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      in US Politics

      More Americans are stockpiling abortion pills without pregnancy – study

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      More Americans are now stockpiling abortion pills in case they get pregnant, according to new research published Tuesday.Before Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, Aid Access, an organization that mails abortion pills to people across the US, received an average of 25 requests a day from people seeking the pills despite not being pregnant. After the leak of the supreme court decision to overturn Roe, that average shot up to 247 requests each day, the research published on Tuesday found.That number fell after the actual decision, but rose again to 172 a day in April 2023, as US courts signaled a willingness to restrict the availability of a major abortion pill.People have been turning to Aid Access for “advance provision” pills since September 2021, after Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban but long before the US supreme court overturned Roe and abolished the national right to abortion. Now, with wide swathes of the US south and midwest under abortion bans, an online market to request and obtain abortion pills is thriving.The study tracks requests between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023. In December 2023, the US supreme court announced that it would hear arguments in a case regarding the future of mifepristone, a major abortion pill. That case is expected to be decided by this summer.In total, over the study’s time frame, Aid Access tracked roughly 48,400 advance provision requests. It received more requests for advance provision pills from states that were anticipated to enact bans – even more than the requests from states that did enact bans.“It seems to suggest that what people are reacting to is the threat of reduced access, the threat of curtailment of reproductive rights,” said Dr Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study. “When you think about what advanced provision is, that makes sense, right? Advanced provision is getting out ahead of things. Advanced provision is advanced planning. Advanced provision is a way to protect a potential need you might have in the future if you think access to the service that would fulfill that need is going away.”Over the study period, Aid Access also received more than 147,00 requests from people seeking to end their existing pregnancies. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to “self-manage” your own abortion, or perform an abortion outside of the formal US healthcare system, using pills within the first trimester of pregnancy.Compared with the people who wanted to terminate their existing pregnancies, people who sought advance provision pills were more likely to be white, child-free and living in urban areas. Choosing from a list of reasons, they most frequently told Aid Access that they wanted the pills to “ensure personal health and choice” and to “prepare for possible abortion restrictions”.Aid Access was launched in 2018 by Dr Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and one of the most visible abortion providers in the world. Gomperts, who co-authored the study published Tuesday, previously founded Women on Web, an organization that, like Aid Access, shipped abortion pills. However, Women on Web didn’t provide pills to the United States. Ultimately, Gomperts decided that the state of abortion access in the country was too dire to ignore.Advance provision pills cost $150 and should arrive within a few days of ordering, according to Aid Access’s website. During the time frame of the study, most of the pills were being shipped by overseas pharmacies, Aiken said.Now, to send abortion pills, US-based physicians associated with Aid Access have begun to rely on what are known as “shield laws”: protections in Democratic states for abortion providers who prescribe pills for patients in abortion-hostile states. This transition to focusing on using US providers was part of the reason for the study’s conclusion in April, Aiken said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It made sense to look at a time period where the service was entirely outside of the formal US healthcare setting,” Aiken said. “Now, I think a lot of people would argue that it’s happening within the formal healthcare setting, because it’s US provider-led and -based.”But while the US providers in blue states may be operating with the formal healthcare system, their patients in red states are not necessarily afforded the system’s protections and guidance. Someone who wants to get a check-up after an abortion, or even just talk to their doctor about their experience, may not feel able to.“In terms of the experience of the person actually using the pills, it may still look a lot more like a self-managed abortion,” Aiken said. “What that means for the nature of the service is an ongoing, interesting question that we’re thinking about now in the research field.”There was not much data available on what people ended up doing with the advance provision pills, Aiken said, since only a fraction followed up with Aid Access. However, of that fraction, most people still had the pills on standby months later.Last year, Gompertstold the Guardian that she wanted people to stock up on pills to protect themselves.“Don’t wait for the decision. Just get the medication now, get it in your house, get it in your hands,” she said. “If you’re in a war zone and the war is coming, you also make sure you have enough food in your house. This is how it feels. It really is a war. It’s a war on women.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump appeals ruling that would keep him off Maine 2024 primary ballot

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      Donald Trump formally appealed a decision by Maine’s top election official to remove him from the ballot on Tuesday, asking a superior court to reverse the decision.Maine secretary of state Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, removed Trump from the ballot on 28 December, saying the former president had violated section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars officials from holding office if they engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.The filing in the superior court for Kennebec county, which includes the state capitol of Augusta, accuses Bellows of bias, says that Trump did not have an adequate opportunity to present a defense, and claims Bellows did not have the authority to exclude him from the ballot.“The secretary’s ruling was the product of a process infected by bias and pervasive lack of due process; is arbitrary, capricious, and characterized by abuse of discretion; affected by error of law; ultra vires, and unsupported by substantial evidence on the record,” the filing says. “The secretary had no statutory authority to consider the challenges raised under section three of the 14th amendment.”Trump’s lawyers ask the court to vacate Bellows’ ruling and immediately place Trump on the ballot.Bellows has said her personal views played no role in her decision to remove Trump from the ballot. She reached her decision after holding an hours-long hearing on 15 December on the issue, during which Trump’s attorneys, as well as those challenging Trump’s eligibility, made their case before her.Trump is also expected to appeal a separate decision from the Colorado supreme court blocking him from the ballot for similar reasons. Both the Colorado Republican party and the voters who brought the case have asked the US supreme court to hear it.Section three of the 14th amendment, which was passed after the civil war to bar confederates from holding office, has never been used to disqualify a presidential candidate. The US supreme court is widely expected to ultimately decide the novel legal issue.Maine has four votes in the electoral college. Unlike nearly every other state, it does not award all of them to the winner of the statewide vote. Instead, the statewide winner gets two electoral votes, and the other two are allocated based on which candidate wins in each of the state’s two congressional districts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden earned three of Maine’s electoral votes in 2020 and Trump earned one. More

