US Politics

Several Democratic governors have moved swiftly to protect access to medication abortion in their states after a ruling by a Texas judge late last week threatened access to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone.In an announcement on Monday, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts said her state had ordered about 15,000 doses of mifepristone, the first of two drugs in a medication abortion regimen that has been approved for use up to the 10th week of pregnancy.Healey also issued an executive order that she said would help protect access to medication abortions and shield providers who perform them.In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, said his state had secured an emergency stockpile of up to 2m pills of misoprostol, the second drug in the regimen that can be used safely on its own, though is slightly less effective as a single medication. That drug, which is used to treat other medical conditions, is also being targeted by anti-abortion groups seeking to remove it from the market.“In response to this extremist ban on a medication abortion drug, our state has secured a stockpile of an alternative medication abortion drug to ensure that Californians continue to have access to safe reproductive health treatments,” Newsom said in a statement. “We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California.”Their actions come after US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of Donald Trump known for his anti-abortion views, issued a ruling late on Friday that invalidated the 23-year-old approval of mifepristone by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On the same night, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory ruling that ordered the FDA to maintain the drug’s approval in at least 17 states where Democrats had sued.On Monday, the US justice department appealed the Texas ruling, asking a federal appeals court to place a hold on the “extraordinary and unprecedented order”. Underscoring the legal uncertainty surrounding the dueling orders, the administration separately asked the federal court in Washington state for clarity.With access to the drug imperiled, and Democrats stymied in Washington by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, a handful of liberal state governors said they were taking matters into their own hands.“A judge has made a politically motivated decision to override doctors, patients and medical experts and block access to critical medications,” Healey said on Monday, unveiling the plan at a press conference outside the Massachusetts statehouse in Boston. “Today, we collectively are saying loud and clear: not on our watch.”In anticipation of the Texas ruling, the Democratic governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, announced last week that his state would stockpile a three-year supply of mifepristone in the event the drug became more difficult to access. Days later, Kacsmaryk issued his ruling.Several other Democratic governors and state attorneys general have condemned the ruling while seeking to make clear that, at least for now, the drug remains available. Some went further, promising to keep medication abortion legal and accessible in their states, although without providing further details.More than half of abortions in the US rely on medication abortion, and most of those involve the two-drug protocol. If the appeals court doesn’t intervene, the Texas ruling would take effect on Friday with far-reaching implications for access.The FDA approved mifepristone to terminate pregnancy in 2000, when used with misoprostol. Despite claims made in the Texas lawsuit, there is decades’ worth of scientific research concluding that mifepristone is safe.States have become the epicenter of the fight over abortion rights since the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade. Since then, more than a dozen Republican-led states have enacted abortion bans or severely restricted access to the procedure.​Anti-abortion groups have long targeted medication abortion, the most common method for terminating a pregnancy in the US. But it became the focus of efforts after the supreme court’s landmark decision last June to overturn Roe v Wade, allowing states to regulate abortion.Although more than a dozen Republican-led states moved quickly to ban or severely restrict abortions​, with scores of new limits pending before state legislatures this session, Democratic-led states have pushed in the opposite direction. Yet if the Texas ruling stands, experts say it would upend access nationwide, limiting the drug even in states where abortion is legal.Abortion opponents in blue states denounced the efforts by Democratic governors to preserve access to medication abortion.“It is appalling that Gavin Newsom is so obsessed with ending the lives of children in the womb that he is attempting to stockpile dangerous and potentially illegal drugs,” California Family Council president Jonathan Keller wrote on Twitter. “California again proves the only ‘choice’ they care about is abortion.”Newsom said the judge’s ruling “ignores facts, science and the law” in a way that puts “the health of millions of women and girls at risk”.“Abortion is still legal and accessible here in California and we won’t stand by as fundamental freedoms are stripped away,” he said.Other supporters of abortion rights similarly denounced the conservative judge’s decision on abortion as “unprincipled” and out of step with the American public. In states where the issue has been put on the ballot, from right-leaning Kansas to battleground Michigan and liberal Vermont, voters have opted to preserve or expand access.