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      ‘Safety beats idealism’: our panel reacts to Biden’s decision to run again | LaTosha Brown, Jill Filipovic, Osita Nwanevu, Bhaskar Sunkara

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      LaTosha Brown: ‘Biden can hold together a big tent’After surviving the Trump debacle, it was important that we had an administration that could re-establish some level of credibility in the political arena. Given the volatility of the current political environment and the depth of political division in America, Biden has demonstrated he is able to hold together a big tent of diverse groups and push an agenda.We need political leadership from someone who believes in democracy, can navigate the intense political polarization of this moment, and bring some sense of civility back to American politics.While I remain a critic of Biden’s criminal justice reform policies, it is astounding, given the obstructionist efforts of the Republican party to block any measurable progress, that he has been able to get so much of his agenda through a deeply divided Congress. Whether or not one agrees with all his policies, he has been an effective president.We live in a country that is riddled with “isms” – including ageism. Aside from the false and fear-based narratives planted by rightwing Republicans, there is nothing in Biden’s leadership, decision-making or policies that indicates he is incapable of leading or serving as president.
      LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter
      Jill Filipovic: ‘Safety beats idealism’It pains me to say this, but Joe Biden should run for re-election.Biden was toward the bottom of my picks during the 2020 Democratic primary. He’s a moderate Democrat, and he’s lackluster when it comes to the issues I care most about: women’s rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights, immigration. While Biden has become more adept at using the right language on these issues, his administration’s policies have ranged from largely absent (abortion) to terrible (immigration).Still: he should run, and I will vote for him if he does.The specter of another Donald Trump presidency, or a Ron DeSantis presidency, is a national emergency. Trump attempted to foment a coup; he is on the campaign trail making clear that, if he wins, he will lean even harder into American fascism than he did the last time around. DeSantis, who seems less and less likely to win the Republican nomination by the day, is well into the process of turning Florida into an authoritarian state, where the government is seizing everything from the right to one’s own body to the right to knowledge.Biden has proven he is capable of beating Trump. He’s also been a surprisingly good president, pushing through legislation that fights climate change, supports American job growth, and helped Americans stay afloat during the pandemic.There are other candidates I would be excited about: Senator Elizabeth Warren; Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; and Congresswomen Katie Porter and Ayanna Pressley. But I worry that any of those women would lose to Trump, despite their superior intelligence and qualifications.Joe Biden is not the most thrilling choice. But he’s the safest one. And with the country facing a grave threat from Donald Trump, safety beats idealism.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
      Osita Nwanevu: ‘Too late to change course’Is it a good idea for Biden to run again? Well, let’s think through what would happen if he didn’t. While most Americans and a substantial proportion of Democrats don’t want to see him in office again, bowing out would still take most of his party by surprise. Harris hasn’t cemented herself as a natural successor; a chaotic, unwieldy, and wide-open primary would begin immediately. There’d be a mad scramble for donors and attention followed by months and months of doubtlessly amusing heat and noise that would end with the nomination of a candidate that would be perhaps unknown to most of the public and lack the advantages of incumbency.Republicans would argue that Biden’s about-face reflected a lack of confidence in Democratic accomplishments and the Democratic agenda; many Americans, already rather unimpressed with Biden’s substantively respectable legislative record, would probably agree.There might have been an opening for an alternative ⁠– if Biden had signaled that he’d step away last year or even earlier in his term, there would have been more time for a primary field to develop and introduce itself to the electorate in an orderly way. But it’s simply too late now. Joe’s the guy, for better or for worse.
      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘There appears no real successor to Biden’If the goal is the surest route to beat Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or whatever Republican emerges out of the 2024 primary, then the answer to whom the Democrats should run should be clear. Joe Biden is an incumbent who just beat a sitting president in an election less than three years ago.Even if he doesn’t always take advantage of it, Biden commands the White House’s bully pulpit. And, amid the backdrop of an improving economy, Trump’s legal issues, and the public outrage at the Republican party’s crusade against abortion rights, he would enter any contest as a favorite.Still, we should be very clear that Biden will only be favored to win an election because of the people he’s up against. The president is unpopular, he hasn’t made good on his self-proclaimed “New Deal-sized” ambitions, and a large majority of Americans don’t want him to run again.Yet at the national level, there appears to be no real successor to Biden. Even if health were to prevent him from running again in 2024, among mainstream Democrats Kamala Harris is also unpopular and plagued by reports of mismanagement within her office. On the left, the situation is just as bleak. Bernie Sanders is even older than Biden, and none of his vaunted successors, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have proven electorally viable beyond deep-blue districts or managed to emulate the Vermont senator’s plainspoken class-warrior language.Hopefully, that will change by 2028. In the meantime, however, both centrist and progressive Democrats alike have a lot of work to do cohering a base and getting candidates ready to contest for power. Biden may be the best answer to 2024’s stupid question – and that’s an indictment of the Democratic party’s last few years.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      An end to political deadlock? Arizona’s experiment with third parties

