US Politics

A county court in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Sept. 6, 2022, became the first in more than 150 years to disqualify a person from public office because they participated in an insurrection.

District Court Judge Francis Mathew found that Couy Griffin, a former county commissioner and founder of the group Cowboys for Trump, had participated in the violent U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. Mathew invoked a nearly forgotten part of the 14th Amendment, called Section 3, which can disqualify certain people from state or federal office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to the United States’ enemies.

The clause was first adopted after the Civil War to keep former Confederates from participating in politics. The amendment says that disqualified people are barred for life from either running for or being appointed to office. But Congress can vote by a two-thirds majority to waive this ban.

The clause fell into general disuse after 1872, when Congress gave amnesty to most former Confederates in a move toward reconciliation.

Some observers have argued that Section 3 disqualification should be dusted off to address the Jan. 6 mob and to stop other people who have threatened and committed violence – or tried to disrupt federal elections – from serving in government.

Mathew’s decision has also renewed talk among Democrats and good-governance groups about finding a way to use Section 3 against former President Donald Trump in order to disqualify him from ever holding office again.

We are scholars of comparative constitutional law who have worked on democratic backsliding around the world. In a forthcoming article, we point out that disqualification is potentially a useful tool to protect democracy, but it can also be dangerous – it rubs up against the basic idea of democracy as a system in which anyone can run, and voters can decide.

The disqualification of Couy Griffin is one of the latest efforts – but the only successful one – to remove people from office or prevent them from running because of their support for the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images

Recent attempts at disqualification

The disqualification of Griffin is one of several efforts voters and advocacy groups have lobbied for after Jan. 6. Most of these efforts have failed to remove someone from office or prevent them from running. But the examples are still useful in understanding how disqualification might be an alternative to more punitive criminal law options.

A suit filed by a group of voters to disqualify Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, foundered in July when a Georgia court affirmed a lower court ruling that she had not “engaged in insurrection.”

Arizona and Wisconsin state judges have also rejected efforts to use Section 3 as a sword against those who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. But none of these targets actually participated in the mob at the Capitol. Mere support of the rioters, or questioning the election outcome, is protected political speech under the First Amendment.

Griffin, though, engaged in a physical invasion of the Capitol.

Mathew’s careful opinion contains extensive factual findings and legal analysis. So it tees up nicely the question of whether and how disqualification from democratic office is legitimate, justified or effective in defense of democracy.

This is especially important in the U.S., where there is a lack of recent historical experience with disqualification of people working in politics.

When disqualification makes sense

Other countries make much more extensive use of political disqualification than the U.S. does, as we show in our forthcoming study.

Israel’s courts, for example, have repeatedly disqualified candidates for lack of “good character.” In Pakistan, the supreme court disqualified sitting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2017 after he was named in the Panama Papers because of corruption.

There are various costs and benefits to disqualifying someone from office, and there are also open questions of how to correctly interpret Section 3. We focus on the first question of costs and benefits here.

Democracies require robust protections for free speech and association. But these freedoms can be abused by those seeking to undermine democracy itself.

For example, Mathew documents Griffin’s persistent efforts to cast doubt on the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election and to instigate violence to derail President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Most of Griffin’s actions, however, fell far short of the threshold necessary to justify criminal penalties for incitement – the First Amendment requires that the violence be imminent.

Griffin, nonetheless, participated in a concerted threat to American democracy. Disqualification is a way to address such threats without the heavy hand of the criminal law.

Section 3, more generally, is another way to address high-level misconduct in politics. As we have explored in another study published in 2021, Congress has rarely impeached a U.S. president – and an impeached president has never actually been removed from office. Given partisan dynamics, it is unclear if impeachment could actually remove and disqualify a sitting president.

This might leave Section 3 as the best alternative.

The risks of disqualification

Mathew’s opinion suggests that Section 3’s “aid and comfort” language can go uncomfortably far. It could potentially chill legitimate political speech – including criticism of the government, or support for a foreign power – that doesn’t threaten democracy.

For example, plaintiffs justified the need to disqualify Griffin by saying that he committed “actions that normalized and incited violence” by “dehumanizing the opposition as ‘wicked’ and ‘vile.’”

