job. And the fact that they’ve thrown 4 cases at him at once (at least 3 of which are very specious) means they’re both terrified of him, and do not care at all about the consequences of these actions. I find that scary. The public will not simply shrug if they try to jail Trump on what most people think are bogus charges.
Last edited 25 days ago by Jem Barnett
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to JJ Barnett
Pray, how could Trump ‘know’ he’d already won apart from the verdict of the people doing the counting? Try to think about this. The people holding the stop-watches say I lost the race, but I say I just set a new world record and I ask them to just — mind, the analogy works backwards — to ‘unfind’ a few seconds from my finishing time. Trump ‘knows’ he won but the people who count the ballots — the *only* people who can even form a meaningful opinion — say he lost. How does that work?
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JJ Barnett
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
Pray, how could Trump ‘know’ he’d already won apart from the verdict of the people doing the counting?
The tone of your question was rather patronising, but perhaps you didn’t mean it to be, so I’ll answer the question straight: Each party sends poll watchers, and their ‘ground teams’ do extensive exit polling. So the parties (and candidates) are constantly being fed info, and making judgements as the day unfolds about where they stand in a certain constituency based on that info.
Take the viciously contested Bush / Gore election; same thing happened there too. Gore was adamant that the info being fed back to him by the ‘ground teams’ should have equalled a clean win, and that therefore there must be shenanigans going on, or at a minimum screw ups with the counting. He was adamant about it — he felt that if there should be recounts and investigations, and he would be shown to be the winner.
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to JJ Barnett
My tone was meant to be exasperated sarcasm because it sets my hair on fire that an intelligent person can let partisanship blind them so completely. (BTW, just to set the record straight, I’m a deep conservative who detests wokeism and who prays for a decent conservative to lead America back from disaster. Remember when conservatives supported law? I still do.)
“Gore was adamant that the info being fed back to him by the ‘ground teams’ should have equalled a clean win”
But those exit polls are never better than approximate. In *fact* Gore won, but only by a tiny number of votes, *not* a ‘clean win’. And please note that he didn’t make personal phone calls to anybody asking them to ‘find’ a few more votes, he challenged the results publicly and via proper channels. Then, note, SCOTUS screwed him and, patriot that he is, — like Nixon! — he let the matter drop. He did not sent mobs to sack the Capitol.
Nuts, in a civilized country, even phoning a vote counting official in the way Trump did to just chat about the weather or wish him/her a happy birthday would be *clearly* out of bounds. I beseech thee to admit this. When conservatives have lost respect for law and even honesty, what hope is there? The adults have left the room.
Last edited 25 days ago by Ray Andrews
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JJ Barnett
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
The entire point of my [original] comment is that when you actually listen to the tape it sounds very clear that Trump was not pressuring an election official to do something illegal, he was pushing for a recount (as Gore did, and many others have). My point was, with the way the media framed this I too was under the impression that Trump brazenly asked someone to cheat for him.
But then I heard the longer clip and it is almost the opposite (in it’s meaning) to what I was being told. That’s extremely deceitful. It’s also very effective. It gets people raging and “setting [their] hair on fire”. It isn’t true though, it’s anger based on a partial fiction. As I said, Mr Trump is a very imperfect person, so this kind of embellishment is not needed. Let’s stick to the facts.
On this point:
[Gore] did not sent mobs to sack the Capitol.
Right. Neither did Trump though.
I’m British, so this isn’t a matter that I intend to set my hair on fire over. But the level of egregious lying and borderline hysteria around Trump thinking he won the election is just a bit too much. Overboard.
A lot of people who despise Trump point out his somewhat loose relationship with the truth. I think that’s a totally fair critique. But it becomes grossly hypocritical to be levelling that claim… if you intend to follow it up with such blatant falsehoods as “[Trump] sent mobs to sack the Capitol”. No, he did not. Which is why he has not been charged with anything remotely like that. Because that did not happen.
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Bret Larson
23 days ago
Reply to JJ Barnett
Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing.
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Patti Dunne
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
well, it all comes down to intent and we don’t know what Trump’s intent was. We can reason this way and that to illustrate a point, but to prove it beyond unreasonable doubt? That is going to be a hard task.
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Jim Veenbaas
25 days ago
Reply to Patti Dunne
That’s the thing. You have to prove that Trump believed there was no voter fraud and still told them to find 11,000 votes. How do you prove that? You need some evidence that he truly thought there was no fraud.
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
“How do you prove that? You need some evidence that he truly thought there was no fraud.”
But ‘proving’ what’s in someone’s head is always next to impossible, no? And that’s why the phone call *itself* must be forbidden. Otherwise you’d have every losing candidate in every election trying to lean on the vote counters — threats, bribes — and then just shrugging their shoulders and saying they honestly thought they had won.
This isn’t rocket science folks, it appalls me that such basic stuff even needs to be discussed. Perhaps you’d all see it more clearly if it was Biden doing it. Say he loses the next election by one state — Ooops, I mean he wins the next election ‘by a lot’ (he *knows* he won it irrespective of the vote-count) so he phones his good buddy the SS of that state and asks, politely, for the ‘missing’ votes to be found. There could be consequences if they aren’t found! What do you all think of that scenario? Don’t like it? Well then, Biden just shrugs his shoulders and says he thought he won — nothing to see here folks. Honestly, is this the state of democracy in the US of A?
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Jim Veenbaas
24 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
I’m actually on the fence about this and I’m certainly no Trump fan. There should be proof though – an email, a text, a conversation – that Trump thought he lost the election. It’s inconceivable that a person like Trump thought he lost the election and never said a word to anyone.
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
Permit me to doubt your conservatism, Mr. Andrews. Trump filed several court challenges to the vote count in Georgia. He started making phone calls only when most of the cases never got an initial hearing, and Raffensburger didn’t do what he promised in terms of looking for uncounted ballots.
Trump’s Constitutional Rights under the 1st and 6th Amendments are being taken from him with this indictment. You’re cheering it on. What makes you think that prosecutors will stop with taking Trump’s rights away, and won’t continue taking away other folk’s rights as well?
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
“He started making phone calls only when most of the cases never got an initial hearing”
Which rather makes my point — there are proper channels and Trump in effect admitted that when he used them. Losing, as he did, he then started using improper channels.
Interfering with due process in anything is NOT a constitutional right. Going back in history, would you say that Al Capone’s 1st Amendment rights would protect his ‘right’ to have private phone conversations with the judge, prosecutors and jury during his trial? After all, he ‘knows’ he’s innocent, so helping the jurors to see his innocence would surely be ok.
Silly, isn’t it? Both Capone and Trump have every right to *publicly* lie through their teeth of course, but they don’t have the right to ‘influence’ due process directly. You must know this.
BTW, please don’t confuse conservatism with Trumpism. Conservatives believe in the Constitution, the law, due process and adult behavior. Donald Trump is the opposite of a conservative (which is why he was a Democrat for most of his life and funded Hillary, so they say).
Last edited 24 days ago by Ray Andrews
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Douglas Proudfoot
24 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
Petitioning government officials for redress of grievances is protected by the 1st Amendment. The right to counsel is protected by the 6th Amendment. If you supported the Constitution, Mr. Andrews, you would allow that even Trump has these rights. Exercising them ain’t a legitimate basis for RICO indictment of Trump, let alone his lawyers.
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Ray Andrews
24 days ago
Reply to Douglas Proudfoot
He certainly does. Via legal channels. He tried legal means and lost, so he started using illegal means. It’s easy if you want to see it. If you don’t want to see it you won’t see it.
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Bret Larson
23 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
Well, I guess well have to see what happens. What do you think the odds are that he is convicted?
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C Yonge
25 days ago
Reply to JJ Barnett
I made a reply to this comparing the “find votes” statement to asking russia to find Hillary’s emails in front of thousands(as if he would commit a crime in TV) and unherd deleted my comment for what that’s worth. Actually, my comment reappeared later
Last edited 25 days ago by C Yonge
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to JJ Barnett
Your take is much the same as Dershowitz’s, which in my opinion gives it much merit. The others, esp. those whose authors obvious glee at Trump’s predicament shines through, not so much.
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Jim Veenbaas
26 days ago
I really don’t like the writing style the author decided to use for this story. This is hard news and the style should be straight forward and to the point – just the facts please.
Instead, he uses a scene-setting style that is better suited to human interest features. I don’t need to know that; “Jordan Fuchs and Gabriel Sterling sat outside, tucked into the shadow of the cafe. They spoke in the confidential tones of people who have survived a war together.”
Although the writer is clearly gifted, the style was inappropriate for the subject matter and is frankly a distraction that doesn’t add any authenticity to the arguments. How do you even know the two men spoke in confidential tones? I consider myself a moderate and this article did not alleviate any of my concerns about the way this is being handled.
I’m really on the fence about this whole thing. IMO Trump is a POS who would stoop to anything to get his way. Yet, I don’t trust the Dems and I know the security state and judiciary will carry water for them. I want to say let’s just throw the guy in prison and put the whole sordid affair behind us and move on. But will it solve anything? Is this the way to build trust in the millions of Americans who no longer trust the institutions?
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Julian Farrows
26 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
America feels like a powder keg ready to go off. This form of political lawfare is not good for the country whatever the outcome. I also wonder if this is why mainstream news media sites are predicting that COVID will return this fall. It would be a convenient excuse to suppress the ‘wrong’ sort of dissent.
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r ll
25 days ago
Reply to Julian Farrows
COVID will return and used as a weapon because it scares people to panic (except me and others) as I know its a scam and delaying tactic to keep voters at home and now we are finding what our “dear leaders” have done with their buddies at teh pharma companies and other government agencies scrambling to cover it all up before they go to jail (i wish).
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Steve Murray
26 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
As a complete outsider peeking in, i agree with you that the tone of this article – let’s call it “conspiratorial” – seems inappropriate. Yep, how could some of that detail be known, in any way except as an attempt to tell a story rather than an attempt at factual reportage. Perhaps that’s the point: there are no facts, only factions.
Then i thought, “but this is America” which itself is a “story” and one that’s unravelling before our very eyes. This article therefore encapsulates precisely that, and therefore succeeds in its most important goal.
Last edited 26 days ago by Steve Murray
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Rob Nock
26 days ago
Reply to Steve Murray
The section about Lawrence Sloan struck me as odd. How does the author know what happened with LS that night. Maybe it is all recorded and crystal clear but it sounded as if one person’s account was being treated as fact.
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Martin Bollis
26 days ago
Reply to Rob Nock
I was also struck by that. Employee is filmed throwing away a ballot and giving an election machine the finger … and here’s a very lame story as to why.
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Patti Dunne
25 days ago
Reply to Martin Bollis
I understood that he was throwing away the instructions that the voter put in the envelope. Those machines are calibrated to reject items over a certain weight. The weight being what the ballot plus envelope should weight. I know nothing about this situation, just my understanding from reading the article and experience from working in a bank processing center that used machines of this type.
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DA Johnson
24 days ago
Reply to Patti Dunne
Mr. Teague did not finish this story–was Lawrence Sloan fired or disciplined for destroying extra paper that came in with the ballot? However extreme the public reaction was to the video, election office workers know they are being filmed and know that extraneous items that come in with ballots cannot just be balled up and discarded.
It seems that this human-interest anecdote was used to illustrate the hysterical over-reaction to a trivial event, but such actions are prohibited exactly because of the perception of cheating that they create.
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Clare Knight
26 days ago
Reply to Steve Murray
I thought the writer described the atmosphere of Georgia and the mood very well. I’ve never been there but I felt like I had.
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Jim Veenbaas
26 days ago
Reply to Clare Knight
I thought he did a great job creating a sense of mood and tone, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for this type of story. It works better in soft stories where mood is just as compelling as accuracy.
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Caradog Wiliams
25 days ago
Reply to Clare Knight
I have spent some time in Atlanta and I liked it. It feels very cosmopolitan and quite, er…., homely for big city. Like most big cities today it suffers from the fact that its downtown area is very boring.
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Benedict Waterson
25 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
I thought it was very good. But I also got a few things out of your remark. Thank God for UnHerd
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DA Johnson
24 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
Thanks for commenting about the inappropriate style of this article, which does have a bearing on its content. Many readers seem to ignore the content of articles and jump right into holding forth with opinions that do not critique–or even marginally relate to–the subject in question or the way that subject is presented.
Last edited 24 days ago by DA Johnson
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Robert Detlefsen
24 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
Agree with the gist of your comment except for: “the writer is clearly gifted.” To me it read like something written by a kid in a freshman creative writing class.
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Darwin K Godwin
26 days ago
Political prisoners. Take away the human interest angle and the spectator sport aspect indulged by current reporting, and we see a great republic in decline. Half of American voters had their collective mugshot displayed on the front pages. I don’t understand how this can end well.
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Cathy Carron
26 days ago
Reply to Darwin K Godwin
This Democrat-waged warfare is destructive and every American should consider it thus. The Democrats have shown no nuance and have not taken their foot off the pedal for decades now….seems like they’re okay with running the country into the ground.
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Bryan Dale
25 days ago
One way to restore trust would be for election officials to follow the law. Georgia law requires signature verification of mail in ballots but that wasn’t done in 2020 and election officials refused to do it even on the recount. That could easily have meant the difference.
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Warren Trees
25 days ago
Reply to Bryan Dale
That is the main point in all this. The very selective and subjective enforcement of laws is nauseating and if this happened the other way round it would cause the left to be more apoplectic than they were when they contracted TDS, the night of the 2020 election, where they proclaimed they would impeach the bad orange man before he was sworn in.
Last edited 25 days ago by Warren T
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Bryan Dale
All hail the expert on Georgia election law!
Educated at Breitbart and the War Room – he don’t need no stupid book learnin’ to know tell us the law!
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
All hail Marxist truth! It’s the oxymoron that replaced military intellegence.
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Sure sure, Dershowitz was educated at Breitbart, then became a successful Harvard Law professor. He says the only indictment with any legal merit is the Florida documents indictment, which he also deems to be a ‘technical’ violation i.e. one that would never have been prosecuted had anyone other than Trump done it.
But hey, a clearly uber-partisan hack knows better.
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Tyler Durden
26 days ago
This is a fully virtual civil war now which I expect to become fully actual in 18 months time – and bloodily too.
And I suspect the Democrats wouldn’t mind that either, a chance to put the entire MAGA movement in Guantanamo – those who survived.
No Republican will be allowed to become President until they sign up to neocon principles and promise to rebalance the Supreme Court to ensure that woke equities prevail – postal voting alone will ensure that.
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Danielle Treille
25 days ago
Reply to Tyler Durden
Brilliant idea: throw all the MAGA cultists into Guantanamo cells and throw away the keys!
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Shrunken Genepool
25 days ago
Reply to Danielle Treille
You are the problem
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Ray Andrews
25 days ago
Reply to Danielle Treille
Half of a brilliant idea. To make it fully brilliant, throw all the woke/trans/CRT/BLM cultists in with them. AOC and Jim Jordan could share a cell.
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Tyler Durden
25 days ago
Reply to Ray Andrews
In some ways they are both Apocalyptic cults. One set are Gnostics/Hermiticists, the other apocalyptic survivalists.
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UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Tyler Durden
I expect 2024 to be a replay of 2020 when, to influence the 2020 elections, fires were started along Oregon Hwy 18 and 101 and Interstate 5. Men caught starting the fires were arrested with gasoline cans only to be let go to start more fires. People were burned alive including a boy and his dog not to mention all the wildlife. Yes, 2024 will be just another bloody election in America.
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AC Harper
25 days ago
Trump is, of course, innocent – until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence (once a liberal value) has become an early casualty of lawfare.
I look forward with interest to see how the loss of this presumption plays out when used against one or more Bidens.
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to AC Harper
You want to explain to us how fatso isn’t innocent until proven guilty? Has he been incarcerated? Execute without trial? Exiled to a faraway land that he can’t find on a map?
No. He has been indicted by a grand jury of his peers and is still free to grift the morons who support him for more and more of their cash. I assume that includes you?
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Man, you’re a nasty piece of work. Not too bright either.
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Champagne Socialist
24 days ago
Reply to harry storm
Did you send him money this morning? You did didn’t you, you silly boy!!!
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UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Calling names is juvenile, Champagne Socialist. Your comments remind me of those hurled at our civil rights leaders in the 1950s.
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Jonathan Nash
24 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Both the NY and Georgia AG’s stood on platforms to “get Trump”. First identify the criminal, then find a crime.
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Peter Johnson
25 days ago
I think the prosecutions have a ‘little boy who cried wolf problem.’ I mean – how many times have they done this. It is just boring. The other more serious problem is that is is clear to any objective onlooker that the Biden clan were running some kind of ‘pay to play’ racket for access to Joe Biden. Most people have a sense of fair play – and the differential treatment is not fair play.
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Peter Johnson
It’s clear is it? Maybe to a Tucker Carlson fan but to us folks who can actually read and stuff like that no such thing is clear.
This is where you say something stupid about a laptop. Go ahead – prove me right!
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Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
It’s a well known feature of bribery law that payments to children of politicians are considered bribery payments directly to the politician, except when the politician is President Big Guy. Then the rule of law doesn’t apply. What is a straight forward investigation becomes so complicated that it takes years and years, if it involves President Big Guy and his family. In fact, it took the DOJ so long to investigate Hunter for obvious tax fraud that the statute of limitations ran out on his 2 biggest revenue years, so he doesn’t have to pay his fair share, or even anything, in taxes for those years. And, at the rate the investigation is continuing, the statute of limitation on all of Hunter’s crimes may have completely expired before any case can be brought against him. But remember, nobody is above the law!
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Jim Veenbaas
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Maybe you and Trump should be running mates. You both employ the exact same rhetorical style – call people names and say stupid stuff. At least Trump is funny every once in awhile.
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Thicker than a brick, and way more arrogant with no grounds.
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UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Peter Johnson
Peter, you ask “how many times have THEY done this.” about Trump. Only four times, so far. Martin Luther King was booked 29 time so the Donald has 25 more to go.
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Dougie Undersub
25 days ago
A few “allegedly”s missing from this article.
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Caradog Wiliams
25 days ago
‘Fuchs and Sterling ponder how to avoid disaster in 2024. “The problem with (electoral) transparency without education is that people see things they don’t understand”‘
And here is the problem with politics today and the reason why Trump has so many dedicated followers. The idea that you have to be clever to understand what is happening in the world frightens normal voters. They feel that the clever ba*ta*ds are trying to trick them. As Michael Sandel demonstrates in his book, “The Tyranny of Merit”, the Democrat voters have become more and more those people with degrees, who hold important jobs, the experts, the people on TV during the Covid lockdowns, the ones who have let things get worse and worse by showing ‘facts’ which are not facts, graphs which are doctored for affect.
“The Tyranny of Merit”, like all books, is overstated and repetitive and misses one important criterion – that populations are getting older. The old people are also voting for Trump because he claims to represent the old America, the one of the ‘American Dream’. Older people have more problems in keeping up with modern ideas, things like gender, immigration, the decline of the family. But they are still voters and their opinions have to be considered. The Democrats are ignoring the old people in their rush to create new trends.
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Julian Farrows
25 days ago
Reply to Caradog Wiliams
The problem which you touch upon is that of the educated class. For decades, US universities have engaged in a fervent form of academic capitalism; this has resulted in a surplus of idiots who believe that not only does a degree confer intellectual superiority, but also a greater degree of moral superiority. This is why we now have a class politicians who are extremely stupid but also dangerously arrogant.
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Julian Farrows
“extremely stupid but also dangerously arrogant”
Self-awareness isn’t your thing, is it?
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Charles Stanhope
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
But it is yours the sound of it?
Sadly, your conceit exceeds your intellect by quite a large margin.
Last edited 25 days ago by stanhopecharles344
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harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
It certainly isn’t yours.
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Julian Farrows
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Hello, my internet friend. Did they let you into the computer room again?
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r ll
25 days ago
One thing is certain, a Pandora’s Box is opened and the Democrats should expect the same treatment in the future, it will not be forgotten about,and righfully so.
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to r ll
The big difference is that the Democrats haven’t committed any crimes.
You see how that works, skippy?
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Jim Veenbaas
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Just because they haven’t been prosecuted for crimes, doesn’t mean the Dems haven’t committed them. It has to be clear by now that the DOJ, FBI and CIA will move mountains to protect and promote the Bidens. There are so many examples, from the suppression of the laptop, the timing of the announcement of the Whitmore kidnapping charges, the testimony of IRS agents, the judge’s decision to reject the Hunter Biden plea deal. It’s getting to be kind of comical by now.
Last edited 25 days ago by clearmedia
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Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
Your tinfoil hat must be on a little tight today, Jimmy! “It has to be clear..” I’m afraid no such thing is clear to anyone who doesn’t lap up the drivel served on Fox and Breitbart. Is that you, Jimbo?
-19
REPLY
Jim Veenbaas
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
I was wondering how you would respond. A fully functioning, reasonably informed, human adult can acknowledge there are issues with Trump, but see there are also issues with Biden and the Dems. The people wearing tinfoil hats are those who see issues in only one direction.
14
REPLY
Billy Bob
25 days ago
Reply to r ll
It’s been opened years ago. One side going after Clinton with Lewinsky, the other trying to push it through the courts to stop Bush winning. The first team then again with all the nonsense about Obama being foreign and not being eligible to the President and now Trump getting dragged through the courts. Refusing to accept the result seems a feature of the American system rather than anything out of the ordinary
1
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Martin Luther King was booked in the same jail for sitting at a lunch counter. Somebody should put King’s and Trump’s mug shots side by side and label one “booked for sitting at a lunch counter” and the other “booked for asking a question””
9
REPLY
Iris C
24 days ago
Is there a cut-off date for the receipt of postal votes in America? . From our limited coverage of the event here, I had a feeling (perhaps wrongly) that postal votes were being received and accepted in Georgia after the polling stations had closed.
Postal votes have the potential to be corrupted unless they are strictly monitored. For example:.
Unopened postal votes should be put into sealed boxes and the boxes kept in a vault until being transferred to the counting venue, where they will be opened and counted at the same time as the votes of personal voters. Ditto with electronic voting.
Only then can one be assured that there is no hocus-pocus..
7
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Iris C
Yes, Iris, mail in ballots are lawfull when received by the voting DAY but in 2020 were accepted four days after election day. Observers from both parties must watch the process but were forced to leave in many states and the windows were boarded over including Georgia (Atlanta), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Michigan(Detroit), etc. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court unlawfully changed voting and ballot rules after voting started when ONLY the Pennsylvania state legislature is allowed to make election rules. Ballot counting was stopped at 10 p.m. in five swing states, observers forced to leave and “counting” restarted when they were gone.
While the US has had many stolen elections such as John Kennedy in 1960 and Harry Truman, the Senator from Pendergast (Kansas boss) in 1940, etc., 2020 topped them all in too many ways to count. The US can give Zimbabwe lessons in election stealing.
No court has allowed the 60 election suits to go forward for technical reasons and the Supreme Court refused Texas’ + many other states’ suit for “lack of standing.”
81 million votes for biden??? c’mon man
17
REPLY
Champagne Socialist
24 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader
Another specialist in election law from Fox News U!!!!
-14
REPLY
Jim Veenbaas
24 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader
The American electoral system is one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional of any democracy in the west, and it happens on both sides of the aisle. Since 1982, there have been 1,150 election fraud convictions in the US. I would suggest that’s more than Europe, Canada and the entire west combined – by a large margin.
10
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
Jim, you might want to read John Fund’s book STEELING ELECTIONS and Karl Rove’s article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal reviewing stolen elections back to 1800.
Not only elections are stolen here in the US, there is also stolen valor as when Lyndon Johnson got a Silver Star for riding in an airplane in WWII and John Kerry got medals for Vietnam.
and speaking of Vietnam and the lies Johnson told (Gulf of Tonkin for one) to get us involved, well…
0
REPLY
Jim Veenbaas
23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader
I’ll check it out
0
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Jim Veenbaas
as I say, United States is way ahead of Zimbabwe and every other country when it comes to election fraud.
4
REPLY
Ciaran Rooney
25 days ago
UnHerd is becoming left-wing trash
6
REPLY
Charles Stanhope
25 days ago
Reply to Ciaran Rooney
Indeed, you may have a point there, sadly!
8
REPLY
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Charles Stanhope
Oh look, Racist Grandpa is triggered!
-18
REPLY
Charles Stanhope
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Really? Please explain.
7
REPLY
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to Charles Stanhope
Which part are you confused about? Or all of it?
-15
REPLY
Charles Stanhope
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
All.
5
REPLY
Douglas Proudfoot
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
If you are losing any argument, any good Marxist calls all opposition racist. The fact that all good Marxists judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, seems to be part of the redefinition of language that Marxists specialize in.
Note to you: This ain’t a faculty lounge and you ain’t Humpty Dumpty.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”
Last edited 25 days ago by Douglas Proudfoot
17
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
On October 29, 2020, Joseph R. Biden said on camera for all to hear, “We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” so there you have it. They don’t even try to cover it over but announce it on television.
You can still watch him say it on youtube along with his boast of having the Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma.
