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‘Fewer rights than their grandmothers’: read three justices’ searing abortion dissent | Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan
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Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean | Moira Donegan
Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will meanMoira DoneganMillions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?TopicsAbortionOpinionUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsWomenHealthcommentReuse this content More
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How Americans lost their right to abortions: a victory for conservatives, 50 years in the making
How Americans lost their right to abortions: a victory for conservatives, 50 years in the making Why, and how, a decision opposed by a majority of Americans came about has everything to do with political power, experts sayThe short version of how Americans lost their right to terminate a pregnancy might be summed up in one name: Trump.The real estate tycoon and reality-TV star first shocked the world by winning the US presidency, then rewarded his base by confirming three supreme court justices to a nine-member bench, thus rebalancing the court to lean conservative for a generation to come.That short road led to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an opinion released this week in which supreme court justices voted to overturn the landmark case Roe v Wade, which in 1973 granted a constitutional right to abortion.The end of federal protection for abortion is expected to lead to 26 states banning the procedure immediately or as soon as practicable, affecting tens of millions of US women and people who can become pregnant.The decision comes even though about 85% of Americans favor legal abortion in at least some circumstances. Why, and how, a decision opposed by a majority of Americans came about has everything to do with political power, experts said.The anti-abortion movement is “the best organized faction in American politics”, said Frederick Clarkson, an expert on the Christian right and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associate, a progressive thinktank in Massachusetts.“They understand they’re a minority of the population, of the electorate, and certainly a minority set of views on reproductive rights issues,” he said. “But because they know that, they’ve found effective ways of maximizing their political clout by being better organized than numerically greater factions who are less well organized.”Put another way, he said, the anti-abortion movement “mastered the tools of democracy to achieve undemocratic outcomes”.The currents that led to the Dobbs decision are among the most powerful in American politics today. Over decades, a religious movement prevailed by harnessing the forces of polarization, the erosion of constitutional norms and the manipulation of US democracy, scholars said.“It’s not like we’ve had this slow erosion of abortion rights,” said Neil Siegel, an expert in constitutional law and professor at Duke University who clerked for former liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Instead, justices issued an opinion that “is utterly dismissive of what has been constitutional law for literally five decades”, and was “repeatedly affirmed by justices appointed by both parties”.The conservative-leaning court will shatter one more constitutional norm, issuing a once-in-a-lifetime reversal, after another event without modern precedent: the leak of a supreme court draft opinion. Even before Dobbs was released, the leak spelled out the doom of Roe v Wade.“The court is not the institution I served,” said Siegel.Today, abortion is among the most partisan issues in the US, with Republicans and the anti-abortion movement so closely aligned there is little daylight between them. In the 1970s, however, abortion was seen as a “Catholic issue”, with both pro-choice Republicans and anti-abortion Democrats in Congress. The supreme court voted in favor of Roe v Wade by a 7-2 margin.Some of this transformation reflects “deliberate changes by the anti-abortion movement, some of it is structural changes to US democracy, and some of it is just luck,” said Mary Ziegler, visiting professor at Harvard and a professor of constitutional law at the University of California Davis.Contrary to popular belief, there was no immediate political backlash to Roe v Wade. In the years that followed, important bills banned the federal government from paying for abortions, but a constitutional amendment to outright ban the procedure failed.It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Republican strategists, such as Paul Weyrich, saw abortion as an issue that might unlock the votes of millions of white evangelical Christians, alongside opposition to women’s rights and to desegregation court rulings. The plan worked: Catholics and white evangelical Protestants were brought into uneasy alliance with Republicans.“Back in the 70s and 80s, when the anti-abortion movement was maturing, I remember events where you would see one Catholic bishop sitting on stage uncomfortably with evangelicals,” said Clarkson.It would be decades before evangelical Christians and Catholics entirely fused their modern agenda, with abortion, gay marriage and religious freedom as top issues. Nevertheless, the new alliance soon produced a “moral majority” that buoyed Ronald Reagan’s campaign. Like Trump, Reagan initially supported “liberalized” abortion law, before he later promised to oppose abortion as president.This political realignment was helped along by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which constitutional scholars argued forced segregationist southern Democrats into real competition with Republicans for the first time.