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      in US Politics

      The major tests US gun control activists face in 2024

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      The grim statistics around mass shootings underscore a haunting reality for the US: despite recent legislative efforts at the state and federal levels, gun violence remains alarmingly common across the country.But gun safety groups say they remain undaunted in 2024, when they plan to push for more change through state legislatures and executive actions. And as voters turn their attention to a crucial election year, gun safety groups are also prepared to press candidates on their plans to curb gun violence.The simple statistics demonstrate what a weighty task it is. In December, a gunman carried out a shooting spree across two communities in central Texas, killing six people. The attack was the 39th mass shooting in the US last year, marking a new single-year record for the country. The previous record of 36 mass shootings had been set just one year prior.Gun reform groups will still face steep hurdles as they attempt to reduce the carnage.Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, have shown little appetite for passing another federal gun safety bill, following the enactment of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022. The supreme court’s conservative majority has similarly embraced a rather expansive definition of second amendment rights, jeopardizing gun safety laws passed at the state and federal level.For gun safety groups, the first significant test of 2024 will come in June, when the supreme court is expected to decide its next major second amendment case.United States v RahimiThe case centers on Zackey Rahimi, who was placed under a domestic violence restraining order after allegedly assaulting his then girlfriend and firing a gun in front of bystanders in 2019. Per federal law, those under such restraining orders are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms, but Rahimi is now challenging that statute based on another supreme court decision.In 2022, the supreme court overturned New York’s century-old regulation requiring that anyone seeking to carry a handgun in public must show “proper cause” to do so. The case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, established a new test to determine the constitutionality of gun regulations. The conservative justices ruled that any gun regulation must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”.The ruling has sparked a flurry of challenges to firearm regulations and forced gun safety advocates to search the historical record for analogous laws from the nation’s founding to defend their proposals. In the case of Rahimi, the conservative-leaning US court of appeals for the fifth circuit agreed with his argument that the law blocking those under domestic violence restraining orders from accessing firearms is inconsistent with historical gun laws and is thus unconstitutional.That ruling has now been appealed to the supreme court, which held oral arguments in the case in November. The justices’ decision could have far-reaching implications for the future of gun rights as well as the safety of survivors of domestic violence. According to a 2023 study, more than half of domestic violence homicides involve firearms.“The stakes are incredibly high in Rahimi because it would be the first time the supreme court strikes down a federal law on gun safety in decades. And of course, it’s a particularly important federal law,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice-president of law and policy for the gun safety group Everytown.The Rahimi ruling may also help clarify lower courts’ apparent confusion over applying the Bruen test. Thus far, courts have reached conflicting decisions over how to interpret the “historical tradition” of gun laws, said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and a constitutional scholar focusing on the second amendment.“I certainly think that confusion is only growing,” Charles said. “We see circuit courts even disagree with one another and are kind of all over the place, the same way that the district courts have been. So I don’t think we’re having any more guidance until the [supreme] court weighs in more.”During the oral arguments, some of the court’s conservative justices appeared skeptical of the fifth circuit’s decision, seemingly hesitant to stretch gun rights to the point of protecting alleged domestic abusers. Even if the supreme court rules against Rahimi, the decision will probably not mark a sea change in conservative justices’ overall approach to the second amendment. Charles, who filed an amicus brief in the Rahimi case, suggested the justices may issue a narrow ruling that upholds the law regarding domestic violence protection orders but leaves the Bruen test intact.“That will still leave lots of other cases, like assault weapons bans, outside the scope of this new kind of revisionary guidance,” Charles said.That dynamic could complicate gun safety groups’ efforts to strengthen the nation’s gun laws, including their campaign to re-enact a federal assault weapons ban.‘A political issue that doesn’t need to be’The country’s worst mass shooting of 2023 unfolded in October in Lewiston, Maine, where a gunman killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar. The devastating attack prompted a change of heart for congressman Jared Golden, the conservative Democrat who represents Lewiston in the House of Representatives. Reversing his previous position, Golden announced he would now support reinstating the federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war,” Golden said. “The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles.”Gun safety groups praised Golden’s announcement, while noting that his new position brings him closer in line with voters’ stance on an assault weapons ban. According to a Fox News poll conducted in April, 61% of voters support banning assault weapons. Other proposed gun regulations, such as enacting universal background checks and mandating safe storage of firearms, enjoy even more widespread support among voters.“We’re hopeful that [Golden’s announcement] will spur others to be able to take some of that political courage and step out there,” said Vanessa Gonzalez, vice-president of government and political affairs for the gun safety group Giffords. “It’s a political issue that doesn’t need to be. We just need more folks to have the courage to say that and to step out on those issues.”The 2024 elections will provide gun safety groups with many opportunities to push sitting lawmakers and first-time candidates on enacting more firearm regulations.“We are continuing to look for younger elected officials or candidates who are not afraid to say gun violence in America has to stop and then actually see it through,” Gonzalez said. “And then on the flip side, what does it look like once [they are] elected to really hold them accountable for what they said they were going to do?”Suplina predicted that gun safety will play a prominent role in campaign ads and messaging in 2024, partly because the issue might help Democrats sway the independent voters who will be crucial in determining the outcomes of close races. An AP/Norc poll conducted over the summer found that 61% of independents believe gun laws should be made more strict.“If you want to win the middle of the American electorate, you have to be strong on gun safety,” Suplina said. “And being strong on gun safety means recognizing that assault weapons should not be in the hands of your average citizens.”So far, efforts to reinstate an assault weapons ban have met consistent resistance from Republicans in Congress. The Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, most recently reintroduced the assault weapons ban bill in December, but Republicans blocked the legislation from advancing. Even if Senate Democrats could get the bill passed, it would almost certainly fail in the Republican-controlled House.Despite the obstacles presented by a divided Congress, gun safety groups have found recent success at the state level, and they hope to build upon those wins in 2024. According to Everytown, state legislatures passed a record-breaking 130 gun safety bills in 2023 while blocking 95% of the gun lobby’s agenda.Gun safety groups are also exploring options beyond Congress as it pushes for change at the federal level. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has proposed a new rule aimed at closing the so-called “gun show loophole”, which allows some private gun sellers to perform transactions without completing background checks on prospective buyers. Hundreds of thousands of gun safety proponents have already submitted comments in support of the proposed rule, according to Everytown.That campaign reflects gun safety groups’ overall goal to put more pressure on sellers and manufacturers of firearms in the year ahead. Such efforts may face resistance from conservative courts, but gun safety advocates fervently believe that the political momentum is on their side heading into 2024.“The state of the gun violence prevention movement in our country is strong and stronger than it’s ever been,” Suplina said. “Courts or no courts, Congress or no Congress, we’re going to really do a lot to animate the public to understand who it is that’s flooding the streets with guns and making money off of it while the rest of us suffer.” More

