This week’s riveting testimony from the Jan. 6 Committee has driven speculation about whether sufficient evidence now exists to criminally charge former President Donald Trump. While that remains a complex legal question, there is a straightforward crime that could be charged quickly — and the targets are Trump’s band of dishonest attorneys.

Of all the evidence uncovered by the committee, what jumps out to me as a former federal prosecutor are the “fake elector” certificates signed by Trump electors and submitted to former Vice President Mike Pence in an effort to delay the certification of the electoral votes on January 6. Those certificates contained statements that are easily proven false

For example, some listed names of people who weren’t even Trump electors that cycle. Others claimed that they were “duly elected.” When you make a false statement to the federal government, you’re putting a target on your back. If you lie to the U.S. government, you can be charged with a felony. Federal prosecutors have frequently charged defendants ranging from Martha Stewart to Michael Flynn with committing this crime. Prosecutors like charging this statute because it can be straightforward to prove, and judges can look at the full range of the defendant’s conduct at sentencing.

It looks like the DOJ is already moving in this direction. Just this week, the Justice Department reportedly subpoenaed the Georgia Republican Party chairman and executed a search warrant on the phone of the Nevada GOP chairman. That means that a federal judge found that there is a good reason to believe that evidence of a federal crime was located on that phone. Perhaps most significantly, on Wednesday, federal agents raided the suburban Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, the acting assistant U.S. attorney general who wanted to use the Justice Department to send false statements to state officials in an effort to overturn the election.

Typically, lawyers are not a weak link. In my experience, lawyers have been the most difficult defendants to convict. They’re usually careful about what they say and what they write down. But Trump’s coterie of dishonest legal advisers — John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Clark — weren’t careful. In their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, they said things that were demonstrably false and were personally involved in lies told to government officials. If prosecutors can prove that one or more of them created the false certificates, and knew that doing so was illegal, they may have criminal liability. If they knew about the false statements and advanced the scheme to transmit them to the U.S. Senate, that may also be enough. Clark is facing the same criminal liability for writing false statements in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch.

We have already heard testimony this week that they knew what they were saying was false. Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers testified Tuesday that after Giuliani and Trump promised him evidence of 400,000 dead people who voted, Giuliani at one point admitted that he had “lots of theories” but “no evidence.” Similarly, Eastman privately admitted that his theory that Pence could overturn the election would lose 9-0 in the Supreme Court, but he nonetheless tried to convince Trump, Pence and others that his view was right.

Based on the Jan. 6 committee’s testimony over the previous five public hearings, we know that the certificates contained false statements and that they were created to be submitted to the United States Senate. If someone concretely moved forward that scheme — by signing the documents, preparing the documents, or organizing the meetings — they committed a felony if they knew the documents contained false statements and they had the intent to do something illegal.

We also heard extensive evidence of Clark’s dishonest scheme, which violates the same statute. Clark drafted a letter to Georgia election officials falsely stating the DOJ had evidence of fraud affecting the state’s results and that the governor should call a special session of the legislature to approve “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.” Clark was told repeatedly by his superiors at DOJ that absolutely no evidence existed to support that statement, and he had no authority to conduct his own investigation or to direct states whether or how to select electors, but he persisted in promoting the conspiracy until days before Congress was scheduled to certify the electoral college votes on Jan. 6. The evidence that Clark knew his statement was false, and that he knew he was doing something illegal, is significant. That’s why he was in his pajamas watching federal agents search his home early Wednesday.

Because the statute criminalizing false statements requires knowledge that the statement was false and that the defendant was doing something illegal, the attorneys are the easiest targets for DOJ. As attorneys, it will be hard for Eastman, Giuliani and Ellis to claim that they had no idea that they were acting outside the four corners of state law by convening “alternative” electors and submitting them to the Senate even though the state had already submitted official electors. It will also be hard for Clark to argue that he had no idea that what he was doing was illegal, given that his superiors forcefully told him so.

Charging those attorneys is also the best route for DOJ if it wants to build a case against Trump. Any case against Trump is complicated by the fact that he surrounded himself with dishonest attorneys who told him what he wanted to hear. If he was prosecuted, he would likely claim that he was acting on the advice of those attorneys.

But if federal prosecutors build a case against Giuliani, Eastman or Clark first, they could potentially flip one of them and have a key cooperator against Trump. Presumably Trump had forthcoming one-on-one conversations with those attorneys, believing that they were protected by attorney-client privilege.

If one of them agreed to cooperate, DOJ could go to a judge seeking an order permitting disclosure of Trump’s statements under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, which permits disclosure of private communications between an attorney and client if they were about ongoing crimes.

Ordinarily, I’d say that is a very uphill battle. But a federal judge in California already disclosed private communications between Trump and Eastman to the committee based on the crime-fraud exception. Prosecutors could point to that ruling and seek a similar ruling as to verbal communications.

Any prosecution of Trump would not be easy. But the committee has made DOJ’s job easier by developing evidence of a straightforward, readily provable crime and revealing how careless dishonest lawyers like Giuliani, Eastman and Clark were, making them ripe targets.

The Supreme Court’s decision is already emboldening the anti-abortion movement to think bigger.

Republicans are celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a win for the anti-abortion movement that was decades in the making.

After a draft version of the opinion was leaked to Politico in May, Republicans expressed optimism, but largely withheld expressions of triumph. They didn’t hold back on Friday, reveling in the immediate shift that began taking place after the decision, as red states invoked laws to further restrict abortion and as congressional Republicans began planning new anti-abortion policies.

“What an historic day this is and what a great victory for life. And it’s not just a victory for life. It’s a victory for millions of people who have been part of this pro-life movement for decades, who have gone to state legislatures, who have gotten involved in the political process, who prayed … The decades of work [are] celebrated today,” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said during a press conference on Friday.

For most Republicans, the decision presented an opportunity to tout their party’s ability to deliver on long-running campaign promises as they head into the midterms. But for Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — who supported the confirmations of some of the conservative justices who joined the opinion based on the assumption that they wouldn’t overturn Roe — it was a moment of reckoning.

“This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon,” Collins said in a statement.

Most Republican lawmakers didn’t share Collins’s frustrations, and have made clear that the end of Roe is a launching pad for the anti-abortion movement, not an endgame. For months, they’ve been outlining a longer-term goal of imposing new restrictions on abortion nationally if they retake control of Congress.

How far they actually go could be limited by public opinion: Gallup’s tracking poll has found 85 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances. Former President Donald Trump reportedly predicted that the decision could ultimately hurt Republicans politically, especially among suburban women who helped propel him into office in 2016.

For now, however, those fears aren’t stopping red states and national Republicans.

Red states immediately started moving to further restrict abortion

At least 13 states have “trigger laws” that were designed to outlaw abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Some of them activated those laws in the immediate aftermath of the decision on Friday.

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision, Missouri’s Republican attorney general issued an opinion that “triggers” parts of a 2019 law to effectively end abortion in the state. That law bans abortion after eight weeks of pregnancy unless there is a critical medical reason, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or human trafficking. It also explicitly bans abortions for fetuses that might have Down syndrome and requires minors to notify their parents or guardians before getting an abortion in most cases.

Texas has yet to trigger its own law, though that will likely happen in about a month. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warned Friday that prosecutors could start seeking criminal charges against abortion providers immediately based on old state abortion bans that were enacted before Roe and that were never repealed by the legislature. The few remaining abortion providers and funds in the state consequently announced that they would be shutting down for fear of legal repercussions.