Dehumanizing speech about political opponents is indeed often unhealthy for democratic practice, but it has become routine in politics.

Another challenge is that the text for Section 3 is not entirely clear about how disqualification actually works. Does it apply automatically to anyone who engages in insurrection? Or does it require some sort of either judicial or legislative process?

There is no settled answer.

In an 1869 decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase suggested that Section 3 did not apply automatically – rather, disqualification occurred when Congress, or perhaps a state legislature, authorized it.

Mathew rejected the position that only Congress could make the determination and instead held that Griffin could be disqualified by order of a state court.

The potential breadth and ambiguity of Section 3 creates a risk that the measure could be repurposed, against its original aims, in a way that hurts democracy.

While a few presidents have been impeached, including Donald Trump twice, they were not removed from office.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The bigger picture

Disqualification, then, is a superficial remedy to a profound problem. It might be effective against a low-level official like Griffin, but the bigger the target, the less power everyday voters have.

Imagine that some court was persuaded to disqualify Trump from a state’s 2024 presidential ballot. Such a move could be considered to disenfranchise his supporters. This could play into Trump’s beliefs that the “game is rigged.”

Whatever the correct legal answer, there is a strong case for eliminating the uncertainty around how Section 3 works. We’ve argued for a carefully crafted federal statute that clearly explains when it applies and how it works.

If disqualification is to become an effective sword to defend democratic politics, it must not become a two-edged one that later weakens the democratic process in the U.S. More

