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      Wisconsin supreme court seems hostile to 1849 abortion ban in oral arguments

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      During heated oral arguments on Monday morning, the Wisconsin supreme court appeared poised to find an 1849 law banning most abortions cannot be enforced.The legal status of abortion in Wisconsin has been contested since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the right to abortion nationwide, triggering bans across the country – including in Wisconsin, where a 175-year-old ban immediately went into effect.Democrats in Wisconsin have seized on abortion as a campaign issue, with Justice Janet Protasiewicz expressing her support for abortion rights and winning a seat on the court in spring 2023. Protasiewicz’s election to the court helped flip the ideological balance on the bench, which is now controlled by a narrow liberal majority.It is highly unlikely the liberal-controlled court will uphold the ban.The 1849 statute, which was nullified by Roe v Wade and then reanimated when the landmark decision was overturned, declares that ending “the life of an unborn child” is a felony, except when required to save the life of the mother. In July 2023, a Dane county judge ruled that the 1849 ban applies only to feticide and not “consensual” abortion, citing a previous ruling that interpreted the statute as an anti-feticide law, and in September, providers including Planned Parenthood resumed offering abortion care.The Sheboygan county district attorney Joel Urmanski appealed the ruling, which is now before the Wisconsin supreme court.“The position of the circuit court below … is ultimately indefensible,” said Matthew Thome, an attorney representing Urmanski, during his opening argument. Thome argued that the 1849 law should be interpreted to “prohibit consensual abortions from conception until birth, subject to an exception when it is necessary to save the life of the mother”.Justice Jill Karofsky interrogated Urmanski’s interpretation of the law, asking if it would provide exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother, or fetal abnormalities.“Just to be clear, a 12-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by her father and as a result, became pregnant, under your interpretation … she would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term?” asked Karofsky. She noted that the “penalty for aborting after a sexual assault would be more severe than the penalty for the sexual assault”.In response to a question about the medical consequences of a ban, Thome responded that he was unsure, given that he is “not a doctor”.“I fear that what you are asking this court to do is to sign the death warrants of women and children and pregnant people in this state, because under your interpretation, they could all be denied life saving medical care, while the medical professionals who are charged with taking care of them are forced to sit idly by,” said Karofsky.The court weighed the question of whether laws that were passed regulating abortion while Roe was in effect “impliedly repealed” the 1849 ban and rendered it unenforceable.“All of those statues” passed after 1973 and before it was overturned, “just go to the dust pile?” asked Karofsky.Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative-leaning judge, argued, of the 1849 ban, that “the law is still there”, adding that “the judiciary doesn’t get to edit laws, the judiciary doesn’t get to rewrite them, we didn’t delete it, we prevented its enforcement”.The assistant attorney general Hannah Jurss disagreed, arguing that “there is nothing in the text of these statutes that says in the event that Roe is overturned we somehow go back to the old law and throw out all of the new ones,” drawing a distinction between Wisconsin’s more than a century old law and “trigger” laws passed in certain states that were specifically designed to go into effect after Roe v Wade was overturned.A separate case, which the Wisconsin supreme court has also agreed to hear, would decide whether the right to abortion is protected under the state’s constitution – possibly opening the door to challenge other laws regulating abortion in the state. More

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      At Women’s March Event, Organizers Say They Are Preparing a ‘Comeback Tour’

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      At a demonstration on Saturday, the crowd was small and enthusiasm was lacking. But organizers are planning a big march ahead of the inauguration.On Saturday, after former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election dashed progressives’ hopes of a new era for women’s rights and other left-wing causes, Women’s March held a hastily arranged protest-cum-dance party outside the headquarters of a conservative think tank in Washington. Only about a few hundred people showed up.The first Women’s March, held in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, drew hundreds of thousands of people to the National Mall in Washington to protest what they feared would be an assault on reproductive rights, immigrants and civil rights under his administration. But this week, Women’s March organizers are grappling with despair among their base that the president they oppose has been elected to a second term, and questions about where the movement is headed.The goal of the Saturday afternoon event was to reinvigorate the organization’s progressive base after the election and perhaps to unleash some anger at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that had designed a policy playbook for a second Trump administration, Project 2025, whose goals included aggressively curtailing access to abortion. The foundation did not immediately respond on Saturday evening to a request for comment.“You are not going to take our joy,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March, before singing along to the music.But while a band and a D.J. played upbeat songs at top volume, the crowd did not do much more than sway to the beat.The hastily arranged protest doubled as a dance party outside the headquarters of a conservative think tank.Tierney L. Cross for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s ‘golden age of America’ could be an unrestrained imperial presidency