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      in Elections

      ‘A formulaic game’: former officials say Trump’s attacks threaten rule of law

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      As Donald Trump faces 91 felony counts with four trials slated for 2024, including two tied to his drives to overturn his 2020 election loss, his attacks on prosecutors are increasingly conspiratorial and authoritarian in style and threaten the rule of law, say former justice department officials.The former US president’s vitriolic attacks on a special counsel and two state prosecutors as well as some judges claim in part that the charges against Trump amount to “election interference” since he’s seeking the presidency again, and that “presidential immunity” protects Trump for his multiple actions to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.But ex-officials and other experts say Trump’s campaign and social media bashing of the four sets of criminal charges – echoed in ways by his lawyers’ court briefs – are actually a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and very tenuous legal claims, laced with Trump’s narcissism and authoritarian impulses aimed at delaying his trials or quashing the charges.Much of Trump’s animus is aimed at the special counsel Jack Smith, who has charged him with four felony counts for election subversion, and 40 felony counts for mishandling classified documents when his presidency ended.Trump’s chief goal in attacking Smith, whom he’s labelled a “deranged lunatic”, and other prosecutors and judges is to delay his trials well into 2024, or until after the election, when Trump could pardon himself if he wins, experts say.Similarly, Trump has targeted the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who has brought a racketeering case in Georgia against Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Biden’s win there, branding her a “rabid partisan”.Right before Christmas, Trump’s lawyers asked an appeals court in Washington to throw out Smith’s four-count subversion indictment, arguing that his actions occurred while he was in office and merited presidential immunity, and Trump in a Truth Social post on Christmas Eve blasted Smith for “election interference”.In an 82-page brief rebutting Trump’s lawyers on December 30, Smith and his legal team wrote that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in 2020 “threaten to undermine democracy,” and stressed Trump’s sweeping immunity claims for all his actions while in office “threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”Former justice department officials say Trump’s rhetoric and tactics to tar prosecutors and judges are diversionary moves to distract from the serious charges he faces – especially for trying to subvert the 2020 election.“Claiming the federal criminal cases or the Georgia Rico action are election interference, and railing constantly about the character of the prosecutors, judges and others, is just a formulaic game to Trump,” Ty Cobb, a White House counsel during the Trump years and a former DoJ official, said.“Delay is his major strategic objective in all these cases. These criminal cases were started because of Trump’s criminal acts and his refusal to allow the peaceful transfer of government for the first time in US history. Trump’s constitutional objections to the trial-related issues are all frivolous including his claim of presidential immunity and double jeopardy.”Cobb added that Trump’s “everyone is bad but me and I am the victim” rants, lies and frivolous imperious motions and appeals are just his “authoritarianism in service of his narcissism”.Other ex-officials offer equally harsh assessments of Trump’s defenses.“The reality is that Trump has clearly done a series of illegal things and the system is holding him to account for things that he’s done,” said the former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, who served during the George HW Bush administration. “He’s telling more lies to mischaracterize prosecutions that we should be thankful for.”Yet Trump keeps escalating his high-voltage rhetoric and revealing his authoritarian tendencies. Trump even bragged that Russian president Vladimir Putin in December echoed Trump’s charges of political persecution and election interference to bolster his claims.“Even Vladimir Putin … says that Biden’s – and this is a quote – ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy’,” Trump told a campaign rally in Durham, New Hampshire.For good measure, Trump complimented two other foreign authoritarian leaders, calling Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, “highly respected” and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “very nice”.In November Trump sparked fire for slamming his opponents on the left as “vermin”, a term that echoed Adolf Hitler’s language, and the ex-president has more than once pledged in authoritarian style to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.Likewise, critics have voiced alarm at Trump’s vow of “retribution” against some powerful foes in both parties if he’s re-elected, including ex-attorney general Bill Barr. That pledge fits with Trump painting himself a victim of a vendetta by “deep state” forces at the justice department, the FBI and other agencies Trump and his allies want to rein in while expanding his executive authority, if he’s the Republican nominee and wins the presidency again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics say Trump’s attacks on the prosecutions are increasingly conspiratorial.“Of course, it’s true that Trump is the undisputed master of election interference, so he certainly knows the field,” Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a leading Trump critic in the House, said.“It’s hard to think of a greater case of election interference than what Trump did in 2020 and 2021. His claim of election interference is meant to give him a kind of political immunity from the consequences of his criminal actions.“He’s basically inviting the public to believe that the legal system’s response to his stealing government documents or trying to overthrow an election are illegal attempts to interfere with his political career.”Raskin noted there was some Trump-style logic to citing Putin in his defense.“We know Putin is Trump’s hero and effective cult master,” the congressman said. “So it makes sense that Trump would try to elevate him as a kind of moral arbiter. Trump would love a world where Vladimir Putin would decide the integrity of elections and prosecutions. Wouldn’t that be nice for the autocrats?”Trump’s modus operandi to stave off his trials is emblematic of how he has operated in the past, say some ex-prosecutors.“Trump has a habit of picking up allegations made against him and, like a kid in the playground, accusing the critics of doing the same thing”, such as crying “electoral interference”, said the Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.Richman stressed that “I wouldn’t assume Trump is trying to mimic other authoritarians. He just shares their values, or the lack of them.”Other scholars see Trump’s desperate defenses and incendiary attacks on the legal system as part of his DNA.“The Trump team is looking to cobble together a defense for the indefensible,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. “Trump has long been looking for and finding ways to protect himself whenever he crosses legal lines. This is who he is.”Naftali suggested: “Trump announced his second re-election bid much earlier than is traditional for major candidates. A likely reason why he announced so early – and then hardly campaigned for a long time – was to pre-empt any indictments so that he could later denounce them as ‘election interference’ and perhaps undermine any future trials. This is a man who lies and creates a reality most favorable to him.”More broadly, Raskin views Trump’s attacks on the legal system as hallmarks of fascist rulers.“Fascism is all about the destruction of the rule of law in the service of a dictator. It’s important for Trump to continue to attack our essential legal institutions. He’s also gotten to the point of dehumanizing his opponents by using words like ‘vermin’. Violence permeates his rhetoric,” he said.“Trump feels entirely emboldened by his supporters. He’s been given license by the Republican party to go as far as he wants.” More