Want to see political change? Look to the marginsRebecca SolnitChange begins in the shadows, not the limelight. Once you see that you see how powerful we can be These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.Nevertheless as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted.‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violinRead moreOne of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt – housing, medical and educational – and began to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system.In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date”. Activists made student debt a public issue and then part of the Biden campaign’s platform and that ultimately led to last month’s debt-relief measures.The year the Debt Collective started its campaign, the supreme court recognized marriage equality as a constitutional right. The mayfly version would have seen that right as likewise handed down from above by the US supreme court, rather than built from below. But the court merely gave legal force to long-term campaigns that encouraged and built on broader shifts in acceptance and support of queer rights and inclusion. To see those shifts, you also have to remember what things were like beforehand.Early in this country’s history, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the war of independence from the British throne was not the revolution; “the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It’s an assertion that the crucial change came through culture, through beliefs and values, that the most important territory to take is in the imagination.Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible, but most important, part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets.One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted. The other day the Salt Lake City Tribune editors called for draining Lake Powell, the now failing reservoir created 60 years ago by Glen Canyon Dam, to make its beautiful canyonlands into a new national park. That was considered an outrageous idea 20 years ago. The city of Oakland just announced plans to return five acres of open space to its original Ohlone owners, an act modest in scale but huge as a sign of how Native American land rights have gained recognition. Barack Obama himself tweeted in support of the student debt relief he did not support as president.If people are shortsighted about the past, so they are about the future – a lot of complaining about the incompleteness of the student loan reform and cancellation was met with the Debt Collective’s vow that they were far from done.That nearly all change is incremental and even a comprehensive victory usually has intermediary steps preceding it is one of the things that disappears in the short view. Imperfect and frustrating though those steps may be, they can still lead us to our destination. We can’t reach the summit without climbing the mountain.Perhaps some of this is built into the news system, which tends to report on events as sudden ruptures rather than the consequence of long-term forces. More of it may come from the attachment to the idea of revolution, of everything changing overnight, though it’s no longer sensible, if it ever was, to believe regime change can change everything – and the long revolutions around gender, nature, race and the rest in our time have been incremental and largely cultural in means even as they produce concrete ends as changed laws, policies and finance.Perhaps the problem is embedded in the very word news, as in new. In the sense that everything has a history, nothing is entirely new. (Even mayflies can live for a year or two as underwater larvae before they emerge into the air for their few days of winged life.) I have been a witness and sometimes a participant to change and I’ve seen so many versions of people fail to see change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying because of this lack of perspective.So far as I can tell, the mayfly view is of a perpetual present in which the order of things is largely immutable. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.The examples are everywhere. In 2020, after 31 years of organizing, the coalition of ranchers, Native Nevadans and other rural people who came together as Great Basin Water Network finally defeated Las Vegas’s attempt to extract the water from one of the driest places on the continent. The plan would have taken 58bn gallons of water annually from eastern Nevada, devastating wildlife and rural communities. As Eric Siegel’s report in High Country News put summarized it, “the Vegas Pipeline, had it succeeded, threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.”Siegel quoted the Ely Shoshone tribal elder Delaine Spilsbury, who declared: “Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling that I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.”It didn’t take forever but it took decades. For much of that time it would have been easy to look at the struggle and conclude that it was doomed or losing because it hadn’t won. You could say the same of many other campaigns, including the student-led movement to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, which took 10 years to reach victory in 2021. As my friend Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective remarked to me when I congratulated her, “We’re all losers until we win.”Another of my friends, Joe Lamb, is a poet and arborist who sports a T-shirt that says: “70 is young for a tree.” In a recent essay about the epic tree-planting program that was part of the New Deal’s effort to stop the erosion that produced the Dust Bowl, he wrote, “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of our past.” It was a gorgeous revision of the old “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”There are past victories you want to repeat, or build on, or learn from. Which is why understanding how they unfold is so essential, recognizing that an oak was once an acorn and then a spindly sapling, remembering this law was once a radical idea and then a campaign. That means seeing the world like a tortoise, not a mayfly.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantledThe commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamed An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.West Point’s Ku Klux Klan plaque should be removed, commission saysRead moreRetired Army Brig Gen Ty Seidule, vice-chair of the commission, said the final cost for all of its renaming recommendations will be $62.5m. The total for the latest changes announced Tuesday is $41m, and is included in that amount.The latest group of assets includes everything from the Arlington memorial, two Navy ships and some Army vessels to street signs, water towers, athletic fields, hospital doors and even decals on recycling bins, according to the panel.The bulk of the remaining costs – or $21m – would cover the renaming of nine Army bases, and about $450,000 for recommended new names at the US Military at West Point in New York.Seidule said the panel determined that the memorial at Arlington was “problematic from top to bottom”. He said the panel recommended that it be entirely removed, with only the granite base remaining.The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American south. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”The pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the 13 Confederate states and Maryland, which didn’t secede or join the Confederacy. Some of the figures also on the statue include a slave woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.And the Latin inscription translates to: “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato,” and was meant to equate the south’s secession to a noble “lost cause.”Seidule said the panel decided early on to propose new names only for the nine Army bases. It said that the Navy secretary has the authority to rename the two ships, which are the USS Chancellorsville and USNS Maury. The Chancellorsville was named for the civil war battle and the Maury was named after a Confederate soldier.He said the service secretaries can find new names for the handful of Army ships and the Air Force’s Fort Fisher Recreation Area in North Carolina. The panel recommended that the defense secretary rename Fort Belvoir, Virginia.The panel’s most sweeping recommendations were released in May, and laying out new names for nine US Army bases that commemorated Confederate officers: Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort AP Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama.The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.For years, USmilitary officials had defended the naming of bases after Confederate officers. As recently as 2015 the Army argued that the names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the south.But in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, and the months of racial unrest that followed, the Pentagon and Congress pushed for a comprehensive plan to rename the military posts and hundreds of other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.The secretary of defense is expected to implement the commission’s plan no later than 1 January 2024.The panel also is recommending that the department set up a process to try and save money and efficiently change the names. And it said the secretary of defense should authorize the military service secretaries and other leaders to remove smaller items – such as portraits, plaques and awards – that honor the Confederacy or those who served in it.Created in 2020, the Naming Commission first met in March 2021 and began taking name recommendations from the public in September. Overall, the commission received more than 34,000 potential names for the nine Army bases.Seidule said that some of the names that were not used can be used by the service secretaries as they determine new names for roads and other base locations and assets.TopicsVirginiaUS CongressRaceUS politicsArlingtonnewsReuse this content More

Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998 Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.A Reagan judicial appointee and US solicitor general under George HW Bush, Starr presented many arguments before the US supreme court.Starr also served as independent counsel, president and chancellor of Baylor University and dean of the Pepperdine School of Law, the family statement said, and described their loved one as having had “a distinguished career in academia, the law and public service.”He was later stripped of that university chancellorship, however, after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.In January 2020, Starr served as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team in the then president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.Starr came to national prominence as the special prosecutor who investigated the sex-and-perjury scandal that led to only the second impeachment of a president in US history, against the at-the-time hugely popular Democratic president.The investigation into Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky when she was a White House intern produced a book-length official document for the US Congress that became a bestseller when commercially sold as The Starr Report.Offering startling and lurid glimpses of sexual trysts intermingled with the densest legalese, the report found Clinton’s attempt to cover up the affair offered grounds for impeachment.The impeachment charges stemmed from Clinton’s false denial of the relationship in his 1998 grand jury testimony and in a deposition in a sexual harassment case filed against him by Paula Jones of Arkansas, where Clinton had been governor.On December 19, 1998, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton, following which a subsequent Senate trial failed to remove him from office.Starr is survived by his wife Alice Starr, to whom he was married for 52 years, his three children and nine grandchildren, the family statement added. Starr will be buried at the Texas state cemetery in Austin.Kentucky Republican and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement saying: “I am very sorry to learn of the passing of my friend Judge Ken Starr. He was a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.”Republican congressman Pete Sessions, representing Starr’s native Texas, tweeted that he was saddened, and called Starr “a great man”.Last year it was reported that Starr had waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the late sex offender and billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a book by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown who uncovered how the law had gone soft on Epstein, before his arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Republican Lindsey Graham proposes nationwide 15-week abortion banWhite House says South Carolina senator’s proposed bill ‘wildly out of step with what Americans believe’ Senator Lindsey Graham proposed legislation on Tuesday for a nationwide 15-week abortion ban, a politically risky strategy as a backlash grows to the US supreme court ruling earlier this summer overturning federal protections for the procedure.Polling shows that 57% of Americans disapproved of the court’s June reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling guaranteeing access to abortion, and 62% say the procedure should be legal in all or most cases.Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76Read moreThe proposal by Graham, a hardline South Carolina Republican, will be called the “Protecting Pain-capable Unborn Children from Late-term Abortions Act”. It stands almost no chance of becoming law, but is seen by analysts as an attempt to frame the discussion around abortion, with fewer than 60 days until the midterms.The White House and top Democrats promptly decried Graham’s efforts.“Today, Senator Graham introduced a national ban on abortion which would strip away women’s rights in all 50 states. This bill is wildly out of step with what Americans believe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.She added: “While President Biden and Vice-President Harris are focused on the historic passage of the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, health care, and energy – and to take unprecedented action to address climate change – Republicans in Congress are focused on taking rights away from millions of women.”She said the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress “are committed to restoring the protections of Roe v Wade.”Republicans in states including South Carolina have seen recent efforts to introduce abortion bans falter, and Democrats are certain to use Graham’s push to fire up their base and repeat earlier warnings that their opponents’ agenda has always been the pursuit of outlawing abortion nationally.Previous versions of Graham’s bill have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, but at a press conference on Tuesday he was unveiling a proposed ban that takes effect after 15 weeks, an attempt to align federal law with Florida.Graham’s earlier proposals contained exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother, which the Florida law does not.Nancy Pelosi added to her party’s protests, calling Graham’s proposal “the latest, clearest signal of extreme Maga Republicans’ intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care.”Joe Biden has recently toughened his language, as the midterm elections approach and Republicans put forward many rightwing candidates, decrying so-called Maga Republicansas semi-fascist and “Trumpies.”Pelosi added: “Make no mistake: if Republicans get the chance, they will work to pass laws even more draconian than this bill – just like the bans they have enacted in states like Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.”Even if Republicans seize control of the Senate chamber in November, Graham’s bill is unlikely to pass because the current Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has indicated he would be unwilling to lift the filibuster – a procedure that requires a bill to win the support of 60 senators – for the abortion issue.McConnell, and Republicans generally, have taken note of developments since the fall of Roe v Wade. While nine Republican-controlled states moved quickly to enact abortion bans, others have witnessed a significant backlash.In Kansas, a staunchly conservative