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      In a swing state that’s likely to decide the next presidential election, two new third parties want to get on the ballot and other groups want to remake the way votes are cast and counted.Arizona, which voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 as the state has grown more purple, could see big shifts to its political establishment in the next year, all premised on the idea that the dominance of the two main political parties creates dysfunction and prevents progress on issues that matter to voters. That has Democrats and Republicans here worried.One new party, No Labels, gathered enough signatures to put candidates on the ballot in 2024. Another new party, Forward, is starting to gather signatures to get ballot status.Separately, a coalition of voting groups has surveyed voters to understand their thoughts on ranked-choice voting and open primaries in an effort to run a 2024 ballot measure that would greenlight the concepts in Arizona.While similar efforts are afoot in other states and nationwide, Arizona provides a fertile place to experiment with attempts to reimagine elections.About one-third of Arizona voters aren’t registered with a political party. Both major parties try to court these independent voters to build winning coalitions. In recent years, Democrats have been more successful at amassing independent support, though Republicans dominated for decades before that.The state also has one of the country’s most prominent independents – Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat who left the party earlier this year and hasn’t said whether or how she’ll run to keep her seat in 2024.Because of its new status as a swing state, donors are now much more interested in spending money in Arizona. This influx of cash means more groups can afford to gather signatures and promote ballot measures, both of which can cost millions in Arizona.And with a state Republican party that’s affixed to the far right, there’s an opening for centrist and center-right candidates who could seek support from moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents.The level of extremism and dysfunction shows why a two-party system with closed primaries doesn’t work, said longtime consultant Chuck Coughlin, who is working with Save Democracy Arizona, a group advancing ranked-choice voting in Arizona.“You did experience the same election I just did, did you not? You did experience this overwhelming feeling of joy with candidates you had to choose from?” he joked about the vitriolic 2022 campaigns. “The obvious answer is because the system is so badly broken right now.”The rise of third partiesPaul Bentz, a Republican consultant and pollster in Arizona, said the dissatisfaction with the two main parties has created a lane for third parties. One big hurdle, though, is that independents often pride themselves on their lack of party affiliation.“What independents do care about is the candidates, and they want to choose based on the issues,” Bentz said. “So if this gives a platform for an alternative individual to present different issues and let independents choose them, that would be something that’s very attractive to them. But there is no independent party because independents specifically don’t want to be part of a party.”No Labels, a centrist party founded in 2010, so far has ballot status in Alaska, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, though the group wants to be on the ballot in 22 states by the end of the year, spokesperson Maryanne Martini said.It’s not clear if the party will run any candidates in Arizona next year. Martini said the group isn’t actively recruiting candidates at this point.Soon after No Labels gained ballot status, the Arizona Democratic party sued to try to get it removed. Democrats overall have been more vocally concerned than Republicans about these incoming centrist parties, fearing they will peel off votes from the left and spoil races for Democrats.In its lawsuit, the Arizona Democratic party alleges No Labels isn’t following requirements for political parties and didn’t follow laws for signature-gathering, so it shouldn’t be recognized as a party in the state.“Arizonans deserve better and voters deserve to know who is behind this shadowy organization and what potentially nefarious agenda they are pushing,” the Arizona Democratic party spokesperson Morgan Dick said when the lawsuit was announced.Martini called the lawsuit “undemocratic and outrageous”.