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      Sandra Day O’Connor’s Legacy Was Undermined by Court’s Rightward Shift

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      Since her retirement in 2006, the court has dismantled her key rulings on abortion, affirmative action and campaign finance.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at 93, was the sort of figure once familiar in American political and judicial life: a moderate Republican ready to look for compromise and common ground.That led her to vote to uphold abortion rights, affirmative action and campaign finance regulations. Since she retired in 2006, replaced by the far more conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court has dismantled large parts of her legacy.That is nowhere more apparent than in abortion rights.Justice O’Connor joined the controlling opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that, to the surprise of many, reaffirmed the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.To overrule Roe “under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision,” she wrote in a joint opinion with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter, “would subvert the court’s legitimacy beyond any serious question.”Last year, the court did overrule Roe, casting aside Justice O’Connor’s concern for precedent and the court’s public standing. In his majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito wrote that Roe and Casey had “enflamed debate and deepened division.”Justice O’Connor also wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision upholding race-conscious admissions decisions at public universities, suggesting that they would not longer be needed in a quarter-century. In striking down affirmative action programs in higher education in June, the Supreme Court beat her deadline by five years.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the timetable was unrealistic and unprincipled.“The 25-year mark articulated in Grutter, however, reflected only that court’s view that race-based preferences would, by 2028, be unnecessary to ensure a requisite level of racial diversity on college campuses,” he wrote. “That expectation was oversold.”Justice O’Connor was also an author of a key campaign finance opinion, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission in 2003. A few years after Justice Alito replaced her, the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote in 2010, overruled a central portion of that decision in the Citizens United case.A few days later, at a law school conference, Justice O’Connor reflected on the development.“Gosh,” she said, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice O’Connor in 1981, making good on his campaign trail promise to name the first female Supreme Court justice. At the time she was a judge on a state appeals court, not a typical launchpad to the Supreme Court in the modern era, when it has been dominated by former federal appeals court judges.But her origin story was a reflection of her strengths, drawing on a range of experience largely missing among the current justices. Raised and educated in the West, she served in all three branches of Arizona’s government, including as a government lawyer, majority leader of the State Senate, and a trial judge.Her background informed her decisions, which were sensitive to states’ rights and often deferred to the judgments of the other branches of the federal government. Her rulings could be pragmatic and narrow, and her critics said she engaged in split-the-difference jurisprudence.But some of her commitments were unyielding, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. “As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” Justice Ginsburg, who died in 2020, told USA Today in 2009.What is beyond question is that she was exceptionally powerful. She held the crucial vote in many of the court’s most polarizing cases, and her vision shaped American life for her quarter century on the court. Political scientists stood in awe at the power she wielded.“On virtually all conceptual and empirical definitions, O’Connor is the court’s center — the median, the key, the critical and the swing justice,” Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn and Lee Epstein and two colleagues wrote in a study published in 2005 in The North Carolina Law Review shortly before Justice O’Connor’s retirement.In 2018, in a letter announcing her retreat from public life as she battled dementia, Justice O’Connor called for a renewed commitment to nonpartisan values, one that would require “putting country and the common good above party and self-interest, and holding our key governmental institutions accountable.”At the time, Chief Justice Roberts, who had joined the court just months before Justice O’Connor left it, described her place in history.“She broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole,” he wrote. “She serves as a role model not only for girls and women, but for all those committed to equal justice under law.”On Friday, the chief justice added: “We at the Supreme Court mourn the loss of a beloved colleague, a fiercely independent defender of the rule of law, and an eloquent advocate for civics education. And we celebrate her enduring legacy as a true public servant and patriot.”That legacy is striking and real. But in the less than two decades since Justice O’Connor’s retirement, a central aspect of that legacy — her jurisprudence — has proved vulnerable. More

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      Could Abortion Rights Rescue Red-State Democrats in the Senate?