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      in US Politics

      Voting Rights Act faces new wave of dire threats in 2024

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      As 2023 comes to a close, the Voting Rights Act is facing a series of dire threats that could significantly weaken the landmark civil rights law.A suite of three different pending cases could gut the ability of private plaintiffs to challenge the Voting Rights Act, make it harder to challenge discriminatory election systems, and limit the Voting Rights Act’s protections in areas where a single racial minority doesn’t constitute a majority.“It’s a shock to the system,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.The new wave of attacks come after the supreme court unexpectedly issued a decision in June that upheld a critical provision of the law.In a 5-4 decision, the justices beat back an effort by Alabama that would have made it much harder to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge voting districts that weaken the influence of Black voters. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts sent a strong signal the court wasn’t interested in reconsidering its jurisprudence around Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the most powerful tool voting rights litigators have to challenge districts. It was a full-throated defense of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law the court has aggressively weakened in recent years.“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our [section] 2 jurisprudence anew,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in the case, Allen v Milligan, that was joined by his fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices. “We find Alabama’s new approach to [section] 2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our [section] 2 case law as Alabama requests.”The rulings was a sigh of relief for voting rights lawyers. Over the last decade, the court has ruled against voting rights at nearly every turn. It gutted the pre-clearance requirement at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, greenlit aggressively removing people from voter rolls, made it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws, and made it nearly impossible to challenge a voting rule as long as an election is near.There’s nothing new about an onslaught of threats facing the Voting Rights Act, which has faced efforts to weaken it virtually since the moment it was enacted. But those attacks appear to be finding a more receptive audience in a supreme court and federal judiciary reshaped by Donald Trump that are willing to entertain fringe legal ideas.“The Voting Rights Act, in 2023, in some ways is on more stable footing than it was last year. And in other ways feels like it’s poised to undergo a whole new set of threats,” said Danielle Lang, a voting rights attorney at the Campaign Legal Center.ArkansasThe most significant threat is a case from Arkansas that could block the ability of private litigants – voters, civil rights groups, political parties – from bringing cases to enforce the Voting Rights Act. No “private right of action” exists under the law, the US court of appeals for the eighth circuit said in a novel ruling earlier this month.It was a decision invited by the supreme court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. In 2021, they issued a separate opinion musing that the court had never definitively said whether or not private parties could bring section 2 cases – a surefire invitation to litigants to try and get the question before the court.If private parties can’t sue under the Voting Rights Act, it would make it virtually impossible the enforce the law. Non-governmental groups, which have more resources than the justice department and can move much more quickly, have brought the vast majority of cases in the six decades since the Voting Rights Act was enacted. If enforcement were only up to the government, priorities could change from administration to administration (the justice department filed very few voting rights cases under Donald Trump).“It would completely eviscerate the last remaining power behind the Voting Rights Act in any way real way,” said Lakin, the ACLU attorney, who represents the plaintiffs in the Arkansas case.The issue has created even more uncertainty for voting rights litigators in an environment in which they already have a reduced toolkit to combat voting discrimination after the Shelby county decision.“It is certainly frustrating,” Lang said. “When you look at all the work that’s yet to be done in the voting rights space. And instead of getting that work done, lawyers get sidetracked having to fight old battles over them.”GeorgiaThe Arkansas case isn’t the only serious threat to the Voting Rights Act. In Georgia, an appellate court recently ruled the Voting Rights Act couldn’t be used to challenge the way the state had chosen to elect the five members of its public service commission (PSC), which oversees utilities. Under state law, each of the five members are elected by the entire state, a method that “unlawfully dilutes the votes of Black citizens under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act”, the US district judge Steven Grimberg ruled last year. A district system would better ensure that Black voters could elect the candidate of their choosing to the PSC.But the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit overturned that decision in November. The Voting Rights Act couldn’t be used to change the way the PSC was elected, a three-judge panel said, because the Georgia legislature had chosen to elect its commissioners that way. “Georgia chose this electoral format to protect critical policy interests and there is no evidence, or allegation, that race was a motivating factor in this decision,” the judge Elizabeth Branch, who was nominated by Trump for the bench, wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.The decision could have far-reaching consequences. It could be read to prohibit Voting Rights Act challenges in Georgia to the state assembly school boards or county commissions – bodies of government where civil rights litigators have long turned to the law to combat voting discrimination.TexasAnother threat to the Voting Rights Act is fast emerging from Texas. Earlier this year, a district judge struck down the city of Galveston’s four county commission districts. When Republicans redrew the districts in 2021, they got rid of the sole district in which Black and Latino voters were able to elect the candidate of their choice. Striking down the districts in the case, the US district judge Jeffrey Brown called the effort “stark and jarring”.A three-judge panel for the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit upheld that ruling. It noted that neither Black people nor Hispanic people constituted a majority on their own in the district at issue, but that precedent allowed them to be considered together for purposes of a Voting Rights Act claim.But then the panel did something unusual. It went on to say it believed that precedent was wrong. And in a highly unusual step, it urged the full court to review the case and overrule it. The full fifth circuit has since agreed to hear the case, and paused redrawing the Galveston district in December, a signal it is skeptical that the Voting Rights Act protects so-called “coalition districts”.Whether or not the Voting Rights Act applies in areas where no minority group makes up a majority, but a coalition of minorities votes cohesively as one, is a question that has not been definitively answered by the supreme court. A ruling saying that those areas are not protected under the Voting Rights Act would make it harder to challenge districts in diverse multi-racial areas.The issue is already playing out in litigation outside of Texas. In Georgia, a federal district judge ordered Republicans to redraw their congressional map to include an additional majority-Black congressional district in west Atlanta. Republicans did that, but they dismantled another district in which a coalition of minority voters formed a majority and had been electing the candidate of their choice. It’s a strategy that is betting courts will embrace the idea that coalition districts aren’t protected.If the supreme court applies its precedent on the Voting Rights Act consistently, it should uphold coalition districts, experts say.“Prohibiting these coalition claims amount to a kind of racial essentialism that the conservatives on the court have been railing against for a long time,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It’s actually … weird to assert that Blacks and Latinos experience is just different. And different enough that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t care.”The emergence of all three attacks has created even more uncertainty in voting rights litigation. But while there’s plenty of reasons to be disturbed by the recent rulings, voting rights experts aren’t warning of a five-alarm fire just yet.They say there are reasons to be somewhat optimistic. First, there is a different section of federal law independent of the Voting Rights Act that gives private parties the ability to bring federal lawsuits to protect civil rights.Second, outside of the eighth circuit, no other court has said that a private right of action doesn’t exist. The ultra-conservative fifth circuit even affirmed that one existed earlier this year, and the panel rejected a request to reconsider in December.Beyond Gorsuch and Thomas, it’s also not clear that a majority on the supreme court will embrace the idea that no private right of action exists.While the eighth circuit ruled no private right of action exists, no other court has issued similar rulings. “It is important for us to kind of wait. This could be a big challenge. If so, we’re gonna meet it head on. It could be a blip,” Lang said.“The crazier claims and the crazier holdings and the crazier findings don’t speak for all of the judicial system. And they certainly haven’t found purchase with the supreme court,” Levitt said.And while the spate of recent cases represents a new level of threats against the Voting Rights Act, lawyers note that the law has long faced efforts to dismantle it and it has survived largely intact.“The challenges to the Voting Rights Act and efforts to dismantle it are going to exist as long as the voting rights act exist. Based on what the supreme court said this year, I expect the Voting Rights Act to exist for a while,” Lang said. “The fact that people are still coming at it with everything they’ve got I think is because it’s maintaining its power.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump expected to challenge removal of name from states’ primary ballots