“If either party in Arizona is worried about a No Labels candidate taking votes away from them, we think they should focus more on appealing to the growing commonsense majority they often ignore and less on filing baseless lawsuits to try to kick competitors off the ballot,” she said.The Forward party, a moderate party co-chaired by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, has legal status in six states and is working toward it in nearly two dozen others this year. In addition to gathering signatures, the party is hosting community events in Arizona to build support, said Chris Hendrickson, the state lead for the party.At a kick-off event in March, four Democratic members of the Arizona house of representatives declared themselves “Forward Democrats”. They aren’t leaving their party, but they support Forward’s mission. Last year, Forward endorsed Democratic US senator Mark Kelly and independent congressional candidate Clint Smith.“I don’t think the objective is to push out any one party or another,” Hendrickson said. “We really need to have four or five legitimate parties who all bring something to the table.”A lot of the consternation over centrist parties relates to the 2024 presidential election. Democrats worry a third-party candidate could cost them the presidency and throw the election to Republicans, possibly to Trump.No Labels said it “is not running and will not run a presidential campaign”. The Forward party also said it won’t run a presidential candidate in 2024 and is primarily interested in state and local elections.Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said the third parties would serve more to hurt Democrats than dismantle a two-party system, though he understands voters’ interest in ending two-party dominance.“The problem is adding minor parties doesn’t put an end to a two-party system,” Cani said. “It just creates new minor parties that will end up with the same chance of winning elections as the Libertarian and Green parties.”A push for ranked-choice votingOther groups want to see the way Arizonans vote change to allow more moderate candidates to win elections and force the parties to run more broadly appealing campaigns.Ranked-choice voting comes in different forms, but typically asks voters to rank candidates in order of their preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t get enough votes, their second and subsequent choices are counted until someone gets more than 50% of votes. The system sometimes necessitates an open primary election, where voters don’t need to select which party’s primary to participate in.Coughlin, the consultant who’s working on a potential ballot measure, said the group is still surveying voters to understand whether a measure could be successful. So far, the groups are looking at a final-five version of voting, where all candidates appear on one primary ballot and the top five move to a general.“Our goal is to make sure that nobody can win in a primary and that all of the decisions are made in November and that we create the greatest amount of competition possible,” he said.Ranked-choice voting confuses some voters, but the idea of open primaries tends to get more support. Partisan, closed primaries are now paid for by taxpayers in Arizona, and focus groups have strongly favored defunding them, Coughlin said.To gather enough signatures and then run a campaign to support a ranked-choice ballot measure would cost around $20m. Coughlin said the group would need to start collecting signatures by August.Though Save Democracy Arizona may not shoot for a ballot measure next year, the idea of ranked-choice voting has Republican lawmakers pushing proposed laws to stop the effort.Republicans in the legislature sent a question to the ballot for next year that would prohibit anything but the kind of primary elections Arizona has now. That means there could be measures to approve ranked-choice voting and to prohibit it on the same ballot.They also approved a bill that prohibits ranked-choice voting at any level in Arizona, though that proposal was vetoed. The Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, said the bill was unnecessary as the practice isn’t used in Arizona, and that ranked-choice voting “is used successfully elsewhere in the country”. More