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      Senator Sherrod Brown is betting that the issue will aid his re-election bid in Ohio, which recently upheld abortion rights. Allies of Senator Jon Tester of Montana are also hoping it helps.In the opening minutes of a debate during Sherrod Brown’s successful 2006 campaign for Senate, the Republican incumbent attacked him over “partial-birth abortion,” a phrase often weaponized by conservatives at the time to paint Democrats as somewhere between immoral and murderous.Mr. Brown, a Democrat from northeast Ohio in the House at the time, glanced at his notes. He opposed “late-term abortion,” he said in a measured voice. He denounced the mere idea that Congress would limit any procedure that could “save a woman’s health.”With that, he quickly pivoted. Mr. Brown used the rest of his time to burnish his political brand as a blue-collar economic populist.Nearly 18 years later, abortion will again be a central point of contention as Senator Brown fights for re-election against one of three Republicans trying to unseat him next year. One difference, other than that his shaggy dark hair is now shaded with gray, is that he is preparing to fully lean into his defense of abortion rights.“This issue’s not going away,” Mr. Brown said in an interview. “Women don’t trust Republicans on abortion, and they won’t for the foreseeable future — and they’re not going to trust these guys running against me.”Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, abortion rights has become an invaluable political asset for Democrats. They have leveraged the issue to hold onto control of the Senate, limit losses in the House and, this month, fuel victories in key state races across the Midwest and the South.But perhaps the toughest test for the issue’s power will come in Senate contests like Mr. Brown’s in Ohio and Senator Jon Tester’s in Montana. The fate of the razor-thin Democratic majority in the chamber could well be sealed in those two places, by the same voters who have installed Republicans in every other statewide office.Senator Jon Tester of Montana, like Mr. Brown, has often focused on local issues in his campaigns, rather than dominant national ones like abortion. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesSo far, voters even in conservative states have consistently prioritized abortion protections over their partisanship. That was true last year in Kansas, where 59 percent of voters rejected a measure to remove abortion rights protections from the State Constitution, and again this month in Ohio, where 57 percent of voters agreed to enshrine such rights in their Constitution.The open question is whether Mr. Brown, 71, and Mr. Tester, 67, can maintain their invaluable political personas while — for the first time in their lengthy careers in public office — persuading their constituents to keep abortion rights front and center when voting next year.Both Democrats have long supported abortion rights, but their electoral successes trace back to carefully tailored campaigns that catered to local issues over dominant national ones like abortion. That individuality was how both men won re-election in 2018, even though their states voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2020.For Mr. Tester, this has meant campaigning on policies he has focused on in the Senate, where he serves on committees overseeing agricultural, Native American and veterans issues.His first television ads this campaign strike similar tones. One features Mr. Tester — a paunchy former schoolteacher with a flattop haircut and a left hand missing three fingers from a boyhood accident with a meat grinder — describing himself as both physically and philosophically different from his congressional colleagues.“I may not look like the other senators,” Mr. Tester says, “but that’s not stopping me from making Washington understand what makes Montana so special.”In Ohio, Mr. Brown has built his reputation on middle-class economic issues, including fighting corporate tax breaks and the high cost of health care. In a 2004 book, “Myths of Free Trade: Why America Trade Policy Has Failed,” he argued that unregulated trade deals had reopened the country’s class divide.This year, Mr. Brown’s campaign has already released a video attacking his three potential Republican challengers as extreme on abortion. In Montana, the Democratic Party has taken a similar approach on behalf of Mr. Tester.“The thing I think a lot of people miss with Sherrod is that he knows abortion is an economic issue,” said Nan Whaley, a Democratic former mayor of Dayton, Ohio, who ran for governor last year. “Abortion rights and abortion access maybe wasn’t discussed as much in previous campaigns, but that’s because it was before the fall of Roe.”Frank LaRose, the secretary of state of Ohio and one of the Republicans running against Mr. Brown, has supported a national abortion ban. Nick Fancher for The New York TimesThe task for the two Democrats will be complicated by a political headwind that neither senator has confronted: seeking re-election on a ballot topped by an unpopular president from their own party.Both first won election to the Senate by unseating incumbents in 2006, when discontent over the Iraq war and Republican corruption scandals helped Democrats make gains in Congress.Each was re-elected in 2012, when Democrats scored huge majorities from Black and Hispanic voters as President Barack Obama won a second term. They won again in 2018, a Democratic wave year propelled by opposition to Mr. Trump.Republicans are already trying to massage their message on abortion. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is coaching candidates to oppose a national abortion ban and to clearly state their support for exceptions when it comes to rape, incest or a woman’s health.But not all Republicans are on board, as the party’s Senate primary race in Ohio shows. One top candidate, Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state, has supported a national ban and opposed exceptions for rape and incest — and also unsuccessfully campaigned against the abortion ballot question.Another contender, Bernie Moreno, a businessman seeking his first elected office, has said he supports exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the woman, but he told a reporter from Breitbart News last year that he did not. He has also expressed support for a 15-week federal ban.Matt Dolan, a Republican state senator in Ohio who is also running against Mr. Brown, opposes a national abortion ban.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe third leading candidate, Matt Dolan, a state senator, opposed the state’s constitutional amendment this month, but he has a more moderate record on the issue than his opponents. Mr. Dolan opposes a national ban and has criticized abortion ban proposals in Ohio that haven’t included the three main exceptions.“Most Americans agree there should be reasonable limits on abortion and abortion policy will primarily be made at the state level,” Mr. Dolan said in a statement, adding that Mr. Brown held “extreme” views on the issue.Some Republicans have said that Ohio’s ballot referendum means the abortion issue will have less urgency in the state next year. But Democrats contend that Republican support for a federal ban would help keep the issue alive, arguing that such a measure would undermine the will of Ohio voters.A poll commissioned by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recommended that messaging focus on G.O.P. support for a “national abortion ban” and that politicians should not be involved in “personal medical decisions.” Abortion rights groups have encouraged candidates to simultaneously adopt a “proactive” platform that calls for expanding access to contraception and maternal health resources while highlighting Republican involvement in abortion restrictions.“Campaigns need to quickly define who the villains are here: Republicans overturned Roe, Republicans have been campaigning against Roe for decades, Republicans have been pledging to create a court that would overturn Roe,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, one of the country’s largest abortion rights groups. “They got it, they did it, they’re responsible. Pin it on them. Do not flinch.”Neither Mr. Brown nor Mr. Tester has been shy about supporting abortion rights.Mr. Tester campaigned in 2018 with Cecile Richards, who had recently stepped down as the president of Planned Parenthood. He said recently that abortion rights had clear resonance in Montana, where libertarian-leaning voters tend to reject perceived government intrusion.Still, Mr. Tester has mostly tailored his campaigns around issues closer to the Continental Divide in his state than the partisan divide in Washington.Supporters celebrating in Columbus this month after Ohio voters enshrined a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution. Adam Cairns/USA Today Network, via, via ReutersMr. Brown won his first political office in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade was decided. He has proudly highlighted his 100 percent voting score from Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom for All.“My focus has always been on civil rights and women’s rights,” he said. “That leads to a better economy, too — when women have better access to child care and can make decisions for their families.”Mr. Brown was involved in the campaign this year to support the constitutional amendment on abortion, phone-banking alongside the Ohio Democratic Party and frequently bringing up the measure during campaign events.Hours after Ohioans voted, Mr. Brown posted a video on social media that framed his three potential Republican challengers as sitting on the wrong side of the issue. “All of my opponents would support a national abortion ban,” the caption read.If there was any doubt, Mr. Brown made clear in the interview that he saw the political benefit of the issue.Abortion, he said, “will surely be talked about more than in my other races.” More