“Although these statutes were unenforceable while Roe was on the books, they are still Texas law,” Paxton wrote. “Under these pre-Roe statutes, abortion providers could be criminally liable for providing abortions starting today.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, also announced Friday that he had enlisted state lawmakers to craft legislation that would ban most abortions after 15 to 20 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions for when the pregnant person’s life is endangered and in cases of rape and incest. He told the Washington Post that his preference would be a 15-week cutoff, but that 20 weeks might be a feasible compromise in the split state legislature.

“The truth is, Virginians want fewer abortions, not more abortions. We can build a bipartisan consensus on protecting the life of unborn children, especially when they begin to feel pain in the womb, and importantly supporting mothers and families who choose life,” he said in a statement.

Republicans are already calling for a nationwide abortion ban

Republicans have also started to build a foundation to further restrict abortion access in the US, especially if they retake control of Congress.

“Having been given this second chance for Life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land,” former Vice President Mike Pence tweeted Friday.

House Republican leaders — including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican Study Committee chair Jim Banks, and Judiciary ranking member Jim Jordan — are already lining up to support legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, CNN reported.

That ban could pass the House if Republicans recapture the majority in this year’s midterm elections, as they are widely expected to, but it probably wouldn’t win support from a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, even if the GOP regains control of the chamber. It is possible that Republicans could choose to eliminate the filibuster to pass the ban, but so long as a Democrat remains in the White House, they would veto any such legislation.

Republicans have also indicated that they plan to reintroduce the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” if they recapture the House majority. That bill would put in place requirements for the care of infants born after failed, late-term abortions and could send doctors to prison if they fail to comply. Reproductive rights and physician groups have previously opposed the legislation on the basis that it could criminalize doctors and is duplicative of existing laws that already support infants in these very rare cases.

And those plans appear to be only the beginning of their ambitions.

“In the days and weeks following this decision, we must work to continue to reject extreme policies that seek to allow late-term abortions and taxpayer dollars to fund these elective procedures,” McCarthy said in a statement Friday. “As we celebrate today’s decision, we recognize the decades of advocacy from the pro-life movement and we acknowledge much work remains to protect the most vulnerable among us.”

Since passing along my duties with the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup to a fresh voice several years ago, I rarely have anything to say about what pundits in the mainstream media write about whether I agree with them or not. Today, however, I’m making an exception for Kathleen Parker. 

Parker is an avowed conservative, so her views on just about anything collide with mine. But a particular column of hers burned me up when I first read it, and it was brought to mind again today when I was recalling the people supposedly on my own side of the political spectrum who for years had said attention to reproductive rights, including abortion, was a side show, a culture war distraction from “real” issues. As if relegating women to inferior status doesn’t matter unless the people doing it call themselves the Taliban.

But I am presuming, hopefully, that those who foolishly took this stance in the past see the error of their ways and will from now on be fighting alongside the rest of us, unified to do all we can to undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion (and possible future rulings on birth control and LGBTQ rights if Justice Clarence Thomas gets his way). 

Parker gets no such consideration. Recently, she deplored potential violence against Supreme Court justices, but had nothing to say about the violence against women that the Six Supremes had already made up their minds to support as we learned from the leaked Alito draft in Dobbs. But her July 3, 2018, column, “Calm down. Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere,” was what stoked my fury:

If Chicken Little and Cassandra had a baby, they’d name him Jeffrey Toobin.

Anyone watching CNN lately has probably heard Toobin’s prediction that if a conservative fills the Supreme Court seat left vacant by departing Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, abortion is dead. …

Whatever the outcome of President Trump’s nomination, slated to be announced Monday , we can expect a battle royal as special-interest groups, presidential wannabes and midterm candidates rev their fundraising engines. There won’t be breathing room in the Senate confirmation chamber during confirmation hearings. Nor will envy of the nominee — my money’s on federal appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh — linger long in the hearing room. What sane mortal would wish upon him- or herself such scrutiny, marooned alone on the block to be picked at by scoundrels, fools and pontificating provocateurs? …

What new justice would want to be that man or woman, who forevermore would be credited with upending settled law and causing massive societal upheaval? As for other conservative justices, only Clarence Thomas would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade . Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the most important voices in this discussion, echoed the thoughts of close-to-the-court sources, who told me that neither Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. nor Neil M. Gorsuch would likely want to wade into that swamp and weigh in on a Roe v. Wade reversal.

Parker dared to label as “scoundrels, fools, and provocateurs” senators who would be questioning whoever Trump nominated to fill the seat left by Kennedy’s retirement. But when Samuel Alito’s draft on Roe v. Wade appeared earlier this year and showed who the real scoundrels are with their woman-hating endorsement of molester-enabling, rapist-encouraging, coathanger-selling, health-shattering forced-pregnancies, not a word from Parker. 

I suspect we won’t be getting any apology—or even a “my bad”—from this wretched pundit who asserts that abortion is violence against gestating fetuses but has nothing to say about the violence to women that this Supreme Court has visited upon them, with quite probably more to come. 

Reproductive rights activists and our allies will not be calming down, Ms. Parker. We won’t be shutting up. But we will be on the lookout for more of your rancid predictions on what else Americans shouldn’t be worried about. 

On Friday, the long-dreaded Supreme Court decision to take away the reproductive rights of more than half of the country became official. The decision overturns the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision protecting people’s rights to choose whether or not they will have an abortion. This is not the only civil right in jeopardy from this court, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote he believes similar decisions that rely on the 14th Amendment protecting rights to contraception and same-sex marriage should be “reconsidered” as well. Thomas left off the Loving case from his list, the one that allowed interracial marriages, but don’t worry—I suspect he’d rule against that as well.

The Democratic Party has known for some time that this day was coming. They knew it was coming when Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell stole the Supreme Court seat former President Barack Obama was set to fill after Justice Antonin Scalia died on a “free” weekend stay at a West Texas resort, and Donald Trump was able to fill the seat with Neil Gorsuch. Democratic leadership knew this day was coming when the clearly incompetent Justice Anthony Kennedy retired and Trump nominated alleged sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh to the high court. The Democratic Party knew this day was coming when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away and Donald Trump filled her seat with Amy Coney Barrett, a member of a religious cult/sect of Christianity.

So on Friday, weeks after a draft of this decision leaks to the public, the Democratic leadership announces that they … are not happy with this decision. No action.

RELATED STORY: Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending abortion rights for millions

Democratic lawmakers flanked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in front of the House of Representatives in order to promote the passing of a gun bill that will do some good things, but nowhere near what needs to be done. Unfortunately, as the protesters in front of them should have clued them into, the Supreme Court announced the whole no-one-has-reproductive-rights anymore thing, so Pelosi and her House Democrats had to consider that their audience was not there for what seems like a very minor victory in a skirmish where we are clearly losing the war.

So what did they decide to do? Associated Press Washington, D.C., correspondent Farnoush Amiri tweeted out a video of these House Democrats, maybe three dozen, standing like a choir on the steps of the House, singing “God Bless America.” What. The. Fuck? The responses from Democratic voters and progressives is thunderous in its frustration with this absolutely incoherent piece of political theater.

To get more perspective.

God bless America? What. The. Fuck????

It’s amazing.

It’s really just profoundly unfortunate. If you are going to play politics you have to be able to do it better than this because right now, at this time, with all of the polling telling you that what you are doing politically ain’t working, this performance comes across exactly like this.

What’s the takeaway?

There’s a fight for our lives and the Democratic Party’s leadership needs to step up or step away. The Republicans that you have had drinks with for decades are not your friends and musical theater is an important art but it isn’t the solution to the problems we face in our government.

Correction: When first published, the story placed the event on the steps of the Supreme Court. The event took place on the steps of the House of Representatives.