“You don’t understand reproductive politics in this country if you don’t understand racial politics in this country,” said Loretta Ross, founder of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, a reproductive rights organizer in Georgia.“I believe the current restrictions on abortion, birth control and sex education are all designed to compel white women to have more babies,” said Ross. “I’m not convinced they want more brown or Black babies,” even though brown and Black women would be disproportionately affected by abortion bans, she said.This political realignment also brought Republicans distinct structural advantages based on the architecture of the US constitution – a force Siegel describes as “rural favoritism”.The two-chamber Congress is made up of the House of Representatives, whose seats are based on population, and the Senate, which grants each state two votes no matter the population. “The constitution has always disproportionately favored rural voters, but it didn’t always favor one party,” said Siegel.As Republican senators began to represent more white, Christian and rural voters, however, they also gained advantage of a feature baked into the US constitution. Today, Republicans collectively represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than Democrats, even though the Senate is evenly split. As a result, the new conservative-leaning court was confirmed by a body which represents a minority of voters.“That is reflective of minority rule,” said Siegel.Republican strategists’ appeal to socially conservative voters also began to substantially redefine what it meant to be Republican.“The party professionals and establishment Republicans thought they could control them,” said Clarkson. “They were wrong: they became the party.”The new anti-abortion arrivals pushed for more power, working “to exercise more influence over the composition of the GOP to ensure the nominees would be ideologically pure enough”, Clarkson said.Demography added urgency to the anti-abortion cause, Siegel said. The Republican party is overwhelmingly white and Christian, but the size of its base is threatened by rapidly changing US demographics as America grows more racially diverse and less religious. White Americans are predicted to be a minority by 2045.That has pushed Republicans to practice “existential politics”, made each election cycle feel more critical than the last and forced the parties further apart, said Siegel. At the same time, partisan redistricting, known as gerrymandering, has allowed more extreme candidates to win uncompetitive districts, exacerbating polarization.In the case of Dobbs, power and luck collided when the base elected Trump, a man who once professed to be pro-choice, won the election even as he lost the popular vote and was then offered the rare opportunity to confirm three new justices to the court.The forces behind Dobbs also show how especially American values – autonomy, liberty and self-determination – will be redefined in a new supreme court era.“There’s mutual animosity between members of the two parties, but there is more of an asymmetry in terms of how far to the right the Republican party has moved, and willingness to break norms for short-term partisan advantage,” said Siegel. “Or, in the case of the supreme court, for long-term partisan advantage.”
This article was amended on 24 June 2022 to clarify Frederick Clarkson’s biography.
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The supreme court just overturned Roe v Wade – what happens next?
The supreme court just overturned Roe v Wade – what happens next?Court’s move will allow more than half of states to ban abortion, with an immediate impact on tens of millions of Americans01:39The supreme court just overturned the landmark Roe v Wade case, which granted women in the US the right to terminate a pregnancy. A reversal of this magnitude is almost unprecedented, particularly on a case decided nearly 50 years ago.The extraordinarily rare move will allow more than half of states to ban abortion, with an immediate and enduring impact on tens of millions of Americans.Roe v Wade overturned as supreme court strikes down federal right to abortion – liveRead moreWhat happened?The court decided there is no constitutional right to abortion in a case called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In reaching that decision, the conservative-majority court overturned Roe v Wade, from 1973.Historically, the court has overturned cases to grant more rights. The court has done the opposite here, and its decision will restrict a constitutional right generations of Americans have grown up taking for granted.As a result of the reversal, states will again be permitted to ban or severely restrict abortion, changes that will indelibly alter the national understanding of liberty, self-determination and personal autonomy.Where will this happen?Twenty-six states are expected to do so immediately, or as soon as practicable. This will make abortion illegal across most of the south and midwest.In these states, women and other people who can become pregnant will need to either travel hundreds of miles to reach an abortion provider or self-manage abortions at home through medication or other means.However, anti-abortion laws are not national. The US will have a patchwork of laws, including restrictions and protections, because some Democratic-led states such as California and New York expanded reproductive rights