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      Donald Trump is reportedly expected to file legal challenges early next week to rulings in Maine and Colorado knocking him off primary ballots amid mounting pressure on US supreme court justices to rule on whether his actions on 6 January 2021 constitutionally exclude him from seeking a second term in the White House.The New York Times said that Trump’s legal moves could come as early as Tuesday.The impending collision of legal, constitutional and political issues comes after the two states separately ruled that the former US president was ineligible under a constitutional amendment designed to keep Confederates from serving in high office after the civil war.In Maine, the secretary of state, a political appointee, issued the ruling and a challenge will be filed in state court. Meanwhile, in Colorado the decision was made by the state’s highest court and will probably have a swifter passage to the conservative-leaning US supreme court – should it wish to hear the case.The conservative justices on the supreme court are sympathetic to “originalism”, which holds that the meaning of the constitution and its amendments should be interpreted by what its authors wrote. On the other side are justices more in tune with a contemporary application of the spirit of the original wording.The precise wording of the passage in question – section 3 of the 14th amendment – says anyone who has taken the oath of office, as Trump did at his 2017 inauguration, and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”, is ineligible.But at the heart of the anticipated challenges will be whether individual states have the authority to interpret constitutional matters outside their own constitutions. “Every state is different,” Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said on Friday. “I swore an oath to uphold the constitution. I fulfilled my duty.”The rulings have received pushback from elected officials. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said Trump should be beaten at the polls and back-and-forth ballot rulings in states are a “political distraction”.After Maine’s decision on Thursday, Republican senator Susan Collins said voters in her state should decide who wins the election – “not a secretary of state chosen by the legislature”. Former New Jersey governor and trailing nomination rival Chris Christie told CNN the rulings make Trump “a martyr”.“He’s very good at playing ‘poor me, poor me’. He’s always complaining,” Christie added.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, told Fox News that the Maine decision violates Trump’s right to due process – a jury decision on the now-delayed insurrection case. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said: “It should be up to voters to decide who gets elected.”One Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that all state appeals court decisions on multiple efforts to kick Trump off state primary ballots – 16 have failed, 14 are pending – have ruled in the former president’s favor.“We don’t love the Colorado ruling, of course, but think it will resolve itself,” the adviser said.According to the New York Times on Saturday, Trump has privately told people that he believes the US supreme court will rule against the decisions. But the court has also been wary of wading into the turbulent constitutional waters of Trump’s multiple legal issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, the court denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request to expedite a ruling on whether Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over his alleged crimes following the 2020 election.But the argument that voters, and not courts or elected officials, should decide elections has been under stress since the 2000 election when Republican George W Bush was elected after a stinging legal battle with then vice-president Al Gore over Florida ballot recounts that was ultimately decided by the court.According to the Times, Trump is concerned that the conservative justices, who make up a “supermajority”, will be worried about the perception of being “political” and rule against him.Conversely, the justices might not want to be steamrollered into making decisions on a primary ballot timetable set by individual states that are themselves open to accusations of political coloring.For now, both the Maine and Colorado decisions are on hold. The Colorado Republican party has asked the US supreme court to look at the state’s decision, and Trump is anticipated to repeat that request and has said he will appeal the Maine decision.Maine’s Republican party chair, Joel Stetkis, told the Washington Post that “Shenna Bellows has kicked a hornet’s nest and woken up a sleeping giant in the state of Maine. There’s a lot of people very, very upset that one person wants to take away their choice.”Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the outlet: “We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”Democrats in blue states, he said, “are recklessly and un-Constitutionally suspending the civil rights of the American voters by attempting to summarily remove President Trump’s name from ballots. These partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy.” More

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      Republicans seek winning strategy on abortion for 2024 – with Democrats also in a tricky spot