state, voters last month rejected abortion restrictions by a large margin, and pro-choice advocates recorded a notable victory earlier this month when the Michigan supreme court ruled 5-2 that the fate of an abortion ban would be in the hands of the midterms electorate rather than the state legislature.Democratic candidates have seized on the apparent momentum. In Pennsylvania, Senate hopeful John Fetterman told a weekend rally that abortion rights were at the top of his agenda. “Women are the reason we can win. Don’t piss off women,” he said.According to research by TargetSmart, a polling analysis company, Pennsylvania ranks fifth in states showing large gaps in registration numbers between men and women since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.Increasing numbers of Republican candidates running for election in November’s midterms, meanwhile, have been softening their messaging over abortion in an attempt to shore up votes, though GOP lawmakers have no plans to soften anti-abortion policy.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America group that is promoting Graham’s legislation, said in a statement that “radical Democrats [are] pushing an extreme agenda of abortion on demand until birth, paid for by the taxpayer, leaving countless unborn babies and mothers unprotected from the violence of abortion.”She called on Congress to “find consensus on a minimum federal standard that reflects the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans”, citing a Harvard Harris poll from June that suggested 79% of Americans wanted abortions limited to 15 weeks.The same poll, however, also found that 55% opposed the overturning of Roe v Wade.TopicsUS politicsAbortionRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Top Democrats have decried a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks proposed today by Republican senator Lindsey Graham.“Today, Senator Graham introduced a national ban on abortion which would strip away women’s rights in all 50 states. This bill is wildly out of step with what Americans believe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.“While President Biden and Vice President Harris are focused on the historic passage of the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, health care, and energy – and to take unprecedented action to address climate change – Republicans in Congress are focused on taking rights away from millions of women,” Jean-Pierre continued, adding that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress “are committed to restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade.”Democratic house speaker Nancy Pelosi joined in, saying, “The nationwide abortion ban proposal put forth today is the latest, clearest signal of extreme MAGA Republicans’ intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care. Make no mistake: if Republicans get the chance, they will work to pass laws even more draconian than this bill – just like the bans they have enacted in states like Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.”Republican senator Lindsey Graham caused quite the stir by proposing a nationwide ban on abortions past the 15-week mark, which even many fellow GOP lawmakers don’t support, at least not right now. The legislation could mark the start of a campaign to seek federal restrictions on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June. Meanwhile, new inflation data showed prices continuing to rise – albeit at a slower rate – across the economy, dampening hopes that the wave of cost increases had faded for good.Here’s what else happened today so far:
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was among those downplaying Graham’s proposal, but the Kentucky lawmakers has previously said the chamber could consider a federal ban on abortion if the GOP wins a majority.
Criminal referrals from the January 6 committee to the justice department are “likely”, a lawmaker on the panel said. More public hearings by the committee are also expected to be announced soon.
Democrat and Republican lawmakers love trading stocks, according to an analysis from The New York Times that will likely add pressure on party leaders to ban congress members from owning or trading securities.
A jury in Connecticut is considering how much to order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for spreading lies that the killings were a hoax.
Lindsey Graham’s proposal to outlaw abortion after 15 weeks isn’t just unpopular with many of his fellow Senate Republicans – it would also appear to be unpopular with the Lindsey Graham of just a month ago, who said the question of abortion access should be left up to the states.Here’s a reminder from The Recount of what Graham had to say about the issue just this past August:Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in August: States should regulate abortion.Sen. Lindsey Graham in September: The federal government should regulate abortion. pic.twitter.com/VvMDZd9fsp— The Recount (@therecount) September 13, 2022
The discomfort over the Republican abortion ban proposal extends beyond the Senate to the campaign trail, where several of the party’s nominees to the chamber are trying to distance themselves from it.Tiffany Smiley, the GOP Senate nominee in Washington state, says she wouldn’t get behind such a bill, Politico reports:A spokesperson for WA GOP nominee Tiffany Smiley also said she doesn’t support the Graham bill and that it should be left up to the states to decide their abortion laws— Marianne LeVine (@marianne_levine) September 13, 2022
Joe O’Dea, a Republican vying for Colorado’s Senate seat, also opposed it, according to Politico. However Herschel Walker, who’s in a tight race for the senate seat occupied by Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock, appeared to support it:Herschel Walker: “I believe the issue should be decided at the state level, but I WOULD support this policy.”Joe O’Dea of Colorado: “I don’t support Senator Graham’s bill. A Republican ban is as reckless and tone deaf as is Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer’s hostility to” compromise— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 13, 2022