Friday, June 24, 2022, is a uniquely sad, frustrating, and disappointing day, but it is not the day we stop fighting. As covered by my colleague Joan McCarter, conservative zealots on the U.S. Supreme Court succeeded in their anti-choice mission to effectively end federal protections for abortion rights. With the 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, more than 10 states have automatically banned abortions via trigger laws, thanks to anti-choice lawmakers. These states include Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Utah.

And, as covered by my colleague Laura Clawson, we know this is not just about abortion, though abortion access is (of course) an enormous deal in itself. As Justice Clarence Thomas points out in his concurring opinion, for example, the Court not only can but should dismantle our rights to birth control and marriage equality. Justices in the dissenting opinion (the three liberals, including Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) also see this as the possible next path for the Court, though of course, they’re ringing alarm bells out of fear, not excitement.

And what are people saying on the internet? Let’s dive into what statements officials are sharing, as well as what folks are sharing in terms of solidarity, resources, and intellectual discourse.   

RELATED: Living in a state with a 'trigger law' makes me want to fight for reproductive justice even harder

Progressives are making a point to honor the deep harm and pain in this decision, but also their ongoing commitment to keep fighting for basic rights and dignities for all of us. 

Folks are making sure to clarify where abortion will stay a safe, accessible, and life-saving procedure and that we’re not giving up the fight no matter where we live.

House Democrats are gathering at the House and marching toward the Supreme Court, per Daily Beast journalist Ursula Perano. 

It appears police in riot gear are also on their way to the court… 

And we have to give space to people who can’t help but gloat this morning.

And then there’s Susan Collins.

And to round things off, some dark dark humor to help us cope.

And one parting message, while we’re on the subject.

Contribute now to support abortion funds providing financial assistance to people seeking abortion care

Democratic lawmakers’ response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s destruction of reproductive rights for the nation has been, let’s say less than urgent. Less than cognizant of the absolute earthquake that just rocked us. Less than aware that we are all looking to them to DO. SOMETHING.

Start with canceling recess. Start with acknowledging that the nation is on fire and that it is their job to start putting the fire out. Recognize that that is what we elected them to do in 2018 and 2020. Show us that they understand that we put our faith in them to do this job. We’re paying them to do it. It is their responsibility.

Then act. Don’t just hold hearings on how awful it is that we just witnessed the end of federal protections for abortion rights. Put legislation on the floor to codify abortion rights and put everyone on the record. Take Justice Clarence Thomas at his word and put legislation on the floor to codify our right to birth control, and put every Republican on the record on that. Put legislation on the floor to codify protections for same-sex relationships and marriages, and put every lawmaker on record on that. Put legislation on the floor to codify the right to interracial marriages, and make every Republican vote on that.

End the filibuster. Don’t let Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski off the hook. They all voted once already this Congress to carve out a filibuster exception for raising the debt ceiling. Make them do the same to preserve abortion rights.

Fix the Supreme Court. Nothing this Congress could do to protect our rights will stand as long as the Supreme Court as it is currently constructed stands. Address that fact.

Address the fact that every one of the extremist judges who did this lied to Congress in their confirmation hearings and that we all know that. Show there will be consequences for those lies, including reforms that could end their lifetime tenure on that Court. Including adding justices to dilute their toxic influence. Including imposing a code of ethics that every other federal judge is supposed to adhere to. Including constraining their power legislatively.

While you’re at it, start impeach proceedings—and investigations--against Clarence Thomas. Because there’s every likelihood that he’s as much an insurrectionist as his wife and a danger to the republic.  

Most of all, wake the fuck up and recognize that this is war. 

This. Is. War. Republicans declared it decades ago, and too many Democrats not only didn’t acknowledge that—they didn’t even recognize it. 

We, the base of loyal progressives and Democrats will continue to fight and will continue to vote and get out the vote and donate and every other thing. But if you’re going to get more people than just us to do all that, you’ve got to show that you deserve it.

Prove that you deserve it.

Though officers were inside Robb Elementary School just three minutes after the gunman entered, it took them 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds to end the massacre.

With every detail that emerges about the Robb Elementary massacre, the police response looks worse.

In the days after the shooting, the Uvalde, Texas, police offered conflicting accounts of what took place when officers entered the school building and why it took so long to stop the rampage. The police changed their story repeatedly. Amid the multiple agencies at the scene — the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police, the Uvalde Police Department, the Department of Public Safety, and Border Patrol — it wasn’t clear to some officers involved who was in charge.

For the past four weeks, investigators watched body camera video, footage from the nearby funeral home, and school surveillance video, and listened to radio traffic and phone and dispatch recordings. Now they’re getting some answers about why communication between officers failed, why basic active shooter protocol was outright ignored, and why teachers and students weren’t rescued for 77 minutes.

The picture emerging is damning.

Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who has been leading Texas’s investigation of the police response, described it at a recent Texas Senate special hearing as “an abject failure, antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”

Eric Gay/AP

Investigations by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department, and the local district attorney’s office are also underway, which means that new information will likely be released and change an ever-evolving story. Some Uvalde officials are already casting doubt on McCraw’s account, claiming that he is trying to distance state troopers and the Texas Rangers from the bungled response.

Here’s what has been revealed so far about three key contributors to the deadly delay.

1) Police had enough resources to act but they delayed for more than an hour

Three minutes after the shooter entered the building, enough armed officers were on the scene to stop the shooter, said McCraw. The post-Columbine doctrine for how to stop active shooter situations is clear, he argued: Officers must stop the killing and stop the dying. “You can’t do the latter unless you do the former,” McCraw said. But officers did not act quickly enough.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” McCraw said. “The officers had weapons; the children had none. The officers had body armor; the children had none. The officers had training; the subject had none.”

At 11:33 am, the shooter entered the building. Three minutes later, as many as 11 officers had entered, nine with rifles — enough to isolate, distract, and neutralize the shooter. Yet officers waited for radios, rifles, shields, a sniper, and a SWAT team that was never needed.

At 11:37, the shooter — now in a classroom — fired another 11 rounds. Some of the bullets went through the walls and grazed two approaching officers. The officers retreated.

At 11:40 am, Chief Pedro Arredondo of the Uvalde Consolidated School District Police called the Uvalde Police Department’s dispatch on his cellphone and requested more assistance and a radio. “We don’t have enough firepower right now, it’s all pistols and he has an AR-15,” he said.

2) There was a futile scramble for keys that McCraw said weren’t even needed

Immediately after the shooting, law enforcement officials said the shooter was able to enter Robb Elementary because a teacher had the door propped open with a rock. Video surveillance shows that wasn’t true: The teacher knocked the rock out of the doorway before the shooter got to the school. The door, which could only be locked from the outside, was unlocked. (Even if it had been locked, there were glass panels beside the door that could have provided access.)

The classroom doors could also only be locked from the outside with a key.

Eric Gay/AP

“I don’t believe based on the information we have right now that that door was ever secured. In fact, I have great reason to believe it wasn’t secured,” McCraw said, since the shooter, who didn’t have a key, could enter, exit, and then reenter the classroom, as investigators observed on video.

Before entering the classroom, officers waited for a sledgehammer and a hooligan, a tool used to force entry. Both tools were available. They waited for a master key, which was requested nearly 45 minutes after the shooter entered.

“We’re having a fucking problem getting into the room because it is locked,” Arredondo said at 12:42 pm. Then: “They gotta get that fucking door open, bro. They can’t get that door open. We need more keys or something.”

“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s unlocked? No one had. The breaching team had been led to believe that the door was locked,” McCraw said. Officers also could have banged on the windows of the classroom to distract the shooter as others breached the door.