“I’ve fought like hell to protect abortion access and I’m not backing down,” Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said on Friday. “I will keep taking steps to expand access to reproductive healthcare and fight against anyone threatening our rights.”Whitmer recently signed legislation repealing the state’s nearly century-old abortion ban, after Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in November to enshrine abortion protections into the state constitution.Democrats and reproductive rights advocates believe the issue will continue to motivate voters in the coming election cycles after lifting them to victories across the country in the 2022 midterms. Last week’s election of a liberal judge to serve on the Wisconsin supreme court brought fresh evidence of the enduring potency of abortion politics.“This decision will only enrage Americans further and move them to more action,” Mini Timmaraju, president of the Naral Pro-Choice America advocacy group, said on a call with reporters on Monday. “Our eyes are on 2023 and 2024 – 2022 was just the beginning.” More

The city of Nashville’s governing council on Monday afternoon voted unanimously to return expelled Black lawmaker Justin Jones to the Tennessee state legislature.The body’s Republican majority state lawmakers had expelled Jones and fellow house member Justin Pearson late last week because they led protests in the chamber demanding gun control after yet another mass shooting in an American school, this one at an elementary school in the city days before.Moments later, Jones marched to the Capitol several blocks away. He took the oath of office on the steps and entered the building while supporters sang This Little Light of Mine.A loud round of applause erupted as Jones walked into the chamber with Democratic representative Gloria Johnson, who was also targeted for expulsion, but spared by one vote.“To the people of Tennessee, I stand with you,” Jones said in his first statement on the house floor. “We will continue to be your voice here. And no expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us, but it will only galvanize and strengthen our movement. And we will continue to show up in the people’s house.“Power to the people,” he shouted, to cheers.The other lawmaker, Justin Pearson, could be reappointed Wednesday at a meeting of the Shelby county commission.There was uproar last week and the act was condemned by many as an extraordinary act of political retaliation. Thousands of protesters flocked to the Tennessee state capitol to support the three Democratic members and their expulsion was slammed as racist. Joe Biden had called the move “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent” in a statement.And US vice-president Kamala Harris rushed to Nashville on Friday evening and praised the lawmakers, whom she said “chose to show courage in the face of extreme tragedy”.Jones’ appointment is on an interim basis. Special elections for the seats will take place in the coming months. Jones and Pearson have said they plan to run in the special election.Before the special council session was to begin, a couple of hundred people gathered in front of the Nashville courthouse, and more were pouring in. Some held signs reading, “No Justin, No Peace.” Inside the courthouse, a line of people waited outside the council chambers for the doors to open.Rosalyn Daniel arrived early and waited in line to get a seat in the council chambers. She said she is not in Jones’ district but is a Nashville resident and concerned citizen.“I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights movement, so I understand why this is so important,” she said.Republican house speaker Cameron Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner, indicated that whoever is appointed to the vacancies by the Nashville and Shelby county governments “will be seated as representatives as the constitution requires”.House majority leader William Lamberth and Republican Caucus chairman Jeremy Faison said they will welcome back the expelled lawmakers if they are reinstated.“Tennessee’s constitution provides a pathway back for expulsion,” they said in a statement. “Should any expelled member be reappointed, we will welcome them. Like everyone else, they are expected to follow the rules of the house as well as state law.”“The world is watching Tennessee,” attorneys for Jones and Pearson wrote to Sexton in a letter Monday. “Any partisan retributive action, such as the discriminatory treatment of elected officials, or threats or actions to withhold funding for government programs, would constitute further unconstitutional action that would require redress.”Johnson, the third Democrat targeted for expulsion, also attracted national attention.She had suggested race was likely a factor in why Jones and Pearson were ousted but not her. Johnson told reporters it “might have to do with the color of our skin”.GOP leaders have said the expulsions – a mechanism used only a handful times since the civil war – had nothing to do with race and instead were necessary to avoid setting a precedent that lawmakers’ disruptions of house proceedings through protest would be tolerated. More