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      in US Politics

      The women who made painful choices challenge Texas’s severe abortion ban

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      After Danielle Mathisen and her husband realized they would be having a baby girl, they started calling her “Mini”. “We figured she would be a mini-me,” Mathisen said.For months, Mathisen’s pregnancy appeared normal. Genetic testing went well. Her parents were thrilled – this would be the first grandchild in the family.But in September 2021, two weeks after Texas banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy, Mathisen went in for her 18-week anatomy scan. And Mathisen, then a 25-year-old fourth-year medical student, quickly realized that something was terribly wrong.Doctors soon confirmed Mathisen’s fears: the fetus had only one kidney, severe scoliosis, a partially formed umbilical cord and improperly positioned hands and feet. The fetus also had an underdeveloped brain.Mathisen’s pregnancy was at risk of ending before she ever gave birth. If Mathisen did give birth, her baby would probably die from respiratory failure shortly afterward. “She doesn’t have enough brain to tell her lungs how to breathe,” Mathisen said.If she continued the pregnancy, Mathisen’s health could be at risk, too.Soon after her diagnosis, Mathisen started calling abortion clinics in Colorado. They were booked solid. Her mother ultimately found her an appointment at a clinic in New Mexico, which Mathisen said was holding appointments open for Texas women. The appointment was for the very next day.Afterward, when she returned to Texas, Mathisen and her husband told everybody that she had had a miscarriage. “Continuing a pregnancy that was not going to end up with a baby in the crib, but a baby in the casket – it did not make sense for me, personally,” she said.Now, though, Mathisen has gone public with her story. She is one of 20 Texas women who have sued their home state, arguing that they were denied medically necessary abortions. While Texas bans almost all abortions, the procedure, according to state law, should be allowed in medical emergencies. But abortion rights advocates and doctors in the state say that the exceptions in the law are so vague that doctors can’t decipher them. Instead, they are forced to watch until patients get sick enough to intervene.The Texas supreme court will hear arguments in the case on Tuesday. Rather than demolishing Texas’s abortion ban outright, the women – as well as two doctors who have also joined the case – are hoping that the court will agree to clarify the state’s abortion exceptions.A judge in Austin, Texas, heard arguments in the case in July, in a hearing believed to mark the first time that women testified in court about their experiences with abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year.Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in the case, talked about learning that her cervix had dilated too early in her pregnancy. She had no chance of giving birth to a healthy baby – but she was also unable to get an abortion in Texas because doctors could still detect a fetal heartbeat, she said. Zurawski ultimately developed sepsis and spent three days in the ICU.Samantha Casiano testified about discovering that her fetus had been diagnosed with anencephaly, a condition where parts of a fetus’s skull and brain do not develop properly. But she did not have the money to travel out of state for an abortion, so she gave birth to a baby daughter who struggled for air and died just four hours after birth. Casiano was so overcome on the stand that, in the middle of testifying, she threw up.A few weeks after the women’s testimony, in August, the judge issued a preliminary injunction, ordering that doctors be allowed to perform abortions in cases where patients have an “emergent medical condition” that threatens their life or health.But Texas immediately appealed that ruling, which froze the preliminary injunction. In court filings, attorneys for Texas argued that doctors, not the state, are responsible for what happened to the women in the lawsuit.“These independent decisions by third-party medical providers, right or wrong, break any purported chain of causation” between the abortion ban and any medical emergency, they alleged.In any case, the attorneys argued, these women don’t have the legal right to sue, because the pregnancies at issue in the lawsuit are in the past and they are no longer at risk of imminent damage from Texas’s abortion laws. Multiple women involved in the lawsuit, including Mathisen, became pregnant again.Nick Kabat, a staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the women in the Texas case, said that the Texas state supreme court –made up exclusively of Republicans – could buy that argument. Kabat is preparing for the possibility that the justices rule that, in order to sue, advocates need a plaintiff who is actively in the midst of a medical emergency.“They could say that what you need is a woman who is in an emergency in desperate need of an abortion,” Kabat said. “So basically, someone who has amniotic fluid dripping down their leg or they’re actively bleeding, where they have an IV connected to them that’s really keeping them alive. And you know what, if they say that, then we’ll find that patient, because the patient exists in Texas, unfortunately.”At the end of August, the Texas government enacted new legislation to, in theory, allow doctors to perform abortions in cases of ectopic pregnancies – a life-threatening condition – or when a pregnant person’s water breaks too early for the pregnancy to be viable.But critics say that those exceptions don’t cover the vast array of nuanced issues that can arise in pregnancy. In addition, rather than completely shielding a doctor from prosecution, the new exceptions offer doctors a defense in court only after they have been charged – a legal mechanism known as an “affirmative defense”.“Whatever fix the Texas government thinks it has adopted, it hasn’t solved this issue,” Kabat said. “That law has not changed the way doctors are practicing.”Mathisen ended up moving to Hawaii for her OB-GYN residency, rather than remain in Texas, where she had once hoped to work.“I’m currently pregnant with another baby girl, and I would love for her to live across the street from her grandma,” Mathisen said. “Right now, I can’t do that, because I don’t think I could go back to Texas and practice medicine if I cannot do abortions.”Since the Texas lawsuit was first filed in March, the Center for Reproductive Rights has filed similar lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee. The Center is also representing a woman who has filed a federal complaint against a hospital in Oklahoma that, she says, refused to give her an abortion for a dangerous and nonviable pregnancy. Instead, staffers at the hospital allegedly told the woman to wait in the hospital parking lot until she was “crashing”.If the Texas state supreme court rules in favor of women like Mathisen, it will not set a legal precedent for the lawsuits in other states. But Kabat believes it would help.“These abortion medical exemptions are worded in very similar ways,” Kabat said. “A ruling in Texas in our favor would be powerfully persuasive to justices deciding similar cases in other states.”Throughout her ordeal, Mathisen clung to one small source of comfort: in the ultrasound, Mathisen could see that Mini’s hands were curved into the shape of a heart.“Like the heart that Taylor Swift makes,” Mathisen said. “The heart that she made with her hands, through all of my tears and sobbing – I was like, ‘She’s OK.’ It was just a sign that everything was going to be OK, even if we ended the pregnancy.” More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris: abortion bans passed by ‘extremist’ people causing ‘chaos, confusion and fear’ – as it happened