in the run-up to the decision.Even so, new abortion bans will make the US one of just four nations to roll back abortion rights since 1994, and by far the wealthiest and most influential nation to do so. The other three nations to curtail abortion rights are Poland, El Salvador and Nicaragua, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. More than half (58%) of all US women of reproductive age – or 40 million people – live in states hostile to abortion.When will this happen?Across most states, this will happen quickly. Thirteen states have abortion bans “triggered” by a reversal of Roe v Wade, though the laws vary in their enforcement dates. Louisiana, for example, has a trigger law that is supposed to take effect immediately. Idaho has a trigger ban that goes into effect in 30 days.Other states have abortion bans that pre-date the Roe decision, but have been unenforceable in the last five decades. Michigan has a pre-Roe ban that is currently the subject of a court challenge.A final group of states intends to ban abortion very early in pregnancy, often before women know they are pregnant. One such state is Georgia, where abortion will be banned at six weeks. Several states, such as Texas, have multiple bans in place.In many cases, court challenges under state constitutions are likely, and experts believe there will be chaos for days or weeks as states implement bans.Can the federal government stop this?The most effective protection against state abortion bans is a federal law, which would precede the states. Public opinion favors such statute – 85% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances.Such a law would need the majority support of the House of Representatives, a 60-vote majority in the Senate, and a signature from Joe Biden to pass. A majority of members of the House of Representatives support an abortion rights statute, as does the White House.However, Republicans are almost certain to block abortion rights laws in the Senate, which is evenly split with Democrats. One Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has repeatedly crossed party lines to vote against abortion rights. That leaves just 49 Democrats, far short of the support needed to pass such a measure.To overcome the evenly split Senate, Democrats would need to win landslide victories in the upcoming midterm elections. However, despite the fact that popular opinion favors abortion rights, it is unclear how the midterms could be swayed by the issue.And, regardless of the outcome of the next election, Dobbs will forever change life in the US. The lives of individuals will be irrevocably altered as people are denied reproductive healthcare, face long journeys or are forced to give birth.TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtAbortionWomenUS politicsLaw (US)HealthexplainersReuse this content More
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The US supreme court voted in favour of … people getting shot | Hamilton Nolan
The US supreme court voted in favour of … people getting shotHamilton NolanThe supreme court think that restrictions on handguns are grotesquely exceeding their powers. But outlawing abortion? Totally fine The US supreme court on Thursday voted 6-3 in favor of more people getting shot. More formally, they voted to strike down a New York law that restricted the ability of people to carry guns outside of their homes. Experts say it is the most consequential second amendment ruling in more than a decade, and it will make it much harder for states and cities to prevent their citizens from roaming around town armed and ready for shootouts like so many cowboys in Deadwood. One thing that is safe to say is that, as a result of this decision, more Americans will die violent deaths – with freedom!To dissect this ruling as a matter of legal theory is a waste of time. It’s all pretext. All you need to know about the legal theories at work in the current supreme court is that if states want to restrict your ability to carry a handgun, they are grotesquely exceeding their powers, but if states want to outlaw abortion, well, it is only fair that states have that power.To portray any of this as the outcome of a coherent, good-faith legal theory would actually make us all dumber. Come on. This is the political outcome of a decades-long political effort by rightwing extremists to influence American law and culture through the courts, since a functional democracy might prevent them from doing so legislatively. (Preventing America from having a functional democracy that would accurately represent the will of the majority of the population, by the way, is part of this very same effort.) Even those pretending that there is a true legal philosophy at play here have to struggle to keep a straight face. “The test is, uh, if we had a seance, can we imagine that a powder-wig-wearing slaveholder with wooden teeth would have imagined this same exact law, word for word, in 1776?”Come on.The discussion we need to have about the US supreme court is: what are we planning to do about their power? Because if there is no coherent plan advanced, the default outcome could well be 20 more years of a tiny unaccountable cabal of religious fundamentalists dismantling the entire progressive agenda that was won in the second half of the 20th century. That is not acceptable. The court is now fully in control of people who believe they are on a mission from God to drag America back to the good old days of 1885, when corporations were free to whip who they wanted and noble American men wore six shooters everywhere and women stayed home and had babies whether they liked it or not. It is, I’m