Last edited 24 days ago by UnHerd Reader
5
REPLY
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Why do you people think that the fat oaf from Mar a Hideous should be above the law?
Which laws is it ok for him to break before you agree that maybe he should be prosecuted? If he kills someone do you say, “well, you can’t weaponize the justice system against him and, anyway, Hillary killed loads of people, probably”?
Its one thing being lured into a cult by some super charismatic genius but, folks, its just embarrassing to be in a cult led by a clueless, obese p***y grabber. Have a little dignity!
-20
REPLY
Alex Tickell
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Actually. you have stumbled upon the answer to this question in highlighting President Trumps words regarding the way that some women use their sexuality for profit or personal advancement.
Most intelligent people of course recognised his meaning as probably they have experienced this phenomenon, especially if they are wealthy or powerful.
His meaning was immediately twisted by the media, just as his remarks regarding the Georgia election have been twisted to frame him as a criminal, rather than a candidate requesting help to right a perceived wrong
2
REPLY
harry storm
25 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Pathetic. Sad.
8
REPLY
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago
Reply to Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist, your rants are very much like those of the people who jailed Martin Luther King 29 times and lined the sidewalks screaming at the black kids being escorted into school. Are you from Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia? What’s next? Will you bring out whips and attack dogs against those you are afraid of?
3
REPLY
Champagne Socialist
24 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader
Is gibberish your first language or did you have to learn it later in life? You certainly have it mastered!
Why do you think your overweight idol is above the law?
-3
REPLY
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Ben Shapiro Furious at Tucker Carlson's 'Orwellian' Trump Interview
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-1507/donald-trump-ben-shapiro-furious-tucker-carlsons-orwellian-trump-interview
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.newsweek.com/ben-shapiro-furious-tucker-carlson-donald-trump-interview-orwellian-softball-comments-1822606
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60% of Americans Think Trump Should Stand Trial Before Election: Poll
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0852/donald-trump-60-americans-think-trump-should-stand-trial-election-poll
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2024 Presidential Election
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centers
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https://themessenger.com/politics/60-of-americans-think-trump-should-stand-trial-before-election-poll
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TRENDING NOW | Patriots Fan’s Preliminary Autopsy Results Revealed After He Died Following Fight in Stands
60% of Americans Think Trump Should Stand Trial Before Election: Poll
About three in five Americans say that they understand the legal cases against the former president somewhat or very well
Published |Updated
Kayla Gallagher
JWPlayer
A majority of Americans say they think former President Donald Trump should stand trial on his federal charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 election before the next White House election, according to a new Politico Magazine/Ipsos.
In polling on two of Trump's legal cases, the 2020 election probe (61%) and his classified document case (62%), most respondents said they think the former president should stand trial before November 2024.
Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Steer N' Stein bar at the Iowa State Fair on August 12, 2023 in Des Moines, Iowa.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The division along party lines is notable, with 89% of Democrats saying they think Trump should be tried in the election subversion case and 33% of Republicans saying the same. However, more Republicans, 46%, agreed with the 86% of Democrats who believe the sensitive documents case got to trial prior to the election.
About three in five Americans surveyed said that they understand the legal cases against the former president somewhat or very well.
The poll, which was conducted from Aug. 18-21, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. It is based on a representative sample of 1,032 U.S. residents, age 18 or older, including 272 Republican respondents, 321 Democratic respondents, and 319 independent respondents.
Read More
Special Counsel Still Investigating 2020 Election Subversion Efforts After Trump Indictment: Report
Most Americans Believe Trump Should Have His Day in Court Before 2024 Election, Poll Shows
Trump Indicted on Federal Charges Tied to 2020 Election
Trump Tries Same Legal Strategy in Classified Docs and 2020 Election Cases
Special Counsel Seeks Hearing on Classified Records in Trump 2020 Election Case
Trump Indicted in Classified Documents Case
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Did Donald Trump Call to Suspend the Constitution?
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0752/facts-and-fact-checking-did-donald-trump-call-suspend-constitution
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-call-suspend-constitution-gop-debate-chris-christie-1822131
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‘Nikki Haley won it’: Body language expert on RNC debate
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-24-1421/2024-presidential-election-nikki-haley-won-it-body-language-expert-rnc-debate
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https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/nikki-haley-body-language-expert-rnc-debate/
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Who Won The First Republican Debate?
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-24-1247/2024-presidential-election-who-won-first-republican-debate
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2024 Presidential Election
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https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republican-debate-august-poll/
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UPDATED AUG. 24, 2023, AT 2:52 PM
Who Won The First Republican Debate?
We partnered with Ipsos and The Washington Post to poll voters before and after the candidates took the stage.
By Holly Fuong, Aaron Bycoffe, Humera Lodhi and Nathaniel Rakich
The first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate is in the books, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy seem to have made the best impressions.
We know that thanks to fresh data from a FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel in the hours immediately following the debate. We surveyed the same group of likely Republican primary voters before and after the debate, allowing us to see how much it may have shifted public opinion. All pre- and post-debate numbers below are limited to respondents who watched some or all of the debate.
The over- (and under-) performers
How well likely Republican primary voters who watched the debate expected each candidate to do before the debate versus how well they thought each candidate actually did
Terrible
Poor
About average
Very good
Excellent
Terrible
Poor
About average
Very good
Excellent
RON DESANTIS
MIKE PENCE
DOUG BURGUM
CHRIS CHRISTIE
NIKKI HALEY
ASA HUTCHINSON
VIVEK RAMASWAMY
TIM SCOTT
PRE-DEBATE EXPECTATION
POST-DEBATE GRADE
We asked respondents how they expected each candidate to do, and how well they actually did, on a five-point scale from “excellent” to “terrible” and converted each answer to a number on a 1-to-5 scale. “Excellent” was equal to 5, “very good” was equal to 4, “about average” was equal to 3, “poor” was equal to 2 and “terrible” was equal to 1. Scores were then averaged to create overall scores for each candidate. Respondents who answered “don’t know” to the expectations or performance questions were excluded.
Before the debate, our poll asked respondents to grade how they expected each candidate to perform on a five-point scale from “excellent” to “terrible.” Then, after the debate, we asked debate watchers to use the same scale to grade how they thought the candidates actually did.
Each candidate largely performed as well as Republican voters were expecting them to, according to their average performance and expectations scores.2 DeSantis received the highest average grade for his performance, followed closely by Haley and Ramaswamy. This was more impressive for Haley, though, considering that expectations were just slightly above average for her going into the debate. By contrast, Ramaswamy had the highest expectations of any debater going into Wednesday night. At the other end of the spectrum, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson both had the lowest expectations going into the debate and got the lowest grade for his actual performance.
Who won and lost the debate?
Share of likely Republican primary voters who watched the debate who said each candidate performed the best and worst in the debate
30
20
10
0%
10
20
30
DESANTIS
RAMASWAMY
HALEY
PENCE
CHRISTIE
SCOTT
HUTCHINSON
BURGUM
WORST
BEST
We also asked debate watchers who they thought performed best and worst on Wednesday night. The results were similar, with 29 percent saying that DeSantis did the best and 26 percent saying Ramaswamy did. Despite Haley’s high performance score, though, not as many people thought she was the strongest performer — just 15 percent. (All numbers in this article exclude respondents who skipped the question, which is why our numbers sometimes differ from those on Ipsos’s website.)
Interestingly, while 14 percent of debate watchers thought Hutchinson turned in the worst performance, he wasn’t the one with the highest share saying so. That “honor” went to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom 22 percent of viewers identified as the worst debater. One possible reason for this could be simply that Christie spoke more than Hutchinson did (over 11 minutes versus seven and a half). Similarly, the candidate who had the most speaking time (former Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke for almost 13 minutes) had a relatively high share of people saying he had the worst performance (13 percent). Ramaswamy’s performance proved somewhat polarizing as well: Despite 26 percent saying he was the strongest debater, another 11 percent said he was the worst.
Who gained (and lost) support
Share of likely Republican primary voters who watched the debate who are considering voting for each candidate after the debate compared with before it
BEFORE DEBATE
AFTER DEBATE
0%
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
DESANTIS
63.0%
63.0%
67.5%
67.5%
TRUMP
66.2%
66.2%
61.4%
61.4%
HALEY
30.2%
30.2%
46.7%
46.7%
RAMASWAMY
40.8%
40.8%
46.3%
46.3%
SCOTT
41.1%
41.1%
43.1%
43.1%
PENCE
21.1%
21.1%
23.5%
23.5%
CHRISTIE
18.2%
18.2%
22.1%
22.1%
BURGUM
4.8%
4.8%
12.4%
12.4%
HUTCHINSON
8.5%
8.5%
9.4%
9.4%
HURD
4.7%
4.7%
3.6%
3.6%
SUAREZ
3.1%
3.1%
2.9%
2.9%
Respondents could pick multiple candidates.
But did those good and bad performances actually sway any voters? We also asked debate watchers after the debate which candidates they were considering voting for and compared that to their answers before the debate. Haley saw the biggest change in her numbers — 30 percent of debate watchers were considering her before the debate, and 47 percent are considering her after it. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (+8 percentage points), Ramaswamy (+5 points) and DeSantis (+4 points) saw more modest increases. Interestingly, only one candidate saw a meaningful decrease in the number of debate watchers considering voting for him: former President Donald Trump, who chose not to attend the debate. This decrease came despite the fact that most debaters chose not to attack Trump in his absence, opting instead to criticize one another.
The popularity contest
Candidates' favorable and unfavorable ratings among likely Republican primary voters who watched the debate
UNFAVORABLE
FAVORABLE
Before debate
No opinion/Never heard of
After debate
BURGUM
11.7%
9.6%
39.5%
35.6%
CHRISTIE
23.4%
61.3%
35.2%
59.9%
DESANTIS
67.5%
26.9%
72.4%
24.7%
HALEY
51.7%
26.4%
65.5%
26.8%
HURD
6.9%
14.4%
10.9%
18.0%
HUTCHINSON
16.8%
22.7%
33.7%
47.1%
PENCE
38.0%
57.3%
42.6%
53.9%
RAMASWAMY
50.2%
12.9%
60.4%
31.8%
SCOTT
58.5%
12.3%
65.3%
23.2%
SUAREZ
8.9%
12.2%
8.1%
18.9%
TRUMP
64.7%
33.6%
59.8%
35.6%
The debate also saw many debate watchers form new opinions of the candidates — some for the better, some for the worse. For example, Haley saw a 14-point increase in her favorable rating with virtually no change to her unfavorable rating, while DeSantis increased his net favorability rating from +41 points to +48 points. Ramaswamy and Hutchinson also saw their favorable ratings rise by double digits after the debate — but their unfavorable ratings rose even more, so they are now less popular on net after the debate than they were before it. Burgum also greatly raised his profile with the debate, though it ended up being a wash: His net favorability rating after the debate (+4 points) is about the same as it was before the debate (+2 points).
Which issues matter most?
Share of likely Republican primary voters who watched the debate who said before the debate that each issue was among the most important to determining their primary vote
Getting inflation or increasingcosts under control
Controlling immigration
Someone fightingagainst liberalism andthe woke agenda
Ability to beat Joe Biden
Cutting governmentspending
Keeping Americasafe from foreignconflicts orterrorism
Combattingpoliticalextremism orpolarization
Reducing crimeor gun violence
Getting inflation or increasingcosts under control
Controlling immigration
Someone fightingagainst liberalism andthe woke agenda
Ability to beat Joe Biden
Cutting governmentspending
Keeping Americasafe from foreignconflicts orterrorism
Combattingpoliticalextremism orpolarization
Reducing crimeor gun violence
52%
52%
44%
44%
29%
29%
27%
27%
27%
27%
16%
16%
15%
15%
14%
14%
52%
52%
44%
44%
29%
29%
27%
27%
27%
27%
16%
16%
15%
15%
14%
14%
The top eight issues are shown. Other issues are improving election security or fighting election fraud, 10%; lowering taxes, 10%; protecting gun rights, 9%; improving health care, 8%; strengthening education, 6%; something else, 5%; fighting against opioid or drug addiction, 4%; limiting abortion, 4%; reducing unemployment, 2%; don’t know, 0%. Respondents could select up to three issues from a list of 16, with additional options for “something else” and “don’t know.”
Finally, before the debate, we asked likely Republican primary voters what issues were most important in determining their primary vote. (Respondents were allowed to select up to three issues from a list of 16.) The most common response among debate watchers was, appropriately, the one that came up first in the debate: getting inflation or costs under control. Controlling immigration came in second place with 44 percent. Ability to beat President Biden, fighting liberalism and the woke agenda and cutting government spending were all bunched up together between 27 and 29 percent. Interestingly, improving election security and limiting abortion — which elicited some of the biggest disagreements between the candidates on Wednesday night — were among the least important issues, with only 10 percent and 6 percent of Republicans, respectively, choosing them as one of their top priorities.
All the data presented here comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight and The Washington Post using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. The same group of respondents was interviewed before and after the Republican presidential debate on Aug. 23, 2023, to track whether and how their answers changed. Numbers on this page exclude respondents who skipped each question. The first wave of the poll was conducted from Aug. 15 through Aug. 22 among a general population sample of adults, with 4,968 respondents who said they were likely to vote in their state’s Republican primary or caucus. For the likely Republican primary voter subset of respondents, the first wave of the poll has a margin of error of ±1.6 percentage points.
The second wave of the poll was conducted late on the night of Aug. 23 and early in the morning on Aug. 24 among 2,219 of the likely Republican primary voters who had previously responded to the first wave. Of those respondents, 775 watched all or part of the debate. The subset of debate watchers carries a margin of error of ±4.0 points.
Click here for a full methodology.
Editing by Maya Sweedler and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux. Copy editing by Cooper Burton. Visual editing by Christopher Groskopf. Additional contributions from Mary Radcliffe. Art by Katrina Stapleton.
| 44
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Media Rush to Dems’ Defense after GOP Debate Shines a Spotlight on Abortion Extremism
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-30-0615/facts-and-fact-checking-media-rush-dems-defense-after-gop-debate-shines
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-rush-to-dems-defense-after-gop-debate-shines-a-spotlight-on-abortion-extremism/
|
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review's News Desk. This week, we recap the media reaction to the first Republican debate, refute a Washington Post column about Republicans and health misinformation, and cover more media misses.
Media Reacts Predictably to First GOP Presidential Debate
Two of the media’s favorite things to lie about — Florida governor Ron DeSantis and abortion — converged the night of the first Republican primary debate, leading to a slew of purported media “fact checks” and snark.
"I believe in a culture of life,” DeSantis said on the debate stage in Milwaukee. “I
...
| 45
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Nikki Haley’s GOP Debate Truths
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0857/2024-presidential-election-nikki-haley-s-gop-debate-truths
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/nikki-haley-gop-presidential-debate-donald-trump-tim-scott-mike-pence-abortion-spending-2125403c?mod=hp_opin_pos_5#cxrecs_s
|
By
Aug. 24, 2023 6:38 pm ET
Listen
(2 min)
| 46
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Fact Check: Jen Psaki Claims ‘No One Supports Abortion Up Until Birth’
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0758/facts-and-fact-checking-fact-check-jen-psaki-claims-no-one-supports-abortion
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/08/23/fact-check-jen-psaki-claims-no-one-supports-abortion-until-birth/
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Fact Check: Jen Psaki Claims ‘No One Supports Abortion Up Until Birth’
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
KATHERINE HAMILTON23 Aug 2023443
1:35
CLAIM: Former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki claimed in an X post (formerly Twitter) during the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday that “no one supports abortion up until birth.”
VERDICT: FALSE. Several Democrat-run states have no limits on abortion, and Democrats have supported legislation that would allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
Jen Psaki claimed that “no one supports abortion up until birth,” despite the fact that Democrat lawmakers collectively refuse to support any kind of limit on abortion. Many Republican presidential candidates have pointed to Democrats’ abortion-on-demand agenda as evidence of the left’s growing extremism.
No one supports abortion up until birth.
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) August 24, 2023
Much to the contrary, several states — run by Democrats — have no restrictions on abortion whatsoever, including Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, DC, where Psaki worked for President Joe Biden.
Many other Democrat-run states, like California, New York, and Illinois, allow abortions up to “viability” but allow abortions later in pregnancy with limited exceptions, including if a woman’s “mental health” is in danger.
On the federal level, Democrats have also supported a radical piece of proposed abortion legislation called the “Women’s Health Protection Act.”
Here is Jen Psaki pushing for support for the "Women's Health Protection Act," which would have legalized abortion in America up until the moment of birth. https://t.co/018Ezc3dFb pic.twitter.com/IRKKs4fCzb
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 24, 2023
The legislation would usurp states’ ability to pass strong pro-life laws and would allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
HealthPoliticsAbortionJen Psakilate-term abortionunborn babies
| 47
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Biden campaign releases abortion ad targeting battleground state women
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0726/2024-presidential-election-biden-campaign-releases-abortion-ad-targeting
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/biden-campaign-abortion-ad-battleground-women
|
JOE BIDEN
Biden campaign releases abortion ad targeting battleground state women
by Julia Johnson, Politics Reporter
August 25, 2023 09:42 AM
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President Joe Biden's reelection campaign announced its first new ad since the Republican National Committee primary debate, focusing on the issue of abortion — an issue it said Republicans were "extreme and out-of-touch" on during the debate.
The new ad, titled "These guys," is set to run for two weeks across digital platforms YouTube and Connected TV, particularly targeting women in battleground states.
TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE IN MILWAUKEE
"Reproductive healthcare decisions are among the most personal a woman will ever make. They're choices that should be made by you and your doctor. And the last people who should be involved are these guys," the ad tells viewers.
It then cuts to footage of former President Donald Trump, who said, "I'm the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade," referring to his appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court that decided the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case in 2022.
A clip of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) at the debate is also played, during which he says, "I believe in a culture of life."
Neither Trump nor DeSantis have committed to signing a national ban on abortion, despite pressure from prominent anti-abortion organizations.
The ad then pivots to Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), playing part of an interview when he said, "If I were president of the United States, I would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation that they can get through Congress." Scott has recently committed to signing Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America's minimum standard of legislation, a 15-week limit on abortion.
According to the ad, "President Biden and Vice President Harris are determined to restore Roe v. Wade, and they will never allow a national abortion ban to become law as long as they are in office. Decisions about your body will be made by you, not by them."
During the RNC debate, Former Vice President Mike Pence and Scott pledged support for SBA Pro-Life America's minimum standard of a 15-week ban. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, however, emphasized the need for "consensus" and claimed that federal legislation limiting abortion wouldn't succeed at passing the current Senate.
DeSantis didn't commit to a federal ban on abortion at the event but reiterated he "will support the cause of life as governor and as president."
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Abortion remains one of the issues on which candidates differ most in the Republican primary race, particularly as the top two contenders have remained vague regarding the federal government's role in it.
Still, the Democratic National Committee and the Biden campaign are looking to paint the slate of candidates with a broad brush on abortion, claiming their positions are extreme. As evidenced by the new ad targeting women in pivotal states, the campaign and DNC see abortion as a means to lock down a key group in the 2024 election, white suburban women.
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Issue 1: Everything you need to know about Ohio's constitutional amendment ballot measure
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Issue 1: Everything you need to know about Ohio's constitutional amendment ballot measure
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Voting in Ohio for a measure championed by conservatives to raise the threshold to amend the state constitution will conclude on Tuesday. Should the measure fail, it could open the door for Democrats to make the right to have an abortion solidified in state law and give the party a boost heading into 2024.
Ohioans are heading to the polls in record numbers to vote on State Issue 1, a measure that would change the number of voters needed to advance a proposed amendment to the state's constitution. Passing the measure could be significant for state conservatives, who say their measure will protect the constitution from a "radical" liberal agenda that involves changes to gun control, abortion, and education.
UNDERDOG NO MORE: SENATE REPUBLICANS LINE UP BEHIND SAM BROWN IN NEVADA
Here is what to know about State Issue 1, who opposes it, and what implications the measure can have in the next election.
What is State Issue 1?
State Issue 1 would raise the threshold needed to amend the constitution from 50% plus one to 60%.
Several Republicans, including U.S. representatives from Ohio and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, are adamant supporters of Issue 1. Anti-abortion groups have latched on to the measure, accusing liberal activists of bypassing lawmakers to push their agenda.
"At its core, it's about keeping out-of-state special interest groups from buying their way into our constitution, which we're seeing happen far too often," Amy Natoce, press secretary for Protect Women Ohio, told Fox News Digital. "They're circumventing the legislative process and going directly after the constitution."
Who is opposed to State Issue 1 and why?
State Issue 1, if passed, will take effect immediately, placing liberal groups at a disadvantage heading into November, when their ballot to enshrine abortion in the constitution will go before voters. Before State Issue 1, groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union were in a better position to gain the support necessary to pass their abortion measure through.
However, by raising the threshold, Democrats and liberal allies will need to attract another 10% of voters in a swing state that favors former President Donald Trump and trends more Republican each year.
The ACLU has blasted State Issue 1 as a method by conservatives to funnel power away from voters and into the hands of lawmakers.
"The purpose of Issue 1 is to silence the majority of Ohioans, and subject us to the policy preferences of a small group of extremists who have secured the favor of our unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislature," the union said of the measure earlier this year.
Millions are being funneled into Ohio's special election for Issue 1, with several abortion-rights groups, such as Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio and the ACLU, raising approximately $8.5 million. Most of the donations came from outside Ohio, arriving from Washington D.C., Oklahoma, New York, and other states.
A sign urging voters to vote “no” on Issue 1 in Ohio’s Aug. 8 special election stands planted in the grass on the outskirts of a parking lot in front of the Franklin County Board of Elections in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday, Aug. 3, 2023.
(Samantha Hendrickson/AP)
What are the November 2023 implications of Issue 1?
Polling in July showed that voters are split on Issue 1, with 42% saying they are a "yes" on State Issue 1, 41% saying they are a "no," and 16% saying they are neutral. However, Democratic and Republican lawmakers are coming to the consensus that Democrats will likely prevail and Issue 1 will fail.
Anti-abortion advocates are hoping to stop the abortion amendment before it reaches voters. Groups against the proposed constitutional amendment filed a lawsuit in late July against LaRose and others to invalidate it, saying its broad language does not articulate what state laws would need to be repealed or replaced.
LaRose, despite his personal opposition, validated the signatures needed for the measure to appear on the November ballot.
The outcome in November could usher in a wave of pro-abortion rights voters at similar levels to the 2022 midterm elections, which was largely spurred by the Supreme Court striking down federal rights to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Several other red states, including Kansas, passed a similar abortion measure to enshrine it in their constitution shortly after the federal law was struck down.
What are the 2024 implications of Issue 1?
How the measure performs could have a drastic effect on the Ohio Senate race in 2024.
LaRose, who is running to replace Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), has been a staunch advocate of Issue 1 and a firm opponent of liberals' abortion measure up for votes in the fall. If Issue 1 were to fail, the secretary of state has the most to lose.
“Frank LaRose has wrapped his arms around this issue and staked his entire political career [on this]. He has spent the entirety of the summer campaigning on this issue, to the detriment of his day job,” Ohio Democratic Party Chairwoman Elizabeth Walters told Punchbowl News. “He’s taking a really big bet here.”
The failure of Issue 1 could also set Republicans on a path of losses in several key areas important to voters, which they cannot afford.
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“If Issue 1 does not pass, then a lot of things are at risk,” Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) told Punchbowl News. “Not only abortion but also gun ownership and possession, redistricting, education curriculum for our children, and other big issues. All these things will be at risk because a simple majority will be able to fundamentally alter our constitution on a whim."
Republicans face an uphill battle to appeal to moderate and independent voters, which could be a difficult task if they continue to support hard-line stances on matters such as abortion and gun control. Losing Issue 1 in Ohio could add more problems to the Republican Party's plate as it heads into 2024 with the goal to grow its House majority and flip the Senate and the White House.
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Senate Passes Defense Bill With No Block On Funding For Abortion Travel, Setting Up Battle With House
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— NEWS —
Senate Passes Defense Bill With No Block On Funding For Abortion Travel, Setting Up Battle With House
By Leif Le Mahieu
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Jul 28, 2023 DailyWire.com
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Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
The Senate passed its own version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Thursday without adding an amendment to pull Pentagon funding for abortion travel, setting up a likely fight with the House.
The Senate’s NDAA was widely backed by both Republicans and Democrats, passing in an 86-11 vote.
“What’s happening in the Senate is a stark contrast to a bipartisan race to the bottom we saw in the House where House Republicans are pushing partisan legislation that has zero chance of passing,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “House Republicans should look to the Senate to see how things get done.”
The group of Republicans who voted against the bill included Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).
“I’ve worked in good faith throughout this process to secure as many wins for Ohio as possible, and I’m proud that many of those priorities have been included in the final version of the NDAA,” Vance said in a statement on his opposition to the bill. “However, I cannot in good conscience support the broader package, which commits the United States to years of additional military aid for the war in Ukraine. It’s disappointing to me that these significant priorities that would benefit Ohioans have been bogged down with such deeply problematic foreign policy proposals.”
An amendment from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to reinstate soldiers who left or were discharged over the COVID vaccine failed, while an amendment to prohibit the purchase of American farmland by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea passed. The Senate also added a measure to ban sales of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia.