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      Vice-president Kamala Harris has released a statement condemning abortion bans, saying that they are passed by “extremist so-called leaders” who continue to “cause chaos, confusion and fear”.She added:
      The women of America deserve better. Congress must pass a bill that restores the protections of Roe v Wade – and when they do, President Joe Biden will sign it into federal law.
      We’ve launched a standalone blog following the latest developments after a vehicle explosion at the US-Canada border.Join us here to follow the latest news and reaction:The politics blog will pause for now.Dramatic images and clips are coming through on the vehicle explosion at the international bridge near the Niagara Falls, but it’s a very fluid situation in terms of official information emerging at this point.The FBI is investigating and, according to CNN, also the US Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) federal agency.Reports so far suggest that a car that was entering the US from Canada, where there are toll booths and officials, exploded. There are no reports yet of any victims but this is all unfolding.A border crossing between the US and Canada has been closed after a vehicle exploded at a checkpoint on a bridge near Niagara Falls, the Associated Press reports.The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s field office in Buffalo, in upstate New York, said in a statement that it was investigating the explosion on the so-called Rainbow Bridge, which connects the two countries across the Niagara River.Photos and video taken by news organizations and posted on social media showed a security booth that had been singed by flames.Further information wasn’t immediately available.New York governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said she had been briefed on the incident and was “closely monitoring the situation”.Images and clips are emerging on social media.The FBI and other law enforcement are investigating a vehicle explosion at the international bridge that connects the US and Canada at the Niagara Falls.The cause of the explosion is not yet clear but there are some dramatic images and reports by the Associated Press citing the FBI that the border has been closed.There is talk of a vehicle bomb or an electric vehicle battery combusting, we will bring you details as they unfold.Here is Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer explaining the Reproductive Health Act which sends a “poweful message – [that] Michigan is a place that fights for people’s right to make decisions about their own bodies”: Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer has signed a package of bills known as the Reproductive Health Act into law on Tuesday.In a series of tweets announcing the signing, Whitmer said that the RHA repeals the state’s TRAP laws which are “medically unnecessary restrictions on hallway width, ceiling heights, HVAC systems, and janitor’s closets” that have “nothing to do with providing healthcare.”The RHA also repeals another “extreme law on the books from 1931 that would have criminalized nurses and doctors for prescribing medication abortion including mifepristone”, said Whitmer.The RHA also ensures that students at the state’s public universities have access to information about their reproductive health options.The American Civil Liberties Union has issued several guides on how to talk about abortion access over the holidays.In a guide by ACLU Alabama, the organization wrote:
      “Alabama has one of the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality in the nation. Restricting abortion access only worsens this issue.”
      Meanwhile, a guide issued by ACLU Indiana said:
      “Having deeper, nonjudgmental conversations in which you share personal, values-based stories has been shown to move the needle – even for people who start with opposite views. It isn’t magic, and it doesn’t work every time or even immediately, but these conversations can change the way Hoosiers think and talk about abortion.”
      Washington’s Democratic senator Patty Murray has also voiced her support for abortion rights, urging the restoration of Roe v Wade, which the US supreme court overturned last year.Murray tweeted:
      “RT if you agree: we need to restore Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion for all women, no matter where they live.”
      Last September, Murray led 29 senators in urging the Joe Biden administration to strengthen privacy protections for women seeking reproductive healthcare under the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act.Catholics for Choice, a Catholic abortion rights advocacy group, has tweeted support for advocates of abortion access who may have different political views from to those around them ahead of Thanksgiving, saying:
      “We know the Thanksgiving table might feel isolating if you have different political views. Catholics who support abortion access are in the pews, teaching Sunday school, & even around your dinner table.
      You are not alone.”
      In an interview earlier this year with the Guardian about pro-choice Catholics fighting to seize the abortion narrative from the religious right, CFC’s president, Jamie Manson said:
      “Catholics overwhelmingly support abortion is because their faith taught them the values of social justice, of the power of individual conscience and of religious freedom.”
      Alabama’s Republican senator Tommy Tuberville has falsely claimed that Democrats support reproductive policies that would allow abortions “after” a baby is born.In an interview last week with Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of former president Donald Trump’s son Donald Jr, Tuberville, who is blocking a handful of military promotions due to his opposition of the defense department reimbursing service members for abortion-related travels, said:
      “We’re going to pay for that by taxpayers’ money. They can’t tell us about the policy in terms of the abortion itself. You know, it’s been rape, incest or health of the mom but we asked in one of our hearings what month are you going to go by for the abortion. They couldn’t tell us if it was abortion after birth.”