very sorry to say, the Democratic party that is going to be responsible for seeing to it that this doesn’t happen. On one side, we have hundreds of millions of Americans who would like to enjoy basic bodily autonomy and rights and not be shot or get cancer from toxic corporate waste. On the other side, we have a half-dozen white Catholic Ivy League Republicans who wear weird robes to work and fully intend to see to it that those hundreds of millions of Americans do not have any of those things. And it’s up to the Democratic party to decide which side they will disappoint.Five of the six current rightwing supreme court justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. The Republican senators who vote to confirm them represent a minority of the population. One of the justices, Neil Gorsuch, sits in a seat that was outright stolen, when Mitch McConnell prevented Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland from proceeding as usual; another justice, Amy Coney Barrett, sits in a seat that she was confirmed for when McConnell reversed that principle and rushed her through before Donald Trump lost his presidency. All in all, we are talking about a wildly unrepresentative group of elitist fringe lunatics, installed in power by the exact opposite of democratic will, accountable only to an imaginary God who instructs them to scrap basic gun control laws in the wake of horrific mass shootings of children, while calling themselves “pro-life”. This is not a foundation strong enough to support a modern nation. Anyone who is not prepared to talk about structural reform should give up their position in public life.We are well beyond the point at which the typical Democratic “Get out and vote!” messages are anything other than insulting to everyone’s intelligence. Republicans may be greed-driven bigots, but they are also savvy political realists. They have systematically nurtured a caste of preprogrammed ultra-conservative judges, and they have installed them in positions of power through the most ruthless means possible. Today’s supreme court is the highest expression of this 40-year project. Now, those who have pursued this project are coming for their payoff – the end of gun control, the end of legal abortion, the end of voting rights laws, the end of labor rights, the end of corporate regulations of all kinds. If a classroom full of murdered elementary school children is not enough to sway these high priests from their bizarre and dangerous convictions about how America should run, it is time to get more radical about reining this whole thing in.Adding justices to the supreme court should right now, today, be an urgent mainstream position of the Democratic party. So too should term limits for supreme court justices. These are just basic starting points. These should be accepted as common sense, in the same way that ending the filibuster has slowly come to be. Only bad things will happen, if we do not do these things. Further, more sweeping structural reforms that might have stopped us from finding ourselves in this position in the first place – campaign finance reform, ending gerrymandering, doing away with the electoral college – are equally necessary, but court-specific measures can be done faster. It is hard, I admit, to imagine that our current geriatric, procedure-addicted Democratic party leadership will be able to find it within themselves to propose solutions that are anywhere near adequate to the problem at hand. But conventional wisdom now has to place on all of them the burden of the situation we face: if they are not ready to do the things that would actually fix the problem, no matter how radical those things may be, they are effectively in favor of the problem itself. It is Republican zealots who will end gun control and abortion rights, but every single Democratic senator who decided that packing the court was simply too extreme will have had a hand in helping them, through their utter futility.One of the greatest underlying flaws of the American power structure is that the people who are in control are never forced to feel the consequences of their own decisions. The supreme court, and the United States Congress, are surrounded by fences and armed guards. When a single mentally ill person went to Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with a gun earlier this month, Congress tripped over itself rushing to pass a bill to further protect judges from threats. Yet the same group of delicate souls is now making the country less safe for everyone else. If the members of the US supreme court want to drag America towards dystopia, fine. Let them walk the gun-filled streets with the rest of us.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
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The US supreme court just made America a more dangerous, violent place | Jill Filipovic