Paul introduced an amendment that would clarify that Congress has final authority on war declarations, but it was defeated 86-13. Paul said he wanted to make sure that “Article 5 of the NATO treaty does not supersede the Constitution.”
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Democrats and the media have claimed House Republicans politicized the bill by stripping the Pentagon’s authority to allocate money for women in the military to travel for abortions if they are in a state with pro-life protections.
The House version, which passed 219-210 along mostly partisan lines, also prohibited military funding going toward sex change operations on military members. Military members are given a 5.2% raise in both versions of the NDAA.
“Under this bill our men and women in uniform, who make sacrifices for our nation every day, will receive the biggest pay raise in decades, radical programs that are forced on our troops at the expense of readiness are eliminated, cutting-edge technology that is essential for the future of this country and will help deter Communist China will receive more investment, and taxpayers will save $40 billion as this bill roots out wasteful spending,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said after the House passed its version.
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The Hidden Radicalism of Ohio’s Abortion Amendment
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-27-1418/abortion-hidden-radicalism-ohio-s-abortion-amendment
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The Hidden Radicalism of Ohio’s Abortion Amendment
People cheer as Planned Parenthood of Ohio participates in a Pride parade in Columbus, Ohio, June 18, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
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By THE EDITORS
July 27, 2023 10:26 AM
The proposed amendment is extreme in ways the average voter would not know simply from reading the text.
D
irect democracy is a bad way to write a constitution. Consider the deceptive ballot measure to change Ohio’s constitution that will be put to voters this November.
Special-interest groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have officially succeeded in gathering enough signatures for a vote on an amendment creating a right to abortion in Ohio’s constitution, but the proposed amendment is extreme in ways the average voter would not know simply from reading the text.
To juice support for it, the text of the proposed amendment begins by creating a constitutional right to four things no one or virtually no one wants to make illegal before mentioning abortion:
Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on:
contraception;
fertility treatment;
continuing one’s own pregnancy;
miscarriage care;
and abortion.
The amendment then declares: “The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against . . . an individual’s voluntary exercise of this right.”
Nowhere in the amendment does it explicitly say anything about taxpayer funding of abortion on demand. But it is written in a lawyerly way to ensure that courts would invalidate Ohio’s version of the Hyde amendment because that long-standing popular limit on taxpayer funding of elective abortion would “directly or indirectly . . . interfere with or discriminate” against abortion.
The text of the amendment doesn’t say anything about striking down Ohio’s parental-consent law on abortion or creating a constitutional right for minors to get puberty blockers and sex-change operations, but it surely would do all of that by declaring that an “individual” — not an “adult” — has a sweeping constitutional right to “carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” that include but are “not limited to” abortion.
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The average Ohioan would get the wrong impression by reading the text of the ballot measure that the amendment would allow meaningful limits on late-term abortion. The text of the amendment explicitly states that “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability.” But — and these are two very big buts — it also says (1) that physicians may determine viability on a “case-by-case basis,” and (2) that there is a right to abortion after viability until birth to protect “health” that is not limited to physical health. When a baby is clearly viable, threats to a mother’s physical health can be treated in minutes or hours by delivering a live baby, while a late-term abortion procedure takes days. So that provision is surely designed to enshrine a right to abortion until birth to protect mental health.
When Virginia delegate Kathy Tran admitted under questioning in a 2019 state-legislative hearing that her abortion bill would allow abortion in months five through nine of pregnancy when a lone physician said the abortion was for reasons of mental health, the public was horrified at the prospect of such a right to infanticide, and Tran’s legislation died in a Democratic legislature. Where is the debate and deliberation about what Ohio’s abortion amendment really means? It’s practically nonexistent. The mainstream media are more than happy to parrot Planned Parenthood’s talking points.
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A hefty number of Ohioans, like the American electorate at large, have complicated views on abortion. In September 2022, an Emerson poll asked Ohio voters: “Do you support or oppose Ohio’s abortion law, which prohibits abortion after six weeks, or when a fetus has a detectable heartbeat. This law has exceptions in order to save the mother’s life or prevent long term impairment of the mother’s bodily functions, but not for cases of rape or incest.” Ohio voters were evenly split — 50 percent to 50 percent — on support for the state’s six-week abortion limit (which is currently enjoined by a lower state-court ruling). The same poll underestimated Republican strength by nine points in the governor’s race and by three points in the Senate race, so there is good reason to believe it slightly underestimated support for the state’s six-week abortion limit.
Yet a Suffolk poll conducted this month found that 57.6 percent of Ohioans back the constitutional abortion amendment. Here’s how the question was asked:
The amendment states that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care and abortion.” Abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability, when a treating physician determines the fetus has a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus with reasonable measures. At this point, do you support or oppose this amendment?
How to reconcile the Emerson and Suffolk polls? Voters in Ohio want some right to and some limit on abortion, but they are hazy on the precise number of weeks. Six? Twenty-three? They can be swayed by poll-tested lines about fertility treatments and miscarriage, and they do not understand the true implications of the amendment on late-term abortion, taxpayer funding of abortion, and parental consent for abortion and transgender treatments.
Opponents of the radical abortion amendment have a difficult task, but they must work to convey to Ohio voters how radical the amendment truly is through advertising, media, legislative hearings, and direct voter contacts.
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One outstanding question is what threshold the amendment will need to reach to be added to Ohio’s constitution. Ohio is unusual in that it currently allows constitutional amendments to be passed with a simple majority. In the 50 states, 32 do not allow outside groups to propose constitutional amendments, and half of the remaining 18 have greater requirements than a single simple-majority vote. On August 8, Ohioans will vote on whether to raise the threshold to 60 percent, which would put Ohio in line with Florida.
Raising the threshold for constitutional amendments to 60 percent would not prevent Ohioans from enacting laws via ballot initiatives with a simple majority. True, voter-initiated laws may be repealed by the legislature, but legislators would think twice before flatly reversing an initiative without making any concessions. And special-interest groups would think twice about slipping extreme and deceptive provisions — discernible to judges but not many voters — into proposed amendments if a greater consensus were needed to enact them.
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Progressive petri dish: Abortion laws meant to help Minnesotans backfire
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-26-0655/abortion-progressive-petri-dish-abortion-laws-meant-help-minnesotans-backfire
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Progressive petri dish: Abortion laws meant to help Minnesotans backfire
by Barnini Chakraborty, Senior Investigations Reporter
July 26, 2023 09:18 AM
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The Washington Examiner went to Minnesota following news that the state's Democrats, known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, had fast-tracked one of the most progressive agendas in state history. What we found was a struggling Republican Party, angry small business owners, and a complete stonewall from Democrats. In this series, the Washington Examiner takes a look at broken promises lawmakers made, how Republicans are trying to control the carnage, and the unintended consequences of some of the bills passed, including one that seems to do more harm than good for women in Minnesota seeking abortions.
ST. PAUL, Minnesota — Minnesota may have led the nation in enshrining abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but a new law that expands access by opening state borders and welcoming anyone seeking the procedure has hamstrung women living in the Midwestern state and in desperate need of care.
Minnesotans must now compete with out-of-state patients for limited resources, including scheduling an appointment, seeing a doctor, getting an ultrasound, and having the procedure, as well as aftercare, forcing some to travel hours out of state for services.
PROGRESSIVE PETRI DISH: MINNESOTA GOP HITS RESET AFTER RECENT SHELLACKING
"Being the only state that has legal abortion in the upper Midwest, we have an influx of people that are coming to our state to seek care," Abena Abraham, campaign director for UnRestrict Minnesota, told the Washington Examiner. "It's harder to get some second-trimester appointments, and we are seeing Minnesotans having to travel outside to access care."
The state had been seeing a gradual decline in abortions but witnessed a 180-degree turn last year.
Abortion rights supporters gather outside the House Chamber in the Minnesota State Capitol on Monday, March 20, 2023, in St. Paul, Minn.
(AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)
Abortions have increased by 20% this year, driven in part by an increase in women traveling from other states at a rate providers haven't seen in at least four decades, according to a recent report from the Minnesota Department of Health.
Last year, more than 16% of the 12,175 abortions performed came from women traveling from other states. Of that number, 1,714 came from border states, while 290 others came from places as far away as Texas.
Planned Parenthood saw a 25% jump in abortions compared to the 10 months before and after the Supreme Court ruling and is planning to increase its capacity at clinics in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Mankato, Ruth Richardson, chief executive of Planned Parenthood North Central States, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Paulina Briggs, executive director of the WE Health Clinic, an abortion provider in the port city of Duluth, told Al Jazeera that providers had been bracing for the increase. In 2022, the clinics performed 568 abortions compared with 462 in 2021.
"A bit less expected is where those patients were coming from," she said. "Even pre-Dobbs [the landmark case that overturned Roe], we were the only abortion provider for hundreds of miles in any direction for northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. That didn’t change after Dobbs, but what did change was patients traveling from the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and St. Paul]."
Duluth and Minneapolis-St. Paul is more than a two-hour drive.
Tammi Kromenaker, director of Red River Women's Clinic, said she's seen people from Texas and Nebraska but suspects "there are more patients from out of state who may just not be telling us where they're coming from."
Abraham, who called the campaign for increased access to abortion the "fight of her life," told the Washington Examiner she knows there's "a need for people to access ultrasounds and free pregnancy tests" and that her organization plans to push for more resources.
"We've been really excited with the progress we've been able to make this past session and hope that with sustained work and continued organizing that that will continue to move things along in the right direction," she said.
Abortion protesters on both sides pack the halls outside the Minnesota Senate chamber on Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn. The Minnesota Senate is debating a bill Friday to write broad protections for abortion rights into state statutes, which would make it difficult for future courts to roll back.
(AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)
Abraham's nonprofit group is led by a multiracial coalition of LGBT advocates, faith communities, doctors, lawyers, organizers, healthcare clinics, and doulas. UnRestrict Minnesota's agenda is to protect, expand, and destigmatize access to abortion care in the state through education, advocacy, and the law. While the group's current focus is Minnesota, its goal is to expand abortion services to other states to ensure sole bodily autonomy.
Fourteen states across the country have banned abortions outright or placed severe restrictions on them following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Georgia, for example, banned abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, a window of time when a lot of women don't even know they are pregnant. In other states, the fight over access has been moved to the courtroom, where advocates have sued the government over laws that place limitations on the procedure.
In July, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) signed a strict abortion ban that was immediately challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, which sued in Polk County. Three days later, District Court Judge Joseph Seidlin put the ban on hold while a larger case against it makes its way through the court system.
In Minnesota, lawmakers and advocates moved quickly to expand access by adding legal protections for providers and patients.
In January, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) signed the PRO Act, short for Protect Reproductive Actions, which established that "every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual's own reproductive health" and included abortion and contraceptives.
"After last year's landmark election across the country, we're the first state to take legislative action to put these protections in place," he said during a bill signing ceremony in which he was joined by more than 100 lawmakers, abortion providers, and advocates who worked to pass the bill.
Gov. Tim Walz signs the PRO Act, (House File 1), during a ceremony on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023, at the Minnesota Department of Revenue in St. Paul, Minn.
(Kerem Yücel /Minnesota Public Radio via AP)
Minnesota already had abortion protections in place under the 1995 state Supreme Court decision Doe v. Gomez, which said the state constitution protected abortion rights. Last summer, a district court judge ruled several abortion restrictions lawmakers had passed in earlier sessions were unconstitutional. Even so, advocates and lawmakers said the PRO Act provided a new layer of protection for women should the makeup of the state court change as it did on the high court. Lawmakers also passed legislation that would shield those seeking or providing abortions in Minnesota from laws in other states banning it.
They were able to pass abortion bills with relative ease following a slate of midterm wins last year. Minnesota's Democrats, known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-Party, control four of the state's eight U.S. House seats, both of its U.S. Senate seats, as well as both chambers of the state legislature and all other statewide offices, including the governor's mansion.
UnRestrict Minnesota has been laying the "groundwork to elect reproductive justice champions and pass proactive policy" by "expanding beyond traditional electoral strategies by engaging young people and LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) communities in key districts where candidates in tough races could help us win a pro-reproductive freedom majority in the state House and Senate."
GOP leaders told the Washington Examiner that during the midterm elections, Democrats weaponized abortion and falsely claimed Republicans wanted to repeal the right as mandated in the state constitution.
State RNC Chairman David Hann.
(Barnini Chakraborty/Washington Examiner)
Minnesota Republican Party Chairman David Hann said candidates were vilified for wanting to put "commonsense" restrictions in place, such as parental notification.
"If you're going to get a tattoo in Minnesota and you're 18 or under, you've got to get parental permission, but if you're 13 years old and you want to get an abortion, you can do it without your parents' permission, and [abortion providers] will keep it secret from them," he said. "This is 'crazytown,' and it's a view held by a very small number of people who look at abortion as the most important right. Our position is that we think all life deserves to be protected, but we also recognize there are hard choices that need to be made, and what we want is a reasonable regiment on abortion that reflects where most people in the state are."
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For most abortion advocates in the state, meeting Republicans halfway isn't an option.
"Our middle ground is that abortion should be legal and accessible and affordable to everybody and that it's not the place of lawmakers to decide what decisions people make around their body," Abraham said. "We believe in sole bodily autonomy, and so if the middle ground isn't that people have control over their bodies and they get to make decisions that are necessary for them, then we're not interested."
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New York Times Headline Twists Story of Teen’s Sentencing in Grisly Abortion Case
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New York Times Headline Twists Story of Teen’s Sentencing in Grisly Abortion Case
Nebraska teen Celeste Burgess is sentenced to 90 days in prison. (KTIV News 4/Screenshot via YouTube)
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By CAROLINE DOWNEY
July 21, 2023 2:19 PM
A recent New York Times headline misrepresents the details of a case involving a Nebraska teen who burned and buried the fetal remains of her illegal chemical abortion.
The headline, “Nebraska Teen Who Used Pills to End Pregnancy Gets 90 Days in Jail,” fails to mention that girl was sentenced for illegal burying and subsequently burning the fetal remains, implying instead that the 90-day sentence was handed down in response to a violation of the state’s abortion law.
Celeste Burgess, 19, was sentenced Thursday to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty in May to a felony charge of removing or concealing human skeletal remains. When she was nearly weeks pregnant, beginning her third trimester, Burgess took abortion pills her mother had ordered for her online, according to court filings. But while her mother, Jessica Burgess, was charged with violating the abortion statute, the daughter was not, even though she was past the 20-week cutoff.
The mother was charged for administering the abortion drug without being a licensed physician and for having done so beyond the 20-week limit. Medical abortions performed after ten weeks of pregnancy can endanger the mother and fetus as it increases the risk of complications. The teen, meanwhile, was accused of “removing, concealing or abandoning” a dead body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting.
While the Times report underlying the misleading headline does relay the facts of the case, it ties Burgess’s sentence to the raging national debate over whether and to what degree abortion should be restricted, prominently quoting a law professor who suggests the actions of Burgess and her mother are a predictable response to pro-life laws passed in the wake of Dobbs and a “harbinger of things to come.”
“This case is really sad because people resort to things like this when they’re really desperate,” Professor Donley of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law said, “and the thing that makes people really desperate is abortion bans.”
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The report fails to explicitly specify that the Burgesses crimes occurred prior to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
Prosecutor Joseph Smith told the Times that the case began as an investigation in 2022 into the unearthing and relocation of human remains. The two initially lied to investigators and said that Burgess had miscarried. With the help of her mother, then 17-year-old Burgess buried her aborted baby, dug it up, drove it north of town, buried it again, then transferred it for a third time, the detective on the case discovered.
While the beginning of the article notes that Burgess and her mother “tried to burn the evidence” of their crime, it is not until the twenty third paragraph of the report that the reader finds out the gruesome details that help explain the sentence Burgess received.
A man who assisted the women in the process eventually reported to the police that the two also tried to burn the fetus. The detective revealed after an examination that the-remains had been exhumed and showed signs of “thermal injuries.”
At the point at which Burgess aborted her child, the fetus usually weighs over a pound, is about a foot long, and is undergoing rapid brain and muscle development. Shining a flashlight on the mother’s belly at this stage of development will oftentimes result in movement from the baby, whose eyes are especially sensitive to light. Around 25 percent of prematurely born children at this age survive outside of the womb.
The Times headline is in keeping with the tenor of coverage elicited by the Burgesses arrest last summer, when a host of mainstream outlets implied that she had been arrested for having a late-term abortion.
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
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CAROLINE DOWNEY is an education reporter for National Review. @carolinedowney_
| 53
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Arizona AG Says She Will Not Enforce State’s Abortion Laws
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-03-1539/abortion-arizona-ag-says-she-will-not-enforce-state-s-abortion-laws
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/arizona-ag-says-she-will-not-enforce-states-abortion-laws
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— NEWS —
Arizona AG Says She Will Not Enforce State’s Abortion Laws
By Anthony Cash
•
Jul 3, 2023 DailyWire.com
•
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Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said she would not enforce the state’s abortion laws.
In a recent interview with Capitol Media Services, the Democrat said she would not prosecute doctors for violating any of the state’s abortion laws, including the 15-week abortion ban.
“I have been clear that we are not going to prosecute doctors and women in the state of Arizona for abortion, period,” Mayes said. “[Abortion] is not a place for government intervention … prosecutorial resources should not be spent on trying to put doctors in jail.’’
Mayes’ announcement comes after Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs issued an executive order on June 23 that centralized the power to enforce abortion laws in the hands of Attorney General Mayes, stripping county prosecutors of that ability.
“The Attorney General shall assume all duties with regard to any criminal prosecution of a medical provider … for violation of any State law restricting or prohibiting abortion care … without limitation,” Hobbs’ executive order says.
Mayes, who took office alongside Hobbs in January, justified the move, telling The Daily Beast, “This is an extraordinary situation. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a right we had for 50 years. Arizonans elected a Democratic governor and AG who are pro-choice, and elections have consequences. Some Republicans are unhappy about it, but this is a consequence of Dobbs.”
The lead prosecutor for Maricopa County, Rachel Mitchell, said that she and other county attorneys are looking at possible litigation over the centralization of prosecuting power.
“Our current governor took an entire category of potential offenses,” Mitchell said, “and is attempting to prevent locally elected county attorneys from reviewing and making charging decisions in those matters.”
The Phoenix-area Republican warned of a new precedent Hobbs and Mayes might set.
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“What happens when another person occupies the governor’s seat and attempts this kind of power grab?” she asked. “What other set of offenses might a governor in the future not like and remove from local prosecutors?”
Mayes brushed aside the question, saying the move should be seen only in the context of abortion laws, according to the Eastern Arizona Courier.
Republicans, who hold a majority in the state legislature, also condemned Hobbs and Mayes’ actions and canceled all plans to consider Hobbs’ nominees.
“You hold the office of Governor in Arizona, not of monarch,” GOP state senators wrote in a letter to Hobbs, calling the executive order a “blatant disregard for separation of powers.”
Read more in:
Abortion,Arizona,Katie Hobbs,Politics,Social Issues
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| 54
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Do We Realize What the Violence of Abortion Has Done to Us?
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-26-0716/abortion-do-we-realize-what-violence-abortion-has-done-us
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/do-we-realize-what-the-violence-of-abortion-has-done-to-us/
|
NRPLUS
POLITICS & POLICY
Do We Realize What the Violence of Abortion Has Done to Us?
A woman uses a megaphone as pro-life demonstrators take part in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
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By KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ
June 26, 2023 6:30 AM
We need to heed the peacemakers, even as we work to end abortion.
Grand Rapids — “We need healing when we use violence,” says Kevin Vallier at the Acton Institute’s “University,” an annual international gathering of nonprofit, faith-based, and civil leaders. The Acton Institute is named after the 19th-century Englishman Lord Acton, known best for the quote “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Here, the attendees are also motivated by his admonition that “liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
Vallier is talking about the so-called culture wars and politics more generally. He’s reflecting on the obvious: our polarized times. One side thinks that if the other side wins, it will be the end of life in the United States as it should be.
It’s been a year since the Supreme Court, in the Dobbs decision, ended Roe v. Wade. Clearly pro-life, Vallier says that he’s grateful for the ruling. But he also warns Republicans against overreaching. He makes a potentially controversial point in pro-life circles: As an act of peace, let states decide how to regulate abortion. For someone who believes that abortion is a human-rights travesty, this is a compromise. But the alternative, he argues, is that Democrats will go to an extreme to defend the “right” to kill babies in the womb.
An experienced Washington politico friend frequently reminded me of his conviction that Dobbs was too much, too soon. That’s essentially what Chief Justice John Roberts said in his concurring opinion in Dobbs. I am grateful for Dobbs because Roe was truly terrible in terms of law and science and history and the pressure that Roe applied on women to “choose” abortion. But I also see my friend’s point. We were not ready for Dobbs. None of us. After 50 years, America has grown used to abortion. It has changed us.
“I think violence always damages us, even if we use it justifiably,” Vallier says.
I think that is not just true for soldiers who bear the wounds of the violence they have been forced to use, I think it’s true of politicians. What is the use of violence in politics going to do to us? Even if we win? Especially if we win. What will we become? Who will we be? Who will be more like Christ in the end?
Acton’s summer gathering has drawn more than 900 people from across the globe — Africa and Brazil both had notable showings. The attendees come to hear lectures on fundamentals and reflections on the world as it is and how it could be. Some core lectures consider the human person, civil society, and political ordering. The leaders in the audience are practitioners of first principles; they are on the front lines. They are going on a retreat to remember why they started on their paths in the first place, to reflect on how they can do better and encourage one another.
As I listen to Vallier talk about how violence always damages us, I think about more than the obvious political violence we’ve seen. Black Lives Matter riots throughout 2020 and Donald Trump’s apparent inciting of violence at the Capitol on January 6 are probably the most familiar. But I also think of the violence of abortion and the suffering it causes — including to our politics.
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Not everyone sees it that way. But they are wrong! But you’re wrong! Whatever side you are on, you feel you have to take a side in what is often talked about as a war. Vallier challenges us: What if we tried agreeing to disagree? Does it really have to be a war?
Shortly after listening to Vallier’s talk, I tuned in to MSNBC host Joy Reid, who was interviewing Kamala Harris about the Dobbs anniversary. I could feel my blood pressure rise, and I went to Twitter for a good rant. But I stopped myself. Abortion will never be ended over Twitter. And the Twitter conflict will only contribute to making people the worst versions of themselves.
Vallier is the author of Trust in a Polarized Age and the upcoming All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. He clearly feels called to the thankless task of reminding people that there is more to life than politics. When you say such things, someone always counters that there is a war in America for freedom. If you’re of a conservative persuasion, you might talk about the trans movement. If you are on the left, you might argue that the Right is trying to take away women’s rights. “Every ideological tradition distorts things about others,” Vallier emphasizes, noting that we all have biases and that most of us don’t fully understand — or grasp at all — the mindset of people with whom we disagree about fundamental things.
Speaking directly to Christians, Vallier preaches about the priority of Jesus for Christians. Faith must come before politics and inform our political participation. And there’s a certain freedom that comes from the fact that
the Gospel does not fit any ideological traditions. . . . Christ defies our ideologies. . . . He disrupts them. We can stand on Christ our solid rock to depolarize. That is a critical power that sincere Christians have.
Vallier is speaking to an audience that is probably conservative. But I couldn’t help but think about the rosary in my purse and the chance that the president of the United States may have one in his pocket right now. I hope we both pray it. Can it draw us together? Maybe Joe Biden is the wrong example. Or is he? Years ago, Charles J. Chaput, when he was the Catholic archbishop in Philadelphia, made the point that Democrats should never have become the proponents of abortion because there were so many Catholics in the party. Obviously, Biden and others do not accept Church teaching on abortion. Others want to see Biden denied Communion over the issue of abortion. The latter is above my pay grade. But Christians who disagree on abortion could lead in helping women, while agreeing to disagree on whether abortion needs to end in America.
Don’t get me wrong, I want abortion to end in America — and yesterday. Or 50 years ago. But I also realize that the country isn’t there yet. I want lives to babe saved, but many people are languishing — including children in the foster-care system. Can we meet in less charged places — such as the heart of little ones in need of a home? It could be healing. It certainly wouldn’t be the road to more violence.
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This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.
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KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review. Sign up for her weekly NRI newsletter HERE. She is the author of A YEAR WITH THE MYSTICS: VISIONARY WISDOM FOR DAILY LIVING. @kathrynlopez
| 55
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‘Without Apology’: On Abortion, Pence Tries To Stand Out From The Field
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-23-1459/abortion-without-apology-abortion-pence-tries-stand-out-field
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Abortion
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rights
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/23/mike-pence-abortion-2024-ron-desantis-donald-trump/
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Pence Lays Down the Gauntlet on Abortion, Challenges 2024 Field to Support National Restrictions
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-23-0946/abortion-pence-lays-down-gauntlet-abortion-challenges-2024-field-support
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pence-lays-down-the-gauntlet-on-abortion-challenges-2024-field-to-support-national-restrictions/
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With the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case fast approaching, one GOP presidential candidate is bucking the conventional wisdom, vocally supporting a national abortion ban and arguing life is a winning issue with voters.