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      Biden expected to announce 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday

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      Joe Biden is expected to announce his 2024 re-election campaign as early as Tuesday, possibly setting the stage for an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.A Tuesday launch would come exactly four years after Biden announced his 2020 presidential bid, in which he warned that the “soul” of the nation was at stake after four tumultuous years under Trump.More than two years into his own presidency, Biden has struggled to heal political and cultural divisions he believes are tearing American society. But he has racked up a list of legacy defining legislative accomplishments while working to restore US leadership on the world stage.Following Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the November midterms, Biden has been open about his intention to seek a second term. For months, the question was not if he would run, but when and how he would announce.Just before leaving Ireland earlier this month, Biden declared that the ancestral journey had reinforced a “sense of optimism” about what he might accomplish. He told reporters the “calculus” on a second term had been completed and he planned to run. An announcement, he said, would come “relatively soon”.Asked again on Monday, Biden replied: “I told you I’m planning on running. I’ll let you know real soon.”Partial to symmetry and nostalgia, Biden appears to have signed off on a plan to announce his 2024 campaign with a video outlining his vision, as he did in 2019. The president is scheduled to speak at the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ US Legislative Conference in Washington on Tuesday, an echo of his first campaign event in 2019, when he spoke at a union hall in Pittsburgh.Much has changed. The pandemic that reshaped US life for nearly three years has receded, due in large part to the mass vaccination campaign the Biden administration oversaw. Decades-high inflation is abating, though economic uncertainty lingers. A loss of federal abortion protections and threats to democratic institutions have fueled Democrats in key battleground elections.“Part of the case President Biden will make to the public after he announces his reelection campaign is that he needs more time to do more and build on the things he has done during his first term,” Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on her MSNBC show on Sunday. “That’s the message: ‘Let me finish the job I started.’”Biden’s team is touting the historically productive start to his term, which included a pandemic-relief package that temporarily halved child poverty; a generational investment in infrastructure; rare action to reform gun laws; a wide-ranging effort to combat climate crisis; lower healthcare costs; and efforts to boost US competitiveness and arrest inflation, leading to an unexpectedly successful midterm election season.With Republicans in control of the House and major legislative action unlikely, Biden has focused the second half of his term on selling these policies to the public. Visits to Japan and Australia next month will bring an opportunity to emphasize efforts to rally the world in defense of Ukraine and against the growing influence of China.But Biden will also have to contend with voter disapproval of his handling of the economy and Republican attacks on immigration.Perhaps most urgently, Biden must decide how to engage with House Republicans in a debt limit standoff. The speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has proposed dramatic spending cuts, including to Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare bill, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling and avoiding default. Accusing Republicans of holding the economy hostage in order to cut social programs, the White House has repeatedly called on Congress to keep negotiations over the debt ceiling separate from debate about fiscal restraint.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Already the oldest president in American history at 80, he would be 86 by the end of a second term. Polling has consistently shown that most Americans, including a majority of Democrats, do not want him to seek re-election. That lack of enthusiasm is especially prevalent among young voters, who were skeptical of Biden in 2020 but ultimately turned out in high numbers to help him beat Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has also tangled with progressives who accuse him of returning to his moderate roots on crime, immigration and climate. Yet the desire to keep Trump or a Trumpian alternative out of the White House remains strong among Democrats and independents. Most Democrats say they will back Biden if he is their nominee.While Biden is not expected to face any major challenge for the nomination, the field of Republican contenders remains unsettled. Trump leads the pack.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is expected to jump into the race, offering a combative alternative to Trump, who faces legal challenges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents, payments to a porn star, a rape allegation and his business affairs.Biden is also confronting a legal inquiry into his handling of classified documents as vice-president and before that as a Delaware senator.Biden ran unsuccessfully for president twice before 2020. To defeat Trump, he mobilized a coalition of young people, women and voters of color while persuading independents soured on his opponent.Biden presented himself as a bridge to the next generation of leaders. But with his mind now made up about a second term, and little agreement over who might succeed him if he did step aside, he appears best placed to be the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.“Running for the president the first time is aspirational. You can make all sorts of big bold promises,” Psaki said. “Running for reelection is when you actually get your report card from the American people.” More

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      AOC: ‘Better for country’ if Dominion had secured Fox News apology

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      Dominion Voting Systems would have better served the US public had it refused to settle its $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News until the network agreed to apologise on air for spreading Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.“What would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that,” the New York congresswoman said.Dominion and Fox this week reached a $787.5m settlement, shortly before trial was scheduled to begin in a Delaware court.Legal filings laid out how in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s election win and the run-up to the January 6 attack on Congress, Fox News hosts repeated claims they knew to be untrue, as executives feared viewers would desert the network for rightwing competitors One America News and Newsmax.Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul and Fox News owner, was among witnesses due to testify.Fox faces other legal challenges but its avoidance of an apology to Dominion caused widespread comment, with some late-night hosts moved to construct their own on-air mea culpas.Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, acknowledged Dominion was not beholden to public opinion.“This was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages,” she told the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, on Sunday. “Their job is to go in and get the most money that they can. And I think that they did that. They are not lawyers for the American public.”The congresswoman continued: “I think what is best for the country, what would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that. But that is not their role.“And so for us, I think this really raises much larger questions. Very often, I believe that we leave to the courts to solve issues that politics is really supposed to solve, that our legislating is supposed to solve.“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air. And we saw that with January 6. And we saw that in the lead-up to January 6, and how we navigate questions not just of freedom of speech but also accountability for incitement of violence.”Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 Capitol attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack. Acquitted by Senate Republicans, he is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.Asked if media platforms should be held accountable for incitement, Ocasio-Cortez said: “When it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.“And when you look at what [the primetime host] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” More