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      At 2.25am, Donald Trump gazed out at his jubilant supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. He was surrounded by his wife, Melania, and his children, the Stars and Stripes and giant banners that proclaimed: “Dream big again” and “Trump will fix it!”“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump vowed. “We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”Having risen from the political dead, the president-elect was already looking ahead to what he called the “golden age of America” – a country that had just shifted sharply to the right. And at its core was the promise of Trump unleashed: a radical expansion of presidential power.The 45th and 47th commander-in-chief will face fewer limits on his ambition when he is sworn in again in January. He returns as the head of a Republican party remade in his image over the past decade and as the architect of a right-leaning judiciary that helped eliminate his legal perils. Second time around, he has allies across Washington ready to enforce his will.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, said: “What we’re going to have is an imperial presidency. This is going to be probably the most powerful presidency in terms of centralising power and wielding power that we’ve had probably since FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 until his death in 1945].”Trump won big in this week’s presidential election against Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-president. He became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote. He improved on his 2020 performance in every state except two (Washington and Utah) and made gains in nearly every demographic. A third of voters of colour supported him. Whereas Joe Biden won Latino men by 23 percentage points in 2020, Trump won them by 10 points in 2024.Emboldened by this mandate, Trump, who said he would be a “dictator”, but only on “day one”, is promising a second act more sweeping and transformational than the first. He is backed by a Republican party that regained control of the Senate, might retain the House of Representatives and is more acquiescent than ever. The opposition Democratic party is demoralised and lacks an obvious leader.Trump, who arrived in Washington as a political neophyte eight years ago, is less likely this time to be surrounded by establishment figures and steady hands curbing his darkest impulses. His allies have spent the past several months pre-screening candidates for his administration, aiming to ensure key posts will be filled by dependable foot soldiers. His pugnacious son Don Jr intends to have a say.Bardella added: “It’s going to be a more competent version of the first term. This time Donald Trump and his team know how the White House works. They know what type of personnel they need where to achieve what they want to achieve. They have, unlike last time, more of a complete hold of Congress.”Trump sceptics such as the House speaker Paul Ryan or the congresswoman Liz Cheney are gone, he noted, replaced by Maga devotees primed to do his bidding. “There’s going to be more continuity, more synergy, everyone’s going to march to the beat of the same drummer. There is no resistance within the Republican party any more and they are now facing a Democratic party that is leaderless, that is searching for its own identity, that’s going to have to recalibrate.”Trump will also expect compliance from a conservative supreme court that includes three of his own appointees. The court has loosened the legal guardrails that have hemmed past presidents in thanks to a July decision that gives presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.The 78-year-old businessman and former reality TV star also hopes to exploit a new universe of rightwing podcasters and influencers who were instrumental in his election and could help him shape the information ecosystem. Chief among these is X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who played a key role in the Trump campaign.Despite the daunting outlook, however, some commentators are optimistic that checks and balances will remain.Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen”, she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”Trump will return to power with an aggressive agenda that includes what his ally Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. He has proposed a government efficiency commission headed by Musk that would gut the federal bureaucracy. Trump plans to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. They could be replaced by what are essentially political appointees loyal to him.On his signature issue, illegal immigration, Trump has vowed to carry out the biggest deportation operation in American history, starting with people who have criminal records or final orders of deportation. He has called for using the national guard and empowering domestic police forces in what he has said will be “a bloody story”.He told Time magazine that he did not rule out building new migrant detention camps but “there wouldn’t be that much of a need for them” because people would be rapidly removed. His running mate, JD Vance, told the New York Times that deporting 1 million immigrants a year would be “reasonable”.During the election campaign Trump played down abortion as a second-term priority, even as he took credit for the supreme court ending a woman’s federal right to terminate a pregnancy and returning abortion regulation to state governments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt Trump’s insistence the Republican platform, for the first time in decades, did not call for a national ban on abortion. Even so, Trump has not explicitly said he would veto a national ban if it reached his desk. He has also indicated that he would let Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, “go wild” on public health matters, including women’s health. Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cut, reversing Joe Biden’s income tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and scrapping levies that fund energy measures to combat the climate crisis. Trump also has proposals aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting tips and overtime wages from income taxes.Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “He’s going to have a Republican Congress go through a deregulatory frenzy; they’re going to propose brutal spending cuts that will affect the people primarily that voted for them but also a lot of other poor people in the country.”Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and slash federal funding “for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children”. The Trump campaign made opposition to transgender rights a central part of its closing argument, with the president-elect vowing to “keep men out of women’s sports”. He plans to end Biden’s policy of extending Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students and ask Congress to require that only two genders can be recognised at birth.On the world stage, Trump touts an “America first” ideology that would make the US more isolationist, non-interventionist and protectionist than at any time since the second world war. He has proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% on foreign goods despite economists’ warnings that this would drive up inflation.Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and not ruled out withdrawing from Nato. He has said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within a day, prompting fears of a a deal that compels Ukraine to surrender territory, and reportedly told Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he wants the war in Gaza to be finished by January.Schmidt commented: “They will act very quickly in Ukraine to end the war while escalating the situation with Iran and you’ll see very quickly a tremendous amount of instability with Mexico. It’s going to be horrendous. It’s going to be shocking.”Trump, who falsely claims that the climate crisis is a “hoax”, has said he will again remove the US from the Paris climate accords and dismantle Biden’s climate agenda. He has promised to increase oil production and burn more fossil fuels – “Drill, baby, drill!” was a regular chant at Trump rallies – and weaken regulatory powers or eliminate bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.The ascent of Trump, the first convicted criminal to be elected president, is also a crisis for the rule of law. The justice department is moving to wind down the two federal cases against him after he vowed to fire the special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. Trump has vowed to bend the department to his will, pardon January 6 rioters and target journalists, election workers and other perceived political enemies.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “Will people who he believes broke the law in trying to persecute him and his friends be investigated? Yes. Will they be subject to all of the defense mechanisms and the fair trials that he was afforded? Absolutely.“I’m sure he looks at it and says, ‘I could have gone after Hillary, there’s a lot of reason to; I showed you an open hand and what did you do? You persecuted me for eight years. The gloves are off.’ That doesn’t mean anything other than, ‘OK, you decided to use these weapons, I now own the weapons. I’m going to use the weapons too.’ It’s not the end of American democracy.”Others, however, are less sanguine. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who campaigned for Harris this year, said: “It’s going to be a revenge tour on steroids. I don’t think people realise what’s coming. He is emboldened. He didn’t think he’d win in 2016. He lied about 2020 but oh my God, he thought he was going to win now, he did, and now he believes, ‘Man, they want me and they want what I’ve been promising and I’ve been promising this enemies list.“‘I’m going to put my enemies in jail, I’m going to fuck Nato, I’m going to do what Putin wants me to do.’ If I were the rest of the world and the country, I’d be scared to death because we just put an absolutely out-of-control authoritarian in the White House. That’s scary shit.”Trump’s strongman tendencies will receive defiance and pushback, however. Along with Congress and the courts, America has a robust civil society and rambunctious media. The Women’s March of 2017 set the tone for four years of resistance by progressive activists and pressure groups, an energy that converted into electoral gains in 2018, 2020 and 2022.Now, as Trump prepares for his once unthinkable return to the White House, these weary foot soldiers are preparing to do it all over again. That, in turn, raises the prospect of a fierce backlash from the would-be American Caesar who once asked authorities if they could just shoot protesters in the legs.“What am I worried about most?” pondered Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “The answer is that in response either to demonstrations in the streets or the exigencies of rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants here illegally, Mr Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act, which is the closest thing in American law to the declaration of martial law.“That prospect terrifies me. There’s very little else about the administration that terrifies me but the mass deployment of the US military in domestic affairs put us, I’m afraid, on a very slippery slope.” More