Former vice president Mike Pence said at Friday’s Faith and Freedom Conference that “every GOP candidate for president should support a ban on abortion before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard.” Pence has sought to distinguish himself from candidates like Donald Trump and Nikki Haley who have either remained silent on the issue or heavily qualified their support. Additionally, whereas other hopefuls have declined to weigh in on abortion pills, a Pence-helmed group filed an amicus brief in a case challenging FDA approval of these drugs.
“I would expect that pro-life voters around the country would…be looking for men and women willing to stand unambiguously for advancing the cause of the right to life at every level — at the state and federal level,” Pence told Politico.
According to the former vice president, the party faces a choice on traditional values — “the conservative principles that have won not only the White House, but won majorities over the last 50 years again and again.”
Pence argued that the widespread assessment that Dobbs and pro-life activism in general hurts Republicans with voters is wrong. He attributed the muted performance in the 2022 midterms to the unsubstantiated claims of Trump and others on election fraud: “Rather, where candidates were focused on the past — focused on relitigating the past — we did not fare well.”
Pence has also explicitly criticized his former running mate for calling the heartbeat bill passed in Florida “too harsh.”
The former vice president highlighted the many Republicans who have passed early abortion limits — like Ohio governor Mike DeWine and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — and still prevailed in their bids. “In one race after another, men and women who stood without apology for the right to life — but expressed that with compassion and principles — fared well, and I believe that will be proven out in 2024 as well,” Pence told Politico.
For Pence, a 15-week limit is “a good starting point” Republicans can deliver for pro-life Americans, explaining European countries have 12 to 15-week limits: “Right now, our law at the national level is essentially equivalent to China and Iran and North Korea.” Major pro-life groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have argued they would not support a candidate who doesn’t commit to a 15-week limit at a minimum.
The former vice president’s attempt to court pro-life voters continues this weekend. He is the only candidate invited to address a nationwide Susan B. Anthony List call commemorating the end of Roe. He is also the only candidate who will speak at the Students for Life rally on the National Mall.
Pence argued that there are ways to help the electorate and especially suburban women embrace this issue. According to him, Republicans must point out how extreme Democrats are on abortion, but also focus on policies of compassion. Such policies include empathy through crisis pregnancy centers, which Pence supports greater funding for, and reforms to make adoption more affordable.
“I knew that the cause of life would have to be my cause…and we’ve never wavered,” explained Pence. “I believe it’s the calling of our times.”
Send a tip to the news team at NR.
| 57
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Supreme Court Renews South Carolina's Case to Defund Planned Parenthood
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-22-0828/supreme-court-supreme-court-renews-south-carolinas-case-defund-planned
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/supreme-court-renews-south-carolinas-case-defund-planned-parenthood
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Share This Article
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out the decision of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that had blocked South Carolina from stopping the taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.
The justices sent the case back to the lower court to reconsider it in light of their 7-2 ruling on June 8 in a related case from Indiana. Reuters reports that the ruling allowed an Indiana nursing home resident's family to sue over his care at a government-run facility under the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act.
At issue in Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, is whether pro-life states like South Carolina can direct Medicaid funds—which are intended to help low-income individuals obtain necessary medical assistance—away from abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.
"Pro-life states like South Carolina should be free to determine that Planned Parenthood and other entities that peddle abortion are not qualified to receive taxpayer funding through Medicaid. Congress did not unambiguously create a right for Medicaid recipients to drag states into federal court to challenge those decisions, so no such right exists," Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Chris Schandevel said in a statement after the high court's ruling.
"The Supreme Court's recent decision in Talevski makes that even clearer. And we're grateful the 4th Circuit will have another opportunity to hold that Congress did not intend to allow federal courts to second guess states' decisions about which providers are qualified to receive Medicaid funding," Schandevel said.
Planned Parenthood South Atlantic operates clinics in Charleston, and Columbia, South Carolina, offering medical exams and abortions.
Currently, federal law prohibits the states from using federal funds for abortions except in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. The 1977 law, known as the Hyde Amendment, has also guided taxpayer funding for abortions under Medicaid programs.
After South Carolina determined that Planned Parenthood was not qualified to receive taxpayer funding as part of its Medicaid program, a federal district court then forced the state to restore Planned Parenthood's funding.
Representing the director of the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, ADF attorneys appealed to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, which ruled in 2022 against allowing the state to terminate Planned Parenthood as a qualified Medicaid provider.
ADF attorneys then filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to hear the case and affirm that the Medicaid Act does not create a private right for Medicaid recipients to challenge a state's decision that a specific provider like Planned Parenthood is not qualified to receive taxpayer funding.
As CBN News has reported, nearly a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the ripple effects are still being felt in America's battle over abortion access.
Since that time, at least 15 states have moved to curtail abortions.
***Please sign up for CBN Newsletters and download the CBN News app to ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
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| 58
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'That's 200,000 Families': Pro-Lifers Celebrate Overturning of 'Roe', Others Lament High Court's Ruling
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-23-0558/religion-and-faith-thats-200000-families-pro-lifers-celebrate-overturning-roe
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Abortion
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rights
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https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/thats-200000-families-pro-lifers-celebrate-overturning-roe-others-lament-high-courts-ruling
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The one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is Saturday. The high court rescinded the five-decade-old case, placing abortion law in the hands of state lawmakers and courts.
Since the landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, statistics show 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes it tougher to get abortions.
Most are led by Republicans with 14 banning abortion in most cases at any time during pregnancy.
"There's no way to really know at this point, but the best guess that we have is about 200,000 children were born this year that would not have been born," said Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) at a news conference. "That's 200,000 kids, that's 200,000 smiling faces on playgrounds. That's 200,000 silly songs starting in kindergarten. That's 200,000 families."
Meanwhile, 20 states controlled by Democrats have secured access to the procedure.
"The consequences of the court's decision have been severe," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). "One in three women, one in three women have lost abortion access. Seventeen million individuals can no longer access the full range of reproductive care."
A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows one in four Americans say states imposing strict limits on abortion since the end of Roe v. Wade have made them more supportive of abortion rights.
And a Marist national poll shows two in three Americans saying "abortion should only be allowed, at most, within the first three months of pregnancy."
"At the three abortion mills in this city of Charlotte, we've had 176 moms that have changed their mind," shared Flip Benham, a pro-life activist in North Carolina. "They get on this great big mobile sonogram unit. We get them sonograms, whatever they need."
"We get them church families that will take them in," he continued.
"I go up, I can say, 'Hey, I'm Miss Tina. I'm a volunteer here. Here are the things to expect,'" explained Tina Marshall, the founder of the Black Abortion Defense League. "And they're usually very thankful. And I always tell them, if you need anything, I'm sitting right here on the corner."
Melanie Israel, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation weighed in on the abortion issue one year after Dobbs.
"I think we just need to take a step back and remember that this is a cause for celebration," she told CBN News. "There are thousands and thousands of human beings who are alive today because of the Dobbs decision."
***Please sign up for CBN Newsletters and download the CBN News app to ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
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| 59
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Abortions Rose in Most States This Year, New Data Shows
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-07-1229/abortion-abortions-rose-most-states-year-new-data-shows
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/07/us/abortion-data-bans-laws.html
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Estimated change in abortions
-20
0
+20
+30
+60%
No estimate
Wash.
Maine
Mont.
N.D.
Vt.
Ore.
Minn.
N.H.
Idaho
N.Y.
S.D.
Mass.
Wis.
R.I.
Conn.
Mich.
Wyo.
Pa.
Iowa
Neb.
Nev.
Ohio
Ind.
Ill.
Utah
Colo.
Calif.
Kan.
Mo.
Ky.
Tenn.
Okla.
Ariz.
Ark.
N.M.
Ga.
Miss.
Ala.
Texas
La.
Alaska
States in gray banned all abortions.
Hawaii
Source: Guttmacher Institute
By Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Allison McCann Sep. 7, 2023
New research from the Guttmacher Institute offers the latest view of legal abortions since the Supreme Court’s last year upended access to abortion nationwide and allowed more than a dozen states to ban or restrict the procedure.
Around 511,000 abortions were estimated
Around 465,000 abortions were recorded
across 50 states and Washington, D.C.,
in six months of 2020.
Texas
29,015
Ill.
26,390
N.J.
24,415
Calif.
77,030
Calif.
89,330
N.C.
Ga.
Pa.
N.C.
Va.
Wash.
Mass.
Mich.
Mich.
N.Y.
55,180
Nev.
Tenn.
Colo.
Okla.
N.Y.
65,130
Ind.
Wis.
La.
D.C.
Ariz.
Md.
Ga.
Ore.
Conn.
Fla.
38,700
Ohio
Kan.
Minn.
Ill.
44,690
Va.
Source: Guttmacher Institute
Altogether, about 511,000 abortions were estimated to have occurred in areas where the procedure was legal in the first six months of 2023, a review of Guttmacher’s data shows, compared with about 465,000 abortions nationwide in a six-month period of 2020.
Abortions rose in nearly every state where the procedure remains legal, but the change was most visible in states bordering those with total abortion bans. Many of these states loosened , and providers opened new clinics to serve patients coming from elsewhere. In Illinois, for example, where abortion is legal, abortions rose an estimated 69 percent in 2023 compared with the same period in 2020, to about 45,000 from 26,000.
Arizona, Georgia and Indiana, by contrast, sought to restrict abortion, and all three states had drops in their estimates. Arizona and Georgia have gestational limits on the procedure, and Indiana recently enacted a total ban.
The report excludes abortions obtained outside of the formal health care system, through, for example, pills mailed into states with bans from other countries or states where abortion is legal. Other data suggests that thousands of people, especially those living in states with bans, have ordered abortion pills online from overseas.
Range of 2023 estimates
2020 count
Low
Median
High
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
Calif.
N.Y.
Ill.
Fla.
N.J.
N.C.
10,000
20,000
Md.
Pa.
Mich.
Ga.
Va.
Colo.
Wash.
Ohio
Mass.
N.M.
Kan.
Nev.
Conn.
Minn.
S.C.
Ore.
Ariz.
D.C.
Ind.
Utah
Iowa
Hawaii
Del.
R.I.
Maine
Neb.
N.H.
Mont.
Vt.
Alaska
Wyo.
Source: Guttmacher Institute
Researchers compared this year’s data with 2020, the most recent year of their annual provider survey and the last year before major abortion restrictions took effect. (Texas passed a in 2021, before the Dobbs decision.) Abortions were already rising that year, reversing a decades-long decline.
The state-level monthly estimates are in line with abortion statistics from January through March of this year released by WeCount, another group that surveys providers.
The picture is expected to shift later this year, as more restrictions take effect. Guttmacher researchers collected abortion data before legislatures enacted bans and restrictions in Indiana, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Correction: Sept. 7, 2023
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Ohio votes on abortion rights this fall. Misinformation about the proposal is already spreading
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-05-1444/abortion-ohio-votes-abortion-rights-fall-misinformation-about-proposal-already
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://apnews.com/article/abortion-ohio-constitutional-amendment-election-misinformation-d7b3d8273389a432b011964c14959789
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FILE - A crowd cheers as Jim Caviezel speaks during a “rosary rally” on Sunday, Aug. 6, 2023, in Norwood, Ohio. As the campaigning for and against the nation’s latest tug-of-war over abortion begins in earnest this weekend, Ohio voters are getting a different message from the measure’s opponents. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
An effort to guarantee access to abortion rights in Ohio, a November ballot measure, is already fueling misleading claims about how it could influence abortion care, gender-related health care and parental consent in the state.
The proposed constitutional amendment would give Ohioans the right to make their own reproductive decisions. Backers say that since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, the proposal would restore a commonsense abortion protection that most Ohio voters can support.
But opponents argue it would do far more than that. Ads portray the amendment as a gateway to children getting abortions and gender-related surgeries without their parents’ consent. Opponents also have falsely suggested the amendment would open doors to protecting abusers and legalizing infanticide.
The Associated Press spoke to numerous medical and legal experts, who explained what the amendment, known as Issue 1, would mean for Ohioans if it were to pass in November.
If the amendment passes, Ohio can still restrict abortion beyond the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb. With modern medicine, that point, referred to as the point of viability, is typically about 23 weeks or 24 weeks into the pregnancy.
Yet opponents of the measure argue that the proposal would still allow for abortions “up to birth” because it lets doctors decide when a fetus is viable or not, and because it has an exemption allowing later abortions to protect the life or the health of the mother.
“They could have made it clear. They could have added weeks in there for viability,” said Mehek Cooke, a lawyer working with the opposition campaign, Protect Women Ohio.
Independent medical and legal experts say this argument discounts that doctors have a duty to follow medical science.
The original language from the amendment’s backers defined fetal viability as the fetus having “a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus with reasonable measures.”
“Obviously, it would be unprofessional for a doctor to say that a 9-month fetus had no possibility of survival outside the uterus unless there was some life-threatening birth defect,” said Dan Kobil, a constitutional law professor at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. “The rationale offered that physicians have willy-nilly ability to define viability as anything they want is inaccurate.”
Abortions later in pregnancy are exceedingly rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The people who are getting abortions later in pregnancy are those who have incredibly heartbreaking situations, either some awful, terrible fetal anomaly that took a while to be diagnosed or some maternal medical condition that puts the mother’s life at risk,” said Mae Winchester, a Cleveland-based maternal fetal medicine specialist.
Experts say the idea of abortions “up to birth” is misleading in itself. Terminations later in pregnancy involve medication that induces birth early, which is different from a surgical abortion.
“Abortion at the time of birth, it’s literally not a thing,” Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington, previously told the AP.
Anti-abortion advocates have argued that the amendment “enables abusers” because it protects any person who “assists” someone in exercising their right to make reproductive decisions.
Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, reasoned in an online flyer that the amendment could therefore protect an adult man abusing a teenage girl or a teacher going behind a parent’s back.
But legal experts say these arguments would not stand up in court.
“I think that that is an incredibly creative and inaccurate reading of the amendment,” Kobil said. “Abusers do not assist their victims.”
“The idea that an abuser could, by coercing someone to obtain an abortion or to carry a pregnancy to term, somehow be protected or insulated from punishment for that coercion is simply inconsistent with the language of the second provision of the amendment,” he said.
David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, said the issue is straightforward. “Abuse is illegal, so abusing someone is illegal under Ohio law,” he said.
Medical experts pointed out that there is some evidence that people seek abortions because they are in abusive relationships. Research has shown that when women in physically abusive relationships are denied abortions, they are more likely to stay with their abuser.
An analysis of the amendment by the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom claims that it “opens the door to infanticide” because the proposal would block government officials from interfering with someone exercising their right to reproductive freedom.
That analysis questions whether exercising that right includes killing or neglecting a living child.
“Does it include ‘having to care for a newborn baby?’” it says. “Does it include the ‘right’ to neglect or abandon the newborn?”
Numerous legal experts said the answer to those questions is an emphatic no. Infanticide is already illegal in the U.S., they said, and the amendment doesn’t change that.
“That’s just pure nonsense,” Cohen said.
Opponents of the abortion amendment say its protection of “reproductive” decisions is unnecessarily broad and could include gender-related health care.
Frank Scaturro, a constitutional lawyer working with Protect Women Ohio, said that under the amendment anything that alters the human reproductive system could be understood as a “reproductive decision.”
Supporters say the proposal makes no mention of gender-related health care — precisely because it’s not about that.
The ballot language specifies that it protects reproductive decisions “including but not limited to” contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care and abortion.
Independent legal experts say it’s a stretch to suggest that also means gender-related health care. That legal theory has not been attempted in other states.
Tracy Thomas, a University of Akron law professor who directs the school’s Center for Constitutional Law, said the term “decision” could be essential in interpreting the language.
“A reproductive decision to me, is a decision to reproduce or not to reproduce,” she said. “The only word there that might arguably be raised (as tied to gender-related care) is fertility treatment. I think fertility treatment is IVF. It means treatment for the purpose of reproducing.”
The amendment does not change Ohio’s existing parental notification and consent law, which requires minors to have parental permission — or a judicial exception in extreme cases — in order to get an abortion.
That has not stopped the measure’s opponents from arguing that it will be challenged in court, perhaps one day leading to a decision that would make the parental consent law unconstitutional.
Their argument is based on the use of the term “individual” in the amendment, which opponents claim applies to any gender and both adults and children.
Similar arguments related to parental consent were made ahead of Michigan’s vote last year to codify abortion rights in the state’s constitution, said Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who serves as a consultant to the Issue 1 campaign.
“None of these things have come to pass,” Hill said.
To be overturned, Ohio’s existing parental consent law would have to be challenged in court and struck down by the state Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority.
Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Texas Says a Fetus Is a Child, Except When a Parent Sues a Negligent Doctor or State Official
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0835/abortion-texas-says-fetus-child-except-when-parent-sues-negligent-doctor-or
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/texas-fetus-abortion-malpractice-ken-paxton.html
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JURISPRUDENCE
Texas Says a Fetus Is a Child, Except When a Parent Sues a Negligent Doctor or State Official
BY DOV FOX AND JILL WIEBER LENS
AUG 24, 20231:28 PM
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks to reporters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 26, 2022. Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Prison guard Salia Issa was seven months pregnant when she reported to work on a warm mid-November evening in 2021 at the Middleton Transfer Facility in Abilene, Texas. Issa had just started her night shift when she felt intense, contraction-like pains. She needed to get to a hospital right away. But, consistent with prison policy, supervising officers wouldn’t let her leave her post for hours, until someone came to replace her.
By the time Issa was allowed to drive herself to the emergency room, her baby had died. Doctors believe that had she made it sooner, the child would have been born alive. Issa and her husband sued the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and three senior officers there for violating their federal civil rights.
The Texas prison agency is represented by the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, who disputes one critical fact. As Paxton tells it, Issa may have suffered an injury, but it was to her body—to her pregnancy. Apparently, Issa’s injury is limited to her uterus. Never mind the death of the child whose arrival she and her husband had been eagerly awaiting. Or that Issa gave birth to her baby no differently than if her child were alive. Standard medical care encourages parents who deliver a dead baby to spend time with and hold the baby, take pictures, and make footprints and other memories. We don’t know whether Issa and her husband were able to spend time with their baby. But we do know that standard of care doesn’t include bonding like this for the loss of a colon, kidney, appendix, or even a uterus.
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This isn’t the only context in which Texas has devalued the unborn child. If a doctor’s misconduct is to blame for fetal death, Texas malpractice law specifically defines the fetus as far less: as just part of the woman’s body and explicitly not as an individual. Ironically, in the current abortion pill litigation, plaintiff Shaun Jester, a Texas OB-GYN, claims that abortion denies him the joy of getting to “bring about a successful delivery of new life.” But if Dr. Jester were to negligently prevent that “successful delivery,” the legal injury is limited to the woman’s uterus—thereby capping any damages to a maximum $250,000. Dr. Jester specifically benefits from the devaluation.
Texas’ framing of the harm of pregnancy loss in terms of a body part is especially perplexing in light of its abortion ban that declares an “unborn child” exists as of fertilization. But Texas isn’t alone in treating the very same unborn life in strikingly inconsistent ways across different contexts; the contradictions actually pervade the legal landscape. For example, Florida bans abortion at six weeks to protect the unborn. But Florida law denies parents any basis to sue for the death of their unborn child. Wrongfully causing a pregnancy loss in Florida is merely a legal injury to “living tissue of the body.”
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Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, and Idaho criminalize abortion from the moment of conception to protect prenatal life. But these states deny grieving parents any cause of action for the wrongful death of their unborn child until the point of fetal viability at around 24 weeks. Mississippi, too, makes abortion a crime from conception, while also denying a legal claim for pregnancy loss until “quickening,” as early as 16 weeks. Ohio bans abortion at six weeks, but denies grieving parents a claim for the death of their unborn child until viability.
Things get even stranger when the embryos people created using in vitro fertilization are contaminated or destroyed. When fertility freezers failed at two clinics in the summer of 2018, some victims sued for the wrongful death of their unborn child, leaving courts to decide between malfunction and murder. The laws in Arkansas illustrate the tension. Its abortion ban says there’s an “unborn child” at “the fusion of a human spermatozoon with a human ovum,” which would also seem to include frozen embryos in a lab. Yet the state law denies relief for lost embryos as life if the death is before the embryo is transferred to the woman’s body. Similarly, ever since the first-ever IVF suit in Rhode Island, courts have treated people’s lost embryos as “irreplaceable property.”
An embryo or fetus is specifically an “unborn child” under public law that criminalizes abortion based on the state’s interest in the unborn. But they’re reduced to body parts or property under the private law of civil wrongs, or torts, when it comes to the interests of parents who grieve their mismanaged pregnancies or mishandled embryos. How can the state’s abstract interest in that life start so much earlier, and be so much stronger, than the interest that aspiring parents have in their very own unborn child?
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For decades, the abortion debate has crowded out real talk about injuries like Salia Issa’s in Texas. For decades, the abortion rights movement has avoided this talk for fear that admitting that pregnancy loss matters risks ceding ground on abortion rights. It doesn’t. Recognizing the grief of reproductive loss is a function of how each person relates to their unborn, which can and often does vary across people and circumstances. That individualized assessment is exactly how tort law considers other personal injuries. This way of thinking about the value of the unborn poses no threat of collapsing into personhood-at-conception for those who seek abortions.
Issa felt her baby kick. She and her husband made all kinds of plans for the child in their life together. The state of Texas did not. Yet its interest is treated as mattering more than theirs. Had Issa ended her pregnancy, Paxton would prosecute the doctor who provided that service to her into prison for killing a baby. But because it wasn’t an abortion, according to Texas, it wasn’t a child, even if that’s how Issa valued him.
The state’s interest in nascent life shouldn’t count for more than that of an expectant parent. Taking reproductive loss seriously points to ways of protecting the unborn that don’t involve forcing pregnancy or childbirth: Support those who want to have their child. Expand access to prenatal care. Accommodate pregnant people at work. At the very least, if they have a miscarriage or their baby is stillborn, don’t devalue their loss; it can’t be a “baby” for the state but a “body part” for the parent.
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Untangling Ron DeSantis’ debate anecdote about an improbable abortion survival story
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0754/facts-and-fact-checking-untangling-ron-desantis-debate-anecdote-about
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/aug/24/untangling-ron-desantis-debate-anecdote-about-an-i/
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Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis listens as former Vice President Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy cross-talk during a Republican presidential primary debate Aug. 23, 2023, in at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. (AP)
When the topic of abortion came up during the first Republican primary presidential debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shared a perplexing anecdote about a woman he met who he said had survived the procedure.
"I know a lady in Florida named Penny," DeSantis said. "She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital."
Some accused the governor of fabricating the story.
"Let me see if I understand this correctly. Doctors tried to abort ‘Penny’ multiple times and discarded her in a pan, and then her grandmother took her to another hospital? DeSantis lies like a toddler," one person posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Our research found that a woman named Penny, who tells an unusual birth story about an attempted abortion, does exist.
We asked DeSantis’ campaign for evidence or more information. The campaign replied via email, sending only a link to a Daily Signal article that identified "Penny" by her full name and recounted her story.
The woman DeSantis referred to is Miriam "Penny" Hopper, an anti-abortion activist who said she survived an abortion attempt in Florida in 1955. Her claim, which is uncorroborated, has been featured online by Protect Life Michigan, an anti-abortion advocacy group.
In a video and in interviews, Hopper said she had been delivered around 23 weeks gestation after her mother went to a hospital in Wauchula, Florida, while experiencing bleeding. In a 2013 interview with radio station WFSU, Hopper said she believes an abortion had been attempted at home before her parents went to the hospital, which also could be why DeSantis referenced "multiple" abortion attempts.
Hopper said the doctor at the hospital induced labor, and she was born at 1 pound, 11 ounces and was left in a bedpan. She told WFSU her grandmother found her alive the next day and was enraged about her being abandoned. Then a nurse volunteered to transport Hopper to what was then Morell Memorial Hospital in Lakeland, Florida, now the site of Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center. That’s about 40 miles north of the hospital where Hopper says she was born.
Her story has been used to support "born alive" bills in state legislatures, which aim to protect infants that survive an abortion, even though there are federal laws for that purpose.
We were unable to gauge the accuracy of Hopper’s account. We couldn’t find records, such as news reports, dating to the 1950s, and people who could corroborate the story, such as her grandmother, are no longer living. Hopper did not respond to requests for comment.
Medically speaking, the scenario is dubious.
From the 1950s through 1980, "newborn death was virtually ensured" for infants born at or before 24 weeks of gestation, The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology says on its website.
Recent studies have shown wide variation in modern-day survival rates for infants born around 23 weeks, partly because of improved hospital practices for resuscitation and active treatment.
A 2022 University of Rochester Medical Center study found that babies born at 23 weeks — who were "actively treated" at academic medical centers in the National Institutes of Health-funded Neonatal Research Network — had a 55% chance of survival.
This is considerably higher than the 23-week survival rate at many other institutions, as well as a previous study conducted from 2008 to 2012 in the same network, which put the rate at 32%. (Lifesaving care for babies born at 22 and 23 weeks varies by hospital policy and physician opinion, according to a New York Times story.)