It took officers 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds to enter the classroom and kill the shooter.

3) Investigators identified an incident commander — who says he wasn’t in charge

Investigators have named at least one person who they think is to blame: Chief Pedro Arredondo, who led the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police force. It was his jurisdiction, he was the ranking senior official, and he was issuing commands and directing actions, McCraw said.

Eric Thayer/Getty Images

Arredondo’s lawyer told the Texas Tribune in an interview that Arredondo did not believe he was the incident commander; he assumed that some other official had taken control of the larger response and so he took on the role of a front-line responder. They also told the Tribune that he “did not issue any orders,” contradicting McCraw’s evidence. Further complicating the chain of command was that most of the portable radios that the officers carried did not function inside the school, causing miscommunication, delayed information sharing, and the spread of misleading intel. The radio chatter that did occur was “chaotic,” McCraw said. Additionally, the charts the police officers used to devise a plan were wrong.

A day after McCraw’s testimony, Hal Harrell, the Uvalde schools superintendent, announced that he decided to place Chief Arredondo on administrative leave. Family members of victims have grown increasingly angry about the slow police response and are calling for Arredondo’s firing.

“I don’t like singling out a person and shifting and saying he’s solely responsible, but at the end of the day, if you assume incident command, you are responsible,” McCraw said.

Officers did try to counter commands to stay back, and it’s the reason the shooter was finally killed at 12:50 pm. The Border Patrol agents who breached the classroom and shot the gunman ignored a directive that they heard in their earpieces not to advance, according to a New York Times investigation. About an hour before, a Department of Public Safety special agent questioned whether there were still children in the classroom, saying, “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.”

The failure was broader than one person. “This set our profession back a decade,” McCraw said. “I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in.”

Here’s the timeline as it stands now but it might keep changing as investigations deepen

• 11:28 am: The shooter, who didn’t have a driver’s license or know how to drive, crashes his vehicle into a ditch, in front of Robb Elementary and the nearby funeral home.
• 11:29: A teacher inside the school observes the crash and calls 911 to report that there is a man with a gun; the shooter shoots at two people who left the funeral home after the crash.
• 11:31: The shooter begins shooting at the school, firing 27 times into two classrooms as he approaches the building.
• 11:33: The shooter enters the west entrance of the school through an unlocked door. The school begins an active shooter lockdown. The shooter fires into classrooms 111 and 112 through the hallway. He enters and exits the classrooms, firing more than 100 rounds.
• 11:35: Three Uvalde police officers, with two rifles, enter the school building.
• 11:36: A total of 11 police officers are in the building: Uvalde PD officers and school district police officers, including Arredondo.
• 11:37: The shooter fires another 11 rounds. Some of the bullets go through the walls and graze two approaching officers. The officers retreat.

5 minutes have elapsed since the first police officers entered. The police get a crucial fact wrong, complicating the response.

• 11:40: The chief received a report from an unknown officer that the shooter was “contained in this office,” suggesting that the subject was barricaded or that a hostage situation — not an active shooter — was in process.
• Shortly after 11:40: Chief Arredondo calls the Uvalde police from his cellphone and provides an incident description, asking for a SWAT team and a radio and claiming to lack firepower.
• 11:40: The shooter fires one round.
• 11:41: Uvalde police report that they believe the shooter is barricaded in “one of the offices” and is still shooting. (This is more misinformation. He’s not barricaded in an office, since there is no office on the floor plan.)
• Dispatch asks if the classroom door is locked and the officer responds, “I’m not sure but we have a hooligan to break it.”
• 11:42: More officers continue to enter the school.
• 11:44: The shooter fires another round.

10 minutes have elapsed since the police entered Robb Elementary.

• 11:48: Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Officer Ruben Ruiz enters the school and tells officers that his wife told him she had been shot. Ruben is physically detained and escorted off the scene while having his gun taken away, according to McCraw.
• 11:52: The first ballistic shield enters the school building. Uvalde Police Department officers show up and get told to help with crowd control.
• 11:54: A Department of Public Safety special agent enters the building and asks, “Are kids still in there?” An unknown officer responds, “It is unknown at this time.”

20 minutes have elapsed since the police entered Robb Elementary. Delays continue, even as more equipment arrives.

• 11:56 am: The DPS special agent says, “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.”
• 12:03 pm: Khloie Torres, a student inside room 112, calls 911. The second ballistic shield enters the building.
• 12:04: The third ballistic shield enters the building.

30 minutes have elapsed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:11 pm: Arredondo requests a master key.
• 12:14: Arredondo instructs officers to have a sniper on the east roof of the school.

40 minutes have elapsed since police entered Robb Elementary. Police continue to say they’re struggling to get into the room.

• 12:16 pm: Arredondo says, “I just need a key.”
• 12:17: Arredondo says, “Tell them to fucking wait. No one comes in.”
• 12:20: The fourth ballistic shield enters the building.
• 12:21: The shooter fires four rounds.
• 12:21–12:33: Arredondo, on body camera audio, asks for a breaching tool and says, “If he starts shooting, we’re going to lose more kids.” He continues to say that he needs keys to get through the door and that the keys he already has aren’t working. “We’re ready to breach, but that door is locked,” he says. “I say we breach through those windows and shoot his fucking head off through the windows.”

An hour has passed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:35 pm: A hooligan tool, used by firefighters to gain entry, is brought into the building.
• 12:41: Arredondo says, “Just so you understand, we think there are some injuries in there. And so you know what we did, we cleared off the rest of the building so we wouldn’t have any more besides what’s already in there, obviously.”
• 12:42: Arredondo says, “We have a fucking problem getting into the room because it is locked. He’s got an AR-15 and he’s shooting everywhere like crazy. So, he’s stopped.”
• 12:43: Arredondo says, “They gotta get that fucking door open, bro. They can’t get that door open. We need more keys or something.”

70 minutes have passed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:46 pm: Arredondo says, “If y’all are ready to do it, you do it. But you should distract him out that window.”
• 12:47: A sledgehammer enters the building.
• 12:50: A stack of seven officers tries to enter the classroom. Only four are able to enter the classroom because the door closes and leaves the other three out. Five officers fire rounds at the shooter and kill him.

Samuel Alito’s majority opinion striking down Roe v. Wade insists LGBTQ rights are safe. Thomas’s disturbing concurrence exposes the incoherence of that claim.

In the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito writes that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, suggests otherwise.

Thomas voted with the 6-3 majority that struck down Roe. In a concurring opinion, however, he expressed the view that he would go further — much further — than the majority in thinking through the implications of today’s decision. One passage in particular captured people’s attention:

In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.

The key concept is the term “substantive due process,” which refers to the idea that the Constitution protects rights that are neither purely procedural (like rights to fair trial procedures) nor explicitly mentioned in the Constitution (like the freedom of the press). Thomas is arguing that such “unenumerated” rights are basically made up: not just the right to abortion protected in Roe, but also protections for birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut, same-sex sexual relations in Lawrence v. Texas, and same-sex marriage in Obergefell.

This does not mean that these rights are necessarily in danger now. In fact, such future rulings may well be unlikely. Thomas has a long history of unsuccessfully calling for the overruling of longstanding precedent, and Alito’s majority opinion goes out of its way again and again to emphasize that it would not have the implications Thomas wants. Together, these facts suggest that the other conservative justices are wary of going down the road Thomas is paving, and that he would have few votes for enacting his extraordinarily radical vision.

