Supreme court strikes down abortion restriction in major victory for campaigners – live

The Supreme Court’s third and last decision released today dealt a win to conservatives fighting against the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), a consumer-finance watchdog agency within the government created to protect consumers from abuse from banks and other financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 recession.

In its decision, the Supreme Court gave power to the president to fire whoever heads the bureau. The law that created the CFPB said that the Senate would confirm a director who would serve a five-year appointment and could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”.

Trump, along with a firm that was being investigated by the CFPB for misleading financial practices, sued the government saying that the law too severely restricted the president’s power. The court today agreed with them, ruling 5-4 that the president has the right to remove the CFBP’s director “at will”.

People are noting that supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh voted to uphold the restrictive abortions law, despite what Maine senator Susan Collins said about the judge when speaking about her decision to vote for his confirmation.

Collins said in 2018 that Kavanaugh has said before and told her personally many times that he respects Roe v Wade, the supreme court case that made abortion in the US a legal right, as precedent. “I have always been concerned about preserving Roe v Wade,” she said at the time.

And then there is, of course, this wonderful fun fact about today’s ruling.

While chief justice John Roberts ruled with the liberal judges this morning and struck down a restrictive abortion law, Roberts made it clear in his opinion for the court that his decision is based on his respecting a previous supreme court decision.

In 2016, the supreme court struck down a Texas law that was nearly identical to the Louisiana law the supreme court decided on today. When deciding that case, Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, Roberts actually voted against the majority, saying that the law was constitutional.

Reproductive rights advocacy groups are celebrating the supreme court’s decision that a Louisiana law that restricted abortion access is unconstitutional.

Decisions from the US Supreme Court are being released this morning. The court’s first decision this morning involves foreign groups that receive US monetary aid.

The ruling says it is not a violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s right to free speech to require foreign groups to denounce prostitution and sex trafficking in order to receive US aid. The court said that because the groups of foreign-based, they are not protected by the First Amendment.

See the full ruling here.

The list of companies who are boycotting Facebook, saying that they will no longer advertise with the company in protest of how it handles misinformation, is continuing to grow.

The campaign, called the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, was launched two weeks ago by the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League. The two anti-discrimination groups encouraged companies to pause advertising on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, “in order to force Mark Zuckerberg to address the catastrophic effect that Facebook has had on our society”.

When the campaign first launched, companies like Patagonia and North Face were the first to join in. But last week, larger companies announced they joined the campaign and will pause advertising, including Coca Cola and Unilever. Starbucks announced yesterday that the company will be pausing advertisement on social media platforms, though they did not specifically say they were joining the campaign.

In a statement to CNN, Facebook responded to the campaign saying, “We deeply respect any brand’s decision and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and providing critical voting information.”

A moving story from the Mississippi Center For Investigative Reporting, after lawmakers voted on Sunday to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.

Myrlie Evers began to weep when she heard the Mississippi Legislature vote to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.

“I can’t believe it. I am so emotional,” the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers said. “Medgar’s wings must be clapping.”

Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist in Mississippi who was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Jackson in June 1963.

As Martha Bergmark of the Mississippi Center for Justice wrote for the Guardian in 2013, “for many of us, white as well as black, the assassination of Medgar Evers was a turning-point. We were forced to ask ourselves with regard to the growing civil rights movement, Where do I stand, and what am I willing to risk?’”

Speaking on Sunday, Myrlie Evers had praise for lawmakers of both parties who voted to change the flag and said: “I never thought this would happen. For the people who hold the palm of Mississippi in their hands, for their wisdom and their strength, for them to vote the way they did is all but unbelievable to me, but I am ever so thankful for that vote.”

Here’s Donald Trump again, following up his retweet of video of a white couple pointing weapons at protesters with: “Can anyone believe that Princeton just dropped the name of Woodrow Wilson from their highly respected policy center. Now the Do Nothing Democrats want to take off the name John Wayne from an airport. Incredible stupidity!”

Here’s more on the Princeton story, where the 28th president’s name is to be removed from the School of Public and International Affairs, due to views on race which are now distinctly outmoded to say the very least.