Before the 1970s, most babies born before 28 weeks gestation died because they lacked the ability to breathe on their own for more than a short time, and reliable mechanical ventilators for these infants did not yet exist. That also makes it improbable that Hopper could have survived overnight without medical intervention when born at 23 weeks in the 1950s.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
RELATED: Fact-check: What Republican candidates got right, wrong in first debate on Fox News
RELATED: Ron DeSantis’ False claim that some states allow ‘post-birth’ abortions. None do.
Facebook video, YouTube archive, Sept. 16, 2022; Feb. 2, 2020
WFSU Public Media, For pro life advocates, the issues are both personal and political, April 18, 2023
Jezebel, Asked about abortion, Ron DeSantis tells bizarre story about a fetus in a pan, Aug. 23, 2023
The Lakeland Ledger, 100-year timeline: Lakeland hospital grew from 65 to nearly 900 beds
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Periviable Birth, October 2017
PubMed, Neonatal mortality rate: relationship to birth weight and gestational age, October 1972
PubMed, Neonatal mortality risk in relation to birth weight and gestational age: update, December 1982,
University of Pennsylvania Nursing, Care of Premature Infants, accessed Aug. 23, 2023
University of Rochester Medical Center, New research shows survival rate improvement for extremely pre-term infants, March 3, 2022
The New York Times, Parents of extremely premature babies face an impossible choice, April 16, 2020
Email interview, American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology press office, Aug. 24, 2023
The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter
| 63
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Some abortion drug restrictions are upheld by an appeals court in a case bound for the Supreme Court
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-16-1539/abortion-some-abortion-drug-restrictions-are-upheld-appeals-court-case-bound
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://apnews.com/article/abortion-pill-restrictions-appeals-court-402be732d162af449c40ed1315cfb851
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FILE - A patient prepares to take the first of two combination pills, mifepristone, for a medication abortion during a visit to a clinic in Kansas City, Kan., on, Oct. 12, 2022. New restrictions on access to the drug used in the most common form of abortion would be imposed under a federal appeals court ruling issued Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023, but the Supreme Court will have the final say. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Mail-order access to a drug used in the most common form of abortion in the U.S. would end under a federal appeals court ruling issued Wednesday that cannot take effect until the Supreme Court weighs in.
The decision by three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans overturned part of a lower court ruling that would have revoked the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. But it left intact part of the ruling that would end the availability of the drug by mail, allow it to be used through only the seventh week of pregnancy rather than the 10th, and require that it be administered in the presence of a physician.
Those restrictions won’t take effect right away because the Supreme Court previously intervened to keep the drug available during the legal fight.
The panel’s ruling would reverse changes the FDA made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.
“In loosening mifepristone’s safety restrictions, FDA failed to address several important concerns about whether the drug would be safe for the women who use it,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote for the panel. She was joined by Judge Cory Wilson. Judge James Ho dissented, arguing to fully uphold a Texas-based federal judge’s April ruling that would revoke the drug’s approval, which the FDA granted in 2000.
President Joe Biden’s administration said it would appeal, with Vice President Kamala Harris decrying the potential effect on abortion rights, as well as on the availability of other medications.
“It endangers our entire system of drug approval and regulation by undermining the independent, expert judgment of the FDA,” Harris’ statement said.
Abortion rights advocates said the ruling poses a major threat to abortion availability following last year’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and the nationwide right to abortion.
“If the Supreme Court affirms this decision, it will prevent patients from receiving their medication in the mail in all 50 states in the nation,” Jennifer Dalven of the American Civil Liberties Union said during an online news conference. “That means that patients will have to travel often hundreds of miles, especially if they’re coming from a state that has banned abortion, for the sole purpose of picking up a pill.”
Abortion opponents hailed the ruling, although they, too, might appeal to seek full revocation of the FDA’s approval of the drug.
“Chemical Abortion Pills take one life almost every time, an innocent child, and exposes women to all kinds of known problems,” said a statement from the anti-abortion Students for Life of America.
Erin Hawley, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed the Texas lawsuit, said her organization had not yet decided whether to appeal to the Supreme Court to try to get mifepristone’s approval fully revoked. The conservative Christian legal group was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to the June 2002 Supreme Court ruling that has allowed states to ban abortion.
An attorney for drugmaker Danco Laboratories, which argued in favor of upholding the FDA approval and revisions, did not respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment. Drugmaker GenBioPro, which was not part of the lawsuit, noted that the ruling would keep its generic mifepristone available, subject to the restrictions.
There is virtually no precedent for a U.S. court overturning the approval of a drug that the FDA has deemed safe and effective. While new drug safety issues often emerge after FDA approval, the agency is required to monitor medicines on the market, evaluate emerging issues and take action to protect U.S. patients. Congress delegated that responsibility to the FDA — not the courts— more than a century ago.
However, during a May 17 hearing, the 5th Circuit panel pushed back frequently against assertions that U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s April 7 ruling was unprecedented and unwarranted.
Kacsmaryk, Ho and Wilson are all appointees of former President Donald Trump. Elrod was appointed to the 5th Circuit by former President George W. Bush. All of the judges have a history of supporting abortion restrictions.
Elrod’s opinion said the full revocation of FDA’s approval of the drug was likely barred by legal time limits. Ho argued that the approval violated the 19th century Comstock Act. He also said the FDA gave the green light to mifepristone under a law that allows approval for drugs that treat serious or life threatening illness. “Pregnancy is not an illness,” Ho wrote.
Mifepristone is one of two pills used in medication abortions. The other drug, misoprostol, is also used to treat other medical conditions. Health care providers have said they could switch to misoprostol if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain. Misoprostol is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.
| 64
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Biden world sees the making of a wider path to victory in 2024
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-11-0626/2024-presidential-election-biden-world-sees-making-wider-path-victory-2024
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Abortion
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lefts
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https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/biden-world-2024-election-abortion-00110775
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ELECTIONS
The president’s team is focused on the states that got him the White House. But the issue of abortion has them dreaming of something bigger.
Though polls suggest concerns about Joe Biden’s age and a lack of enthusiasm even among voters who like him, the president’s team is confident in their chances in a second round with Trump. | Alex Goodlett/AP Photo
By HOLLY OTTERBEIN and JONATHAN LEMIRE
08/11/2023 04:30 AM EDT
Joe Biden’s team thinks his path to victory in 2024 could look an awful lot like it did in 2020. But people close to the president believe that voters’ enthusiasm about abortion rights could also unlock new roads to another term.
The most straightforward route that those in Biden world see includes protecting the blue wall of Rust Belt states that were essential to his success three years ago, while preparing for repeat battles in the new swing states of Georgia and Arizona that he swiped from the Republican column.
Biden’s aides also are moving to expand the map. Above all else, they believe North Carolina, where a 12-week abortion ban has gone into effect, is a legitimate pick-up opportunity and no longer Democratic fool’s gold. A senior Biden campaign official, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly, said it would be “crazy” to not put North Carolina on the map since the president only lost it by 1 percentage point in 2020.
Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have aired ads there as well as in former President Donald Trump’s home base of Florida, where an amendment to restore abortion rights could be on the ballot next fall. And after this week’s election in solidly red Ohio, where voters defeated a proposal designed to restrict abortion rights, a handful in Biden’s orbit have begun to dream a little bit bigger: thinking that state could maybe, just maybe, be in play.
“I never count out Ohio,” said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, a close ally of Biden’s. “What you saw [this week] in terms of Ohio is that fairness won out.”
Becca Siegel, a senior adviser who led the Biden campaign’s data and analytics efforts in 2020, said the team’s goal at this early stage in the race is to “maximize the chances of reaching 270” electoral votes in whatever way it can.
It’s an approach that the Biden operation also took in 2020, she said, when it put states like Georgia and Arizona on their list of possibilities even though that shortest path to winning was flipping back the Rust Belt states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. She said the strategy is designed to protect against uncertainty: in both polling as well as in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the states Trump unexpectedly flipped in 2016. Biden went on to take those battlegrounds back last election, as well as Georgia and Arizona.
Strategists in Biden world are clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning in Florida and Ohio — few share Weingarten’s optimism about the Buckeye State and others say Florida is wishful thinking. Both states, once the ultimate battlegrounds (Barack Obama won them both, twice), have moved decisively to the right in recent cycles.
Instead, the president’s map begins with that trio of Rust Belt states he took back from Trump, according to five sources close to the Biden campaign who were granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly. They think the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada are also among the top toss-ups.
They also foresee a likely rematch with Trump.
“Will it probably just be the same states? Yeah, probably,” said one of the people close to the Biden campaign.
But, the source added, the “abortion issue is alive and well” and gives the Biden campaign a certain advantage: “You have an abortion referendum in places like Florida and Ohio. Well, that makes you take a good look at things. … Maybe all of a sudden Ohio is in play.”
The White House has spent more than two-and-a-half years zeroing in on the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, repeatedly dispatching the president and top advisors to union halls and construction sites there.
But there are questions about the blue wall’s sturdiness. A round of recent polling shows Biden in a dead heat with Trump in the three battlegrounds.
An Emerson College poll of Michigan voters released last week found Biden and Trump each at 44 percent, with Trump sneaking ahead if Green Party candidate Cornel West is on the ticket. A Marquette Law School survey released the week before showed Wisconsin voters a 50-50 split between Biden and Trump. And a Pennsylvania poll by Quinnipiac University released a month prior told a similar story, with Trump edging Biden 47-46, though it was well within the margin of error.
Those tasked with securing the president a second term are not overly worried, but they admit that the race will be tight. They argue that Biden’s legislative record, his leadership on the world stage, and the economic growth coming out of the pandemic will help propel him to another win. They also believe that Trump’s legal challenges, litany of scandals and MAGA positions will alienate swing voters.
At the same time, they acknowledge Trump’s strength in those swing states, particularly among white working-class voters. Trump has also picked up support among union workers, despite Biden’s close relationship with organized labor. And all three of the Rust Belt states feature large cities, including Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee, where Biden needs to reverse a drop in enthusiasm in both young voters and Black voters, particularly men.
“In the midterms and throughout elections this year, we’ve seen that President Biden’s message is the winning one for 2024. That said, we fully expect this to be a competitive election and will take nothing for granted,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “We must earn every American’s vote, which is why we’re already investing in our battlegrounds and key voting blocs.”
Of the three Rust Belt states, the people close to the Biden campaign feel the most confident about Michigan. But even they don’t think it is a sure thing. Pennsylvania, many believe, will be closer. Biden has spent more time there than any other swing state and hails from neighboring Delaware. But Trump showed remarkable strength with white working-class voters in the state, and Biden did not quite meet projections with that same group in 2020, according to two sources familiar with internal campaign data.
In fact, some in Biden’s orbit believe that demographics indicate Pennsylvania may be where Ohio was ten years ago, only growing more challenging for Democrats with each passing cycle. Others are less bearish, pointing to wins by Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman in 2022 as proof of strong momentum in the state.
Wisconsin, most of the sources believe, will be the closest state on the map and quite possibly the race’s tipping-point state. Arizona, those people think, will likely be next, followed by Georgia and Nevada.
Georgia, though, could be more challenging depending on the nominee. Some close to the president believe that it arrived as a swing state ahead of schedule and only Trump’s presence at the top of the ticket puts it in play — especially if coverage of his likely election interference trial there saturates the state. Another Republican, in their view, likely carries it.
But there are differing takes on that front. The senior Biden campaign official disagreed, saying that Georgia is in play even if other Republicans win the nomination. And broadly speaking, the person argued that it is too early to have too firm of opinions about what the map will look like next November.
Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who was a senior advisor to Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said a big question for Biden is whether his base returns to him.
“Does he recover his footing with younger voters, with non-white voters? Can he get those numbers back up?” he said. “If not, it makes states like North Carolina and Nevada really tough for him.”
Trump, he said, faces his own challenges. “For Trump, can he improve his standing with independents? My sense is that he has not so far. If he can’t, due to reminders of January 6, then you could see Pennsylvania fall off the map, maybe Arizona and Georgia get tougher, too.”
Not every Democrat is dreaming of new paths to 270 electoral votes. Jim Messina, who served as then-President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign manager and has at times informally advised Biden, said that 2024 will feature “the smallest map in the history of American politics.” That’s a reflection, he added, “of two candidates who are so well-known and the increased political tribalism” in the country in recent years.
Though polls suggest concerns about Biden’s age and a lack of enthusiasm even among voters who like him, the president’s team is confident in their chances in a second round with Trump.
And abortion, they think, will be key. They expect it to drive turnout, including among suburban women and voters who may be lukewarm to the president.
When Roe v. Wade was struck down, “there was a huge shock of ‘Oh my god, this really happened. They really took away a right.’ And as these states have been more and more extremist, you’re seeing more women and families wondering why their government is taking rights away from them,” said Weingarten. “I do think it is expanding the map.”
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How Ohio’s ballot vote could preview the 2024 politics of abortion
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Hear from Ohio citizens amid the fight over abortion amendment in Ohio
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Hear from Ohio citizens amid the fight over abortion amendment in Ohio
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The ballot initiative Ohio voters will decide Tuesday is likely to demonstrate again the continuing public resistance to last year’s Supreme Court decision ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion – while also offering an early indication about how broadly that backlash may benefit Democrats in the 2024 election.
Ohio voters are facing a measure placed on the ballot by state Republicans that would require future initiatives to change the state Constitution to receive 60% of the vote to be approved. The change would apply to amendments on all subjects, but the campaign has become a proxy test of attitudes about abortion in the state. Almost everyone agrees Republicans and their allies in the anti-abortion movement have advanced this proposal to end majority rule on ballot initiatives because they fear that a majority of Ohio voters will support a separate ballot initiative in November to overturn the six-week abortion ban approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
Abortion rights advocates are feeling confident about winning both today’s vote and the follow-on election in November to restore abortion rights in the state. “If I were on the ground in Ohio, I’d be feeling very good about the work I was doing,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion rights group.
If Ohio voters on Tuesday reject the measure, known as Issue 1, to require super-majorities for future initiatives, it would underscore the broad public support for maintaining legal access to abortion, even in most states that now lean strongly toward Republicans. A massive 2022 polling project by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of voters in 43 states said they believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances.
Ohio special election becomes proxy for abortion rights fight
Those attitudes have translated into results at the ballot box. Since the Republican-appointed US Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, abortion rights supporters have triumphed each time voters have had the opportunity in a ballot initiative to directly decide whether abortion should remain legal in their state. That pattern has extended through red states (including Kansas, Kentucky and Montana) and blue (such as California and Vermont). Another victory on Tuesday in Ohio, a state former President Donald Trump won comfortably in both 2016 and 2020, will encourage advocates to press ballot initiatives restoring abortion rights next year in other traditionally Republican-leaning states where GOP governors and legislators have restricted or banned the procedure, including Florida, South Dakota, Missouri and possibly Arizona.
But while an Ohio victory may generate momentum for abortion rights advocates, it could also demonstrate the big political challenge still confronting them. While the abortion rights’ side has consistently won ballot initiatives, the issue’s impact on electoral campaigns has been much more uneven.
In 2022, promises to defend abortion rights proved a powerful weapon for Democratic candidates in Democratic-leaning and swing states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – places where abortion primarily remains legal. But in more red-leaning states, such as Florida, Texas, Iowa and Ohio itself, Democrats in 2022 were unable to generate any meaningful backlash against Republican state officials who imposed severe abortion bans-even though polls, including both the PRRI project and local surveys, showed most voters in those places supported maintaining legal abortion. That was especially true in Ohio, where DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the restrictive abortion ban that voters appear poised to repeal this year.
“Ballot measures can win in very hard places that Democrats will struggle to win because it’s just an up or down [vote] on where you are about abortion,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster. But, she added, “in red states voters may use other issues” such as crime or immigration “more heavily than abortion” in deciding which candidate shares their values most.
Ohio will present a critical test of whether Democrats in 2024 can more effectively convert support for abortion rights into votes against red state Republicans who oppose those rights. It is one of the three states most likely to determine which party controls the next Senate. Democratic senators in those three states – Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jon Tester in Montana and Joe Manchin in West Virginia – are the last three Democrats holding any of the 50 Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Trump in 2020. All three of those seats will be on the ballot next November. “What’s really going to be important for folks in these Senate races is to underscore for voters, your rights are important to me, I’m here to protect and restore your rights,” said Vasquez-Giroux. “We need candidates to be out front.”
In a conference call with Democratic activists earlier this month, Brown portrayed Tuesday’s vote as the start of a chain reaction that could help him defy the state’s rightward drift. “If we get our people to the polls, we win this overwhelmingly,” Brown said about Issue 1. “That will give us momentum for the November vote on protecting women’s rights, and it will give us momentum then for our elections next year.”
That could happen. But it would require Brown and abortion-rights advocates to break the pattern from 2022, when the issue, somewhat paradoxically, benefited Democrats more in places where the procedure remained legal than in places where it was banned.
On a national basis, support for abortion rights clearly helped Democrats hold down their losses in the House of Representatives: more than three-fifths of voters said they supported legal abortion and almost three-fourths of them backed Democratic candidates for the House, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. And, the exit polls found, in most key swing states abortion likewise benefited Democrats running in gubernatorial and US Senate races against Republicans who opposed abortion rights.
A remarkably similar 62% to 63% of voters supported legal abortion in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, the exit polls found, and Democrats won the governorships in all four – carrying over four-fifths of those pro-choice voters in the first two states and almost exactly three-fourths of them in the latter two. Huge margins among voters who supported abortion rights also keyed Democratic Senate wins last year in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona and Nevada. And abortion rights was the critical issue that powered a landslide Democratic victory in a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election last spring.
But in more solidly Republican-leaning states, Democrats faced, as I wrote last November, a “double whammy.” While most voters in those states also supported abortion rights, the majorities recorded in the exit polls were in the range of 53% to 58%, narrower than in the purple (much less blue) states. As important, compared to the swing states, Republican candidates in the red states frequently won a higher percentage of voters who said they supported abortion rights. In Florida, for instance, both Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio carried almost exactly one-third of voters who backed legal abortion, the exit polls found; in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed a six-week abortion ban, carried nearly 3 in 10 voters who supported legal abortion, and strikingly won nearly three-fourths of all White women. Apart from Arizona, which has been trending away from the GOP, Democrats didn’t flip the governor’s seat in any state that restricted or banned abortion; Democrats didn’t dislodge a GOP state legislative majority in any state that retrenched abortion rights.
Jim Henson, executive director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said in that state Republicans were able to overcome majority public opposition to their sweeping abortion ban mostly by convincing voters to focus more on other issues. That success reflected both Democratic weakness and Republican strength. In Texas, as in other red states, Henson notes, the Democratic party is too weak to shape what issues define the public debate. “You lose influence over the public discussion,” Henson said. Rather than abortion, which split even their supporters, Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott were able to keep voters in their coalition focused on the issues where they agree with the party, particularly border security. “It’s about agenda management and the salience of issues,” Henson said.
In Ohio, a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest signed by DeWine in 2019 went into effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe last summer. The policy immediately generated enormous controversy when a 10-year-old rape victim had to travel to neighboring Indiana to obtain an abortion. But the issue proved barely a speed bump for Ohio Republicans in the November election, even though the exit poll found 58% of voters there wanted abortion to remain mostly legal (and the PRRI survey put support for legal abortion even higher).
Republicans in the state legislature were insulated from any backlash by a severe partisan gerrymander. DeWine scored a landslide reelection victory, and Republican J.D. Vance notched a solid win over Democrat Tim Ryan in the US Senate race. Exit polls found that nearly one-third of voters who supported legal abortion backed Vance, and that DeWine carried 43% of voters who favored abortion rights – much more than any other Republican governor in the states where exit polls were conducted.
Operatives in both parties cite multiple reasons why opposition to the abortion ban didn’t hurt Ohio Republicans more. One reason is that the law’s impact was muffled when a state court blocked implementation of it before the election. In the Senate race, another factor was that Ryan, in his intent focus on recapturing blue-collar White workers, downplayed the issue. And DeWine benefited not only from a massive funding advantage over his Democratic opponent, former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, but also from good grades for his handling of the pandemic among many of the college-educated voters most dubious of abortion bans.
Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says that while abortion mostly fizzled in the statewide contests, it was an effective issue for Democrats in several of their surprising Ohio congressional wins last year. And he echoes many Democrats there who believe that support for legal abortion could prove a more powerful asset for Brown next year.
A key reason for the Democrats’ decline in Ohio, Rusnak noted, is that they haven’t matched the party’s performance with female voters in other states across the region, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. But increased focus on abortion, he maintains, could reverse that. “This is the kind of issue that touches everybody,” he said. “There are large numbers of people who feel very strongly about this, whether you are in an urban, suburban or rural area of this state. They don’t want government interfering, they don’t want government making these decisions for them.”
The abortion-related ballot initiative votes on Tuesday and in November will keep the issue front and center for voters. And if Ohio votes to restore abortion rights in November, that could make voters there particularly sensitive to the risk that Republicans might override that decision by passing a nationwide abortion ban if they win unified control of Congress and the White House next year. (Conversely, a Republican victory on either Issue 1 or the November ballot measure about abortion would signal that receptivity to GOP arguments has reached a level in Ohio that will be extremely difficult for Brown to surmount.)
Both of the leading GOP contenders to oppose Brown have taken strongly anti-abortion positions, with Secretary of State Frank LaRose, probably the slight front-runner for the nomination, positioning himself as the leading advocate of Issue 1 and a staunch backer of the state’s six-week abortion ban. LaRose’s main rival, the Trump-allied business owner Bernie Moreno, has described himself as “100 percent pro-life with no exceptions.”
LaRose recently frustrated other Republicans when he directly linked Tuesday’s vote to the abortion ban. Republicans have focused their campaign for Issue 1 on the argument that the current rules will allow out of state interests to flood the state with money and engrave a wide-ranging wish list of liberal priorities into the Ohio Constitution. (Ads supporting the initiative have referenced drag shows, gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and parental rights, hot button issues for GOP voters.) But at a May GOP dinner, LaRose was recorded saying: “Some people say this is all about abortion. Well, you know what? It’s 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”
David Pepper, the former Democratic state party chair, said on a podcast last week that while polling and early vote results are promising for opponents, a late turnout surge of culturally conservative GOP voters could still pass Issue 1. And anti-abortion groups are pushing hard on its behalf. “Issue 1…safeguards Ohio’s constitution against outside groups pushing extreme amendments,” said Sue Liebel, director of state affairs and Midwest regional director for SBA Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, in a statement.
But the measure has drawn broad bipartisan opposition, including from multiple former Ohio Republican governors and attorneys general. One long-time GOP operative in the state closely following the debate told me he anticipates the state will reject Issue 1 and then approve the November measure to override the state’s abortion ban, perhaps resoundingly in each case.
“I am as confident as I can be that it’s going to pass in November, based on everything I’ve seen over and over again,” said the GOP operative, who asked for anonymity while discussing the state of the contests. “The abortion law that was passed … was way out of kilter with what people think in Ohio.”
Banning abortion appears equally “out of kilter” with majority public sentiment in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – all swing states where Democrats must defend Senate seats next year. And in all those places, Democratic Senate candidates are likely to stress the possibility that Republicans will seek a nationwide abortion ban if they win control of the chamber. Democratic polls have found that most voters expect the GOP to pursue such a national prohibition if it captures the majority. “Abortion is going to be one of the defining issues of the cycle,” said David Bergstein, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Voters are as angry about the overturn of Roe and what it means to them today as when it happened.”
But even if abortion helps Democrats hold all of those precarious seats, they would still likely lose their Senate majority unless they can win two of the three races in the more reliably Republican terrain of West Virginia, Montana and Ohio. Democrats can afford a net loss of only one Senate seat, even if they retain the White House next year, and with it the tie-breaking Senate vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
If Manchin seeks reelection, he’s unlikely to stress the issue in West Virginia (he was the lone Senate Democrat last year to vote to uphold a Republican filibuster on a bill to restore the nationwide right to abortion). But abortion almost certainly will need to play a leading role if Brown in Ohio and Tester in Montana are to survive the Republican current in their state-particularly in a presidential election year. Control of the Senate may pivot on whether support for legal abortion proves decisive for more voters in red America next year than it did in 2022.
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Ohioans vote in election that could determine future of majority rule
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Opponents of a measure that would make it harder to amend the Ohio constitution packed the statehouse rotunda in May. Photograph: Samantha Hendrickson/AP
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Sam Levine
Tue 8 Aug 2023 12.59 CEST
Last modified on Tue 8 Aug 2023 16.36 CEST
Ohioans will decide on Tuesday how difficult it should be to amend the state’s constitution in an election that will have huge consequences for reproductive rights and the future of majority rule in the state.
Currently, Ohio requires activists to get a certain number of signatures on petitions, both statewide and in 44 of 88 counties, to send an amendment to the ballot. In each of the 44 counties, the total number of signatures needs to be equivalent to 5% of the vote in that county in the last gubernatorial race. Statewide, the total has to be equivalent to 10% of the same.