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      Supreme court justices think selves exempt from rules, top Democrat says

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      Dick Durbin, the Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee leading a push for supreme court ethics reform, accused the top court of being a panel of “nine justices [who] believe they are exempt from the basic standards of disclosure”.His claim came amid growing criticism of the conservative justice Clarence Thomas, whose judicial record is under scrutiny after he became embroiled in scandal over taking undeclared gifts from a Republican mega-donor.The last US Congress considered a bill demanding the inclusion of the supreme court in existing judicial conference regulations but it did not clear the Senate and the chief justice, John Roberts, has been mostly silent on the issue.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Durbin said he hoped Roberts would take advantage of an invitation to testify before the judiciary committee on 2 May, to explain how he intended to handle ethics reform.“This is John Roberts’s court,” the Illinois Democrat said. “We are dealing with a situation where history will remember it as such. He is an articulate, well-schooled man when it comes to presenting his point of view. I’m sure he’ll do well before the committee.“But history is going to judge the Roberts court by his decision as to reform, and I think this is an invitation for him to present it to the American people.”Asked why he didn’t ask Thomas to appear, Durbin said: “I know what would happen to that invitation. It would be ignored. It is far better from my point of view to have the chief justice here.”Durbin’s statement that he thought all nine justices considered themselves above ethics standards came when he was asked what a code of conduct might look like.“[It] would look an awful lot like the code that applies to the rest of federal government and other judges, and basically would have timely disclosures of transactions like this purchase of the justice’s mother’s home,” he said, referring to Thomas’s failure to declare the sale to the mega-donor Harlan Crow.“It would also give standards for recusal so that if there’s going to be conflict before the court and recusal, it’d be explained publicly, and investigations of questions that are raised. It’s the same across the board code of conduct, ethics laws, applied to the court.“Why this supreme court, these nine justices, believe they are exempt from the basic standards of disclosure, I cannot explain.”Durbin’s invitation to Roberts did not mention Thomas, referring instead to “a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and, indeed, of public servants generally”.The court’s “decade-long failure” to address those problems has “contributed to a crisis of public confidence”, Durbin wrote.He said the 2 May hearing would focus on “the ethical rules that govern the justices of the supreme court and potential reforms to those rules”, noting that the “scope of your testimony can be limited to these subjects, and that you would not be expected to answer questions from senators regarding any other matters”. More

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      Limit access to US secret documents, Democrat says in response to leaks

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      Too many people have access to the US government’s closest secrets and a central entity should oversee the classification process, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said on Sunday, addressing leaks of documents in an online chat group.A US air national guardsman was charged on 14 April with leaking classified documents on the Discord platform.It is believed to be the most serious US security breach since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2010.On Sunday, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told ABC’s This Week that “once we get to that highest level of classification, we maybe have too many folks taking a look at them, over 4 million people with clearances”.The senator’s powerful position gives weight to his recommendations as Joe Biden’s administration examines the handling of intelligence and looks for ways to clamp down on future leaks.The US has numerous intelligence-gathering entities and Warner said the situation needed to be dealt with.“We need somebody fully in charge of the whole classification process and I think for those classified documents there ought to be a smaller universe,” he said.As an example, Warner said the National Security Agency has suffered leaks in the past – notably including the disclosures by Edward Snowden in 2013 – and internal controls now limit the copying of documents.The Pentagon has called the latest leak a “deliberate, criminal act”.Warner also said that not everyone handling a document needs to see the whole document and that just seeing the header could be enough. More