      In response to Tuberville’s misleading claims about Democrats’ support for abortion after birth, Minnesota’s Democratic senator Tina Smith said:
      Did Kimberly attempt to acquaint Senator Tuberville with the criminal code? Because this is utter nonsense. But harmful nonsense. Senator Tuberville blocking these promotions is hurting our military.
      Vice-president Kamala Harris has released a statement condemning abortion bans, saying that they are passed by “extremist so-called leaders” who continue to “cause chaos, confusion and fear”.She added:
      The women of America deserve better. Congress must pass a bill that restores the protections of Roe v Wade – and when they do, President Joe Biden will sign it into federal law.
      Democrats in Virginia this week proposed amending the state constitution to enshrine abortion rights.The proposal follows Democrats’ win in the state earlier this month in which they gained control of the state legislature, signifying a blow to Republicans’ plans that included curtailing abortion access.The amendment seeks to establish that “every individual has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom” in the state constitution.In a statement on Monday, the majority leader, Charniele Herring, said:
      Throughout the campaign cycle we told Virginians that a Democratic majority meant that abortion access would be protected in the commonwealth.
      Today, that reigns true. Our resolution will begin the process of amending our constitution to protect reproductive rights in Virginia, building on the work that I and congresswoman Jennifer McClellan started many years ago.
      It has become all too clear that without constitutional protection, access to reproductive healthcare is at risk for the commonwealth.”
      Lawyers from the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, as well as Cooper & Kirk have asked the US supreme court on behalf of Idaho’s attorney general to strip prosecution protections for ER doctors who perform abortions in the state. Bloomberg Law reports:Idaho requested the US supreme court let it enforce a near-total abortion ban, pending appeal of a decision that found the ban makes it impossible for hospitals in the state to comply with a federal emergency care law.Attorney general Raúl Labrador Monday filed an emergency application to stay an injunction that prevents the state from imposing penalties on physicians who perform abortions in emergency situations, except when necessary to save the pregnant person’s life.The US didn’t show that it’s likely to succeed on a claim that the abortion law conflicts with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Labrador said. It’s not impossible to comply with both laws because the emergency care law doesn’t require anything that Idaho law prohibits, he said.In a 2022 audio clip aired by CNN on Tuesday, the House’s newest speaker, Mike Johnson, said that allowing people to get abortions is “truly an American holocaust”.During a radio interview in 2022, Johnson also said:
      “I mean, the reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these – big abortion – they set up their clinics in inner cities. They regard these people as easy prey … That is what’s happening across the country now.”
      Johnson also criticized what he called “activist courts”, saying:
      “There’s been some really bad law made. They’ve made a mess of our jurisprudence in this country for the last several decades. And maybe some of that needs to be cleaned up.”
      The Missouri supreme court has refused an appeal surrounding the wording of a ballot question on abortion rights in the state.On Monday, the state supreme court declined to hear an argument from Republican secretary of state Jay Ashcroft who proposed asking voters whether they are in favor of allowing “dangerous and unregulated abortions until live birth”.In October, a state appeals court ruled against Ashcroft, calling his ballot summaries “replete with politically partisan language”.Ashcroft, who is running for governor in 2024, appealed the court’s decision but was turned away on Monday by the state’s supreme court.In response to the state’s supreme court rejection, a spokesperson from ACLU Missouri told Springfield News-Leader:
      “The courts’ repeated rejection of the secretary of state’s arguments verify that his case has no legal bearing but, instead, shows he will sacrifice Missourians’ constitutional rights to gain the support and funding of special interest organizations to advance his political career.”
      Good morning,Activists across the country are racing to get abortion rights on the ballot in 2024.The multi-state efforts follow a series of Democratic wins earlier this month in several states including Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky where voters rejected Republican attempts to limit or ban the procedure.Abortion rights groups in Missouri – where abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions – have proposed 11 different amendments that seek to expand abortion rights in the state, NBC reports.In Nebraska, abortion rights groups launched a ballot measure last week that seeks to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The measure proposes a constitutional amendment that would protect legal abortion care until “fetal viability”.Meanwhile, Democrats in Minnesota and abortion rights groups are divided on how exactly to put forth the question of abortion rights to voters. According to Axios, the state’s house speaker Melissa Hortman said that the idea is “in the mix when we talk about 2024”, but said that they “haven’t heard clearly from voters or from the caucuses here at the state capitol that [an amendment] is the next thing that we should do”.Meanwhile, in an aired audio clip on Tuesday from 2022, Mike Johnson, the House’s newest speaker, said that allowing people to receive abortions is causing “an American Holocaust”.Here are other developments in US politics:
      Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is considering a potential run for New York City mayor, Politico reports.
      Jill Stein has launched her 2024 White House bid as a Green party candidate. More