But just because it’s unlikely doesn’t make the possibility any less chilling when spelled out in a Supreme Court concurrence. And Thomas’s concurrence exposes the incoherent logic at the heart of Alito’s ruling — and a fundamental problem with the way the Supreme Court operates.

How Thomas exposed the majority’s incoherence

The basic argument in Alito’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is that there is no explicit constitutional protection for abortion rights, and that any right not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” in order to qualify for constitutional protection. Abortion, he argues, does not pass this test.

But if abortion fails, it’s hard to see how rights to same-sex marriage and contraception pass. Though Thomas’s reasoning is far more extreme than the majority’s, his concurrence shows that it’s difficult to put a limiting principle on a ruling rolling back these legally interconnected rights. The Court can declare all it wants that this ruling only applies in one case, but it becomes harder to see why once you start following the logic.

It’s not just Thomas who sees that. It’s also an argument that the liberal minority — Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor — make in their joint dissent:

The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

The majority’s response to this argument is that abortion is somehow a unique case: “rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life.’” It’s worth noting that this reassurance was in the final opinion, but not in the version that was leaked in May.

But the fact that abortion raises questions about ending lives does not make it any more or less “deeply rooted in our history”: it’s an act of pure legal handwaving, an invention of a standard designed to escape the obvious consequences of Alito’s own logic.

Nor is there any clear reason in the Dobbs treatment of stare decisis, the principle that courts generally ought to adhere to precedent, that would prevent its logic from being applied to these other landmark constitutional cases. Some of the Court’s reasons that Roe was so egregiously bad that it deserved to be overturned — that it, for example, “usurped the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves for the people” — could also apply to Griswold or Obergefell.

Instead of setting up clear standards, it seems that Alito and his colleagues are trying to make the problem exposed by Thomas and the dissenters disappear: to assert that their logic doesn’t apply to what it obviously does.

As a practical matter, this might very well work: The Court majority is not bound by any formal rules other than the ones it decides on. It can simply do whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants; if it does not want to extend the logic of its own ruling to similar cases for arbitrary reasons, it can easily do that.

But this should reveal to the rest of us that what Alito and company are doing is not simply following legal principles wherever they lead: They are exercising power, reshaping the law according to their own political beliefs and calculations about potential political backlash.

Ironically, a ruling decrying the Court behaving like a legislature is engaged in much the same enterprise. And this, in turn, raises the question of whether nine unelected judges really should have the power we’ve given them.

Correction, 3 pm: A sentence previously included in this article referred to Clarence Thomas’s dissent instead of concurrence. He voted with the 6-3 majority to overturn Roe.

Sen. Susan Collins, ostensibly one of two Republicans who support abortion rights in the Senate, is of course very concerned that the radical Supreme Court has just ended a federal guarantee of abortion rights in the United States, and is very disappointed that the nominees she voted for did this thing. Because, gosh, none of us could have foreseen that Lyin’ Brett Kavanaugh, who lied in two separate confirmation processes, was not being honest with her.

Collins didn’t vote for Amy Coney Barrett. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell let her off the hook on that one because he didn’t need her. He made Lisa Murkowksi do it. 

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When Collins stood on the Senate floor on Oct. 5, 2018 and announced what everyone already knew already—she was voting for Kavanaugh—she said: “Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself.”

“He believes that precedent ‘is not just a judicial policy … it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent,’” Collins said. “In other words, precedent isn’t a goal or an aspiration; it is a constitutional tenet that has to be followed except in the most extraordinary circumstances.” Ha. “The judge further explained that precedent provides stability, predictability, reliance, and fairness.” Ha, again.

That’s after Kavanaugh’s lies to the Senate Judiciary Committee for his lower court nomination were exposed. It was not secret that Kavanaugh is a liar. 

It was no secret that Kavanaugh was hostile to abortion rights: Just a year before his confirmation, Kavanaugh would have denied a 17-year-old detained immigrant an abortion while he was on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “The Government has permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor, and refraining from facilitating abortion,” Kavanaugh wrote, dissenting from the majority. He called their decision “a radical extension of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence.”

Abortion

Roe v. Wade Defined An Era. The Supreme Court Just Started A New One.

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jun. 24, 2022, at 2:45 PM

There are only a handful of Supreme Court rulings that most Americans can name. The decisions that become a shorthand in our collective vocabulary mark the beginning and end of political eras, the moments when something fundamental changes.

Brown v. Board of Education. Roe v. Wade. 

And now, Dobbs v. Jackson.

For most of the past 50 years, Roe v. Wade was the ruling that was too big to fail. People seemed to believe it would last forever — even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. As recently as last fall, when the Supreme Court allowed the state of Texas to implement a law that directly contradicted Roe, most Americans still thought the ruling was safe.

It was very much not. In the Dobbs opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Roe must be overturned because it amounted to an “abuse of judicial authority.” Along with four other conservatives who joined his opinion, he explained that the Constitution simply doesn’t protect abortion. Roe conferred a right that never existed.

Roe was the most famous ruling from an era when rights were being given — to the accused, to racial or ethnic minorities, to women. If I had to guess, I’d say that Dobbs will be the most famous ruling from an era when rights are being taken away. Americans — particularly white Americans — aren’t used to seeing rights vanish overnight. And that’s what makes Dobbs different than the slow erosion of abortion rights that I’ve been reporting on for almost a decade. Those laws were easy to ignore. This ruling won’t be.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/overturning-roe-means-abortion-access-us-fivethirtyeight-85676655

As a result, Dobbs marks the end of one political era and the beginning of another. The fight to overturn Roe helped define the last 40 years of American politics. Now, the fight over how far Dobbs’s mandate should stretch may define the next 40 years. Soon, many Americans will have to decide, perhaps for the first time in their lives, how they actually feel about legal abortion. And how much they care that abortion rights were given, and then taken away.

Politics

The Supreme Court’s Argument For Overturning Roe v. Wade

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The End

The 1980 Republican Party platform promised to “work for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” Politicians aren’t known for following up on their promises. But the GOP kept that one.

As the country came down from the high of the 1960s, abortion was a potent symbol of how the rebellious, uninhibited mood of the decade had curdled. Conservative politicians and strategists offered the rise of legal abortion as an example of the feminist movement’s callousness. It was an emblem of sex without consequences, love without marriage, women without children. Evangelical leaders, seizing on an issue that used to be the domain of Catholic Democrats, struck an apocalyptic tone. In 1979, one Christian activist took thousands of baby dolls and scattered them over the bed of the Dead Sea. As his camera panned over the dolls, he solemnly described how an abortion is performed. It was, he said, the slaughter of the innocent; the abandonment of morality and decency.

As southern white voters and evangelical Christians shifted their loyalty to the Republican Party, people started to develop opinions on abortion that tracked with their new political allegiances. In the mid-1970s, it was pretty much impossible to distinguish Republicans from Democrats based solely on abortion. Fifteen years later, they were starting to be separated by an all-too-familiar partisan gulf.

The anti-abortion movement succeeded by politicizing the issue everywhere they could — in the courts, in state legislatures and in American society more broadly. Republican strategists and politicians worked to elevate a new generation of judges and lawmakers who believed Roe was wrong. At first, they tried to work within the confines of public opinion, passing laws that seemed innocuous, even protective — requiring waiting periods, counseling, parental consent. Fear of a backlash was heavy in the air. In 1992, the Supreme Court teetered on the brink of overturning Roe, but even the court’s Republican appointees were afraid of what it would unleash. They cobbled together a compromise opinion that upheld the right to an abortion but allowed for stricter regulation of it.