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      Democratic states stockpile abortion pills as legal fight for access looms

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      Despite a reprieve by the US supreme court, a growing number of Democratic states are stockpiling abortion pills as the legal fight for access to the abortion drug mifepristone is set to continue.On Friday, the supreme court decided to temporarily block a lower court ruling that would have significantly restricted the availability of mifepristone, an FDA-approved abortion medication.Nevertheless, as the case continues to wind through America’s court system and remains challenged by anti-abortion groups, more Democratic states are now stockpiling abortion pills amid an unpredictable legal battle.Earlier this month, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction that suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, calling it a drug that is used to “kill the unborn human”.Swiftly after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, Democratic states have been stockpiling abortion pills including mifepristone as well as misoprostol, the second drug in the abortion regimen which can also be used on its own, although less effectively.At the Massachusetts governor Maura Healey’s request, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has purchased approximately 15,000 doses of mifepristone. The stockpile is expected to offer “sufficient coverage” in the state for over a year.“Mifepristone has been used safely for more than 20 years and is the gold standard. Here in Massachusetts, we are not going to let one extremist judge in Texas turn back the clock on this proven medication and restrict access to care in our state,” Healey said last week.Meanwhile, the Democratic governors of New York and California both announced plans to stockpile misoprostol in attempts to safeguard their states’ abortion access.New York’s governor Kathy Hochul announced last week that New York will be purchasing misoprostol in order to stockpile 150,000 doses, a five-year supply.Hochul also pledged that if mifepristone is removed from the market, New York will commit up to an additional $20m to providers to support other abortion methods.In a similar move, governor Gavin Newsom of California announced last week that the state has secured an emergency stockpile of up to 2m misoprostol pills“We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California,” Newsom said, adding that California has shared the negotiated terms of its misoprostol purchase agreement to assist other states in securing the pill at low cost.Since then, additional Democratic states have followed suit.The governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, recently announced a partnership with the University of Maryland’s medical system to purchase a “substantial amount of mifepristone”.“This purchase is another example of our administration’s commitment to ensure Maryland remains a safe haven for abortion access and quality reproductive health care,” said Moore, who also released $3.5m in previously withheld funding for the state’s abortion care clinical training program.On Thursday, Oregon made a similar announcement, with its governor Tina Kotek revealing the state has secured a three-year supply of mifepristone, regardless of the supreme court’s ruling on the pill.“Here in Oregon, I will make sure that patients are able to access the medication they need and providers are able to provide that medication without unnecessary, politically motivated interference and intimidation,” Kotek said.With Democratic states rushing to stock up on abortion pills, the tumultuous legal fight for abortion access is far from over. In the last nine months, 13 states have banned abortion. With anti-abortion groups fighting for increased pill restrictions nationwide, even states that have legalized the procedure may become affected.Following the supreme court’s decision to temporarily block mifepristone restrictions, the next stage of the litigious battle over the drug will take place in the fifth circuit, with oral arguments scheduled for 17 May. The case will then likely return back to the supreme court.In a statement to the New York Times, Erik Baptist, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization representing a coalition of anti-abortion groups and doctors, pledged to continue fighting against abortion care.“The FDA must answer for the damage it has caused to the health of countless women and girls and the rule of law by failing to study how dangerous the chemical abortion drug regimen is and unlawfully removing every meaningful safeguard, even allowing for mail-order abortions,” he said about the 23-year-old FDA-approved drug.Meanwhile, the Joe Biden administration and civil rights organizations promised to continue fighting for reproductive rights.“I’ll continue to fight attacks on women’s health. The American people must also continue to use their vote as their voice and elect a Congress that will restore the protections of Roe v Wade,” Biden tweeted shortly after the supreme court issued its decision.The American Civil Liberties Union echoed similar sentiments, with Jennifer Dalven, ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project director saying: “Make no mistake, we aren’t out of the woods by any means … And as this baseless lawsuit shows, extremists will use every trick in the book to try to ban abortion nationwide.”Dalven added: “But if our opponents think we will allow them to continue to pursue their extreme goals without fierce backlash, they are sorely mistaken.” More