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      As the 2024 election season ramps up, Republicans continue to struggle to find a winning national strategy on the flashpoint issue of abortion – where restricting the procedure has animated the conservative movement for half a century but tormented the party since the fall of Roe.The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade delivered Republicans one of their most significant policy victories in a generation. But in the year and a half since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling has also become one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.Over the last 18 months, voters have favored abortion rights in seven consecutive ballot measures, including in conservative states. Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections while Democrats scored off-year election wins in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Virginia – results that again emphasized the enduring power of abortion rights.Now the presidential election year brings a further huge test.“With abortion, there’s really a kind of catch-22 for Republicans,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading expert on the history of abortion in the US. “On the one hand, you have a lot of base Republican voters who really care about opposing abortion and on the other you have a huge group of something like 70% of Americans who don’t like abortion bans.”The US supreme court meanwhile set the stage for another major showdown over abortion rights, this time just months before the 2024 presidential election. The court has agreed to decide a case that could determine the accessibility of a widely used abortion pill, including in states where the procedure remains legal.But whether abortion will continue to fuel Democratic victories in a presidential election year is also unclear.Despite delivering a long list of anti-abortion victories, voters tend to view the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, a thrice-married former Democrat from New York, as less socially conservative than his rivals, says Gunner Ramer, political director for the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.“Donald Trump likes to stoke culture wars and own the libs but on social issues he’s seen as more moderate,” Ramer said, adding: “If Trump is the nominee, Democrats are in a much trickier position on abortion.”For decades, the Republican party championed the mission of the anti-abortion movement – to overturn Roe – without clearly articulating what would follow. Now they are contending with the real-world consequences: pregnancy resulting from rape and incest, life-threatening complications, fatal fetal conditions and miscarriages that require the procedure.Sixteen states now ban abortion at conception or after six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. Among them is Texas, where Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, was forced to leave the state this month to receive an abortion after Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, threatened legal action – “including first-degree felony prosecutions” – against doctors or anyone else who assisted in performing the procedure. The Texas supreme court ultimately ruled against Cox’s request to have an emergency abortion in the state.Seizing on the turn of events, top officials on Joe Biden’s re-election campaign assailed the “unspeakable reality” now facing women in states with limited or no access to abortion.They drew a direct line to Donald Trump, the former president and likely Republican presidential nominee, blaming his appointment of three supreme court justices who cast decisive votes to overturn Roe.“Kate had to leave her home state to seek the healthcare she urgently needs,” said Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “This is happening right here in the United States of America and it’s happening because of Donald Trump.”In the increasingly noncompetitive race for the Republican presidential nomination, disagreements among the White House hopefuls over how to approach or even talk about abortion reflect a wide lack of unity within the GOP on the issue.Trump, in conspicuous fashion, is trying to have it both ways. He has blamed conservative activists’ uncompromising positions on “the abortion issue” for costing Republicans at the ballot box while touting his anti-abortion legacy to the party’s socially conservative base.In Iowa, which launches the Republican presidential primary contest next month, Trump is running ads declaring himself “the most pro-life president ever”. But on the major litmus test for anti-abortion activists – support for a national ban – he has been noncommittal.At a CNN town hall this month, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is challenging Trump for the nomination, accused the former president of “flip-flopping on the pro-life issue”. Trump has said DeSantis made a “terrible mistake” when the governor signed into law earlier this year a six-week abortion ban. Pressed to commit to a national standard, DeSantis has said he would support a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Nikky Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and the only woman in the race, has sought a different tack, calling for “consensus” and “compassion”. Haley, who as governor of South Carolina in 2016 signed a 20-week ban, has suggested that as president she would enact any abortion restrictions that reached her desk, but said such measures were unlikely in the narrowly divided and deeply polarized Congress.Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who is running for president, is incredulous that Republicans are calling for federal action on abortion after waging a 50-year legal battle to return the issue to the states.“I trust the people of this country, state by state, to make the call for themselves,” he said during a recent debate.It’s a view shared by the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy, who opposes a federal ban but says he supports state laws outlawing abortion after six weeks.Among the Republican presidential candidates, the two most avowed abortion opponents Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, have already exited the race.Furthering the divide, leading anti-abortion groups are pressuring Republican candidates to back a national ban starting at least at 15 weeks of pregnancy if not earlier, while some party strategists are advising them to clearly state their opposition to any such federal limit.In a post-election memo Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, said the losses were “major disappointments for the pro-life movement” and “warning signs for the GOP”.