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell may have downplayed the idea of a national abortion ban today, but don’t be surprised if he one day changes his mind.Consider his comments to USA Today in May, after a draft opinion leaked showing the supreme court was poised to overturn Roe v Wade, but before they officially did so later the following month.“If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies – not only at the state level, but at the federal level – certainly could legislate in that area,” the Kentucky lawmaker said. “And if this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process. So yeah, it’s possible. It would depend on where the votes were.”That means Graham’s proposal, or one like it, could be put up for a vote if Republicans reclaim control of the Senate – which they’ll have a chance of doing in the November midterms.However, Democrats could use the filibuster to block any such legislation, and even the GOP’s most optimistic forecasts don’t have the party winning the 60 seats needed to overcome that. In the USA Today interview, McConnell also made clear he was not in favor of changing the chamber’s rules to make legislation easier to pass. “No carve out of the filibuster – period. For any subject,” he said.Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to make the most of Graham’s abortion ban proposal as they make their case to maintain control of Congress.Here’s top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer at a press conference today:Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) slams Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) proposed 15-week abortion ban:”What Senator Graham is introducing is a MAGA Republican nationwide abortion ban. If it walks like a nationwide abortion ban and talks like a nationwide abortion ban…” pic.twitter.com/CofXO5SUB4— The Recount (@therecount) September 13, 2022
So much for that. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has poured cold water on the party making any concerted effort to get a vote on Lindsey Graham’s proposed 15-week abortion ban.Here’s what CNN reports that McConnell, who would become Senate majority leader if the GOP wins a majority in the upper chamber in the midterm elections, had to say about the idea:McConnell on Graham’s bill: “you’ll have to ask him about it.” Says most Republicans want to leave it to the states— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) September 13, 2022
A more immediate obstacle for Graham is the Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, which are sure to oppose his bill.Politico has more on the cool reception Lindsey Graham’s abortion ban has received in the Senate, particularly among his fellow Republicans.“That wasn’t a conference decision. It was an individual senator’s decision,” Texas’s Republican senator John Cornyn said in the piece, echoing the sentiment of several lawmakers from Republican-dominated states that are moving to restrict abortion, but wary of pursuing such bans nationwide.“My state, today, is working on this. I’m not sure what he’s thinking here. But I don’t think there will be a rallying around that concept,” Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator from West Virginia, said.Elsewhere, Democrats have seized on the proposal to attack Republicans. The Democratic Party of Virginia put out a statement accusing Jen Kiggans, a state senator vying for a US House seat against Democratic incumbent Elaine Luria, of changing her stance on abortion rights.“The reason why Jen Kiggans is trying to walk back her stance on abortion is that she knows her extreme anti-abortion agenda is out of touch with Coastal Virginians and will cost her the election,” the Democrats wrote.The full text of the 15-week abortion ban proposed by Republican senator Lindsey Graham can be read here, and contains an important detail about exactly what would be outlawed.“The term ‘perform’, with respect to an abortion, includes inducing an abortion through a medical or chemical intervention, including writing a prescription for a drug or device intended to result in an abortion,” according to the text of the bill.That likely means it would outlaw abortion pills that are seen as one of the best options for women to receive care in states where the procedure has been outlawed or restricted.Mail-order abortion pills become next US reproductive rights battlegroundRead moreThe Republican proposal to ban abortion after 15 weeks is only hours old, but it’s already become an issue on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania.According to Insider, John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee to represent the state in the Senate, has used the proposal to attack his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz.Fetterman already using the Graham bill against Oz pic.twitter.com/gBkSslVOI4— bryan metzger (@metzgov) September 13, 2022
Republican senator Lindsey Graham has proposed legislation to ban abortions nationally after 15 weeks, in what is likely the start of a campaign to seek federal restrictions on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June. Meanwhile, new inflation data showed prices continuing to rise – albeit at a slower rate – across the economy, dampening hopes that the wave of cost increases had faded for good.Here’s what else happened today so far:
Criminal referrals from the January 6 committee to the justice department are “likely”, a lawmaker on the panel said. More public hearings by the committee are also expected to be announced soon.
Democrat and Republican lawmakers love trading stocks, according to an analysis from The New York Times that will likely add pressure on party leaders to ban congress members from owning or trading securities.
A jury in Connecticut is considering how much to order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for spreading lies that the killings were a hoax.
Further cracks have appeared in Graham’s insistence that his proposed 15-week abortion ban has wide political support.CNN reports that not all Senate Republicans are onboard with the measure:Senate GOP not on same page on Graham’s 15-week abortion. Thune supports it. Rick Scott said he’d “look at it.” Cornyn and Ron Johnson said it should be left to the states. Asked if he backs Graham bill, Johnson said it should be decided by “we the people” in the 50 states.— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 13, 2022