It was always likely, meanwhile, that Trump wouldn’t like news out of Orange county, California, that the airport there named for John Wayne could soon be given a different title.

According to an Associated Press report, the Orange County Democratic party wants to rename the airport, having passed a resolution “condemning ‘racist and bigoted statements” the actor, who died in 1979, made in a 1971 interview with Playboy.

In the interview, Wayne makes bigoted statements against black people, Native Americans and the LGBTQ community.

“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people,” he said.

Wayne also said that although he didn’t condone slavery: “I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves.”

The actor said he felt no remorse in the subjugation of Native Americans.

“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. . (O)ur so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival,” he said. “There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Wayne also called movies such as Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy perverted, and used a gay slur to refer to the two main characters of the latter film.

Democrats are therefore calling on the Orange County Board of Supervisors to drop Wayne’s name, statue and other likenesses from the international airport and “to restore its original name: Orange County Airport”.

Trump likes Wayne (who campaigned for rightwing causes in Hollywood) and Wayne would’ve liked Trump – at least according to the cowboy star’s daughter, Aissa, who held an event for Trump on the campaign trail in 2016.

“The reason that I’m here to support Mr Trump is because America needs help,” Aissa Wayne said at an event at the star’s Iowa birthplace. “And we need a strong leader. And we need someone like Mr Trump with leadership qualities, somebody with courage, someone that’s strong like John Wayne.

“If John Wayne were around, he’d be standing right here instead of me.”

In response, Trump said: “We love John Wayne. We love John Wayne and we love his family equally, right? Equally.”

Not all Wayne’s family returned the love. Ethan Wayne, the actor’s son and president of John Wayne Enterprises, responded with a statement in which he said no one “can speak on behalf of John Wayne and neither the family nor the Foundation endorses candidates in his name”.

Speaking of the supreme court, opinions are due today and they could include cases involving abortion restrictions, the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act and … Trump’s taxes.

Eyes down around 10am for all that.

The court has recently delivered rulings against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace and in support of DACA, the programme which protects Dreamers, or undocumented people brought to the US as children, from deportation. But as Nathan Robinson advises here, that doesn’t mean the 5-4 conservative court, with its two Trump appointees, has suddenly become all progressive…

New York Times media columnist Ben Smith’s latest column is about the Washington Post under editor Marty Baron and its struggles with a changing news landscape, and as usual it may seem pretty Inside Baseball if you’re not in the media. But it does lead off with a remarkable story concerning Brett Kavanaugh.

During the supreme court justice’s tempestuous confirmation hearing, in late 2018, Smith reports, the Post was all set to run a story in which Watergate veteran Bob Woodward outed Kavanaugh as a source, specifically for a story about special counsel Ken Starr and his investigation of Bill Clinton which Kavanaugh had publicly denied at the time.

Smith writes:

The article, described by two Post journalists who read it, would have been explosive, arriving as the nominee battled a decades-old sexual assault allegation and was fighting to prove his integrity.

The article was nearly ready when the executive editor, Martin Baron, stepped in. Baron urged Woodward not to breach his arrangement with Kavanaugh and to protect his old source’s anonymity, three Post employees said.

Baron and other editors persuaded Woodward that it would be bad for the Post and “bad for Bob” to disclose a source, one of the journalists told me. The piece never ran.

One can only wonder what kind of detonations that would have set off had it run. Kavanaugh was confirmed, but only just, amid huge controversy over allegations – which he strenuously denied – of sexual assault while a student.

Striking video from Aurora, Colorado, of police in riot gear breaking up a vigil for Elijah McClain, an African American man who was 23 when, one day last year, police put him in a neck hold, killing him.

The confrontation happened on Saturday, as the Denver Post reports:

As evening fell … tensions rose and police announced that the protest was now an ‘illegal gathering”. Police said protesters were throwing rocks and bottles and confirmed they used pepper spray on the crowd. That scene contrasted sharply with the violinists who were performing at the same time, honoring McClain who played the instrument.