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      California’s attorney general readies the fight against Trump’s extreme agenda: ‘We’re prepared’

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      California was considered a leader in fighting the most extreme policies of Donald Trump’s first administration, and after the Republican’s decisive win this week, officials in the Golden state say they are more prepared to resist Trump’s expected agenda for his second term.Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, will be a crucial figure in that effort, tasked with spearheading litigation and defending vulnerable Californians’ rights in the courtroom. It’s a tall order as the president-elect has promised policies that could threaten the state’s immigrant population, LGBTQ+ residents, climate initiatives, gun safety measures, healthcare programs and abortion rights.But Bonta, in an interview with the Guardian on Thursday, said his office was ready on every front.“I know a lot of people are anxious and worried, concerned, fearful, angry, sad,” said the Democrat, who now occupies the seat previously held by Kamala Harris. “I’m not happy with the results, but I’m energized and ready to fight … I’m ready to do my job and lean in hard and punch back and push back and fight back against any attacks from the Trump administration on California’s ongoing progress.”Bonta’s efforts could have a significant impact in the most populous and diverse state in the US, home to the fifth largest economy in the world and considered a leader on progressive policies.In Trump’s first term, Bonta recalled, California successfully fought Trump’s “public charge” rule, which sought to block green cards for immigrants who accessed certain benefits, such as food stamps. The state also sued to prevent Trump from denying funds to sanctuary cities, and helped stop the former president’s effort to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program that protects immigrants who entered the US unauthorized as children.“Trump has a very difficult time resisting the temptation to violate the law,” said Bonta, saying he expected the president-elect to once again use executive action to make changes that require congressional action. “If he wanted to take a blowtorch to the Affordable Care Act and end it on day one by executive order … he can’t do it.” Trump recently said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the popular Obama-era program that expanded healthcare coverage, and his victory has raised alarms among public health advocates.Bonta said he had been in discussion with attorneys general across the US – sharing briefs, memos and knowledge from their fights during Trump’s first term – and they were primed to coordinate lawsuits as needed: “It’s all hands on deck, use every tool that you have. Litigation will certainly be one of the most potent and powerful ones.“We’ve been preparing for months, in some cases years,” he continued. After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, his staff wrote a legal brief to challenge a national abortion ban, a draft he has ready, if necessary. His staff has also monitored comments by Trump’s inner circle and reviewed Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for his second term drafted by Trump’s allies.“We’ve got a lot in our back pocket ready to drop,” he said. “In some [cases], the whole strategy is thought through – the court we file in, when we file it, based on what action the Trump administration takes. We’ve just gotta dot the Is and cross the Ts and press print. But we are very far along, very advanced in our preparation.”Trump has threatened unprecedented mass deportations, an agenda that was partially thwarted in his first term by California and other blue states that passed sanctuary laws limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents. California Democrats will face pressure from immigrant rights’ groups to expand those sanctuary policies, which advocates say are not currently the strongest in the nation. California prisons, for example, continue to coordinate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), which helps drive deportations, but Gavin Newsom, the state governor, has previously vetoed efforts to prevent cooperation with Ice.Bonta said officials should be exploring ways to “reinforce and strengthen” the existing sanctuary law, though he didn’t offer specifics.Newsom has called a special legislative session in December for lawmakers to discuss ways to “Trump-proof” state laws, and immigration will probably be a priority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The federal government can’t conscript or commandeer state or local resources or law enforcement agencies to do their job [of immigration enforcement],” Bonta said, describing the current sanctuary policies. “There could be some additions that could help make that stronger.”He said he would be looking for ways to ensure the sanctuary law is properly followed and implemented across the state. Advocates are also bracing for rightwing pro-Trump sheriffs in conservative counties to potentially violate California’s sanctuary rules. Bonta said he would respond if that happens: “They are law enforcement officers. They need to enforce the law. They can’t pick and choose the laws they want to enforce … if they’re going to politicize it and break the law, then we’ll be there to hold them accountable.”Trump has also promised a major rollback of LGBTQ+ rights and some of his campaign ads have spread significant misinformation about the rights of transgender Americans, particularly around healthcare and sports. He has pledged to revoke funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth, punish schools that affirm trans youth and push a law stating the government doesn’t legally recognize trans people.California was the first state in 2022 to establish itself as a sanctuary for trans kids seeking healthcare, and Bonta’s office successfully sued a local school district over its policy that would have required schools to out trans and gender non-conforming students to their parents.“We’ve been fighting on so many fronts against the attacks on our transgender kids, whether fighting for them to be able to play sports … or use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity, or be able to go to a doctor’s office and have gender-affirming care,” he said. “We will continue … The courts are a good place to find relief when you target and single out someone based on their protected class.”Bonta advocated for Harris during the election and was hoping he would not need to stand up to the federal government. “I didn’t want this outcome,” he said. “I was working to have a different outcome, but I couldn’t guarantee [it] … so we needed to be prepared for the possibility of [Trump]. Unfortunately, this outcome is here. Fortunately, though, we’re ready for it, because we prepared.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      in US Politics

      ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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      As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      in Elections