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      in US Politics

      House speaker Mike Johnson likened abortion to ‘American holocaust’

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      Before he became speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Louisiana Republican congressman Mike Johnson likened abortion to “an American holocaust”.“The reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these … big abortion … they set up their clinics in inner cities,” Johnson told a radio show in May 2022, in comments aired by CNN on Tuesday. “They regard these people as easy prey.”But while these remarks may sound stunning, anti-abortion activists often refer to abortion in the United States as a “holocaust”. This isn’t even the only time that Johnson has made the comparison.“During business hours today, 4,500 innocent American children will be killed,” Johnson wrote in a 2005 op-ed for the Shreveport Times, which was recently resurfaced by CBS News. “It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v Wade.”In that op-ed, Johnson also said the judicial philosophy that undergirded Roe – and allowed for the removal of the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a womanwith severe brain damage who became a cause célèbre among anti-abortion activists – to be “no different than Hitler’s”.Johnson went on to add that abortion had led to a dearth of “able workers” and a crisis for social security, a claim he would repeat at a House hearing years later.Comparisons between US abortion and the Holocaust date back decades, with anti-abortion advocates writing books in the 1980s with titles such as The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution. Although the mainstream United States may have grown less tolerant of the comparison, it has never disappeared from anti-abortion circles, which are predominantly Christian.In fact, it’s sometimes used as a recruitment tool. One prominent anti-abortion group even claims anyone born after the supreme court decided Roe in 1973 is a “survivor of the American abortion holocaust” and invites young people to become “boots on the ground” in recognition of their aborted peers. In 2019, Texas Right to Life – a powerful anti-abortion group in Texas – held a training for young anti-abortion activists where leaders screened documentaries about the Nazi Holocaust and urged the activists to “write down three similarities between the Holocaust and abortion”.These kinds of comparisons have even made their way into law. In a 2019 abortion case, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion claiming that abortion was on the verge of becoming “a tool of modern-day eugenics”. Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, which was first passed in 2019 and took effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, suggested abortion was worse than famous 20th-century atrocities.“More than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973,” the ban reads, “more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin’s gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.” More

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      We Did an Experiment to See How Much Democracy and Abortion Matter to Voters

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      Yes, the economy is important, but we found that election subversion attempts appear to matter more to voters than polling suggests.Voters usually penalize those supporting electoral subversion.Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesDo abortion and democracy matter to voters?If you look at the results of New York Times/Siena College polling, the answer often seems to be “not really.”Around 40 percent of voters agreed that Donald J. Trump was “bad” for democracy in our latest poll. Only around a quarter said that issues like democracy and abortion were more important to their vote than the economy.But in election after election, the final vote tallies seem to tell a very different story. Last fall, Democrats excelled when abortion and democracy were at stake, even though our pre-election polls offered little indication that these issues were driving voters. It raises the possibility that the usual poll questions simply failed to reveal the importance of abortion, democracy and perhaps other issues as well.With that in mind, we tried an experiment in our latest Times/Siena poll. We looked at the persuadable voters — those who were undecided or who said they were open to supporting the other candidate — and split them into two groups. We gave each group a set of two hypothetical Republican candidates based on views on abortion and democracy.While only an experiment, the findings suggest that democracy has the potential to be an extremely important factor in people’s voting — even among voters who say it’s not important to them at all.Here’s the democracy matchup:Hypothetical A: Would you be more likely to support a Democratic candidate who says Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy, or a Republican candidate who tried to overturn the 2020 election?Hypothetical B: Would you be more likely to support a Democratic candidate who says Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy, or a Republican candidate who says we should move on from the 2020 election?If democracy didn’t matter to voters, these two hypotheticals might not yield very different results.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      The Crisis in Issue Polling, and What We’re Doing About It