“It is long past due for the GOP to define where it stands on the issue nationally,” she wrote. “Having a clear position and contrasting it isn’t enough – campaigns and the party must put real advertising dollars behind it, going toe-to-toe with the Democrats.”Her group has urged candidates to support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation at a minimum or risk losing its endorsement.Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, has criticized Republicans for not confronting the issue more aggressively. “You can’t hide in a corner and think abortion’s not going to be an issue,” she said on NBC News in November, adding: “We can’t just say it’s a state’s issue and be done.”Others have urged candidates to emphasize its support for exceptions, while expressing more compassion and empathy when discussing what can be a deeply personal – and in some cases medically advisable – decision. Still, some say its a matter of semantics, suggesting Republicans avoid terms like “pro-life” and “ban”.According to Politico, a group of prominent Republican pollsters suggested candidates change the subject, presenting polling to members of Congress that showed they could sharpen their appeal with women and independent voters by focusing on protecting contraception rather than banning abortion.“Abortion is, as the courts decided, an issue for states to decide, not the federal government,” states the campaign website for Kari Lake, who is expected to be the Republican Senate nominee in the race for Kyrsten Sinema’s seat. It’s a retreat from her position as a candidate for governor in 2022, when the far-right Republican cast herself as an outspoken ally of the anti-abortion movement and embraced Arizona’s territorial-era law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.Lake is one of several Republican candidates running in battleground Senate races who have adjusted their stance – and their rhetoric – on the issue.Meanwhile in the House, now led by Mike Johnson, the Louisiana congressman, one of the chamber’s staunchest anti-abortion crusaders, vulnerable Republicans have sought to distance themselves from absolutists in the party.“The supreme court needs to stand down,” said Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who represents a district Biden won in 2020, in response to the high court’s decision to take up the abortion pill case. In a statement, he emphasized his opposition to a national ban.**As Republicans struggle, Democrats say the problem is taking positions that are deeply unpopular with the American public.When Democrats won full control of the Virginia state legislature in November, the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, declared support for what he called a “reasonable” 15-week abortion ban.That same night Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor, won re-election after his campaign ran a powerful ad featuring a woman who was raped by her stepfather as a child. In the video, she criticized Daniel Cameron, Beshear’s Republican opponent, for supporting Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, which does not include exceptions in cases involving rape or incest.And in beet-red Ohio, 56.6% of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.“In every election since the overturning of Roe, voters have sent a resounding message: they want more freedom, not less – and come 2024, Republicans will once again face the repercussions of their unrelenting crusade to strip away our rights,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.At the state-level, abortion-related ballot initiatives could help Democrats mobilize Republican women and independent voters who have helped make up their winning coalition in the years since Trump was elected.Building on the success of abortion-related ballot initiatives, abortion rights advocates are working to put the issue before voters in battleground states, including Arizona and Florida. An effort is also underway in Montana, where Democrats hope a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion protections could boost turnout and help one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbent senators, Jon Tester, win re-election.As long as abortion is severely restricted in large swaths of the country where Republicans hold power, candidates at the national level will likely struggle to convince voters that they have moderated on the issue, even if they now champion later-stage “consensus” limits and exceptions, Ziegler said.“If the pro-life movement has a different agenda that they continue to pursue in a large swath of the country, national Republicans either have to say, ‘that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not for that’; or they’re going to be associated with that,” she said.Even so, the road ahead for Democrats is not straightforward.A string of recent surveys found a mixed picture: Biden is trailing Trump nationally and in several swing states. In a Wall Street Journal poll, voters said Trump was better equipped to handle most major policy issues with the exception of abortion, which Biden led by a double-digit margin.The Biden campaign has vowed to put abortion front and center this election cycle. They have argued that Trump – or any of his Republican rivals – would seek to ban abortion as president, possibly through policy changes that would not require congressional approval as some conservatives have proposed.There are risks to the strategy, especially if Trump is the nominee, says Ramer, from the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.Ramer says there was a key dynamic in play in 2022. While Democrats harnessed voter fury over the loss of constitutional abortion rights, he said they were helped by Republicans, who nominated candidates with “extreme” absolutist positions on the issue, such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan.That may not continue in 2024.“Abortion is a very nuanced issue for voters,” he said. “And the economy, at the end of the day, is more top of mind for Republicans and swing-state voters.” More