Issue 1, the only question on Tuesday’s ballot, would make that process considerably harder. It would require supporters to get the signatures in all 88 counties and then obtain a 60% supermajority for an amendment to pass.
The election that could determine the future of democracy in Ohio
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The vote comes just three months before Ohio is to rule on a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights in November. Republicans have openly said that Issue 1 is an attempt to block the abortion measure from passing.
The vote is also an effort to preserve Republican political power in Ohio. Activists in the state are crafting a constitutional amendment that would strip state lawmakers of their ability to draw electoral districts and hand it over to an independent commission instead. Last year, Republicans repeatedly ignored rebukes from the supreme court calling for the redrawing of district lines because they were too distorted in favor of Republicans. Republicans eventually ran out the clock, preserved their supermajority in the state legislature, and then used that supermajority to refer Issue 1 to the ballot.
Polling has been limited and it is difficult to predict the results of a ballot referendum. The average of three polls, all of which have slightly different wording, have shown 35% of Ohioans support the change, 45% oppose it, and 20% aren’t sure, according to FiveThirtyEight. Similar measures to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments in other states have failed in recent years, the outlet noted.
If the measure passes, opponents say, it would effectively institute minority rule in Ohio. Supporters say it should be harder for citizens to amend the state constitution. That argument is not supported by data – roughly 75% of the citizen-initiated constitutional amendments over the last century have failed. Ohio also allows the legislature to send constitutional amendments to the ballot and voters have approved 106 out of 157 since 1914, according to cleveland.com.
The push to adopt the amendment has been largely funded by Richard Uihlein, an Illinois billionaire and Republican megadonor, who has spent millions backing the effort. Those opposing the campaign have also raised considerable sums of money, though no donations as big as Uihlein’s, from out-of-state left-leaning groups.
Ohio hasn’t voted on a statewide constitutional referendum in August since 1926. And this year, Republicans in the state cancelled August elections altogether, citing their low turnout (it was just 8% last year). But in May, they reversed that decision to put Issue 1 on the ballot in August.
That reversal appeared to be a calculation that turnout would be low in August, giving the measure a better chance of passing. But it may have backfired. Nearly 600,000 people voted early through 4 August, turnout that one election official told the Associated Press was akin to a gubernatorial election. There have been some reports of long lines in urban areas (Ohio only allows each county to have one early voting site) and some counties have made last minute changes to their polling locations.
Polls are open on Tuesday from 6.30am until 7.30pm.
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States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/abortion-state-laws-criminalization-roe/
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States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat
By Caroline Kitchener, Kevin Schaul, N. Kirkpatrick, Daniela Santamariña and Lauren Tierney
Updated September 18, 2023 at 12:32 p.m. EDT|Published June 24, 2022 at 10:23 a.m. EDT
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Access to abortion remains a patchwork of state-by-state policies after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, with abortion restricted across much of the Southern United States. In the six months that followed the ruling, there were an estimated 43,410 fewer legal abortions in states that had bans, according to a recent survey.
New restrictions are continuing to take effect, with Republican-led legislatures pushing to enact bans in some states that have become abortion havens. In April, Florida passed a six-week ban, which will outlaw most abortions in the country’s third most populous state. More restrictions in other states are almost certainly on the way.
States we’re watching in 2023
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Current status of abortion access
CORRECTION
A previous version of this graphic incorrectly stated that the governors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina are up for re-election. They are term-limited.
Bonnie Berkowitz, Nick Mourtoupalas and Eugene Scott contributed to this report.
About this story
Weeks of pregnancy are calculated since the last menstrual period. Fetal viability is generally considered to be around 23 or 24 weeks, but there’s no universal consensus. Life endangerment is defined differently in different states. Medical emergencies can include cases of severely compromised health, endangerment or physical health conditions.
Sources: Post reporting; Elizabeth Nash, principal policy associate for state issues at the Guttmacher Institute; Center for Reproductive Rights; Census Bureau. Edited by Kevin Uhrmacher and Peter Wallsten. Copy edited by Carey L. Biron.
Abortion access in America
Tracking abortion access in the United States: Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the legality of abortion has been left to individual states. The Washington Post is tracking states where abortion is legal, banned or under threat.
Abortion pills: The court battle over the abortion pill mifepristone, which is part of a two-drug regimen used to terminate early pregnancy, is ongoing. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to rule on when and how mifepristone can be prescribed and distributed after the Justice Department asked the high court to overturn a lower-court ruling limiting access to the pill. For now, full access to mifepristone will remain in place after a Supreme Court ruling in the spring.
Post-Roe America: With Roe overturned, women who had secret abortions before Roe v. Wade felt compelled to speak out. Other women who were seeking abortions while living in states with strict abortion bans also shared their experiences with The Post through calls, text messages and other documentation. Here are
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THE U.S. FIGHT OVER ABORTION
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States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat
September 18, 2023
Where 2024 presidential candidates stand on abortion bans
May 19, 2023
Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin will resume offering abortions
September 14, 2023
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Harris raises alarm about abortion restrictions but has 'faith in the people of America'
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-raises-alarm-abortion-restrictions-faith-people-america/story?id=101768406
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Vice President Kamala Harris called out leaders in several states who she says have been diminishing the reproductive rights of women after last year's Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but she expressed some hope that the American public will push back.
Harris sat down with ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis for an interview while visiting Iowa Friday where she spoke about the six-week abortion ban that the state's Republican governor recently signed into law, currently blocked by an Iowa judge.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Linsey Davis during an interview with ABC News, July 28, 2023.
ABC News
Fifteen states have ceased nearly all abortion services.
MORE: Map: How abortion access has shifted in year since Roe v. Wade was overturned
Harris said she was concerned about what was going on in the country and criticized the state leaders for, she says, undermining women's health with these restrictions.
"There's something underlying this approach that states like Iowa have taken that really suggests that they're-- that they don't trust women to be able to know what's in their best interests and make the decision accordingly," the vice president said.
Watch Linsey Davis' full interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC News Live Prime, Monday, July 31, at 7 p.m. ET.
Harris said that restrictions on reproductive health services have led to serious medical emergencies for millions of American women. She noted the anecdote of a woman who suffered a miscarriage and was rejected by an emergency room due to her state's abortion laws.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Linsey Davis during an interview with ABC News, July 28, 2023.
ABC News
"She went to the emergency room while she was having a miscarriage, denied care. She went back, denied care. Only when she contracted sepsis did they give her care. So this is what's happening in real time in our country," Harris said.
"I think on this issue, it is critically important that we understand this is not some intellectual debate," she added. "Every day in America, there are people suffering, silently suffering in many cases."
MORE: Biden highlights Republican-led abortion restrictions in 100 days since Roe was overturned
Republican leaders, like Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, have touted their restrictive laws as they implement the Supreme Court's decision.
"We have a responsibility not only to protect the unborn in law, but to change the destructive culture of abortion that still exists in a post-Roe world," Reynolds said at the signing of the state's six-week abortion ban two weeks ago.
However, Harris noted that the American people have pushed back at the ballot box as they implement when since the Supreme Court decision, voting against the restrictions and leaders who support them.
"So I am concerned about what's been happening, but I also have faith in the people of America," she said.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Linsey Davis during an interview with ABC News, July 28, 2023.
ABC News
Harris encouraged Americans to get out and vote if they are concerned about more reproductive health restrictions and said she has hope that the previous protections on abortions can be restored.
"Congress has the ability to put back in place the protections that the Supreme Court took away," she said. "And President Joe Biden has been very clear, when that happens, he will sign it."
MORE: Harris blasts Florida's history standards' claim slavery included 'benefit' to Black Americans
Harris, the first female Black and South Asian vice president, once again criticized controversial Black history standards unanimously approved by Florida's board of education. Among the changes approved was a section of "benchmark clarifications," and among those was one that states "instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Linsey Davis during an interview with ABC News, July 28, 2023.
ABC News
Harris said that notion was "ridiculous" and reiterated there should be no "ideological debate" over the truth about slavery in this country.
"I think that this is just a matter of whether one chooses to speak fact and truth or not," Harris said. "I don't think that this is subject to any ideological debate to say that people who are enslaved do not benefit from slavery, period."
"There are so-called leaders, extremists, who are attempting to require in our nation an unnecessary debate, with the intention, I believe, to try and divide us as Americans. Stop. Stop," she added.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called Harris' criticism of the proposed curriculum "outrageous," and has defended the instruction despite distancing himself from it.
"I wasn't involved in it," he said last week. "But I think what they're doing is, I think that they're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual," adding, "These were scholars that put that together. It was not anything that was done politically."
DeSantis doubled down on his pushback on Friday at the Lincoln Dinner in Iowa and accused Harris of "coming down to Florida trying to create a phony narrative."
Harris also slammed Republican leaders this month over the ongoing migrant crisis and called the policies of some governors shipping migrants by the busload to other cities and states "inhumane, outrageous and un-American."
She reiterated her criticism noting that these families have already suffered hardships in their home countries and during their travels north.
"Human beings should not be treated as pawns in a political game," she said.
"One very clear solution, a very significant solution has been in front of us for years now. We need to pass immigration reform," Harris added.
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Sen. Tommy Tuberville overestimates number of abortions military women would seek out under new DOD policies, researchers say
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/politics/tommy-tuberville-abortion-military-fact-check/index.html
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
CNN
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Despite frequent claims from Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama that new Pentagon reproductive health policies would result in thousands more abortions a year, the number estimated by a study Tuberville himself cites is far lower, though nearly impossible to actually know.
Tuberville is protesting new Pentagon reproductive health policies, which provide a travel allowance to service members and their dependents who must cross state lines to get an abortion because of where they are stationed. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, many states had so-called “trigger laws” go into place, immediately restricting abortion access. Tuberville is holding up hundreds of senior military nominations that must be confirmed by the Senate to protest the policies.
The Defense Department said earlier this year that because service members cannot choose what states they are stationed in, the Pentagon would provide up to three weeks of leave and a travel allowance for service members and dependents who have to travel out of state to receive care. The leave also applied to people who were traveling to receive other reproductive health care not covered by the military, including in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intrauterine insemination (IUI).
In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December, Tuberville referenced a briefing he said he received from the acting assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. The briefing, he said, stated that the new policies “would increase DoD subsidized abortions by as much as 4,100 per year. That estimate does not include dependents, which your policy also intends to cover, who might seek assistance in obtaining an abortion.”
The new policies providing a travel allowance to receive an abortion do apply to dependents. Tuberville’s office told CNN that the number he is referencing came from a study by the RAND Corporation, a research organization which often conducts research on behalf of the DOD.
Tuberville repeated a similar claim on Monday, during an interview on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins.”
“We’ve done a couple of dozen abortions in the military for the last 40 years, a couple dozen a year,” he said. “Now we’re going to have 4,000 to 5,000 a year because this new rule, this new supposedly law that this administration’s pushing through. So let’s think about the unborn.”
Facts First: Tuberville’s claim is incorrect. He is misleadingly comparing the number of covered abortions provided by DOD health facilities with an estimate of how many women in the military receive abortions outside of those health facilities, have ectopic pregnancies or still births annually. RAND researchers, one of whom was directly involved in the study Tuberville cites, told CNN that Tuberville is significantly overestimating the number of women in the military who would take advantage of the new DOD policies.
The survey being referenced by Tuberville was conducted in 2020 and sponsored by the Defense Department, according to Dr. Sarah Meadows, a senior sociologist at RAND.
While it’s not possible to know exactly how many people would use the Pentagon’s new policies to be reimbursed for travel to receive an abortion, the estimates calculated through the 2020 survey provide a window into how many women in uniform may seek out abortion care.
In the survey, Meadows said they asked women who had been pregnant in the last 12 months how their pregnancy ended – in a birth, miscarriage, or “other.” The “other” category included ectopic pregnancies, still births and abortions. Meadows said other data on pregnancies led researchers to believe the bulk of the pregnancies marked as ending in “other” were abortions.
That number was then taken by RAND and applied to the total population of women in the military, which gave them an estimated range of how many pregnancies of members of the military would end in one of the “other” categories.
“The other thing to keep in mind,” Meadows explained, “is that’s total. That is every active-duty service woman in every state in the continental United States, to include Alaska and Hawaii. So, of those, only a certain percentage will need to travel to receive abortion care … So, people use those numbers, but it’s really only like half, 46% actually, of those women who are seeking an abortion will need to travel to get it based on where they live.”
Even Meadow’s estimate of about 2,000 assumes all of the women who would need to travel to get an abortion would take advantage of the Pentagon’s new policies, which even she said is not likely. Previous data shows that a “not insubstantial percentage” of women don’t feel comfortable even getting contraceptive care through military health facilities, Meadows said.
“They don’t want the military health system to know what they’re doing, essentially,” she said. “So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that … there’s still this barrier, that you’re going to have to go to your commander and say, ‘I need this, you know, administrative leave,’ and then I have to process the paperwork to get reimbursed for travel and my hotel and per diem.”
RAND senior political scientist Dr. Kyleanne Hunter added that many women in the military are barely comfortable telling their commanders of planned pregnancies because of long-existing stigma.
“What we do know as well from other research surveys, but also a lot of focus group research that has been done in the past, is that service women are often very uncomfortable even telling commanders about pregnancies that are wanted,” she said. “And there’s a lot of stigma around just reporting pregnancies – a planned, wanted pregnancy. So again, I think that we don’t have an estimate, but it’s a very reasonable assumption that having to go through the process of getting the travel claim will provide an additional barrier.”
Both Hunter and Meadows pushed back on the idea that the Pentagon’s new policy was providing more abortions as Tuberville has claimed. It is “a factually incorrect statement to say that they’re paying for abortion,” Meadows said.
The Defense Department is not allowed to provide abortions in DOD health facilities outside of three exceptions – in the cases of rape or incest, and when the life of the mother is at risk. A defense official told reporters last year that between 2016 and 2021, a total of 91 covered abortions were performed – coming out to roughly 15 a year.
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Trump still isn’t backing a national abortion ban — and evangelicals don’t care
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-26-1255/donald-trump-trump-still-isn-t-backing-national-abortion-ban-and-evangelicals
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Abortion
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https://www.semafor.com/article/06/26/2023/trump-still-isnt-backing-a-national-abortion-ban-and-evangelicals-dont-care
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In this article:
On Saturday night, Donald Trump told religious conservatives that he saw “a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life.”
He didn’t get more specific — and he didn’t face much pressure to do so, at an event celebrating one year since Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade.
Trump joined 10 other Republican presidential candidates at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual “Road to the Majority” conference, where some activists and lawmakers urged the party to embrace a ban on abortion after 15 weeks. He didn’t commit to the legislation, avoiding a topic that’s tripped up some Republicans in the first post-Roe election. But he was greeted like a rock star, as new polls confirmed that his indictments in Florida this month didn’t affect his formidable primary lead.
No candidate has yet figured out how to pry away the religious conservative voters who were skeptical of Trump in 2016 but make up some of his most loyal supporters now. This isn’t complicated: Trump won when the media said he couldn’t, then ended Roe with his court appointments, delivering what preacher and conference speaker John K. Amanchukwus called “the fetal emancipation proclamation.”
Trump knows this: On Saturday — even while he remained vague on what specific role the federal government could play on abortion should he take office again — he sought to highlight his own role in making a reality what conservatives had been vying for for 50 years.
“Conservatives have been trying for 50 years, exactly 50 years … but I got it done,” Trump told the crowd. “I’m proud to be the most pro-life president in American history.”
Trump’s openness about the issue’s tricky politics — he argued Saturday that politicians “have to learn to talk about this issue,” even as he’d rather avoid it — has frustrated activists and rivals. “I don’t believe his commitments are reliable,” Asa Hutchinson told reporters outside the ballroom where the candidates spoke. Lindsey Graham, who has endorsed Trump, used his speech to promote his own 15-week ban bill, which he said the party could defend and win with.
“To those who believe there’s no role for the unborn in Washington, you are wrong,” said Graham. “Our Constitution does not require me, a United States senator, to sit on the sidelines and not be able to say anything about a baby being aborted in California in the ninth month.”
But no opponent directly challenged Trump on the question. Nikki Haley’s remarks on Saturday morning marked a repeat of what she’d said at SBA Pro-Life last month: A federal abortion ban wasn’t going to happen.
“We haven’t had 60 Senate votes in over 100 years,” Haley said. “We might have 45 pro-life senators. So let’s start talking about how we can come together on what we can agree on.” She was promoting her own campaign, but that approach has given cover to the frontrunner.
Mike Pence, his former running mate, criticized Trump unsparingly at the launch of his own campaign this month. At the conference, he quoted skittish comments that the former president had made about abortion politics, but didn’t mention Trump by name. He also tried to set the baseline on the topic, calling the 15-week ban the “minimum nationwide standard” for any nominee.
“We’ve not come to the end of our cause,” Pence said from the ballroom stage of the Washington Hilton. “We’ve simply come to the end of the beginning.”
But most discussion of abortion — on and offstage — was less about the commitment needed from a new nominee and more about what could be banned in states.
“Our pro-life movement is now entering this Walls of Jericho phase,” North Carolina Sen. Brad Overcash told a room of activists on Friday, referring to a Biblical story of Israelis marching around a besieged city until their faith in God collapsed its defenses. “We have to keep marching, put one foot in front of the other, because we never know when the next step will be the seventh time on the seventh day.”
Ralph Reed, the the Faith & Freedom Coalition founder and president, told reporters during a private lunch that Trump likely doesn’t want to head into the general election “with Joe Biden being able to go up on the air in every battleground state, the day I secure the nomination, saying I favor a federal abortion ban.”
“That’s obviously the cul-de-sac he’s trying to avoid driving into, right?” he argued.
Lila Rose, an anti-abortion activist and founder of “Live Action,” suggested to Fox News last week that Trump, despite his past efforts on abortion, isn’t the leader best qualified to push the movement forward this time around.
The Democratic National Committee took Trump’s remarks Saturday night differently than most in attendance: In a statement, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison slammed Trump’s “endorsement of a national abortion ban” and argued that he is “responsible for the cruel abortion bans across the country.”
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Wyoming judge halts state's abortion pills ban
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-22-1700/abortion-wyoming-judge-halts-states-abortion-pills-ban
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https://www.axios.com/2023/06/22/abortion-pill-ban-halted-wyoming
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A fragile new phase of abortion in America
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-22-1555/abortion-fragile-new-phase-abortion-america
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/roe-v-wade-ruling-one-year-anniversary/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f003
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A fragile new phase of abortion in America
One year after the fall of Roe, the full impact of the landmark ruling remains unknown and in flux
By Caroline Kitchener,
Rachel Roubein,
Andrew Ba Tran,
Caitlin Gilbert and
Hannah Dormido
June 22 at 6:00 a.m.
1964
Map of abortion bans on Sept. 1, 2021
Banned or mostly banned
Ban blocked by courts
Legal
WASH.
MAINE
MONT.
N.D.
MINN.
ORE.
N.H.
N.Y.
IDAHO
WIS.
S.D.
R.I.
MICH.
WYO.
N.J.
PA.
IOWA
NEB.
NEV.
OHIO
MD.
ILL.
IND.
UTAH
COLO.
W. VA.
VA.
CALIF.
KAN.
MO.
KY.
N.C.
TENN.
OKLA.
ARIZ.
N.M.
ARK.
S.C.
GA.
ALA.
MISS.
TEX.
LA.
ALASKA
FLA.
HAWAII
Republican-led states started banning abortion more than nine months before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Texas was the first to act, outlawing most abortions on Sept. 1, 2021.
Oklahoma went one step further in May 2022, enacting a near-total ban that forced all of the state’s clinics to stop providing abortions while Roe was still the law of the land.
Then came the day — June 24, 2022 — when abortion access was upended nationwide. With its landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court cleared the way for 11 states to immediately halt all or most abortions. For the first time in nearly 50 years, abortion was no longer a constitutional right in the United States.
Today, one year after the court swept away the protections established by Roe, 17.5 million women of reproductive age — about a quarter of all women in that age bracket in the United States — live where abortion is banned or mostly banned.
New restrictions across the South and Midwest have led to at least 24,290 fewer legal abortions since the ruling, according to research conducted by the Society of Family Planning, which supports abortion rights. The laws have also prompted widespread confusion and fear as hospitals have turned away patients with potentially life-threatening pregnancy conditions. In a new survey of OB/GYNs conducted by KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization, approximately 40 percent of respondents who practice in states with abortion bans say they have faced constraints caring for patients experiencing miscarriages or other pregnancy-related emergencies since the ruling.
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But in many respects, as America begins the second year of life after Roe, the full impact of the ruling remains unclear — and in flux.
Interviews with more than 30 key players in the abortion rights debate, including advocates, lawmakers and doctors, found that the stark lines dividing post-Roe America — with some states restricting abortion access and other states expanding it — have become far blurrier than many anticipated in the 12 months since the ruling.
A rapidly expanding underground network of abortion pill providers is helping people who live in states with bans self-manage their abortions — ending an unknown number of pregnancies.
Meanwhile, the swell of criminal prosecutions that many abortion rights advocates feared would follow the ruling has yet to materialize, further empowering those who are helping to distribute pills to people in states where abortion is banned.
In addition, legal abortions have spiked in states that neighbor regions with abortion bans — including North Carolina, Illinois, Colorado and Florida — suggesting that tens of thousands of patients have traveled out of state since the decision.
And while many Republicans raced last summer to embrace the strictest abortion bans possible — at times without exceptions for rape or incest — some in the party have become reluctant to crack down further, fearing political backlash from voters who have repeatedly demonstrated their support for abortion rights. Lawmakers in some Republican-led states have started coalescing behind bans after 12 weeks of pregnancy that allow most abortions to continue.
Now, the fight over abortion has entered a fragile new phase, in which access could be upended again by the 2024 presidential election and several pending court decisions. Strict bans are blocked by the courts in at least six states, while the Supreme Court may take up a case that could revoke government approval of a key abortion drug used nationwide. In addition, a new ban in Florida could soon halt most abortions in the country’s third most populous state, if the state Supreme Court allows it to take effect.
“The system is still trying to find its balance,” said Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Aid Access, a Europe-based organization that mails abortion pills to all 50 states, including states where abortion is banned. “There is still a lot to come.”
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Antiabortion leaders say they are eager and determined to crack down further.
“I think we’re farther than anyone would have expected we would be,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, a national antiabortion organization. “But am I complacent with that? Hell no.”
Whether the bans are succeeding in compelling significantly more women to carry their pregnancies to term remains unknown, with data on legal abortions muddied by the many who are choosing to self-manage abortions with medication.
Only in Texas, where a roughly six-week abortion ban took effect in 2021, has relevant birth data started to emerge. Early government numbers show that the Texas birthrate spiked by 4.7 percent from 2021 to 2022, the greatest increase in birthrate of any state in the country during that period — a pattern that experts say can be partly attributed to the state’s abortion restrictions.
Not everyone with an unwanted pregnancy has been able to effectively navigate the complicated post-Roe landscape, said a woman who joined the abortion pill network a few days after Roe was overturned. Many people have never heard of the various overseas organizations offering abortion pills, she added.
“Band-Aids can’t fix bullet holes,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss illegal activity. “And we are just a Band-Aid … trying our best to stop the rain with our hands.”
An abortion rights advocate mails abortion pills in October to people in need from a state where the procedure is banned. (Photo for The Washington Post)
Abortion access one year post-Roe
When Alan Braid was forced last June to stop providing abortions in San Antonio, the now 78-year-old doctor had already mapped out plans for his post-Roe future. He soon opened two locations close to red-state borders in New Mexico and Illinois, Democrat-led states where abortion is likely to remain protected.
His first new clinic, outside Albuquerque, quickly had a full schedule, he said, with over 90 percent of patients coming from out of state, almost all from Texas.
“To drive here from the Rio Grande Valley, Corpus Christi and places like that, it’s somewhere between 10 and 12 hours, or more.”
Still, Braid said, they come.
The pattern reflects an evolving post-Roe landscape of abortion access, with 55 clinics across the South and Midwest forced to stop providing abortions and 16 new abortion clinics opening in states where abortion is legal, according to a database maintained by Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who studies abortion.
Map of the U.S. showing abortion clinics as of April 2023
As clinics shuttered in states with bans, new clinics opened
in nearby states to meet demand
County level data shows how the number of clinics in each area has shifted between May 2022 and April 2023
Abortion is banned or mostly banned
Net clinic loss in county due to bans
Operating clinics
Net clinic loss in counties outside of ban states*
Number of clinics
Net clinic gain in county
20
1
The Red River Women’s Clinic
moved a five-minute drive away,
from Fargo, N.D., to Moorhead, Minn.
WASH.
MONT.
N.D.
VT.
MINN.
ORE.
N.H.
MICH.
WIS.
IDAHO
S.D.
N.Y.
—R.I.
WYO.
IOWA
PENN.
NEB.
OHIO
NEV.
IND.
W.
VA.
MD.
UTAH
ILL.
CALIF.
KAN.
COLO.
KY.
VA.
MO.
N.C.
TENN.
ARK.
ARIZ.
OKLA.
S.C.
N.M.
ALA.
MISS.
GA.
TEXAS
LA.
FLA.
Georgia has a six-week ban,
not a total ban, allowing
clinics to remain open.