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      A poll can be very close to the actual result but miss the key story line. We’ll try new question forms; we might even try an experiment or two.Protecting democracy has been a potent message in recent elections. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBy the usual measures, last year’s midterm polls were among the most accurate on record.But in harder-to-measure ways, there’s a case those same polls were extraordinarily bad.Poll after poll seemed to tell a clear story before the election: Voters were driven more by the economy, immigration and crime than abortion and democracy, helping to raise the specter of a “red wave.”In the end, the final results looked just about like the final polls, but they told a completely different story about the election: When abortion and democracy were at stake, Democrats excelled. And while the polls had sometimes or even often showed Democrats excelling, they almost always failed to convincingly explain why they were ahead — making it seem that Democratic polling leads were fragile and tenuous.Take our own Times/Siena polls. Our results in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona were very close to the final results and showed Democrats with the lead. By all accounts, abortion and democracy were major factors helping to explain Democratic strength in these states, especially against election deniers like Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake.But although these polls performed well, they simply didn’t explain what happened. If anything, the polls were showing the conditions for a Republican win. They showed that voters wanted Republican control of the Senate. They showed that a majority of voters didn’t really care whether a candidate thought Joe Biden won the 2020 election, even though election deniers wound up being clearly punished at the ballot box. Voters said they cared more about the economy than issues like abortion or democracy, and so on.The Times/Siena polling wasn’t alone in this regard. Virtually all of the major public pollsters told the same basic story, and it’s the opposite of the story that we told after the election. If we judge these poll questions about the issues by the same standard that we judge the main election results — a comparison between the pre-election polls and what we believe to be true after the election, with the benefit of the results — I think we’d have to say this was a complete misfire.If you do this exercise for previous elections, issue polling failures look more like the norm than the exception. There just aren’t many elections when you can read a pre-election poll story, line it up with the post-election story, and say that the pre-election poll captured the most important dynamics of the election. The final CBS/NYT, Pew Research and ABC/Washington Post polls from the 2016 election, for instance, barely shed any light at all on Donald J. Trump’s strength. They contributed essentially nothing to the decade-long debate about whether the economy, racial resentment, immigration or anything else helped explain Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters in that election.With such a poor track record, there’s a case that “issue” polling faces a far graver crisis than “horse race” polling. I can imagine many public pollsters recoiling at that assertion, but they can’t prove it wrong, either. The crisis facing issue polling is almost entirely non-falsifiable — just like the issue polling itself. Indeed, the fact that the problems with issue polling are so hard to quantify is probably why problems have been allowed to fester. Most pollsters probably assume they’re good at issue polling; after all, unlike with horse race polls, they’re almost never demonstrably wrong.In fairness to pollsters, the problem isn’t only that the usual questions probably don’t fully portray the attitudes of the electorate. It’s also that pollsters are trying to figure out what’s driving the behavior of voters, and that’s a different and more challenging question than simply measuring whom they’ll vote for or what they believe. These causal questions are beyond what a single poll with “issue” questions can realistically be expected to answer. The worlds of political campaigning and social science research, with everything from experimental designs to messaging testing, probably have more of the relevant tools than public pollsters.Over the next year, we’re going to try to bring some of those tools into our polling. We’ll focus more on analyzing what factors predict whether voters have “flipped” since 2020, rather than look at what attitudes prevail over a majority of the electorate. We’ll try new question forms. We might even try an experiment or two.We already tried one such experiment in our latest Times/Siena battleground state poll. We split the sample into two halves: One half was asked whether they’d vote for a typical Democrat against a Republican expressing a moderate view on abortion or democracy; the other half was given the same Democrat against a Republican expressing more conservative or MAGA views on abortion or democracy.In the next newsletter, I’ll tell you about the results of that experiment. I think it was promising. More

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      In Iowa, DeSantis Talks Abortion to Win Over Evangelical Voters