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      The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024

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      More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the dust from the landmark decision’s collapse has yet to settle.It has been a dramatic year of fallout, with abortion rights supporters and foes now waging a state-by-state skirmish for abortion rights. They are sparring in state legislatures, courtrooms, voting booths and hospitals, with each side racking up victories and losses.With a presidential election and another major supreme court case on the horizon, the coming year promises to be at least as eventful. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over abortion in 2023 – and what it means for 2024.Abortion rights supporters keep winning at the ballot boxIn 2022, Republicans underperformed in the midterms and abortion rights activists won a string of ballot measures to preserve abortion rights, even in conservative states. This year, activists extended their winning streak – and they hope to replicate their successes in 2024.In November, Ohio became the first reliably red state since Roe fell to vote in favor of proactively enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, while Virginia Democrats successfully fended off Republicans’ attempt to retake the state legislature by campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban.For activists and Democrats, these victories were proof that abortion is an election-winning issue – and, potentially, an issue that can draw in voters from across both sides of the ideological spectrum. Activists are already at work on 2024 abortion-related ballot measures in roughly a dozen states, including swing states like Arizona and Nevada.Abortions are on the riseAfter abortion clinics across the south and midwest were forced to shutter, patients overwhelmed the country’s remaining clinics. In the first year after Roe’s demise, the average number of US abortions performed each month rose rather than fell. Clinics and their advocates are now struggling to keep up. “What actually is happening is a complete disruption,” one expert told the Guardian.There is also a gaping hole in the data, which was released in October by the Society of Family Planning: it does not include abortions performed at home, a practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy, and a number of services shipping abortion pills have increased in visibility since Roe’s overturning. But while evidence suggests that self-managed abortion is on the rise, the lack of concrete data about the practice reflects a growing problem in the post-Roe United States: as abortion moves further into the shadows of US life, we will know less about it.Legal battles over abortion bans are ongoingAbortion bans continued to cascade across the country in 2023, with near-total bans taking effect in Indiana, North Dakota and South Carolina. South Carolina and Nebraska, meanwhile, enacted laws to ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In total, 24 states or territories have now banned abortion before viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal under Roe.Litigation over abortion restrictions is still unfurling in many of these states, and court cases have frozen bans in states like Wyoming and Iowa. Wisconsin abortion providers, meanwhile, found themselves in a unique position this year: after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted to ban abortions instead only banned feticide and did not apply to what she called “consensual abortions”, providers resumed performing the procedure – even though the ban is still technically on the books.Lawsuits may force other hardcore anti-abortion states to soften their bans in 2024 to clarify exceptions when abortions are permitted in medical emergencies. While Tennessee and Texas carved out narrow exceptions in their abortion laws, abortion rights supporters have still filed lawsuits in those two states, as well as in Idaho, that challenge the language. One Texan mother of two filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency abortion while she was still pregnant. (She ultimately fled the state for the procedure.)Theoretically, people in medical emergencies should be able to access the procedure even in states with bans – but doctors say that, in reality, these bans are so vaguely worded that they block doctors from helping sick patients. This summer, one of these lawsuits led women to testify in a Texas court about their experiences of being denied abortions. It was the first time since Roe fell, if not the first time since Roe itself was decided, that women did so.Abortion pills are in perilThe most common method of abortion, abortion pills, is at the mercy of deeply conservative courts in 2024.In April, a conservative judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of a key abortion pill, mifepristone, in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of rightwing groups determined to make the pill the next target in their post-Roe campaign against abortion. A federal appeals court soon scaled back that decision, ruling to keep the pill, mifepristone, available but impose significant restrictions on its use. The supreme court then stepped in and decreed that the FDA’s rules around mifepristone should stay the same while litigation plays out.The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone in September have asked the supreme court to formally hear arguments in the case. In December, the justices agreed.Although the justices indicated that they will only rule on the restrictions imposed by the appeals court, rather than on the overall legality of mifepristone, the case could still have enormous consequences. Rolling back the FDA’s rules could allow future lawsuits against other politicized medications, like gender-affirming care, HIV drugs or vaccines. Plus, the supreme court will probably rule by summer 2024 – just months before the presidential election.Mifepristone is used in more than half the abortions in the country. If access to the drug is curtailed, many abortion clinics have said they will pivot to using doses of a different drug, misoprostol, to perform abortions, but misoprostol-only abortions are less effective and associated with more complications.Doctors are fleeing states with abortion bansWith abortion bans endangering their patients and threatening to send doctors to prison, doctors are fleeing states where the procedure is banned. After Idaho banned abortion, at least 13 reproductive health physicians left the state and at least two rural labor and delivery wards have closed. Doctors in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have also told reporters that they are leaving states with abortion bans or planning to do so.OB-GYNs are already in short supply in the United States. About half of US counties do not have a practicing OB-GYN, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The US maternal mortality rates are also worsening, particularly for Black and Native people, at a time when the United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries.Doctors are now even afraid to get trained in states with abortion bans. Applications to OB-GYN residencies in states with near-total bans fell by more than 10% the year after Roe’s demise, according to data from Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications to US OB-GYN residencies overall dropped by about 5% – indicating that fewer doctors are planning to become OB-GYNs at all. More