The US supreme court just made America a more dangerous, violent placeJill FilipovicThis nihilistic decision will propel the US further toward mass gun violence and a culture of death The conservative justices of the US supreme court just made America an even more dangerous, even more violent place.The decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn, Inc v Bruen took on a simple and commonsense New York state law requiring individuals to have a license in order to own a gun, and requiring people who want to carry a concealed pistol or revolver out in public to demonstrate a particular need to be toting a secret gun around. That law has been on the books in New York since the early 1900s.Sotomayor accuses supreme court conservatives of dismantling church-state separationRead moreThe supreme court just invalidated it in a decision that is an extreme expansion of the largely invented and now near-limitless individual right to own and carry deadly weapons. And it doesn’t bode well for future efforts to impose any restrictions on guns whatsoever – to make it as difficult to get a gun as to get, say, a driver’s license or an abortion. This radical, nihilistic decision potentially calls a great many state gun laws into question – and will propel the US further toward mass gun violence and a culture of death.The case was brought by two New York men who, according to the opinion, “both applied for unrestricted licenses to carry a handgun in public based on their generalized interest in self-defense”. The court, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that “New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense”.Only in America does a “generalized interest in self-defense” give an individual the nearly unlimited right to own a deadly weapon and the right to put everyone else in a community at risk; only in America is the supposed right to carry a hidden deadly weapon in public an “ordinary self-defense need” that supersedes the rights of everyone else to be safe from gun violence.In no other wealthy democracy is any of this “ordinary”.And in no other wealthy democracy are America’s rate of gun violence ordinary.This case comes on the tail of two decades of an increasingly conservative supreme court radically expanding access to guns. And as gun access has radically expanded, so has gun violence. Last year saw a staggering number of gun deaths: more than 20,700, and that’s excluding suicides, which in 2020 accounted for more than half of gun deaths. There were hundreds of mass shootings last year and a far greater number of the handgun killings that have now simply become part of the fabric of American culture, so commonplace that they often don’t even make the nightly news.What’s particularly striking about this case, though, is that the court largely sets aside any concern for public safety. After all, there are good public safety reasons why a state may not want to grant any individual the legal right to carry a concealed gun in public for no reason other than they want one. More guns equal more gun violence – that’s a clear calculus, bolstered by decades of research, at this point undeniable (except by the people who are politically motivated to deny facts and reality).New York has long concluded, pretty reasonably, that it does not want any random person carrying a gun on the subway, or into a school, or into a grocery store. Having a bunch of armed people around increases the chances of any conflict turning deadly; it increases the chances of an accident turning deadly; it just about guarantees that people with no need for a gun who are simply macho, insecure, paranoid and prone to violence will be able to get their hands on one and enjoy the freedom of carrying it anywhere they wish.The supreme court, in an opinion signed by the institution’s self-styled “states’ rights” conservatives, has said that states do not have the right to regulate guns in this way.This decision comes roughly a month after a man armed with a weapon of war murdered 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, as the police sat impotently outside. It comes roughly a month after the murder of 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store by a white supremacist. In the wake of those two shootings – simply the latest mass slaughters of African Americans and schoolchildren – American politicians have done absolutely nothing to rein in our out-of-control gun culture and our astounding rates of gun violence.More Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 than soldiers have died in all of America’s wars combined. An astounding 1.5 million Americans died by gunfire between 1986 and 2017. In the US, nearly 80% of homicides are gun-related; in the UK, it’s 4%. And for every 100 US residents, there are more than 120 guns – the highest rate of civilian gun ownership anywhere in the world (Yemen, with about 53 guns for every 100 people, ranks a distant second).Over and over again, the US relives the now-famous headline from the Onion: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”The reality is that while mass shootings are devastating and shocking, handguns toted around by individual citizens wreak more widespread, if quieter, havoc. Part of what the New York law is trying to prevent is the violent escalation of the kinds of altercations that have already become much more pitched during Covid: People screaming at customer service workers; aggressive drivers fueling road-rage incidents; patients and family members threatening and attacking healthcare workers; adults losing their minds at school board meetings. These kinds of rage incidents are typically not pre-planned, but they can turn deadly fast if one party (or more) is armed. A law may not keep a gun out of the hands of a careful and premeditated killer. But a law like New York’s has kept guns out of the hands of average if violence-inclined citizens while they are in public. That reality is no longer.The devastating truth is that the current court is made of up of a majority of nihilistic rightwing radicals seeking to impose their vision of a heavily armed male-dominated Christian theocracy on the rest of us. This gun case is only a taste of where we’re headed: toward more violence, more death and fewer individual rights – aside, of course, from the ability to own, conceal, and carry just about anywhere as many weapons of death and destruction as one pleases.
Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
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January 6 hearings: Barr ‘not sure at all’ transition would have happened had DoJ not resisted Trump – live
The January 6 committee has concluded its hearing for the day, with the next sessions expected later in July, when House lawmakers return to Washington from a recess.In his closing remarks, committee’s chair Bennie Thompson outlined what the committee had found thus far and what it expected to show in the future..css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Up to this point, we’ve shown the inner workings of what was essentially a political coup and attempt to use the powers of the government, from the local level all the way up, to overturn the results of the election. Send fake electors, just say the election was corrupt. Along the way, we saw threats of violence, we saw what some people were willing to do. In a service of the nation, the constitution? No. In service of Donald Trump.
When the Select Committee continues this series of hearings, we’re going to show how Donald Trump tapped into the threat of violence, how he summoned the mob to Washington, and how after corruption and political pressure failed to keep Donald Trump in office, violence became the last option.The testimony of the justice department officials who gave the bulk of the day’s evidence has concluded, but before they did, Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, told a tale familiar to those who have watched the committee’s hearings closely: he never heard from Trump on the day of the attack.“I spoke to a number of senior White House officials, but not the president,” Rosen said.What Trump was doing during the attack and who he was talking to are both expected to be focuses of later hearings of the committee.The committee has just unveiled evidence of more Republican congressmen requesting pardons from Trump in his final days in office. NEW on PARDONS: Republican congressman Mo Brooks sent an email on 11 January 2021 seeking pardons for “Every Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania.”— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) June 23, 2022
Trump WH aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Brooks and Gaetz pushed for pardons for every Republican lawmaker who participated in Jan. 6 planning meeting — and Reps. Perry, Biggs, Gohmert asked for pardons. Jordan asked whether White House would pardon members.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) June 23, 2022
The testimony adds to the list of pardon requests that have emerged as the January 6 committee aired its evidence.Capitol attack pardon revelations could spell doom for Trump and alliesRead moreJeffrey Clark came very close to be the acting attorney general, a position in which he could have used his authority to disrupt the certification of Biden’s election win in several states, according to evidence the committee is airing.On January 3, three days before the attack on the Capitol, the White House had already begun referring to Clark as acting attorney general, according to Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican leading the committee’s questioning today.The committee then turned to exploring a meeting between Trump and the leaders of the justice department that day in the Oval Office, in which Trump repeated specific claims of fraud that had been debunked and expressed his will to see Clark take over the department.Richard Donoghue said he warned of mass resignations to follow if Clark took over the department. “You’re gonna lose your entire department leadership. Every single (assistant attorney general) will walk out. Your entire department of leadership will walk out within hours. And I don’t know what happens after that. I don’t know what the United States attorneys are going to do,” Donoghue said. “My guess would be that many of them would have resigned.”Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general in the final weeks of the Trump administration, is now recounting Trump’s attempt to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, who was playing a major roles in his efforts to have states that voted for Biden overturn their results.In a meeting on a Sunday, Rosen said Clark “told me that he would be replacing me,” and had made the atypical request to ask to meet him alone, “because he thought it would be appropriate in light of what was happening to at least offer me, that I couldn’t stay on his his deputy.”“I thought that was preposterous. I told him that was nonsensical,” Rosen said. “There’s no universe where I was going to do that, to stay on and support someone else doing things that were not consistent with what I thought should be done.”However, Clark also said he would turn down Trump’s offer to replace Rosen if the acting attorney general signed the letter disputing the validity of Georgia’s electors for Biden. Richard Donoghue recounted that Rosen made the decisions to begin informing other department officials about the quandary, and almost all the assistant attorney generals said they would resign if Trump replaced Rosen with Clark.As this hearing has unfolded, the justice department officials testifying have said they investigated many of the claims of fraud in the 2020 election brought forward by Trump and his allies. The decision to look into these claims in the weeks after polls closed may be more significant than it appears at first glance.In video testimony aired earlier in the hearing, William Barr, Trump’s attorney general during the election, said be believes that the department’s ability to debunk the false claims of fraud as Trump was making them were essential to allowing Joe Biden to assume office.“I felt the responsible thing to do was to be… in a position to have a view as to whether or not there was fraud,” Barr told investigators.“I sort of shudder to think what the situation would have been if the position of the department was, we’re not even looking at this until after Biden’s in office. I’m not sure we would have had a transition at all.”The committee has returned, and is now asking Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, about a request from Trump to seize voting machines.