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      The Florida governor is courting white evangelicals by using Donald J. Trump’s criticisms of hard-line abortion restrictions against him.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida paused, looked down and then told a banquet hall filled with conservative Iowa Christians something that he had never before said in public: His wife, Casey DeSantis, experienced a miscarriage several years ago during her first pregnancy.The couple, Mr. DeSantis explained on Friday at a forum for Republican presidential candidates hosted by an influential evangelical group, had been trying to conceive before taking a trip to Israel.“We went to Ruth’s tomb in Hebron — Ruth, Chapter 4, Verse 13 — and we prayed,” Mr. DeSantis, citing Scripture, said at the event in Des Moines. “We prayed a lot to have a family, and then, lo and behold, we go back to the United States and a little time later we got pregnant. But unfortunately we lost that first baby.”The deeply personal revelation — in response to a question about the importance of the nuclear family — was an unexpected moment for Mr. DeSantis, who is usually tight-lipped about both his faith and his family life. On the campaign trail, he rotates through a limited set of anecdotes about Ms. DeSantis and their three young children, as well as his religious beliefs. Still, at the Iowa event, he lingered only briefly on his wife’s miscarriage, calling it simply a “tough thing” and a test of faith.Mr. DeSantis, a Roman Catholic, is heavily courting Iowa’s religious right, which has helped deliver the state’s last three competitive Republican presidential caucuses to candidates who wore their faith on their sleeves. White evangelical voters are likely to play a decisive role in the state’s Jan. 15 caucuses, the first contest in the 2024 G.O.P. primary, and they often turn to politicians who speak the language of the church.“You have to talk authentically from the heart,” said Terry Amann, a conservative pastor from Des Moines. “Anybody can cite Bible verses.”A majority of evangelical voters in Iowa favor former President Donald J. Trump over Mr. DeSantis. But some say they fear Mr. Trump is backing off on abortion.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIf Mr. DeSantis has any hope of beating former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner, who leads him by roughly 30 points in Iowa polls, it lies in winning over conservative Christian voters while fending off the challenge of Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who is seen as more moderate.A DeSantis victory in Iowa remains a long shot, but Mr. Trump’s criticisms of the hard-line abortion restrictions favored by many evangelical voters in Iowa may have created a lane for the Florida governor to bolster his standing. The former president has described a six-week abortion ban signed by Mr. DeSantis in Florida as “a terrible mistake.” Mr. Trump has blamed extreme positions on abortion for recent Republican losses at the polls and, looking to win over moderates in the general election, has avoided supporting a federal abortion ban. That has deeply disappointed some evangelical leaders and voters who cheered him after his appointments to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade.“Trump has backed off his pro-life position,” said Mike Demastus, who leads an evangelical church in Des Moines. “And that’s caused voters like myself to pause and be willing to listen to other candidates.”Mr. DeSantis is trying to take advantage of concerns like Mr. Demastus’s. As he opened his new Iowa campaign headquarters outside Des Moines on Saturday, the governor told reporters that Mr. Trump’s comments on abortion had been the real “mistake.” He had previously said of Mr. Trump, during an interview with an Iowa radio station, that “all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out.”Still, Mr. Trump remains immensely popular with conservative Christians, and not only because of his role in Roe’s demise. Mr. Trump moved the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an issue of deep importance to many evangelicals. He is also credited for his anti-immigration policies and for a strong economy during his presidency, reflecting the fact that many religious voters have political concerns beyond their faith.Even many of the evangelical voters who support Mr. DeSantis are deeply grateful to the former president.“The reversal of Roe v. Wade — I didn’t ever think that would happen in my lifetime, and he did that,” Jerry Buseman, 54, a retired school administrator from Hampton, Iowa, said of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have battled for months to win over influential evangelical leaders and top Republicans in Iowa, a state some say is still Mr. Trump’s to lose.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNow, the DeSantis and Trump campaigns are engaged in a back-and-forth to win over faith leaders and voters. Evangelicals are the single largest religious group among Iowa Republicans, accounting for more than a third of their ranks, according to Pew Research Center. So far, polls suggest Mr. Trump is winning the race for their votes. The former president had the support of 51 percent of white evangelical voters, compared with 30 percent for Mr. DeSantis, according to a September poll by CBS News and YouGov. It’s a major shift from 2016, when evangelicals flocked to Ted Cruz rather than to Mr. Trump, helping the Republican senator from Texas win the caucuses that year.“Trump has already proven himself to have a backbone,” said Brad Sherman, a pastor and state legislator who has endorsed Mr. Trump, even though he said he wished the former president would take a “stronger stand” against abortion. “He’s shown that he will do what he says.”Like Mr. Sherman, many Iowans backing Mr. Trump seem willing to forgive his more recent comments on abortion. Only 40 percent of Trump supporters agreed that he was right to criticize six-week abortion bans, according to an October poll by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom.Alex Latcham, the Trump campaign’s early-states director, said the former president had gotten results on issues that had been “the top priorities” for evangelical voters for decades. In his Des Moines office, Mr. Latcham said, he keeps a map of Iowa showing the locations of more than 100 religious leaders who have endorsed Mr. Trump.“There’s plenty of time, but right now it’s Trump’s to lose,” said Steve Scheffler, the president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, who is staying neutral through the caucuses.To counter Mr. Trump’s popularity, Mr. DeSantis held his first official campaign rally in May at a church outside Des Moines, where a group of pastors prayed over him. He has rolled out his own endorsements from more than 100 religious leaders around the state. Before each Republican presidential debate, he has invited a pastor to pray for him and his wife in the green room backstage. His campaign holds a monthly video call for pastors. And unlike Mr. Trump, he has attended several church services in Iowa, including alongside the Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who hosted Mr. DeSantis at the forum where he discussed his wife’s miscarriage.Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting the DeSantis campaign, has produced advertisements that accuse Mr. Trump of a “betrayal of the pro-life movement,” call into question his support for Israel and criticize his attacks on Kim Reynolds, the popular Iowa governor who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and has also signed a six-week abortion ban.”DeSantis has done an outstanding job networking with evangelicals,” said David Kochel, a veteran Iowa political strategist. “He’s running the campaign the right way. The problem is he’s doing it against someone who has already delivered for evangelical voters.”Ms. Haley, the other top runner-up in the race, who is now tied with Mr. DeSantis in many Iowa polls, does not appear to be pursuing the state’s faith leaders as aggressively, and her more measured way of talking about abortion has turned off many evangelicals.In Iowa, Mr. DeSantis must also fend off Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who has become a formidable challenger for second place.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesOlivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, highlighted Ms. Haley’s “steadfast support for Israel” as a reason for evangelical voters to get behind her. And she pointed to Ms. Haley’s recent endorsement by Marlys Popma, a prominent anti-abortion activist in Iowa. For Mr. DeSantis, a lack of folksy charm may still be an issue in Iowa, despite his efforts to be more personal with evangelical voters.Evangelical voters “want to see the heart,” said Sam Brownback, a conservative Christian and former Republican senator from Kansas whose own presidential campaign failed to take off in 2008. “They want to see what you really are inside.”The last three Republicans to win contested caucuses — former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mr. Cruz — all talked easily about their faith. (None of them captured the nomination.)Mr. DeSantis, who has been criticized as stilted on the campaign trail, is not built in that mold. Instead, he is relying on his record as Florida governor, which includes, in addition to the six-week abortion ban, laws to restrict the rights of transgender people and to limit discussions of sexuality in schools.When a reporter asked why he was a better fit for Iowa’s evangelicals than Mr. Trump — a thrice-married former Democrat — Mr. DeSantis replied that he was “better representative of their values.”“I have a better record of actually delivering on my promises and fighting important fights on behalf of children, on behalf of families and on behalf of religious liberty,” he said on Saturday at a coffee shop in Ottumwa, Iowa.Heidi Sokol, 51, a Republican voter who teaches at a Christian school in Clear Lake, Iowa, said she wasn’t bothered that Mr. DeSantis spoke far more about policy than about his personal faith when she saw him speak at a Des Moines church this fall.“We’re not hiring the president to be our pastor,” Ms. Sokol said.Ruth Igielnik More