“I think there will be a couple of Democrats who will be with us, maybe, hope, pray,” Republican senator Lindsey Graham replied when asked about whether his proposed nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks will win enough votes to pass the closely divided Congress. “I think the public’s with us,” he added.It’s unclear whether any Democratic votes would materialize for the proposal, but that party controls the House and Senate, and it’s unlikely they’ll even let the measure come up for a vote as long as that’s the case.As for public support for Graham’s proposal, a recent poll doesn’t bear that out. Earlier this month, a poll by The Wall Street Journal found 57% of respondents opposed an abortion ban at 15 weeks with exceptions for the health of a mother – exactly the kind of measure Graham proposed.In fact, the survey found voter support for abortion increasing overall since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June. While in March, 55% of voters said the procedure should be legal in all or most cases, that had risen to 60% in the phone survey conducted in mid-August.Top Democrats have decried a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks proposed today by Republican senator Lindsey Graham.“Today, Senator Graham introduced a national ban on abortion which would strip away women’s rights in all 50 states. This bill is wildly out of step with what Americans believe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.“While President Biden and Vice President Harris are focused on the historic passage of the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, health care, and energy – and to take unprecedented action to address climate change – Republicans in Congress are focused on taking rights away from millions of women,” Jean-Pierre continued, adding that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress “are committed to restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade.”Democratic house speaker Nancy Pelosi joined in, saying, “The nationwide abortion ban proposal put forth today is the latest, clearest signal of extreme MAGA Republicans’ intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care. Make no mistake: if Republicans get the chance, they will work to pass laws even more draconian than this bill – just like the bans they have enacted in states like Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.”Senator Lindsey Graham has unveiled his proposed nationwide abortion ban, which would outlaw the procedure after 15 weeks, with certain exceptions.“I think we should have a law on the books that says after 15 weeks, no abortion on demand except in cases of rape, incest, to save the life of the mother, and that should be where America’s at,” Graham said as he unveiled the legislation in the Capitol.Graham said the proposal, dubbed the “Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act”, would match similar laws in European countries. He said the 15-week threshold is when fetuses will feel pain, however that doesn’t quite match the science. Many scientists say fetuses can’t feel pain before 24 weeks, although the subject is complicated and continuing to be researched.Graham acknowledged the political realities of his proposal. “If the Democrats are in charge, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a vote on our bill.”As The Guardian has reported previously, late-term abortions are very rare in the United States.The truth about late-term abortions in the US: they’re very rareRead moreRepublican senator Lindsey Graham will soon introduce his legislation to ban abortions nationally. While it has no chance in the Senate as long as Democrats are in control, it will likely attract considerable support from Republican lawmakers, and could mark the start of the party’s effort to restrict the procedure nationwide thanks to the supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade.The Washington Post reports that Graham has said the ban will apply after 15 weeks of pregnancy – five weeks less than in previous versions of the legislation the South Carolina lawmaker has introduced:Breaking: Graham just told Fox News that his “late-term abortion act” is indeed a 15-week ban.This is pretty extraordinary language to be using for 15 weeks. When antiabortion groups use “late term abortions” (not a medical phrase), it’s usually understood to mean 21-24 weeks +— Caroline Kitchener (@CAKitchener) September 13, 2022
You can watch the senator’s press conference here.A Connecticut jury began hearing arguments Tuesday in a trial to decide how much money conspiracy theorist and right-winger Alex Jones should pay relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy, for spreading a lie that the massacre was a hoax, The Associated Press reports.A settlement was ordered at trial against Jones last month in a civil case in Texas brought by parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting with the current case in Connecticut pending.Critics have said many things of Jones and his platform Infowars, among them the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate and extremist groups in the US, whose spokesman said in August: “He has probably done more to further the cause of hate in this country than almost anyone outside of Donald Trump himself.”The AP writes today of this trial in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from Sandy Hook:More than a dozen family members, including parents of some victims, filed into the courtroom to listen to the opening statements and first day of evidence.A jury of three men and three women along with several alternates will decide how much the conspiracy theorist should pay relatives of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school.Judge Barbara Bellis found Jones liable without a trial last year after he failed to turn over documents to the families’ lawyers.On Tuesday, she sanctioned Jones for failing to turn over analytic data related to his website and the popularity of his show.She told his lawyers that because of that failure, they will not be allowed to argue he didn’t profit from his Sandy Hook remarks.Jones did not attend the opening of the trial Tuesday.He said on his show Monday that he would be traveling to Connecticut next week.The trial is expected to last about a month and feature testimony from both Jones and the families.More of the Guardian piece that contains that SPLC quote, above, here.‘He has done more to further the cause of hate in the US than almost anyone’: the rise and fall of Alex JonesRead more More