ALASKA
HAWAII
*Reasons why clinics would close in states where abortion remains legal include property closures,
staffing, financial issues, among other factors.
Source: Clinic data from a database of facilities providing abortions maintained by Caitlin Myers,
professor of economics at Middlebury College
But while many women have been able to travel to states where abortion is legal, those journeys come with a high price tag — hundreds of dollars for transportation, hotels and child care, in addition to the $500 to $800 typically required for the procedure or medication itself — making such an option inaccessible to many low-income patients who can’t cover the costs or take time off work.
Aid Access received almost 60 percent more requests for pills this spring than in the months immediately following Dobbs, fielding an average of 344 orders per day in April, in the wake of attempts to ban a key abortion drug nationwide, according to Abigail Aiken, lead investigator of the Self-managed Abortion Needs Assessment Project at the University of Texas at Austin. (Some people order pills in advance to use if they become pregnant in the future, Gomperts said.)
“Because of what happened, people became more aware of the possibility of pills — they learned that they can do it themselves, and it’s easier, cheaper,” Gomperts said.
Other overseas organizations say they don’t keep track of exactly how many pills they mail, making it hard to know the number of abortions occurring outside the traditional health-care system.
“We don’t keep any records for security reasons,” said Verónica Cruz Sánchez, the director of Las Libres, a Mexico-based organization that mails abortion pills. The demand, she added, “maintains a steady pace.”
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For Aid Access, the process of mailing pills became even more streamlined in mid-June, Gomperts said. The organization revamped its operation to allow doctors in Democrat-led states with “shield laws” — designed to protect health-care providers from abortion bans — to mail abortion medication to patients in states where abortion is illegal, rather than shipping pills from India, as the organization has done for years.
“I think this will make all these bans more or less ineffective because it is within the U.S. itself that the providers are stepping up,” she said.
For many people who have learned about abortion pill websites, she added, she believes abortion is now more accessible than it was before Roe fell.
Las Libres director Verónica Cruz Sánchez works with her team at their office in Guanajuato, Mexico, in September. Las Libres is a Mexico-based activist group that had recently begun providing medication abortions to Americans. (Lisette Poole for The Washington Post)
Jerry Kapp with Sidewalk Advocates for Life, an antiabortion group, approaches a driver leaving Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Ill., in July 2022. Since the Dobbs ruling, many women have traveled to southern Illinois as surrounding states have restricted abortion. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
Franz Theard watches a patient from Texas take mifepristone, a medication used in abortions, with medical assistant Elizabeth Hernandez, at his clinic in Santa Teresa, N.M., in January. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
The option is not a substitute for widespread access to abortion in clinics, several abortion rights advocates said. Many people aren’t comfortable taking a pill to end their pregnancies, preferring a surgical procedure, while others fear the potential risks associated with ordering illegal pills online and taking them at home alone without easy access to a medical professional.
“It is not the same consistent access of being able to go to a provider in your community, ask for the care that you seek and receive it,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, the head of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, referring to both out-of-state travel and obtaining pills online.
While those who help to distribute abortion pills in antiabortion states could be charged with a crime — and sentenced to at least several years in prison across much of the South and Midwest — state laws explicitly exempt those who are seeking abortions from prosecution.
Online chat groups and forums have emerged as a critical gathering spot for people in antiabortion states who learn they are pregnant and suddenly face a ticking clock if they want to end their pregnancies. On r/Abortion, an abortion-focused Reddit forum that helps people navigate their options, users frequently ask about Aid Access and other online pill websites, said Ariella Messing, the executive director of the Online Abortion Resource Squad, the organization that runs the forum.
“They come seeking confirmation that these things are legitimate,” said Messing, whose team now fields about 1,300 posts per month, a number that has increased significantly since the ruling. “They’ll say, ‘I just heard about this thing called Access Aid. Is this real?’” (Aid Access is widely regarded in the medical community as a safe resource for medication abortion.)
Many people seeking abortions lack accurate, up-to-date information about their options, said Messing, whose team provides information about both out-of-state clinic options and self-managed abortion. She said she’s aware that her forum serves only a select group: those who know where to seek out information.
“It’s a subset of the population who comes to this subreddit,” Messing said.
Countless other women will never find it.
People in Raleigh, N.C., on May 16 after state Republican lawmakers vote to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after 12 weeks. (Erin Siegal Mcintyre/Reuters)
Antiabortion activists push for more
One month before Texas lawmakers convened for this year’s legislative session, the state’s largest antiabortion group delivered an urgent message at the Capitol: Despite a near-total ban on abortion — which slashed the number of legal abortions in the state from 50,000 a year to a handful each month — thousands of Texas women were still finding ways to end their pregnancies.
“The new abortion clinic is as close as your pocket and your cellphone, where you can go to these websites,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, recalled saying to a group of over 100 state lawmakers and their staffers. “This is the new threat.”
Seago ticked through a list of solutions in a presentation titled “Post-Roe Lawlessness”: Block abortion pill websites. Expand civil liability. Empower the state attorney general to prosecute anyone who breaks the law.
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But the same Republican-led legislature that had passed multiple abortion bans before Roe was overturned showed little interest in embracing those ideas. One by one, each of the antiabortion bills prioritized by Texas Right to Life died before it got a hearing, signaling that, at least for now, Republicans representing the state at the forefront of the antiabortion movement felt that they had done enough.
That sentiment appeared to grow across several Republican-led legislatures, where a driving desire to ban all or most abortions gave way to fear of political backlash in the wake of multiple victories by pro-abortion-rights candidates and ballot initiative campaigns during the 2022 midterm elections.
After months of debate, lawmakers in conservative Nebraska and North Carolina passed 12-week bans in May, significantly narrowing the window for legal abortion but still allowing over 90 percent of abortions to continue.
“The majority of Americans are really moderate people who want to live and let live,” said North Carolina state Sen. Amy Galey, who was part of the Republican working group that devised the 12-week law. “They don’t want a government who is probing into people’s personal lives excessively.”
Betsy Riot, center, at a sit-in for abortion rights in the Texas Capitol in Austin on March 8. (Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman/AP)
An abortion rights demonstrator in Raleigh, N.C., after Republican lawmakers overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of the state's 12-week abortion ban on May 16. (Erin Siegal Mcintyre/Reuters)
Nebraska state Sen. John Cavanaugh (D) addresses the chamber during a final reading of a 12-week abortion ban in Lincoln, Neb., on May 16. (Kenneth Ferriera/Lincoln Journal Star/AP)
That view has not prevailed everywhere. Republican-led legislatures in South Carolina and Florida recently passed laws to ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they are pregnant — though neither law is in effect, each pending a court decision expected in the coming months. Abortion is currently legal up to 22 weeks in South Carolina and up to 15 weeks in Florida.
Florida’s six-week law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has touted as a sign of his conservative bona fides as he launches a 2024 presidential bid, could singularly alter the national abortion landscape once again, given the number of abortions in the third most populous state. Clinics in states where abortion is legal are already scrambling to meet an elevated need — and demand would grow more intense if even a fraction of the more than 80,000 people who get abortions in Florida each year attempt to travel elsewhere.
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The law is written to take effect only if the state’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court approves Florida’s existing 15-week ban, which passed last spring and took effect shortly after the Dobbs ruling.
There are some indications that a six-week ban in a large state can have a measurable impact on the number of births. In the year after Texas implemented Senate Bill 8, which outlawed abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, the birthrate in the state rose by 4.7 percent, according to a Washington Post analysis of provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while birthrates across the country remained flat, upticking by only 0.2 percent.
Experts say the Texas abortion ban has probably played a role in the state’s rising birthrate. Several other factors also led to the spike, according to three demographers, including a rise in births amid a post-pandemic spike in immigration from Latin America, among a population that tends to have a higher birthrate. Florida — which, like Texas, has a large Hispanic population — also experienced a significant rise in birthrates without a strict abortion ban in place, but slightly less than in Texas.
“At least some of the increase in 2022 seems to me very likely because of S.B. 8,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a professor of demography and public health at the University of California at San Francisco who focuses on abortion. “We know that people are self-managing, but not everyone is self-managing.”
Antiabortion hard-liners, like Seago, are also hoping that, in time, Republicans will be more willing to crack down on the illegal abortion pill networks, backing measures that would help states to fully enforce their abortion bans.
Farah Diaz-Tello, legal director at If/When/How, an abortion rights organization that offers support to people who fear they might face legal consequences for their abortions, said she had not seen any situations in which people — such as community activists or family and friends of the person seeking an abortion — had been charged for distributing pills under new laws in antiabortion states. Several antiabortion activists interviewed for this story said they too had not heard of any examples of prosecutions.
One civil case has been filed by the now ex-husband of a Texas woman who obtained an abortion, against three friends who allegedly helped her access abortion pills — but documents released have called some of the ex-husband’s claims into question.
When Seago urged Texas Republicans to crack down on people involved in the illegal abortion pill network, he said, lawmakers did not want to engage.
“I heard from elected officials that women were not considering abortion in Texas anymore,” he said. “That is a delusion. It’s completely disconnected from reality.”
People in American flag attire during the Republican Party convention in Greensboro, N.C., on June 9. (Eamon Queeney for The Washington Post)
The road to 2024
The future of abortion access in America is far from settled.
A high-profile case to revoke government approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in over 50 percent of abortions across the country, is still making its way through the courts — and is likely to reach the Supreme Court for a second time in the coming months or years.
Meanwhile, antiabortion activists are pressuring Republican candidates to back a national ban on most abortions at 15 weeks or earlier.
“It’s not just that different states are going to play it out,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a vocal supporter of abortion rights. “The extremists are still trying to block abortion everywhere, looking for every tool to do it.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of prominent antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, countered that it’s Democrats who hold “extreme” views on abortion, contending that many refuse to say whether they support any limits.
A lot hinges on the 2024 presidential race. President Biden is expected to make his support for abortion rights a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. While the federal government’s ability to intervene in state legislation is limited, the Biden administration has issued various guidelines, executive orders and legal interpretations to protect abortion and reproductive health care, which could be rescinded by a Republican president.
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“Another administration could come in and remove those protections,” Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House’s Gender Policy Council, which helps oversee the administration’s abortion policy, said in an interview. She said the administration is cognizant that “nothing will replace federal legislation,” which is why it is pushing to codify Roe into law.
When Roe was overturned, some antiabortion activists shifted their focus to the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 150-year-old law that made it illegal to send “indecent” publications through the mail, including anything that could be used for an abortion. While Biden’s Justice Department has issued guidance making the Comstock Act largely inapplicable, a Republican administration could revoke that guidance, said Jonathan Mitchell, the antiabortion lawyer behind the novel Texas abortion ban that took effect in 2021.
“I don’t think they’ll say a thing about it on the campaign trail,” Mitchell said. “The question is what will they do after taking office.”
Some Republicans in the 2024 field have struggled to articulate whether they would sign a bill imposing federal limits on abortion, and what those limits would be.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) initially refused to answer direct questions on what national restrictions he’d support, before committing to sign a 15-week ban. In April, former president Donald Trump drew the ire of antiabortion groups when his reelection campaign said abortion restrictions “should be decided at the state level,” and has since met with antiabortion activists.
Rebecca Rose and other members of the Students for Life Action canvas a neighborhood in July 2022 in Overland Park, Kan. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
Voting at Byron Township Community Center in Michigan on Nov. 8. (Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)
Gail Rowland assembles signs at the Johnson County Democratic Party headquarters in Kansas. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
Abortion rights advocates who scored major victories in last year’s midterm elections are now grappling with how to sustain that momentum throughout the 2024 campaign.
Part of the strategy, according to some Democrats, is to characterize any abortion limits as extreme, including 12-week bans. In response to North Carolina’s new 12-week law, for example, abortion rights groups have deployed the same rhetoric they’ve used to fight restrictions earlier in pregnancy, arguing that all abortion decisions should be between the patient and their doctor and fiercely opposing Republican efforts to describe 12-week bans as “mainstream.”
“It’s the same message, and we’re winning on that message,” said Mini Timmaraju, who leads the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America. “The longer these bans are in place, all of the bans, the more unpopular they’re getting, so our goal is defining them all as bans. None of them are good.”
Dannenfelser described every restriction passed as an “incremental gain” for the antiabortion movement, even if it doesn’t stop most abortions.
“We would say 12-week protection, we would say 12-week limit, but they would just say a ban because they want people to think that all abortions have been banned,” Dannenfelser said.
At the state level, abortion rights groups are seeking to counteract abortion bans and enshrine access to the procedure into constitutions in a handful of red states. They’ve launched campaigns to gather signatures to put abortions rights on the ballot in Ohio and Florida, while activists in Missouri have begun the lengthy process to kick off their own effort. It’s possible more states could follow suit.
Nationally, Biden has called for the Democratic-controlled Senate to scrap its long-standing filibuster rules to enshrine abortion rights into federal law. But a top Senate Republican, Minority Whip John Thune (S.D.), told The Post that the GOP, if it wins back the majority, wouldn’t use similar tactics to pursue its abortion goals and intends to keep the rule requiring 60 votes to pass legislation in place for abortion policy. Aware that a move against the filibuster by antiabortion lawmakers could backfire if party control of Congress flipped again, Dannenfelser said she also is not advocating such a move.
“There are rules we have to play by here,” Thune said.
About this story
Editing by Peter Wallsten, Kevin Uhrmacher, Emily Eng, Meghan Hoyer, Anu Narayanswamy, Betty Chavarria, Natalia Jimenez and Wendy Galietta. Graphics by Hannah Dormido and Carson TerBush. Copy editing by Allison Cho. Design and development by Carson TerBush.
Abortion access in America
Tracking abortion access in the U.S.: After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the legality of abortion is left to individual states. The Post is tracking states where abortion is legal, banned or under threat.
Abortion pills: The Justice Department appealed a Texas judge’s decision that would block approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. The Supreme Court decided to retain full access to mifepristone as the appeal proceeds. Here’s an explanation of what happens next in the abortion pill case.
Post-Roe America: With Roe overturned, women who had secret abortions before Roe v. Wade felt compelled to speak out. Other women who were seeking abortions while living in states with strict abortion bans also shared their experiences with The Post through calls, text messages and other documentation. Here are photos and stories from across America since the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
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In Ohio, civic bridges over cultural divides
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DIGNITY
THE MONITOR'S VIEW
In Ohio, civic bridges over cultural divides
State ballot initiatives on abortion rights show an arc bending toward empathy and a shared embrace of democratic principles.
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Kurt Steiss/The Blade via AP
View caption
By the Monitor's Editorial Board
August 9, 2023
Since the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded constitutional protection of abortion a year ago, every state ballot measure affirming the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions has passed. Those states now include Ohio. Voters there rejected a proposal last night intended to make it harder to enshrine social issues like abortion in the state’s constitution.
One consequence of the court’s decision to return the question of abortion rights to “the people and their elected representatives” is now becoming more apparent. The voting trend on ballot initiatives, consistent across red and blue states, shows that one of the most polarizing cultural issues in American society is now uniting Americans in defense of democracy.
“Ohio is stronger when we can all lend our voices and we all have an equal chance to participate in the work of our state’s democracy,” said former Republican Gov. John Kasich, one member of a bipartisan group of past Ohio governors and attorneys general who opposed the ballot measure.
Kansas was the first to signal this trend. Two months after the court’s reversal, which came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, voters rejected a proposal that would have denied a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Tens of thousands of Republicans joined in voting no. Since then, other states such as Kentucky and Michigan have done the same.
By linking reproductive rights with democratic concerns, citizen-led ballot initiatives are creating openings for empathy and humility, acknowledging the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals. In Kansas, for example, “the people that we talked to really didn’t see abortion as a partisan or political issue,” Ashley All, communications director for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, told Kansas Reflector after the state’s abortion vote. “They saw it as incredibly complex and deeply personal, and so we intentionally approached it in a nonpartisan way.”
Proponents of the Ohio proposal admitted their motives were tactical. The measure would have raised the threshold for changing the state constitution from 50% plus one vote to 60%. Had it passed, it would have made it harder to approve a proposed amendment upholding a state right to abortion in a referendum this November.
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The state’s Republican election officials admitted hoping that an August ballot would draw low voter turnout. They were wrong. Nearly 650,000 cast early ballots, more than in recent primary elections. In the end, 57% of voters rejected the proposal. A July USA Today Network/Suffolk University poll found that 41% of Republicans opposed the measure.
The debate over reproductive rights is far from settled, of course. Since Dobbs, more than a dozen states have imposed severe restrictions on abortion. In Ohio, Republican lawmakers promise new legislation to curb the procedure. But the arc of the issue bends in a different direction. At least 10 states are poised to put citizen-backed measures protecting abortion rights on their ballots in 2024.
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“The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it,” wrote the late Justice Antonin Scalia about a 1992 court decision upholding constitutional protection of abortion, “are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”
He was partly right. Placed in the care of ordinary citizens, the divides over reproductive rights are finding new bridges. That progress involves listening even more than persuading.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
Mark Sappenfield, Editor
[email protected]
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Biden to sign executive order expanding access to contraception
Reuters
June 23, 20239:59 PM GMT+2Updated 3 months ago
[1/2]U.S. President-elect Joe Biden talks about protecting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as he speaks to reporters with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris at this side about their "plan to expand affordable health care" during an appearance in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., November 10, 2020. Acquire Licensing Rights Read more
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday will sign an executive order designed to protect and expand access to contraception, after a Supreme Court ruling last year overturning the constitutional right to abortion raised fears that birth control could also face restrictions.
Biden senior adviser Jen Klein told reporters that the order will increase ways for women to access contraception and lower out-of-pocket costs.
Klein said the order directs federal departments to consider requiring private insurers to offer expanded contraception options under the Affordable Care Act such as by covering more than one product and streamlining the process for obtaining care.
Biden's order comes as reproductive rights advocates say rising barriers are leaving millions of women without easy access to contraception.
Contraceptives have been in focus since the Supreme Court on June 24 of last year overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
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Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are expected to make remarks on Friday marking the one-year anniversary of the landmark decision, Klein said.
"This action will build on the progress already made under the Affordable Care Act by further reducing barriers that women face in accessing contraception prescribed by their provider," a White House fact sheet on the order said.
While the Affordable Care Act, the signature domestic policy achievement of former President Barack Obama, requires coverage of contraception, health plans provided by certain exempt religious employers do not have to cover it.
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Biden’s order will also direct the government to consider ways to make affordable over-the-counter contraception, including emergency contraception, more accessible, the fact sheet said. This could include convening pharmacies, employers, and insurers to explore the issue.
Improving access to family planning services and supplies for people covered by the government's Medicaid and Medicare programs is another goal of the order.
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The U.S. House of Representatives last July, when it was still controlled by Democrats, passed a bill to protect access to contraception, but it was blocked in the Senate by Republicans.
Two U.S. senators last week introduced a new bill to protect access to contraception. To become law, the bill would need to pass in both the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House.
Leading reproductive rights groups - EMILYs List, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund - on Friday announced their endorsements of Democrats Biden and Harris for reelection in 2024.
Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Mark Porter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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What a Year in Post-Roe America Reveals About Abortion
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By Laura Kusisto
June 23, 2023 5:30 am ET
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Tony Lauinger spent 50 years fighting to end abortion in Oklahoma. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June and the state criminalized the procedure, the president of Oklahomans for Life saw his once-improbable goal become reality.
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She helped kill Roe v Wade - now she wants to end abortion in America
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She helped kill Roe v Wade - now she wants to end abortion in America
Published
24 June
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Kristan Hawkins says she will abolish abortion in the US
By Holly Honderich
in Washington
When Kristan Hawkins was 23, she started sleeping in her office.
It was years before her organisation, Students for Life of America (SFLA), would become one of the largest, most influential anti-abortion groups in the country. And it was more than a decade before she would stand outside the US Supreme Court to announce to her triumphant supporters that the nationwide right to abortion had been undone.
But back then, in 2008, the SFLA headquarters were in Arlington, Virginia, and the closest town where Hawkins and her husband could afford to buy a house was 90 minutes away.
At first, she tried the commute, leaving home at 5am and returning at 8pm. But the drives became too much, fuel too expensive.
So she bought a cheap loveseat from Ikea, figuring she could put in 30 hours of work over two days before driving home for a night. She used a nearby Gold's Gym for showers, the new couch for naps. When Hawkins found the office was also inhabited by cockroaches, she bought an eye mask and started sleeping with the lights on to keep them away.
"It was terrible, terrible," her husband Jonathan said of that period, which was just two years into their marriage.
But Kristan Hawkins was relentless. And she had a job to do, she was going to see the end of Roe v Wade, overturning the national right to abortion that had been protected for nearly half a century.
Last June, she was successful. Pro-choice advocates say that her activism since then has already helped cut off abortion access for around 20 million women, and pushed the country into a public health crisis.
But Hawkins has a new, more ambitious goal: she wants to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable across the US.
In the year after Roe was overturned, Hawkins has gone into overdrive, growing the size and reach of SFLA and using that power to push state legislatures to pass increasingly severe bans.
"That's the momentum thing, right? Like, ok, all of America is watching, push the gas pedal down on everything, right now," she said. "More, more, more, more, more."
Hawkins, now 38, is bolder and more unyielding than her predecessors, reflective of a new generation of activists moving towards their ultimate goal: a federal abortion ban, beginning at conception.
"She's representative of the rightward shift in the movement… and how far the movement can go," said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the US abortion debate. "Kristan is really important to understanding what comes next."
Hawkins' plans are at odds with public opinion - a majority of Americans support access to legal abortion - and even some Republicans say she is going too far, too fast.
But Roe's reversal, too, was once considered a longshot. And now, one year after its demise, Hawkins believes she will lead the anti-abortion movement to another improbable win.
IMAGE SOURCE,
GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Students for Life activists celebrate the end of Roe v Wade. "We launched SFLA to be this post-Roe generation," Hawkins said
Most anti-abortion advocates have an origin story, a moment they say set them on a mission.
Kristan Hawkins' moment came when she was 15. At home in West Virginia, she started volunteering at a crisis pregnancy centre, the type of facility that dissuades women from having abortions by providing anti-abortion counselling, ultrasounds and material supplies like diapers and wipes.
Before she was allowed to start work, Hawkins had to learn what abortion was, to understand what it looked like. Someone at the clinic gave her a VHS tape of the Silent Scream, a controversial 1984 anti-abortion propaganda film that purported to show a foetus on ultrasound experiencing distress during an abortion at 12 weeks. The film, denounced as a fraud by abortion rights activists, runs counter to findings from leading scientists who say a foetus does not have the capacity to feel pain until at least 24 weeks gestation.
But Hawkins was horrified. She was also incredulous. In her view, she had just encountered the greatest human rights atrocity of our time: the routine killing of "preborn babies" - the term she uses to describe foetuses. So why wasn't everyone trying to stop it?
"I remember that first day at the pregnancy centre, walking out and saying 'Oh my God, how is life going on as normal when this is happening?'" she said during an interview in May. "That changed everything."
After a summer at the clinic, Hawkins started a community anti-abortion group called Teens for Life. She joined the local Right to Life chapter, she joined the local Republican chapter. "I was the youngest one there by like four decades," she said.
By 2006, after college graduation and short stints at the Republican National Committee and the Department of Health and Human Services, Hawkins was recruited to run Students for Life, then a fledgling organisation with groups on 180 campuses. She was 21.
Seventeen years later, Hawkins remains obsessive, prone to sending colleagues texts and emails at all hours. Her daily schedule, typed into her iPhone, is a nightmare, more than two dozen meetings and commitments blocked off in overlapping intervals. Her days are, occasionally, interrupted by calls from a health coach. "They're trying to get me to drink water," she said. "I always joke that Students for Life is built on Diet Mountain Dew."
She and Jonathan live in a motorhome with their four children so the entire family can join her on her frequent SFLA excursions. Jonathan, a former teacher, provides homeschooling.
"I just go with the flow, that's all you can do," Jonathan said during a family outing at the Pittsburgh Zoo last month.
"I think you're sick of the word abortion," Kristan said to him later that day. "When I say it sometimes, I swear I can see you twitch."
Watching her with followers and donors, Hawkins is sarcastic and often turns to humour, a sometimes unexpected habit from a woman pushing to outlaw abortion entirely. She also swears a lot and fidgets when she talks. She doesn't have friends, she said, "in the traditional sense".
"Like, I don't have girlfriends I go for brunch with… what would I talk about besides ending abortion?"
Hawkins' mission, born that day at the pregnancy centre, has proven to be all consuming, something she is well aware of. She has tried to teach her team the principle of DBW - Don't Be Weird - which is code for: don't freak people out.
"You have to know when to display your passion," she said. "If you carry around a pocketbook of graphic images of children who've been aborted and whip that out at the dinner table, some people are going to be pretty mad at you."
Image caption,
SFLA now has 1,400 campus groups in all 50 states
On a swampy June day in Washington, between clusters of teenagers on school trips and tour groups in matching t-shirts, six Students for Life members made their way to Capitol Hill, ready to lobby.
