Kamala Harris says Trump ‘guilty’ of ‘stealing’ abortion rights at rally – as it happened

Democrats went on the attack as they marked the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech near Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Trump plans to rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, the day after his debate with Biden. His campaign believes the state is winnable in November, even though it voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020.

• The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors …

• … but first it will release decisions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, almost certainly on at least some of the high-profile cases the justices have yet to decide.

• The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.

• A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.

Meanwhile, in Florida, the judge handling Donald Trump’s stalled prosecution over the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort is in the midst of a major hearing that could determing the case’s trajectory. Here’s the latest on what the two sides are arguing, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for retaining classified documents is expected on Monday to consider modifying his conditions of release to include a prohibition on making statements that could endanger the safety of FBI agents involved in the case.

The request to the US district judge, Aileen Cannon – the first time prosecutors have sought to limit Trump’ public remarks in this case – raises the stakes for Trump. Unlike in his other cases, where prosecutors sought gag orders, a violation of release conditions carries a risk of jail.

The latest dispute over Trump’s inflammatory statements stems from his blatantly false characterization of the FBI’s use-of-deadly force policy when they executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago club in August 2022 and retrieved more than 100 classified documents.

The order, which limits FBI agents to use deadly force only if they face extreme danger and became public after the FBI’s operational plan for the search was unsealed, used standard language that is routinely used in hundreds of warrants executed across the country.

But Trump and some allies twisted the limiting language to claim the FBI was authorized by the Biden administration to shoot him when they searched Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump was not there during the search and the language is standard US justice department policy.

The supreme court has indicated that the justices may release more decisions on Thursday and Friday, as several politically weighty cases await rulings.

The justices were already expected to issue decisions on Wednesday, thus bringing to three the number of days this week that we can expect to hear from the court. The conservative-dominated body has a bunch of matters outstanding, which touch on everything from Donald Trump’s legal fate, to the scope of government regulation. Here are a few:

• Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him by special prosecutor Jack Smith for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

• Where the Biden administration can require federally funded hospitals to perform emergency abortions, even in states like Idaho, which the case centers on, that have strict abortion bans.

• A challenge to a longstanding doctrine underpinning many federal regulatory decisions.

• Whether municipalities can make it illegal for people to sleep outside, even when there is insufficient shelter space, in a case that could upend homeless policies nationwide.

Decisions on some, all, or theoretically none of these cases could come before the end of the week.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden will hold the first of two debates they have scheduled on Thursday.

The day after, the former president is scheduled to hold a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, a state that Biden won overwhelmingly in 2020, but which Trump’s campaign argues is within his grasp this year.

Trump will “speak with the people of Virginia about how he will reverse the devastating effects of Joe Biden’s failed presidency,” his campaign announced.

“President Trump will ease the financial pressures placed on households and re-establish law and order in this country! We can Make America Great Again by tackling lawlessness head-on, ceasing the endless flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border, and reversing the detrimental effects of inflation by restoring people’s wealth.”

Polls have lately showed a close, perhaps tied, race between Trump and Biden in Virginia, though there have been none released so far showing the former president with the advantage.

Democrats are continuing to press their message against Republicans over their support for the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade, and allowed states to ban abortions.

“Two years ago, the extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority issued one of the most egregious rulings in our nation’s history,” the Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said.

Here’s more:

The Dobbs decision undermined reproductive freedom for women all across America as part of the extreme MAGA Republican plan to criminalize reproductive health care, outlaw contraception and march us toward a nationwide abortion ban.

The decision by the out of control Supreme Court majority to take away the long-held right to an abortion represents an assault on freedom, the Constitution and the values shared by a majority of Americans. House Democrats will continue to fight until reproductive freedom is the law of the land and the extreme MAGA Republican effort to impose a nationwide abortion ban is crushed.

Still not a peep from Donald Trump and most leading Republicans on the second anniversary of Roe v Wade’s overturning, but that’s not stopping the Biden campaign.

Their official account has spent the day tweeting out past instances where Trump has taken credit for orchestrating the downfall of the precedent, which prevented the sorts of abortion restrictions now commonplace in Republican-controlled states.

From his town hall in Iowa earlier this year:

And what appears to be one of the many videos Trump has posted on his Truth Social account:

Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, the GOP nominee for a Senate seat in the state, was one of the few Republicans to mark the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade.