Second Sandy Hook defamation trial for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones beginsConnecticut jury hears arguments in trial to decide how much Jones should pay victims of school shooting he said was hoax A Connecticut jury began hearing arguments Tuesday in a trial to decide how much money the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should pay relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting for spreading a lie that the massacre was a hoax.The trial is being held in Waterbury, less than 20 miles from Newtown, where a man shot 26 children and teachers dead in 2012.More than a dozen family members, including parents of some victims, filed into the courtroom to listen to the opening statements and first day of evidence.It is the second such trial in just a few weeks for Jones, who was ordered by a Texas jury last month to pay nearly $50m to the parents of one of the children who was killed.A jury of three men and three women – along with several alternates – will decide how much the conspiracy theorist should pay relatives of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school massacre. Judge Barbara Bellis found Jones liable without a trial last year after he failed to turn over documents to the families’ lawyers.Damaging Alex Jones texts mistakenly sent to Sandy Hook family’s lawyersRead moreOn Tuesday, she sanctioned Jones for failing to turn over analytic data related to his website and the popularity of his show. She told his lawyers that because of that failure, they will not be allowed to argue he didn’t profit from his Sandy Hook remarks.Jones did not attend the opening of the trial Tuesday. He said on his show Monday that he would be traveling to Connecticut next week.The trial is expected to last about a month and feature testimony from both Jones and the families.Bellis instructed the jury that Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, have already been found liable for damages to the plaintiffs for calling the shooting a hoax on multiple media platforms and saying that no one died.The Sandy Hook families and former FBI agent William Aldenberg say they have been confronted and harassed for years by people who believed Jones’s false claim that the shooting was staged by crisis actors as part of a plot to empower the government to confiscate people’s guns.Some say strangers have videotaped them and their surviving children. They have also endured death threats and been subjected to abusive comments on social media. And some families have moved out of Newtown to avoid harassment. They accuse Jones of causing them emotional and psychological harm.Jones, whose Infowars web show and brand are based in Austin, Texas, has been banned from YouTube, Facebook and Spotify for violating hate-speech policies.He now says he believes the shooting was real. At the Texas trial, he testified that he realizes what he said was irresponsible and is now sorry for hurting people’s feelings.He continues, however, to insist that his comments were protected free speech. He views the lawsuits as efforts to silence him and put him out of business.Jones’s lawyers say he intends to pursue an appeal of the judgment against him in Texas. Jones also will face a third trial back in Texas involving the parents of another slain child.TopicsUS newsUS politicsConnecticutNewtown shootingReuse this content More

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