      On the Ballot, Abortion Rights Proved More Popular Than Kamala Harris

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      In states like Arizona and Nevada, some voters split their tickets, supporting abortion rights measures while also backing Donald Trump.Democrats headed into the election hoping that abortion rights initiatives would drive support for Kamala Harris in states where the measures appeared on the ballot, including two presidential swing states, Arizona and Nevada.But while the ballot measures, broadly put, performed well on Tuesday, succeeding in seven out of 10 states, Ms. Harris and other Democrats underperformed them across the map.In both Arizona and Nevada, more than 60 percent of voters approved measures to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions, though more votes remained to be counted on Thursday. But Donald J. Trump appeared on track to win both states, according to New York Times estimates. Abortion rights initiatives also passed in Missouri and Montana, two states Mr. Trump won easily.Even as a growing share of women said abortion access was central to their vote, pre-election polling suggested that it wasn’t voters’ top concern overall. Fifteen percent of likely voters in an October national New York Times/Siena College poll said abortion was the most important issue in their vote for president, but roughly twice as many listed the economy, or inflation.The voters who cited abortion as their top concern favored Ms. Harris, 88 percent to 11 percent, and the voters who prioritized economic issues favored Mr. Trump, 72 percent to 24 percent.In states where the ballot measures passed but Mr. Trump won or was leading, voters had, in effect, split their tickets, supporting abortion rights in their states while also backing a candidate who took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, which had established a nationwide right to abortion. Ms. Harris had made protecting abortion rights a central theme of her campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Today is a day of despair for America. We are plunged into an anticipatory grief | Moira Donegan

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      Today is a day of despair, and it would be futile to tell those who fear and grieve for what is to come in America that they will be OK. It would also be dishonest: many of us, in truth, will not be OK.Donald Trump appears to have decisively won the American election. He and his Republican allies have promised mass deportations that will ruin lives and sunder families; they have threatened to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and appoint the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to a position of authority on public health. They have pledged vast cuts to social security and Medicare, the persecution of dissidents and violent suppression of Trump’s political enemies. There will almost certainly be a nationwide abortion ban and this will further degrade women’s citizenship, rob them of their dignity, steal their dreams and ruin their health.For those of us aware of what Trump is capable of, this morning has plunged us into a cold kind of anticipatory grief. There are people in America who are reading the news with worry, who are bracing themselves for crackdowns and unrest, and who will, inevitably, be confirmed in their anxiety; who will discover that they have even more to fear from the coming administration than they now know. I’m thinking of all the ordinary Americans who are alive now, thriving or struggling in this declining country, who will have their lives destroyed or cut short by what is coming.For many, Trump’s victory will remind them of nothing so much as his 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton. Once again, his vulgarity, corruption, pettiness, narcissism and bigotry have been rewarded, at our expense; once again, the nation will be plunged into chaos as his vanity, greed, incompetence and anger take precedence over the national interest; once again, a violently and grossly misogynist man has been elevated to a position of superlative power over a flawed but competent, hardworking woman.But 2024 is not 2016. It is worse. In his first term, Trump’s incompetence was often an impediment to the worst of his agenda; no longer. Institutions, both in the government and in civil society, worked to slow or resist his program; now, many of them seem all too willing to participate, with universities and NGOs eager to launder Trumpism into respectability and the billionaire-controlled media eager to cut deals, suppress unfavorable coverage and minimize his misdeeds. And if in his first term Trump’s impulses were sometimes mitigated by moderates and institutionalists in his administration, by now those people have all been purged. He is surrounded by incels, bigots, conspiracists and sadists, and they are much better prepared to use the organs of the state to pursue their hateful aims. Trump himself even has the promise of broad criminal immunity, a recent gift from the supreme court that will enable his authoritarianisms in ways we cannot yet anticipate.But Trump’s victory, and his return to the White House, will not only be a catastrophe because of what they will mean for America’s future. They are also a horror for what they will do to our past. The last eight years, four under Trump’s governance and four under what American politics has become due to his influence, have prompted tremendous struggle and suffering. The groups he disparages – from immigrants, to women, to disabled people, to those from “shithole countries” – will be humiliated again by his return and betrayed by the countrymen who refused to vindicate their dignity with a vote against him. The people who have been harassed and threatened and attacked by his supporters have now seen their countrymen treat the violence that has been done to them with what they will read as indifference at best, and approval at worst.The historically marginalized among us – those who are Black, or trans, or female – have struggled to make their worthiness and citizenship meaningful in spite of the hatred and hierarchy that Trump has championed. This was the aim of the Women’s Marches, of #MeToo, of Black Lives Matter, which were in part rebukes to Trumpism, and symptoms of the desire for a different America, one that is less cruel to its citizens and more worthy of its stated ideals of liberty and justice for all. They dreamed of turning this country into a free nation of equals; instead, they must now settle for the smaller dream of keeping themselves safe from the worst of what is to come. Trump’s return to the presidency makes these bygone years of activism seem, in retrospect, like a humiliating exercise in futility.Does America deserve Trump? In the years since he rose to power, one theory posits that he is merely the manifestation of the nation’s unexorcised demons – a vestige of the racism that allowed this country to build its economy off the backs of the enslaved, of the casual relationship to violence that allowed it to build its territory and its global hegemony through violent conquest and coercion, of the grubby love of money and shameless disregard for principle that have always motivated our rapacious economy. In this version of the story, Trump is not merely a morbid symptom, but something like America’s comeuppance, a punishment for our sins. Living under his rule takes on the grim appropriateness of one of those ironic punishments in the underworlds of classical mythology, or in the hell of Dante’s Inferno. It is a feature of this horror that those who suffer most under his rule are usually those who are least culpable for these trespasses. Because we never really atoned – not for slavery, not for empire, not for the slaughter and dispossession of Indigenous Americans or the war and exploitation of foreign countries – this is what we now must endure: a figure who brings these cruelties home and who mocks our self-flattering delusion that we ever were, ever could have been, anything else.And yet there remain so many Americans who hope for this country to be something else, if only because they will not survive it otherwise. In the coming days, those who tried to prevent this outcome will turn on one another. Liberals and leftists will point fingers; various Harris campaign staffers will be named responsible for failed strategies in this or that state; someone will make a racist bid to scapegoat Arab Americans and the Uncommitted movement; and many people, smug and insulated from the worst of what is to come, will say that the Democratic party spent too much time campaigning on abortion rights issues.There is plenty of blame to go around. But for the most part, this finger-pointing will be a distraction, a way of putting off the confrontation with what is coming. Instead, I hope that we can turn our attention to the most vulnerable among us: those Trump has antagonized and ridiculed, those who are less safe today than they hoped they might be yesterday. It is those targeted groups who need us, our solidarity and careful attention. In turning to them, we can keep alive in ourselves some small part of the America that Donald Trump seeks to destroy.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Florida’s Abortion Rights Ballot Measure Fails, Keeping Six-Week Ban in Place