That decision was viewed as a betrayal, and a turning point. From then on, anti-abortion advocates insisted that all future Republican presidents nominate justices who wouldn’t falter when the fate of Roe was in their hands. And as time passed, politicians also became more willing to barrel past what most Americans thought was acceptable. In 2013, when 61 percent of Americans thought abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, Republican legislators in Arkansas passed a law that banned abortion after 12 weeks, which was overturned by the courts. At the time, it felt like a doomed act of hubris. But in retrospect, it was a sign of how powerful anti-abortion activists had become — and where they were going. Their efforts were incremental, but over time, they added up. The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, tracked hundreds of anti-abortion laws that were passed between 2011 and today.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-court-overturns-roe-wade-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-85666091

In the years since I started covering abortion, I’ve had moments where it’s felt like we were all living through some kind of bizarre political experiment. A solid majority of Americans have supported legal abortion in at least some circumstances for decades. Support for abortion stayed steady even as abortion access was dwindling in large swaths of the country. But that support didn’t translate into widespread political backlash, even when states passed more and more laws that fell well outside the mainstream. Exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape or incest — which are popular even with some conservatives — are no longer present in many of the latest restrictions. Last fall, Texas banned abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy. The law — the most restrictive in the country at that point — went into effect, there were a couple of weeks of protests, and then … nothing.

Most Americans were able to keep living their lives as if nothing was happening in part because abortion isn’t an experience that affects everyone. Sure, nearly one in four women will have an abortion in her lifetime, but those women aren’t evenly dispersed across different walks of life. And the difficulty involved in getting an abortion varies wildly depending on all kinds of factors — geography, wealth, insurance coverage, age.

But part of the problem for the abortion-rights movement is that it never quite convinced Americans to connect the dots between legal abortion and the many other ways that women’s lives have been transformed in the decades since the 1960s, and Roe. Abortion might still be controversial, but many of the other social changes it intersected with — sex outside marriage, having a baby outside of marriage, divorce, women delaying having children, mothers working outside the home — have become normal, even expected. Opposition to abortion is still tied up with support for traditional gender roles. But I’m not sure how many Americans actually connect abortion rights with their own personal choices and relationships.

Is legal abortion necessary to help women lead the lives they want? It’s a question more Americans may have to ask themselves. Researchers can point you to studies suggesting that access to legal abortion lowered child poverty; kept women from getting married as teenagers; raised women’s wages; increased women’s participation in the labor force; made it more likely for them to finish college; and reduced maternal mortality. But those trends are easier to spot in big data sets than in individual people’s lives. Would your friend have gotten her degree if only she’d had an abortion? Could your sister have gotten that big raise without one? Causal pathways aren’t easy to tease out in everyday life and they’re shaped as much by our beliefs and post hoc justifications as anything else.

In the oral argument last December, lawyers for Mississippi argued that abortion simply isn’t necessary anymore. But that seems like a misreading of the country’s mood. Most Americans just want a status quo where abortion isn’t something you have to think about unless you need one. For many people I’ve spoken with over the years — on the campaign trail, at parties, even at family dinners — the issue feels exhausting, abstract and even a little lurid. They bring it up and then change the subject with a shrug.

But that doesn’t mean they think abortion is unnecessary. Instead, the idea of a country without the right to abortion is for many Americans more like a political phantasm — something candidates use to motivate voters, not something that can actually become real.

Except of course, it’s about to be.

The Beginning

While campaigning in 2016, former President Donald Trump said that he’d appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade “automatically.” I was one of the many journalists and legal experts who chalked this up to a typical Trump overpromise. Days after the 2016 election, I tried to sort out what Trump’s election would mean for abortion rights. The Supreme Court is (or was) a measured, sedate branch of government. Could Trump really appoint enough justices who were willing to overturn a decades-old precedent in one fell swoop? It seemed much likelier that Roe would be hollowed out over years or decades, until it collapsed under its own weight.

It might not have been automatic, but the court certainly wasn’t patient. Less than two years after Trump appointed his third justice, Roe is gone. And the court’s decision is just the beginning. Dobbs will set in motion a swift and dramatic response. Within a month, tens of millions of reproductive-age women will be living in a state where abortion is illegal. 

In some corners of the abortion-rights movement, there’s a sense that Roe gave Americans a false sense of complacency. And it’s true that for better or worse, a veil is being lifted. We’re not heading for another 10 years of the slow removal of abortion access — we’re about to see what happens when half the country takes away a right many people took for granted.

The Supreme Court wrote that the issue of abortion belongs with the states. “This Court cannot bring about the permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settlement and telling the people to move on,” Alito wrote. Now, it's set the battle lines for a conflict that seems likely to escalate. In states controlled by anti-abortion lawmakers, the question may soon be whether a fetus, an embryo or a fertilized egg has the same rights as a person. That will have effects everywhere – in courtrooms, hospitals, even the U.S. census. Murder could soon mean a different thing on opposite sides of state lines. Medical practice could change, since abortion care, although siloed in politics, is actually bound up with many other kinds of health care. The meaning of parenthood could be altered, along with all the legal structures that scaffold it. A Georgia law passed in 2019 requires child support payments for fetuses. So can a fetus inherit money? Can it own land?

It will take a while, but these changes could insert themselves into people’s lives in ways that appear entirely separate from abortion. But it seems inevitable that people who are carrying wanted pregnancies will feel the effects of these restrictions too. People who use drugs during pregnancy can already be prosecuted or reported in many states. If a fetus is considered a person, the stakes for everything a pregnant person does will be much higher.

I’ve been thinking recently about when I arrived at a hospital in southern Indiana to give birth to my daughter last year. As I changed into my delivery gown, a nurse asked me for a urine sample. I asked her why, and she acknowledged that they were going to test it for drugs. When I protested — with the righteous, incoherent anger that only a woman who is five centimeters dilated can muster — they told me that if I refused to consent to the test, they’d act as if it was positive. That, they said, could mean calling in a social worker, someone who would evaluate whether I was capable of parenting my child. The nurse looked into my face with anxiety. “Do you have something to hide?” she said.

I buckled, and consented to the test. What else could I do? I was unnerved by the prospect that my behavior was already being watched, with the assumption that I might be harming my unborn child. After Dobbs, the surveillance that pregnant people already experience could spiral in ways that are hard to predict and control. Already, a pregnant person drinking a cocktail in public risks moral judgment. In the future, it could invite a very different kind of scrutiny. In fact, some poor and Black women are already living in this reality.

Meanwhile, abortion could soon be less restricted in some blue states than it ever has been. Democratic lawmakers in states like California are trying to create “havens” for abortion access, even setting up state funds to pay for the procedure. Some companies, too, are offering to reimburse workers who have to travel more than 100 miles for an abortion, laying the groundwork for a new standoff between corporations and GOP legislators.

Judges and politicians have talked longingly for years about sending the abortion issue back to the states, but it will be hard for state legislatures to arrive at a peaceful truce. States are already trying to reach across each other’s borders, to make it harder or easier to travel for abortion. If Republicans win back the White House and a large enough congressional majority in 2024, a national abortion ban could be a possibility. It’s unlikely that anyone on either side of the abortion debate will be content to let the states have the last word.

These changes are so fundamental that they feel like they might have the power to shake something in the country loose, to jolt us out of our political rut. We’re at a point where partisan allegiances and grudges shape everything around us, even the most personal aspects of who we are — our religion, our friends. But the country is about to change in palpable, unpredictable ways. Hundreds of thousands of people will carry pregnancies to term that they might otherwise have ended. Abortion bans could lead to unexpected consequences — for birth control, for fertility treatments, for other rights that seem completely unrelated. If the end of abortion rights — and everything that comes after — doesn’t unsettle our political order, I’m not sure what can.