The US Senate judiciary committee’s Democratic members on Monday unanimously urged the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, to investigate luxury trips taken by associate justice Clarence Thomas that were paid for by a hugely wealthy Republican party donor.The senators deemed the justice’s conduct inconsistent with ethical standards for “any person in a position of public trust”, they said.The committee will hold a hearing in the coming days on the matter, chairman Richard Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, and the panel’s 10 other Democratic members wrote in a letter to Roberts.The hearing, they said, would focus on “the need to restore confidence in the supreme court’s ethical standards”.“And if the court does not resolve this issue on its own, the committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” they told Roberts. “But you do not need to wait for Congress to act to undertake your own investigation into the reported conduct and to ensure that it cannot happen again. We urge you to do so.”ProPublica reported last Thursday that Thomas accepted expensive trips from Republican donor and real estate magnate Harlan Crow over decades without disclosing them.Thomas defended the trips on Friday, saying he had been advised he was not required to report that type of “personal hospitality”. But the conservative justice said he would abide by new, tighter rules that recently took effect.Crow told ProPublica he had “never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue”.The senators in the letter told Roberts: “You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again.”The report by ProPublica found that Thomas had repeatedly vacationed with Crow, including on his private jet and superyacht in the US and around the globe. The news outlet said the frequency of the gifts has “no known precedent in the modern history of the US supreme court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The report describes conduct by a sitting justice that he did not disclose to the public and that is plainly inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any person in a position of public trust,” the senators wrote.Democratic US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday she wants Thomas impeached over his trips.“It is the House’s responsibility to pursue that investigation in the form of impeachment,” she told CNN in an interview.Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged, however, it was unlikely the Republican majority in the House of Representatives would want to take action against the conservative justice. More

The US government on Monday appealed a Texas judge’s decision to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of a key abortion drug, saying the ruling endangered women’s health by blocking access to a pill long deemed safe.In a filing with the 5th US circuit court of appeals, the Department of Justice (DoJ) called judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision on the drug mifepristone “especially unwarranted” because it would undermine the FDA’s scientific judgment and harm women for whom the drug is medically necessary.The DoJ also said the anti-abortion groups that sought to overturn the FDA’s approval had no right to sue in the first place, saying they could not show they were harmed and had left the approval unchallenged for years.Kacsmaryk’s decision “upended decades of reliance by blocking FDA’s approval of mifepristone and depriving patients of access to this safe and effective treatment, based on the court’s own misguided assessment of the drug’s safety,” the department said.Lawyers for the anti-abortion groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kacsmaryk, a district judge appointed by former Republican president Donald Trump, had ruled on Friday that the FDA exceeded its authority by ignoring mifepristone’s risks and relying on “plainly unsound reasoning” when approving it.The judge, who works in Amarillo, Texas, stayed his ruling for seven days to allow the Biden administration time to appeal.In Monday’s filing, the justice department asked that Kacsmaryk’s stay remain in place until all appeals, including if necessary to the US supreme court, are resolved.Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen, also including misoprostol, for medication abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The drugs account for more than half of all US abortions.Kacsmaryk ruled just 18 minutes before a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory ruling that directed the FDA to keep the drug available in 17 states.In a Monday filing in that case, the justice department asked the judge there to clarify what should happen if Kacsmaryk’s order took effect.The conflicting rulings could foreshadow a resolution by the supreme court, which last June overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, eliminating a constitutional right to abortion.The supreme court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The New Orleans-based fifth circuit also has a conservative reputation, with three-quarters of its active judges appointed by Republican presidents.“This administration stands by the FDA and is prepared for this legal fight, and we will continue our work to protect reproductive rights,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said.Monday’s appeal came in a case brought by anti-abortion groups led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which was formed last August.They accused the FDA of failing to consider during its approval process for mifepristone the drug’s safety when used by girls under age 18.The plaintiffs sought a sympathetic court by suing in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk is the only federal district judge.Kacsmaryk had written critically about Roe v Wade, and the former Christian legal activist’s courtroom is a popular destination for conservatives challenging Biden policies.Twelve US states ban abortion, while 14 others ban it at some point after six to 22 weeks of pregnancy, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. More