They all wore red, half in SFLA branded clothing - "The Pro-Life Generation VOTES" emblazoned on their chests like a cheery warning. One wore a pair of dangly earrings, tiny gold feet meant to match the size of a foetus's foot at 12 weeks. "It's a picture into their humanity," she said.
Groups like this can be found at state legislatures and on college campuses across the US on any given week. Under Hawkins, SFLA has grown into more than 1,400 campus groups in 50 states, overseen by 80 paid staff. Since 2006, more than 160,000 anti-abortion activists have completed SFLA training. Experts say Hawkins' particular power lies in her ability to get people to turn out - SFLA activists are now staples at anti-abortion demonstrations across the country.
"We launched SFLA to be this post-Roe generation," she said. "We were going to have that trained army."
And after Roe's reversal last year, that army has mobilised, helping to steer dozens of anti-abortion bills through state legislatures. So far, 13 Republican-controlled states have outlawed abortion. Bans in at least six other states are in limbo pending legal challenges.
Nearly one-third of American women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is unavailable or severely restricted, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group. Over the past year, stories have emerged about the apparent consequences of these bans - a 10-year-old rape victim denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio, 13 women in Texas who say they were denied abortions despite life-threatening pregnancy complications - further galvanising support for abortion access.
She was denied an abortion - then she almost died
"What SFLA and other anti-abortion groups promote is the worst, most damaging, most criminalising policy," said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice-president at NARAL Pro-Choice America. "She [Kristan] is the embodiment of the extremeness of the movement."
"You're making it unsafe to be pregnant in the United States," she said.
But where the anti-abortion movement goes now that Roe has been overturned is a matter of debate.
Hawkins and most other leaders still share a unifying philosophy: a foetus is a rights-holding person. They share an objective too: a federal abortion ban. But there is disagreement on what that ban would look like and how, exactly, to get there.
"The movement is really fragmented," said University of California's Mary Ziegler. "There is no consensus."
IMAGE SOURCE,
ROSS MANTLE/BBC
Image caption,
Hawkins reflects the rightward shift of the anti-abortion movement
SFLA has pushed what they call an "early abortion model", drafting and championing legislation that bans abortion at conception or, at the latest, after early cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
Hawkins' organisation, in other words, has abandoned the incrementalism that shaped earlier iterations of the anti-abortion movement, a strategy still favoured by some of SFLA's peers.
Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) is one such group. A powerful and long-established presence in the anti-abortion lobby, SBA's leader Marjorie Dannenfelser has said she will oppose any presidential candidate who does not embrace a 15-week national ban, a benchmark supported by 44% of Americans, according to a recent poll.
Pence challenges rivals to back 15-week ban
That isn't good enough for Hawkins. Candidates must pledge support for a federal ban at six weeks if they want SFLA's support.
It's a tension Hawkins acknowledges. "Marjorie is the insider…and I'm the person who comes in and is like, '[Screw] it, we're just doing what we know is right'," Hawkins said, using an expletive. "We're not fighting."
Hawkins is also more outspoken, more outwardly conservative, on other abortion-related issues. She opposes exceptions for rape and incest. And she opposes several forms of birth control, including oral contraceptives, a position another anti-abortion leader privately called "unhelpful".
"What has changed is they are willing to say the quiet part out loud," said Elisabeth Smith, state policy director at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-choice group. "They are willing to be publicly extreme."
IMAGE SOURCE,
GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Pro-choice groups say Hawkins' work has helped push the US into a public health crisis
Hawkins' uncompromising approach worries some Republicans, too. Politicians have been forced to choose between disappointing Hawkins and her allies and alienating a much more moderate electorate.
"Republicans are politically in a much more defensive position than the Democrats because they keep talking about restrictions that are not supported by most Americans," said John Feehery, a former Republican congressional aide.
A predicted red wave at the 2022 midterms seemed to collide with a surge of support for abortion rights, carrying Democrats to unexpected victories in a series of high-profile races. Last year, pro-choice voters swept all six abortion-related ballot measures, including in conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky.
"Women are watching Republicans post-Roe, and anything short of a compassionate strategy to win back suburban women and swing voters will severely set back the pro-life movement and the party as a whole," Nancy Mace, one of the few House Republicans who has publicly called for more flexibility on abortion, told the BBC in a statement.
But Hawkins does not see the Republican party as her problem. She has little patience for politicians she deems insufficiently "pro-life", threatening primary challenges against Republicans who do not support early bans.
Merv Riepe, a Nebraska state senator who voted against a six-week ban this year, "is going to be retired pretty soon", Hawkins said.
The three female Republican senators in South Carolina who opposed an outright ban face the same threat. Two supported a six-week ban, but that was not sufficient for Hawkins. Each of them was sent a plastic infant-size spine from SFLA earlier this year, with a note suggesting they grow a backbone.
"I think that's the difference between us and other pro-life organisations," Hawkins said. "I don't really care if so-and-so in Washington, DC, isn't happy with me. It doesn't even earn me any points in my demographic."
That approach - aggressive, uncompromising - has fuelled her dominance among anti-abortion activists, now lurching to the right in the absence of Roe.
"The movement as a whole is moving towards asking for more extreme bans," said Zelly Martin, a researcher at University of Texas' propaganda lab, who specialises in the US abortion debate. "They feel like now that we don't have Roe protecting abortion why would we pull back? And I think Kristan Hawkins is a big part of that."
Image caption,
In the year since Roe was overturned, the anti-abortion movement has splintered
Just how far Hawkins will get - how close to abolishing abortion she will come - remains an open question.
"I don't see a point in American history where Americans are going to want an absolute ban on abortion," Ziegler said. "There is no sign of that."
But Hawkins and others are exploring ways to bypass both public opinion and political resistance, Zieger said. One, perhaps the most feasible, would be to ask the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to recognise foetal personhood under the Constitution.
It seems improbable, but those are odds Hawkins is used to.
Last month, in Northville, Michigan, Hawkins stood in a small first-floor conference room, neat rows of potential donors sitting in front of her. She began her speech with an anecdote from early in her career.
A mentor in the anti-abortion movement had offered Hawkins some unsolicited advice: stop saying "when" Roe v Wade is overturned. By assuming Roe's demise, he cautioned, she sounded "too immature, too naive".
Hawkins ignored him. She told her staff to double down, boost their messaging that promised to send Roe to the "ash heap of history".
"I always tell our team: winners envision the win."
Update 11 July 2023: This article was amended in line with BBC Style Guide to describe activists as anti-abortion rather than pro-life.
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South Carolina approves six-week abortion ban for most women
Published
24 May
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Legal challenges to the abortion bill are expected once it becomes law
By Kathryn Armstrong
BBC News
Legislators in the US state of South Carolina have passed a bill that would ban nearly all abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy - before most women know they are pregnant.
The bill is expected to be signed into law by the state's Republican governor, Henry McMaster.
But it will now face legal challenges.
The majority of southern US states have curtailed abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion last year.
The vote in South Carolina passed mostly along party lines but was opposed by the three Republican women in the state's Senate.
Vicki Ringer, the director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said her organisation would file a request for a temporary restraining order after the bill is signed by Mr McMaster.
"Twenty-seven Republican men (all of them) voted today to ban abortion in SC," Ms Ringer wrote on Twitter.
"I'm gutted. Because women will die. Full stop."
The bill, known as the "Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act", would ban abortions in most cases after early cardiac activity can be detected in a foetus or embryo - normally about six weeks into a pregnancy.
It allows for terminations up to 12 weeks in cases of rape and incest, and provides an exception for medical emergencies.
Abortions are currently allowed through the first 22 weeks of pregnancy in the state.
The bill is a revision of an earlier measure that South Carolina's Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional in January.
Following Tuesday's vote, Mr McMaster tweeted that with the passing of the bill, "our state is one step closer to protecting more innocent lives".
"I look forward to signing this bill into law as soon as possible," he said.
Republicans in the state Senate had tried multiple times to pass the bill but had been blocked by a cross-party group of five women, including the three from their own party.
"What we are doing today is not going to do away with illegal abortions - it is going to cause illegal abortions," said Republican State Senator Sandy Senn, who was among them.
South Carolina had been seen as a last legal bastion for women in the South seeking abortion but recent efforts to tighten restrictions has put increasing pressure on the state of Virginia.
Last week Republican lawmakers in North Carolina voted to uphold a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks.
The last refuge of abortion access in the US south
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Antiabortion Group Used Cellphone Data to Target Ads to Planned Parenthood Visitors
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Byron Tau
in Washington and
Patience Haggin
in New York
May 18, 2023 9:49 am ET
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From a high-stakes legal battle over the abortion pill mifepristone, to states debating their own legislation, WSJ’s Laura Kusisto highlights where abortion access stands now and what could come next. Photo Illustration: Preston Jessee
A Midwest antiabortion group used cellphone location data to target online content to visitors of certain Planned Parenthood clinics, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
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Abortion rights hang in the balance at state Supreme Court oral arguments
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Anne Geggis
September 8, 2023
8min
15-Week Ban
Abortion Rights
Casey V.Planned Parenthood
Charles Canady
Floridians Protecting Freedom
Jennifer Canady
Lauren Brenzel
Mat Staver
Roe V. Wade
SB 300
Six-Week Ban
State Supreme Court
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A ruling in favor of the state's position would clear the way for banning the procedure before most women know they are pregnant.
The Florida Supreme Court is poised to make a crucial decision potentially affecting not only Florida residents’ abortion rights but also marking an entire swath of the country as a place where abortion is mostly off-limits.
Justices will hold oral arguments today on whether Florida’s existing 15-week abortion ban violates the privacy clause in the state constitution enacted by voters in 1980. And if the Supreme Court agrees with the state’s case, it will clear the way for new legislation further restricting abortion to go into effect 30 days after the court’s ruling.
That new law (SB 300) the Legislature passed earlier this year bans abortion before most people know they are pregnant — after six weeks of pregnancy unless the mother’s life is at risk, or the patient can produce proof of rape or incest. The case the court will hear today has kept that law from going into effect.
Florida is currently the only place from Texas to South Carolina and north to Tennessee where abortion is allowed at 15 weeks. Those states and all those between either ban it after six weeks or allow it only under special circumstances.
Previously, the high court had blocked another abortion law based on a privacy clause voters approved in 1980.
Attorney General Ashley Moody has asked the court to overturn the 1989 ruling, contending that it is as “egregiously wrong” as the Roe decision and that the privacy clause was never intended to include abortion.
“Far from a hidden thought whispered in the confines of the home, the effects of abortion ripple throughout society, from the women who endure it to the medical staff who perform it, to the unborn lives extinguished by it,” states the brief from Moody and her legal team.
But attorneys representing the abortion clinics and the physician challenging the law with the 15-week ban point out that voters in 2012 rejected a constitutional amendment proposed by the Legislature that would have wiped out the 1989 ruling.
“The state asks this court to override the will of the people and do with the stroke of a pen precisely what the people rejected at the ballot box,” states the brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.
All eyes will be on Justice Charles Canady. Some have called for him to recuse himself because his wife, Republican state Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland, co-sponsored the six-week ban that would soon become Florida law after the ruling.
The Liberty Counsel, which bills itself as a religious civil liberties law firm, filed an amicus brief supporting the state’s case and noted Florida’s role in the Southeast region since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the court decisions that guaranteed abortion rights up to when a fetus can survive outside the womb — at about 24 weeks — throughout the country.
“Tragically, after … Roe (v. Wade) and Casey (v. Planned Parenthood) abortion decisions were overturned, Florida has become a sanctuary for abortion, said Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman, according to a prepared statement. “Now the Florida Supreme Court must establish this as a state that values unborn life according to the state Constitution.”
In the background, however, a coalition of groups have come together to form Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF). It’s a political committee pressing for another constitutional amendment that would render the high court’s opinion moot if cleared to be on the ballot and approved.
If the petition garners enough signatures to get on the ballot and then the question wins the approval of 60% or more of voters, the state constitution would be amended to guarantee abortion rights as Floridians had for nearly 50 years before last June’s Supreme Court decision.
The group announced Wednesday it had gathered enough petition signatures to trigger a state Supreme Court review of the question.
One-third of the 891,523 required validated signatures that need to be validated by Feb. 1 — 297,799 signatures — have been validated, the official state tracker shows.
If it goes on the ballot, the referendum would ask voters to agree that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
Lauren Brenzel, FPF campaign director, said that Floridians, who polls show overwhelmingly support abortion rights, should take heart no matter the outcome of Friday’s oral arguments.
“Our campaign is poised to give voters the chance to reclaim their freedom and put a stop to politicians interfering in our personal medical decisions once and for all,” Brenzel said in a prepared statement.
___
Christine Jordan Sexton of Florida Politics contributed to this report.
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https://clickorlando.com/news/politics/2023/09/08/arguments-on-floridas-15-week-abortion-ban-to-go-before-state-supreme-court
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Christie Zizo, Digital Editor
ORLANDO, Fla. – The Florida Supreme Court on Friday took up a monumental case that could decide the future of abortions in the state.
The high court’s justices heard oral arguments over the current 15-week abortion ban Friday in Tallahassee.
The 15-week abortion ban was passed by the Florida Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022.
Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida filed the lawsuit. They argue the ban violates the Florida Constitution’s right-to-privacy provision.
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The courts allowed the law to go into effect while the case was hashed out in court.
However, if the high court rules in favor of the state and says the abortion ban is constitutional, a stricter ban will go into place a month later. That law, signed by DeSantis last April, would ban abortions after 6 weeks with few exceptions.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may also soon play a role in another abortion measure.
A group trying to get abortion access on the November 2024 ballot as a constitutional amendment says it has collected enough petitions to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review of the ballot measure to make sure its language is in line with Florida law.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily:
Copyright 2023 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.
During last week's Republican presidential debate, Florida Gov_ Ron DeSantis dodged a question about a federal abortion ban by telling a story about a woman he knew who he claimed survived despite “multiple abortion attempts.”.
Health regulators ordered an Orlando abortion clinic to pay a $193,000 fine for violating a law that requires women to wait 24 hours before having abortions, nearly three times the fine recommended by an administrative law judge.
An amendment for the 2024 election that would allow abortions in Florida up to the viability of a fetus is one step closer to being on the ballot.
Christie joined the ClickOrlando team in November 2021.
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Reps. McMorris Rodgers, Kilmer push Congress to honor Vietnam evac pilots, crew
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VETERANS
Reps. McMorris Rodgers, Kilmer push Congress to honor Vietnam evac pilots, crew
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(The Center Square) – Two representatives from Washington state are working together to reintroduce a bill from the 117th Congress to honor Vietnam War Veterans.
The bipartisan bill, if adopted, would award the Congressional Gold Medal to Dustoff crewmembers – the helicopter pilots, crew chiefs, and medics responsible for evacuating more than 900,000 U.S., Vietnamese, and allied forces during the nearly eleven year long period between May 1962 to March 1973.
“During the Vietnam War, millions of Americans left home to fight in muddy trenches and jungles halfway around the world,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Spokane, in a statement. “Many made the ultimate sacrifice. Others returned home just to be ostracized and ridiculed. Some were never recognized for their service at all. That’s exactly what happened to the Dustoff crewmembers who risked their lives to save nearly one million others. They were some of the very best, and their heroism deserves to be recognized.”
The History and Art Archives of the United States House of Representatives notes that Congress “has commissioned gold medals as its highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions.”
“Each medal honors a particular individual, institution, or event,” the archive states.
The first recipient of the award, handed out by the Continental Congress on the 25th of March 1776, was none other than George Washington.
To date, few Vietnam war veterans have been awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.
Bill co-sponsor Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor, wants to correct this oversight.
“Years after the end of the Vietnam War, too many Vietnam veterans have not been sufficiently recognized for their service and sacrifice,” said Kilmer in a statement. “That remains true for the members of the Dustoff crews – who valiantly rescued so many. Awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dustoff crews of the Vietnam War will be an important step toward recognizing the pivotal role that these service members played in saving lives and serving their country proudly. I’ll keep pushing to ensure we demonstrate our appreciation on behalf of a grateful nation.”
The prior version of the bill from the 117th congress died in committee without being passed on for a vote.
Veterans Military Sports Memorial Congress
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AOC, Rubio find common ground on rail union strike: 'A rarity'
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JOE BIDEN Published December 1, 2022 2:27pm EST
AOC, Rubio find common ground on rail union strike: 'A rarity'
A railway strike could cost US $2 billion a day
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By Caitlin McFall FOXBusiness
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How Congress can ‘solve’ the rail problem
Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen President Michael Baldwin discusses Congress' involvement to avoid a rail strike, arguing a strike is the 'last thing' the industry wants.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Thursday that she and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., had found common ground in the potential rail worker strike that has concerned many across the nation.
"A rarity," she said in reference to a tweet from the Florida Republican earlier this week in which he said he would object to a deal that does not reflect the wishes of the workers.
"The railways and workers should go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept," he said in a post Tuesday. "I will not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)
BUTTIGIEG INSISTS CONGRESSIONAL INTERVENTION TO PREVENT RAIL STRIKE IS 'BEST WAY FORWARD'
Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the message and said, "Glad we are on the same page [regarding] railworkers’ paid sick days."
"The House just sent over what you asked for: the full TA deal w/ sick days as supported and demanded by our railworkers. Can they count on your YES vote for the amendment?" she questioned.
Fox News Digital could not immediately reach the senator’s office for comment on how he will vote in the bill's uncertain future.
Though two measures were passed through the House with bipartisan support to address workers' demands, they were also contested across party lines, including by some Democrats who believe the effort did not go far enough.
One bill passed Wednesday codified a July deal negotiated by rail unions and the Biden administration that would raise workers pay by 24% over a five-year period from 2020 through 2024, including an immediate payout on average of $11,000 upon ratification.
PELOSI, SCHUMER AGREE TO MOVE RAILROAD UNION BILL 'ASAP' AFTER WHITE HOUSE MEETING
President Biden talks with firefighters at the Nantucket Fire Department in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on Nov. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh / AP Newsroom)
The agreement would also allow rail workers to take time off for medical appointments without penalization.
But a separate resolution was also passed that would increase paid sick leave from one day a year to seven days a year in a move to appease workers' demands and circumvent an economic disaster.
"Let me be clear: A nationwide rail shutdown would be catastrophic," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said ahead of the vote Wednesday. "A shutdown would grind our economy to a halt, and every family would feel the strain."
"Time is of the essence. We must act now," she added.
While senators on both sides of the aisle have expressed hesitancy in passing the measures, they are not the only uncertainty when it comes to avoiding a railway shutdown.
Activists in support of unionized rail workers protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)
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Workers originally called for 15 days of paid sick leave, which union leaders reportedly opposed, and a rail strike could begin as early as Dec. 9.
A rail worker strike could leave millions of Amtrak and commuter rail passengers stranded, freeze up to 30% of U.S. cargo shipments and cost the U.S. $2 billion a day, according to reports.
Fox News' Kyle Morris and Andrew Murray contributed to this report.
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Bipartisan group of lawmakers release bill to make it easier for news outlets to negotiate with tech giants
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CONGRESS Published August 23, 2022 4:49am EDT
Bipartisan group of lawmakers release bill to make it easier for news outlets to negotiate with tech giants
The new version of the bill aims to make it easier for news organizations to negotiate collectively with platforms like Google and Facebook
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A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers revealed a revised version of legislation designed to help media outlets negotiate collectively with Google, Facebook and other platforms.
According to a press release from the lawmakers, the bill, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, would remove "legal obstacles to news organizations' ability to negotiate collectively and secure fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that regularly access news content without paying for its value."
The group of lawmakers includes Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Reps. David Cicilline, D-R.I., and Ken Buck, R-Colo., of the House Judiciary Committee.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers revealed a revised version of legislation designed to help media outlets negotiate collectively with tech giants. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
A prior version of the bill that was introduced in March 2021 was opposed by two technology industry trade groups — the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice — that Meta Platforms' Facebook and Alphabet's Google belong to.
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The new version of the legislation would cover news organizations with fewer than 1,500 full-time employees and non-network news broadcasters.
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A prior version of the bill that was introduced in March 2021 was opposed by two technology industry trade groups. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration / Reuters Photos)
The bill would allow them to work together to secure better deals from Facebook, Google and other platforms, the press release said.
FACEBOOK FALLING IN POPULARITY AMONG TEENS, SURVEY SAYS
The group of lawmakers includes Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Reps. David Cicilline, D-R.I., and Ken Buck, R-Colo., of the House Judiciary Committee. (AP Images)
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Last year's bill would have applied to any print, broadcast or digital news organization with an editorial staff that published at least once a week.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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This Democrat and this Republican agree on a major bipartisan win for American energy
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OPINION
This Democrat and this Republican agree on a major bipartisan win for American energy
U.S. is among the slowest nations in approving energy infrastructure projects
By Gov. Spencer Cox , John Bel Edwards Fox News
Published June 28, 2023 8:00am EDT
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The United States used to build huge, impressive projects really fast.
We don’t do that anymore. Projects that once took months or a couple of years now take decades.
The U.S. is among the slowest nations in the developed world in approving infrastructure projects – particularly when it comes to energy.
Why? As co-chairs of a bipartisan group of governors working on energy policy, we submit that the primary culprit is lousy permitting policies that needlessly drag out projects and which now endanger the massive infrastructure investments the federal government has made since 2021.
Several permitting reforms were included in the debt ceiling legislation negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. (Getty Images)
FOSSIL FUEL, GREEN ENERGY GROUPS TEAM UP IN RARE JOINT EFFORT TO PUSH PERMITTING REFORM
It doesn’t have to be this way. We were thrilled to see both Congress and the Biden administration recognize the urgency of the problem by including several meaningful permitting reforms in the recent debt ceiling legislation. We offer our thanks to both Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden.
Much more remains to be done, but this was a good start. The bill included welcome updates to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA generates a blizzard of overlapping and repetitive review phases spanning multiple agencies – all but guaranteed to keep projects stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey speak to reporters outside the White House, Feb. 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
By setting a maximum two-year time limit and establishing guidelines to ensure each project review is spearheaded by just one federal agency, Congress made substantial headway in reducing some of the uncertainty and redundancy plaguing the process.
We hope Congress and the administration view this success as a down payment –important progress but not sufficient.
Setting deadlines for federal review solves only part of the problem. Projects approved after years of rigorous environmental assessment and a thorough public comment process can face new delays from endless legal challenges.
JOE MANCHIN REIGNITES BATTLE OVER ENERGY PROJECT PERMITTING
And even when projects aren’t litigated, the potential for litigation forces federal agencies to do much longer and detailed analysis than necessary.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards speaks at the Essence Festival on June 30, 2017, in New Orleans. (Josh Brasted/Getty Images)
The SunZia transmission project is the latest to make headlines illustrating America’s broken permitting process. The project to deliver electricity generated by wind energy in New Mexico to homes and businesses in Arizona and California finally received government approval last month – 15 years after developers first applied. And this is a project that was "fast-tracked."
Every state has an example like this. In Utah, a transmission line to carry electricity through the state to deliver low-carbon electricity to California from a wind farm in Wyoming just got approval – also after 15 years.
In Louisiana, a state-of-the-art coastal restoration project is finally moving forward after six years of review. Time is of the essence to protect communities threatened by shoreline erosion, but the project was still delayed despite being fast-tracked by both the Obama and Trump administrations.
Further reforms could backstop indefinite challenge periods by establishing clear and durable standards for the public comment process and limiting judicial review once those standards have been met.
In Utah, a transmission line to carry electricity through the state to deliver low-carbon electricity to California from a wind farm in Wyoming just got approval – also after 15 years. (Nick Wagner/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Preserving environmental safeguards and community engagement is of paramount importance, and governors will not support any policy that would undermine these essential components. But faster permitting and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive, and governors from both parties agree it’s time for commonsense parameters to prevent abuse of the judicial review process.
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Over $1 trillion is heading to cities, states and territories to upgrade roads, bridges, ports and railways; expand broadband access; construct pivotal energy projects; and build high-tech manufacturing capacity. That’s a lot of money that will get piddled away in endless analysis or lawsuits if we don’t fix the federal permitting mess.
In fact, states can play an important role here. Democratic and Republican governors, through the National Governors Association, are already working together across party lines and state lines on solutions to safely speed up the process for all types of projects: wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear, oil, natural gas, coastal restoration, electric transmission, coal, pipelines, transportation and water infrastructure, forest projects, broadband, and critical minerals.
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And because states and territories play a leading role in developing and building infrastructure projects, a better process would leverage state expertise. Through reforms to allow revenue-sharing and other support, states could hire staff, unleash innovative technologies and apply their on-the-ground expertise to further speed the process without compromising safety.
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It shouldn't take longer to approve a project than it takes to build it. Democrats and Republicans alike recognize permitting delays weaken U.S. economic growth, security and competitiveness.
We've seen great things happen when the parties work together. By finishing the job on permitting reform, Congress and the administration can achieve a major bipartisan win that gets America building again.
Let’s get it done.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM SPENCER COX
John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is governor of Louisiana.
Republican Spencer Cox is the governor of Utah.
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Republicans and Democrats, Unite Against Big Tech Abuses
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Jan. 11, 2023 12:00 pm ET
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Manchin's Comments Create Hope for Bipartisan Entitlements Deal
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