But even if Americans do chafe under the policies that are coming, this decision won’t be easy to undo. Abortion rights aren’t the only ones that have come under attack. Thanks to the Supreme Court and Republican legislators, it’s much harder to vote in many states than it was a decade ago. Those states, not coincidentally, are the ones where abortion bans will be the most stringent, and their lawmakers’ grasp on power will be hard to dislodge. There are only a handful of states where this November’s elections will actually have an impact on whether abortion stays legal.

There’s a part of me that also wonders if most Americans will be too tired to tune in. Over the past few years, politics has wrung all of us dry. It’s a spectator sport, where we root for our own team’s victory from a safe distance. Maybe abortion will ossify further into one more line dividing us from them and them from us — not so different from the many other partisan feuds that have come to structure our lives.

That, as much as anything, is Roe’s legacy, and the post-Dobbs reality. For decades, Americans ceded the fight over abortion to the loudest, most extreme voices and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Today, the anti-abortion side won. Now, even though they really don’t want to, Americans have to decide how much abortion matters to them.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-court-overturns-roe-wade-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-85666091

Just prior to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday to overturn the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, essentially banning abortion for millions of people, 20 Black congresswomen implored President Joe Biden to ensure legal and safe access to abortion by "declaring a public health and national emergency,” according to an exclusive report from USA Today.

The all-Democratic group of lawmakers wrote a letter to Biden urging him "to use any and all executive authorities to address the public health crisis our nation will face if Roe v. Wade is dismantled."

We know that the lack of reproductive health care and abortion access disproportionately impacts Black, brown, and low-income folks living in rural communities. But, as the letter reads, “More than 21 million Black women in America … urge you to use every tool at your disposal to protect fundamental reproductive rights and abortion rights access across the country.”

RELATED STORY: This activist leads reproductive justice groups in their battle to safeguard abortion in the South

The letter goes on to discuss the connection between the impact of Roe’s end and the Black maternal health crisis in the nation.

“Black women and pregnant people already face significant barriers to accessing essential and time-sensitive sexual and reproductive health care … services already robbing us of the lives of Black women three to four times the rate of white women,” the letter reads. “Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms that the maternal mortality rate for Black women increased significantly between 2019 and 2020, and in the first six months of the pandemic alone, Black women experienced a 2.3-year drop in life expectancy.”

The coalition is being led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus’ Abortion Rights and Access Task Force.

In a May interview with Daily Kos, Allison Coffman, director of Amplify Georgia Collaborative, said it’s impossible to talk about reproductive justice without also talking about America’s history of reproductive violence and the ongoing efforts to control the bodies of Black women, femmes, and people of color.

Amplify Georgia Collaborative is a Georgia-based nonprofit made up of seven reproductive health and justice organizations that work together to preserve access to abortion in the state.

“Abortion care is part of maternal health care,” Coffman said simply.

After Friday’s ruling was announced, Biden gave public comments to the nation.

He called the ruling “a sad for the court and the country,” the court “extreme” in its ideology, and the decision a “tragic error.” Ultimately, he called on Congress to restore the protections of Roe as federal law, adding that “voters need to make their voices heard … This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” Biden said.

The president said he’s directing his administration to “defend the bedrock right” for Americans to travel out of their home states if need be to receive an abortion. And he added that he would be directing the Department of Health and Human Services to take steps to ensure at abortion medication be “available to the fullest extent possible.”

Biden ended by appealing to the nation for protests to stay peaceful and nonviolent, adding that today’s decision “must not be the final word.”

“My administration will use all of its appropriate lawful powers, but Congress must act. With your vote, you can act. You can have the final word. This is not over,” Biden said.

The letter is signed by 20 Democratic Representatives:

• Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts
• Cori Bush of Missouri
• Barbara Lee of California
• Alma Adams of North Carolina
• Joyce Beatty of Ohio
• Brenda Lawrence of Michigan
• Gwen Moore of Wisconsin
• Yvette Clarke of New York
• Ilhan Omar of Minnesota
• Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey
• Nikema Williams of Georgia
• Terri Sewell of Alabama
• Jahana Hayes of Connecticut
• Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware
• Marilyn Strickland of Washington
• Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia
• Shontel Brown of Ohio
• Lucy McBath of Georgia
• Karen Bass of California
• Stacey Plaskett of the United States Virgin Islands

Roe v. Wade is now overruled. Are access to contraception, same-sex marriage, and even the right to choose your own sex partners next?

Roe v. Wade is overruled. The Republican Party, which achieved a generational victory when it captured a supermajority of the Supreme Court’s seats under former President Donald Trump, has now capitalized on that victory to achieve one of its longtime political goals. The half-century when American constitutional law protected a right to an abortion is now over.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is substantially similar to a leaked early draft of that opinion, which was published by Politico in early May. Alito’s opinion was joined by the Court’s four most conservative members. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative who often takes a more incrementalist approach than Alito, wrote a separate opinion arguing that the Court should limit but not yet overrule Roe.

Alito’s final opinion doesn’t just allow Mississippi to enact the 15-week abortion ban at issue in Dobbs — a ban that violated Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 opinion that weakened Roe while retaining the constitutional right to an abortion up to the point of “viability.” Alito’s opinion goes further, and concludes that Roe and Casey “must be overruled.” It is written in Alito’s characteristically snide tone, repeatedly referring to abortion providers by the pejorative term “abortionists.” And it rests on a conservative theory that limits which rights are protected by the Constitution.

“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito writes.

According to Alito, if a right isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, it must be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’” to qualify for constitutional protection. He then spends many pages of his opinion arguing that the right to an abortion is not rooted in legal history or tradition.

Much of Alito’s account of this history is dubious. The Roe opinion itself argued that, under English “common law,” which still forms the basis for much of US law, “abortion performed before ‘quickening’ — the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero, appearing usually from the 16th to the 18th week of pregnancy — was not an indictable offense.” And there is considerable historical evidence that a right to pre-quickening abortions is, indeed, firmly rooted in US legal history and tradition.

Ultimately, however, Alito’s opinion is less a triumph of one theory of history over another, than it is the triumph of one political party over another. Roe was overruled because Republicans appointed six justices and Democrats appointed only three. This outcome became inevitable the minute Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in the final weeks of a Republican presidency.

So what happens now? The immediate impact is that the many state laws that already ban abortion — either outright or very early in a pregnancy — will quickly take effect. Many clinics in the states with the most rigid laws suspended abortion procedures as soon as the Dobbs opinion came down.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

There’s also an open question about whether other rights, such as the right to same-sex marriage or the right to contraception, are in danger. Many of the Court’s decisions protecting a right to sexual, romantic, or bodily autonomy rely on similar reasoning to Roe. And Alito’s reasoning in the Dobbs opinion closely tracks reasoning he once used to argue that same-sex marriage is not rooted in American legal history and tradition. In other words, the logic Alito uses in Dobbs could be used to target other rights.

That said, Alito’s Dobbs opinion does contain language denying that overruling Roe necessarily means the demise of other, still-existing freedoms. Alito declares abortion to be a “unique act” because it “terminates ‘life or potential life.’” That distinguishes the now-defunct constitutional right to abortion from, say, the right to marry a person of the same sex.

This is one of the largest changes from the leaked opinion in May, which did contain some language suggesting that the Dobbs opinion is limited to abortion, but not nearly as much as the final version. That suggests that at least one of the justices who joined Alito’s opinions might have reckoned with the earlier draft’s sweeping repercussions and pushed for a slightly less aggressive opinion.