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Joe Biden has given his strongest hint yet that he intends to run for re-election in 2024, but said he is “not prepared to announce it yet”.The president has previously indicated that he intends to stand again despite a low approval rating in opinion polls and voter concerns over his age. At 80, he is the oldest president in American history.But the timing of an official announcement remains uncertain, forcing his Democratic party and potential campaign staff to put their plans on hold.Biden inched closer on Monday during a lighthearted interview to Al Roker on the NBC News network’s Today show ahead of the White House easter egg roll, an annual tradition hosted by the president and first lady.Biden said: “I plan on at least three or four more Easter egg rolls. Maybe five. Maybe six, what the hell? I don’t know.”Roker asked: “Are you saying that you would be taking part in our upcoming election in 2024? Help a brother out, make some news for me.”The president said: “I plan on running, Al, but we’re not prepared to announce it yet.”Biden would be 86 at the end of a second four-year term, but many in Washington regard a re-election bid as all but inevitable. He coveted the White House for all of his career, running failed campaigns in 1988 and 2008, then serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president for eight years before finally securing the prize in 2020.His supporters argue that he had an extraordinary successful first two years in office, passing at least four major pieces of legislation despite narrow majorities in Congress.He does not yet face a serious challenger on the Democratic side. The self-help author Marianne Williamson has formally announced an intent to run for the party’s nomination, and so has anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of former US attorney general Bobby and nephew of President John F Kennedy.Another potential argument in Biden’s favour is that former president Donald Trump remains the front runner for the Republican nomination. Having beaten him by 7 million votes in 2020, Biden can make the case he is best placed to do it again.In December, Ron Klain, the then White House chief of staff, said he expects Biden to announce a 2024 bid following the Christmas break after talking to his family. In February, during a trip to Kenya, first lady Jill Biden told the Associated Press that there’s “pretty much” nothing left to do but figure out the time and place for the announcement.Biden’s aides have said a formal announcement could come this month, after the first fundraising quarter ends. That is around the time that Barack Obama officially launched his 2012 re-election campaign.The White House easter egg roll involves people rolling brightly dyed hard-boiled eggs on the White House lawn with spoons. Biden told families gathered on the south lawn: “Anything’s possible in America if we remember who we are.”On the Republican side, Trump’s former secretary of state Nikki Haley and ex-governor Asa Hutchinson have also declared themselves as candidates for 2024. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is also widely expected to join that field at some point. More

The Iowa attorney general’s office has paused its practice of paying for emergency contraception – and in rare cases, abortions – for victims of sexual assault, a move that has drawn criticism from some victim advocates.Federal regulations and state law require Iowa to pay many of the expenses for sexual assault victims who seek medical help, such as the costs of forensic exams and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. Under the previous attorney general, Democrat Tom Miller, Iowa’s victim compensation fund also paid for Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill, as well as other treatments to prevent pregnancy.A spokesperson for the Republican attorney general, Brenna Bird, who defeated Miller’s bid for an 11th term in November, told the Des Moines Register that those payments were now on hold as part of a review of victim services.“As a part of her top-down, bottom-up audit of victim assistance, attorney general Bird is carefully evaluating whether this is an appropriate use of public funds,” the spokesperson, Alyssa Brouillet, said in a statement. “Until that review is complete, payment of these pending claims will be delayed.”Victim advocates were caught off guard by the pause. The chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood North Central States, Ruth Richardson, said in a statement that the move was “deplorable and reprehensible”.Bird’s decision comes as access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US plunged into uncertainty after conflicting court rulings on Friday over the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone. For now, the drug the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000 appeared to remain at least immediately available in the wake of separate rulings issued in quick succession.Federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, a Donald Trump White House appointee, ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone. But that decision came at nearly the same time that federal judge Thomas Rice in Washington state, a Barack Obama White House appointee essentially ordered the opposite.The extraordinary timing of the competing orders revealed the high stakes surrounding the drug nearly a year after the US supreme court overturned the federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade. Joe Biden said his White House administration would fight the Texas ruling.In Iowa, money for the victim compensation fund comes from fines and penalties paid by convicted criminals. For sexual assault victims, state law requires that the fund pay “the cost of a medical examination of a victim for the purpose of gathering evidence and the cost of treatment of a victim for the purpose of preventing venereal disease”. But it makes no mention of contraception or pregnancy risk.Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, who served as director of the victim assistance division under Miller, said the longtime policy for Iowa has been to include the cost of emergency contraception in the expenses covered by the fund. She said that in rare cases, the fund paid for abortions for rape victims.“My concern is for the victims of sexual assault, who, with no real notice, are now finding themselves either unable to access needed treatment and services, or are now being forced to pay out of their own pocket for those services, when this was done at no fault of their own,” she said. More