Hogan, in a statement shared by the Washington Post, said that if elected, he would work on bipartisan legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.”

He noted that as governor, he “reaffirmed my commitment to uphold Maryland law protecting access to abortion,” adding that he was “proud to make Maryland the first state in America to provide over-the-counter birth control covered by insurance.”

Hogan, who last week tried to reject Donald Trump’s endorsement in his Senate race, also promised to protect women’s reproductive rights.

“A woman’s health care decisions are her own,” he said.

Whether it be the decision to start a family with the help of IVF, or exercise her reproductive rights, nothing and no one — especially partisan politics — should come between a woman and her doctor.

Planned Parenthood will spend $40m ahead of November’s elections to bolster Joe Biden and leading congressional Democrats.

The group will initially target eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Biden is seeking to defend 2020 victories, as well as North Carolina, which the Biden campaign to flip, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which have races that could help determine control of the Senate and House, it told Associated Press.

Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said:

Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters. It will be what enables us to win.

A six-week abortion ban in Texas was linked to a 13% increase in the number of infants who died in their first year of life, a new study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics suggests.

The study, published two years to the day since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and permitted more than a dozen states across the country to outlaw almost all abortions, is one of the first glimpses into how strict abortion bans impact babies’ health.

The study also estimated that the ban may have led the number of infants in Texas who died within their first month of life to rise more than 10%.

Because Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban in September 2021, months before Roe’s demise, scholars have studied what has happened in Texas for clues about how post-Roe abortion bans are now affecting the rest of the nation. Some of the researchers involved in the Monday study have previously concluded that the Texas ban also led to 10,000 additional births.

The study found a 23% jump in infant deaths due to congenital anomalies – the kind of conditions that are often identified in utero and lead to abortions in states where the procedure is legal, since they can be incompatible with life. But that choice is no longer available to pregnant Texans.

Two hundred and sixteen more infant deaths occurred due to the Texas six-week abortion ban, the researchers estimated.

Kamala Harris has warned that abortion bans in states across the country are cutting women off from essential reproductive care and causing a “health care crisis”,

In an interview with MSNBC aired today alongside reproductive rights advocate Hadley Duvall, Harris reflected on her experience visiting a reproductive care clinic in Minnesota in March.

In those clinics that are trusted in the community, there is — you can get a Pap [smear] … breast cancer screening, HIV screening, the things that where people want to be able to walk into a health care facility and be treated with dignity and without judgment so they can address their health care concerns.

She continued:

That’s what these clinics do. And in states where they have passed these Trump abortion bans, these clinics are closing, which means that there is a reduction of very essential health care across the board for a lot of people.

Democrats are on the attack as they mark the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech outside Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is three days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress have said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors.

• The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.

• A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.

Kate Cox, the Texas mother who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year, introduced Kamala Harris at her speech in Maryland.

“Every minute that I stayed pregnant, the risk to my health and to a future pregnancy were growing,” Cox said.

“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said, adding: “I never imagined having to fight for something so basic as a procedure to save my health.”

As a young student and mother “just trying to stay afloat,” Cox said she didn’t always make time to vote.

“I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it,” Cox said.

Growing emotional, Cox then shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause, as many stood to cheer for her.

“And I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.

She then welcomed Harris on to the stage as a “champion of the cause” for reproductive freedom.

“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.

Harris emphasized the importance of turning out to vote in November to protect abortion access so that places like Maryland remain havens for reproductive healthcare.

Pointing to the statistic that one-in-three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”

Making her case that Trump was “guilty” of stripping abortion access, which was previewed by the campaign before her appearance, Harris said Trump appointed three supreme court justices with the intention of overturning Roe v Wade.

“It was premeditated,” Harris said from a stage, where a sign that said “Trust Women” hung behind her.

“Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions,” she added.

Later this afternoon, Harris will go to battleground state Arizona for a second event marking the Dobbs anniversary.

Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years.”

She then said Trump was “guilty” in “the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America”, and went on to lay out what she said are the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.

“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term will be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”

She called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices”, and said voters shouldn’t be fooled by Trump’s wavering on abortion, but should focus on what he has said. And she warned that he would go even further, curtailing access to contraception and IVF.

“If there were a second Trump term, he has admitted that he is ‘looking at restrictions on contraception,’” she said. “And pay close attention to how his friends in the United States Senate obstructed a bill to protect the right to contraception, not once, not twice, but three times.”