“We had seen nothing improper with regard to the voting machines,” Rosen said he replied, noting that investigators had looked into allegations the machines gave fraudulent results and found nothing wrong. “And so that was not something that was appropriate to do … I don’t think there was legal authority either.”Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, is recounting a meeting with Trump, in which he pushed him unsuccessfully to seize voting machines. By the end, “The president again was getting very agitated. And he said, ‘People tell me I should just get rid of both of you. I should just remove you and make a change in the leadership with Jeff Clark, and maybe something will finally get done,’” Donoghue said.Donoghue said he responded: “Mr President, you should have the leadership that you want. But understand the United States justice department functions on facts and evidence, and then those are not going to change. So you can have whatever leadership you want, but the department’s position is not going to change.”The committee is now in recess, but before they finished, Richard Donoghue described his reaction when he first learned of Jeffrey Clark’s proposed letter to the Georgia legislature asking them to convene to declare alternate electoral college voters.“I had to read both the email and the attached letter twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing because it was so extreme to me I had a hard time getting my head around it initially,” Donoghue said. He responded in writing to Clark’s letter, saying that its allegations were “not based on facts,” and, in his view, “for the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think, would have had grave consequences for the country. It may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis. And I wanted to make sure that he understood the gravity of the situation because he didn’t seem to really appreciate it.”Clark himself made a brief appearance in video testimony the committee played before it took its break, responding to questions by asserting his fifth amendment rights and executive privilege.The committee will reconvene in a few minutes.One name that’s coming up a lot in this hearing is Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania Republican congressman who the committee said took part in Trump’s plan to pressure the justice department, and in particular install Jeff Clark at its helm.The committee just showed text messages between Perry and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, which showed the lawmaker encouraging Meadows to work on promoting Clark. Richard Donoghue also detailed a phone call from Perry where the congressman claimed fraud in the results in Pennsylvania from the 2020 election – which the justice department determined unfounded.The committee had sought documents and requested an interview with Perry last year, but the Republican refused to comply. Last month, Perry was among a group of congressmen subpoenaed by the committee.Capitol attack panel subpoenas five Republicans in unprecedented stepRead moreRichard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, is outlining his efforts to convince the president that the justice department could not interfere with a state’s election.“States run their elections. We are not quality control for the states,” he recalled explaining to Trump. “The bottom line was, if a state ran their election in such a way that it was defective, that is to the state or Congress to correct, it is not for the justice department to step in.”But Trump wanted something simpler, Donoghue said.“That’s not what I’m asking you to do,” Donoghue told the committee Trump said after he explained the department’s position. “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” the president said.Today’s hearing is focusing on the inner workings of the justice department, but as in previous sessions, the committee has tried to make sure the insurrection isn’t far from viewers’ minds.Case in point: lawmakers just aired video from the day of the attack showing marchers chanting “Do your job!” outside the justice department — evidence that Trump’s most ardent supporters were well aware of the president’s attempts to push government lawyers to interfere with Joe Biden’s victory.But as justice department officials tell it, they never believed in Trump’s fraud claims. Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, said Trump lawyer Pat Cipollone described the letter Clark wanted to send for Trump as a “murder-suicide pact. It’s going to damage everyone who touches it.”The committee’s top Republican Liz Cheney is offering more details about the actions of justice department official Jeffrey Clark, who had his house raided today by federal investigators.According to Cheney, Clark and another justice department lawyer drafted a letter addressed to the Georgia state legislature, which would have said the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia”, and that the legislature should convene and consider approving a new slate of electors. Joe Biden had won Georgia, but Trump made baseless allegations of fraud in the polls, and the new electors would have presumably given him the state’s electoral votes.“In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie,” Cheney said. “The Department of Justice had already informed the president of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”Cheney said Clark had met with Trump privately and agreed to help him sway these states’ legislatures without telling his bosses at the justice department. But Cheney said Clark’s superiors – who are the witnesses testifying today – refused to sign it. That was when Trump began considering installing Clark at the helm at the justice department – which he never ended up doing. The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has started its fifth hearing, which will focus on Donald Trump’s efforts to get the justice department to go along with his plans to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Testifying in the chamber will be:
Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general for the final weeks of Trump’s term, including during the attack on the Capitol.
Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, who appeared in a video aired at the conclusion of Tuesday’s hearing threatening to resign if Trump appointed Jeffrey Clark to head the justice department.
Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel.
We’re about 10 minutes away from the start of today’s January 6 hearing, which my colleague Lauren Gambino reports will offer new evidence of how Trump pressured the justice department to take part in his plot to overturn the 2020 election:The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection plans to present new evidence on Thursday about Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to pressure the justice department to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he lost, aides said.After exhausting his legal options and being rebuffed by state and local elections officials, the president turned to the justice department to declare the election corrupt despite no evidence of mass voter fraud, the nine-member panel will seek to show in their fifth and final hearing of the month.Testifying from the Cannon Caucus Room on Capitol Hill are Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting attorney general; Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general; and Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel.Capitol attack panel to show how Trump pressured DoJ to overturn electionRead more More - in US Politics
Sotomayor accuses supreme court conservatives of dismantling church-state separation
Sotomayor accuses supreme court conservatives of dismantling church-state separationLiberal justice delivers warning after ruling that state of Maine cannot exclude religious schools from tuition programme The liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor has warned that the US supreme court is dismantling the wall between church and state, after the conservative majority ruled that the state of Maine cannot exclude religious schools from a tuition programme.‘I got in the car and he blindfolded me. I was willing to risk death’: five women on abortions before RoeRead moreIn a dissent to the ruling in Carson v Makin, released on Tuesday, Sotomayor wrote: “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.“… In just a few years, the court has upended constitutional doctrine, shifting from a rule that permits states to decline to fund religious organisations to one that requires states in many circumstances to subsidise religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.”Progressives fear other rulings due this month, among them a case set to bring down Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which established the right to abortion, and a ruling on a New York law set to loosen gun regulations even after several horrific mass shootings.Supreme court justices often claim not to rule according to political beliefs but few serious observers give such claims any credence.In the Maine case, John Roberts, the chief justice, wrote for the conservative majority. In Roberts’ view, the tuition programme violated the free exercise clause of the first amendment to the US constitution, because it said private schools were “eligible to receive the payments, so long as they [we]re ‘nonsectarian’”.Roberts wrote: “Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the programme operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”A conservative, Roberts was appointed by George W Bush. Since Republicans rammed three new justices on to the court under Donald Trump, the chief justice has become in some cases a voice for moderation. Not this time.Sotomayor wrote: “While purporting to protect against discrimination of one kind, the court requires Maine to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds.”The main dissent was written by Stephen Breyer, at 83 the oldest of three liberals on the nine-judge panel. Breyer will soon retire, to be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s first pick and the first Black woman confirmed to the court.Like her fellow liberal Elena Kagan, Sotomayor was nominated by Barack Obama.Concluding her dissent, Sotomayor wrote: “What a difference five years makes. In 2017, I feared that the court was ‘lead[ing] us … to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment’.“Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation. If a state cannot offer subsidies to its citizens without being required to fund religious exercise, any state that values its historic antiestablishment interests more than this court does will have to curtail the support it offers to its citizens.“With growing concern for where this court will lead us next, I respectfully dissent.”Sonia Sotomayor says supreme court’s ‘mistakes’ can be corrected over timeRead moreHer words caused a stir. Antony Michael Kreis, a law professor and political scientist at Georgia State University, wrote: “Sotomayor is not having it today.”Nonetheless, Roberts’ ruling was further evidence of a court in conservatives’ grip.Last week, addressing progressive lawyers in Washington, Sotomayor said: “There are days I get discouraged. There are moments where I am deeply, deeply disappointed. And yes, there have been moments when I’ve stopped and said, ‘Is this worth it any more?’“And every time when I do that, I lick my wounds for a while, sometimes I cry, and then I say, ‘OK, let’s fight.’”TopicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)MaineUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