This past week, a Republican supermajority voted to expel two young African American men from the Tennessee legislature; a third Democrat – who happens to be white and female – only narrowly escaped this punishment. The charge? The lawmakers, who are now being called “the Tennessee Three”, had participated in a protest against the GOP’s cynical inaction after the elementary school shooting in Nashville on 27 March.According to Republicans, using bullhorns breached the “decorum” of the legislature. This de facto disfranchisement demonstrates yet again that the problem with the GOP is not one lone demagogue (who may or may not be consumed by lawsuits), but a commitment by plenty of its members to authoritarianism at federal, state and local levels.What’s more, Republicans, in a typical form of projection, now present themselves as defenders of democracy, and Democrats as a source of “disorder” and “dishonor” for sacred political institutions. They even draw a parallel between peaceful protest and the January 6 insurrection. We must not fall for this false equivalence; and we must remember that even measures beyond ordinary protest – namely civil, which is to say peaceful, disobedience – can be legitimate if they serve democratic ends.US states have long functioned as laboratories for autocratic measures, be it vote suppression or gerrymandering. Ron DeSantis and other pioneers of what scholars call autocratic legalism are experimenting in state assemblies to see how they can entirely disempower their opponents through measures that violate the spirit of democracy, but are passed in procedurally correct ways.This happens even in situations where Republicans already have supermajorities and Democrats appear to be condemned to griping from the sidelines. In Oklahoma, a Black, Muslim and non-binary representative, Mauree Turner, was censured and relieved of committee assignments by the GOP-controlled legislature after a transgender activist found refuge in their office. Such measures obviously have a chilling effect; they also send a not-too-subtle signal of what kind of minorities Republicans deem dangerous.Of course, as we have learned the hard way in recent years, knowing how to lose matters greatly in a democracy. Rightwing politicians will charge that protesters against outcomes they don’t like are simply sore losers who throw “temper tantrums”, as the Tennessee GOP sponsor of the expulsion measures put it; maybe not insurrectionists, but, ultimately, in the same category as the January 6 rioters. The right thus turns the charge habitually levelled against Trump and his autocratizer allies around: it is the “woke mob” that is breaking both formal and informal norms on which democracy ultimately depends.This is the politics of false equivalence. For one thing, losers in a democracy do of course remain free to criticize the outcome; all the losers are asked to do is put up with the results, not to shut up about the results. And, at the risk of stating the obvious: a noisy protest is not the same as trying to hang the vice-president and kill the speaker of the House. In situations, however, where results evidently do not reflect what majorities actually want, it is also perfectly legitimate to dramatize this fact in a peaceful manner. After all, the reason why the US remains a country where civilians can brandish assault rifles is not due to some age-old American tradition, nor to the second amendment (which – do we really need a reminder? – regulates militias and does not license individuals to acquire technology made for mass shootings). Rather, it is the multiple veto points that allow well-resourced minorities to block legislation which, in less dysfunctional democracies, would long have long been pushed through. It is not protesters who cause “disorder” and “dishonor” here; it is the cynical defenders of a long-discredited status quo.In the face of such a tyranny of the minority, what some legal scholars call a distinctly democratic form of disobedience – which is to say, peaceful and primarily symbolic, lawbreaking – can be justified. The idea is different from the kind of peaceful law-breaking associated with the civil rights movement; the latter was alerting majorities to a fundamental injustice which absolutely had to be rectified. Democratic disobedience, by contrast, gives leeway for people to decide what they consider legitimate outcomes – but it has to be genuine majorities who make the call, as opposed to special interest groups, or, for that matter, justices apparently beholden to such groups.Democracy is not about decorum or, as the communitarian kitsch endlessly repeated in our age has it, “civility”. Its purpose is to help us deal with disagreements and divisions; the latter will not magically heal if we just keep our voices down or refrain from grabbing bullhorns. Those targeted by the radical right now dominant in many GOP-controlled state legislatures have every reason to make what John Lewis famously called “good trouble, necessary trouble”. More