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      A ballot measure that would have enshrined abortion rights in the Florida Constitution failed, according to The Associated Press, delivering a major defeat to proponents who had hoped to restore broad access to the procedure in the nation’s third-largest state.The measure, known as Amendment 4, won 57 percent of the vote, falling short of the 60 percent required for passage. It would have allowed abortions “before viability,” usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Florida bans most abortions after six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant.The defeat, while not unexpected, halted what had been an unbroken winning streak for abortion rights groups on ballot measures since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Voters sided with abortion rights in all seven states that had ballot questions on the issue before this year, in states as different as Kansas and California. But the highest vote that any of those earlier measures won in red states was 59 percent, just under what Florida, with its higher threshold, needed to pass.The Florida measure’s failure is a political victory for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who had become the face of a well-funded and well-organized opposition campaign. He spent much of his political capital, and considerable state resources, to defeat it. Another ballot measure that Mr. DeSantis and his allies strongly opposed, which would have legalized marijuana in the state, was also defeated.Mr. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers enacted a 15-week abortion ban in 2022 and the six-week ban in 2023. Florida had previously allowed abortions up to 24 weeks and had been a destination for women in other Southern states with stricter laws.Organizers of the Yes on 4 campaign raised more than $100 million to get the measure on the ballot and campaign for it, knowing it would be a difficult battle. Though similar measures have passed in other conservative states, Florida’s 60 percent threshold is higher. Going into Election Day, polls showed support hovering around 60 percent.The nonpartisan Yes on 4 campaign knew that it would need support from Democrats, Republicans and voters with no party affiliation. Organizers hoped that enough Republican-leaning voters would vote yes even if they also supported anti-abortion candidates.Former President Donald J. Trump, a Florida resident, had opposed Amendment 4, after initially suggesting that he might support it.Eric Adelson More