But whether other rights are next on the chopping block or not, Dobbs is already a sweeping change for America, one that will immediately change society not just in the states likely to ban abortion, but across the country.

Abortion will very soon be illegal in at least 18 states, and will be banned very early in pregnancy in at least four more

Eighteen states currently have laws on the books that either ban abortion outright or permit it only in extremely limited circumstances. Some, but not all, of these states permit abortion to save a patient’s life or protect them from a dire health consequence. Some, but not all, permit the termination of a pregnancy that results from rape or incest.

Many of these laws are now in effect, after the Court’s decision overruling Roe, but some of these states have “trigger” provisions that do not take effect until a certain condition is met — such as that 30 days have passed after the Dobbs decision. That means abortion may remain briefly legal in a few states with trigger laws, but that the bans will most likely take effect by the end of the summer.

The 18 states with near-total bans on the books are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Four other states — Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and South Carolina — have laws on the books banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, which is before many people who may want an abortion will be aware that they are pregnant. (There’s also the unusual case of North Carolina, which once had an abortion ban on the books. But a more recent law appears to have legalized abortion up to the 20th week of pregnancy.)

It should be noted that this list of states will fluctuate. State supreme courts retain the power to interpret their own state constitutions, potentially to protect a right to abortion within their state’s borders. In Michigan, for example, a judge has temporarily blocked the state’s ban from taking effect, and the litigation continues. Given that Democrats currently hold a narrow majority on the state’s highest court, the state could protect the right to an abortion.

And, of course, Alito’s opinion also means that state legislatures can pass new laws regulating or banning abortion. That means states currently controlled by Republicans are likely to enact new bans in the coming weeks or months.

The future of LGBTQ rights is uncertain

Alito’s Dobbs opinion acknowledges that the Constitution protects some rights that are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, but only rights that are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

He’s made this argument before. Specifically, Alito made this “history and tradition” argument in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the landmark opinion holding that people with same-sex partners have the same right to marry that partner as anyone else. “It is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage” is not sufficiently rooted in history and tradition, Alito claimed in his Obergefell dissent.

Justice Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, wrote a concurring opinion in Dobbs where he denounced the concept of “substantive due process,” the legal theory that drives many of the Court’s decisions involving a right to sexual and romantic autonomy. Alito also rejects the idea that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment implies the right to an abortion. But Thomas goes further.

According to Thomas’s opinion, which is joined by no other justice, the Court’s pro-contraception decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), its decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that consenting adults have a right to choose whom they have sex with and how they have sex, and its decision in Obergefell should all be reconsidered.

That said, the final version of Alito’s opinion seems to go out of its way to explain that abortion is different from these other rights — again, because abortion involves the termination of a fetal life and these other rights do not. Much of this language was added after Alito wrote the leaked early draft of the Dobbs opinion.

Indeed, Alito accuses the dissenting opinion — which is co-authored by all three of the Court’s Democratic appointees — of stoking “unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights” because the dissent worries that Dobbs could endanger things like same-sex marriage or contraception.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

In any event, the future of rights other than abortion will likely need to be litigated. There is no doubt that Thomas would happily light many existing rights on fire. And there is little doubt that Alito, based on his Obergefell dissent, would also happily tear down same-sex marriage.

But it takes five votes to strip away an existing constitutional right, and it remains to be seen whether Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — conservatives who sometimes break with Alito’s most aggressive attempts to drive the law to the right — will support mass rollbacks of existing rights.

Certain forms of contraception might now be banned

Although there may not be five votes on the current Supreme Court to permit an outright ban on all forms of contraception, the Court may permit states to ban certain forms of contraception that many religious conservatives believe to be akin to abortion.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), a 5-4 Supreme Court held that employers who object to certain forms of birth control on religious grounds may refuse to cover these contraceptive methods in their employees’ health plans. At least some of the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby claimed that “two forms of emergency contraception commonly called ‘morning after’ pills and two types of intrauterine devices” can cause an abortion because they “may operate after the fertilization of an egg.”

It is far from clear that these forms of birth control actually do operate on fertilized eggs. As Dr. Mary Jacobson, an OB-GYN and chief medical officer at Alpha Medical, told me, “No existing scientific studies validate the fallacy that hormonal contraceptives or the copper intrauterine device act partly as abortifacients.”

But the question of whether IUDs or morning-after pills qualify as contraception (which is still protected by existing Supreme Court precedents) or abortion-inducing drugs (which are not protected after Dobbs) will not be decided by medical doctors. It will be decided by a federal judiciary dominated by conservative Republicans.

In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), moreover, the Supreme Court held that state and federal lawmakers have “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.” This line is likely to play a starring role in conservative judicial decisions permitting bans on certain forms of contraception.

Under Gonzales, to justify a contraception ban, a state does not need to prove that a particular form of contraception definitively acts as an abortion-inducing drug. They just have to convince a court that may be dominated by right-wing Republicans that there is “uncertainty” about how a pill or contraceptive device operates.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Litigation over contraception bans, in other words, is inevitable if a state decides to ban common forms of birth control such as the morning-after pill or IUDs.

Will the courts declare abortion illegal in all 50 states?

Abortion opponents will no doubt feel emboldened by their victory in Dobbs, and will try to press their advantage.

One of the most aggressive anti-abortion theories is known as “fetal personhood.” It claims that a fetus is entitled to the same rights as a fully born human being. And thus the law must treat killing a fetus the same as a homicide.

Could this theory gain purchase in this Supreme Court? Based solely on the text of the Dobbs opinion, the answer is “no.” Alito claims that his decision “returns the issue of abortion to ... legislative bodies” and allows people with varying opinions on abortion to “affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.”

Alito, of course, is notoriously hostile to the right to vote. Among other things, he is the author of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), an opinion that invented a number of judicially created limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text. So, if Alito’s Dobbs opinion does permit voters to shape abortion policy moving forward, it will do so only after Alito has skewed the electorate toward Republicans.

A second caveat worth considering is that the Court recently tripped over itself to ensure that Texas’s SB 8 law, an unusual ban on most abortions that relies on private litigation to enforce the ban, could take effect. (Now Dobbs permits Texas to ban abortions outright.)

The Court’s decision in that case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), didn’t simply shield SB 8 from judicial review. If taken seriously, Jackson’s reasoning would permit a state to nullify any constitutional right by writing a law with a similar enforcement mechanism as SB 8 .

The Court, in other words, was willing to do considerable violence to the Constitution as a whole in order to spite abortion rights in Jackson. That suggests that five justices may be willing to take similarly extraordinary steps to restrict abortion in the future.

For the time being, however, the Court’s most recent pronouncement on abortion rights is Dobbs. And Dobbs, at least on its face, is inconsistent with the theory of fetal personhood.

At least for now, in other words, abortion is likely to remain legal in blue states.

Author Celeste Headlee has composed a helpful list of quotes from the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe today, and it's a reminder that Senate confirmation hearings are, at this point, just another institutionalized venue for lying. Nobody believed what the handpicked far-right nominees were saying, because their far-right patrons would not have pushed for them to take the role if they had not expressed previous support to gut whatever needed gutting to serve the far-right agenda. That was the point.

It should probably go without saying that Amy Coney Barrett was the most flagrant bullshitter.

But she quickly hedged by saying that while Roe was precedent, it wasn't “SUPER-precedent.” That is a real thing that an actual Supreme Court nominee argued. It's also a distinction that the court's conservatives now have to lean on, as they shred hundreds of years of precedent to come to conclusions based on misogynists and would-be revolutionaries of the 1600s. It doesn't matter if we erase mere precedents, because they're not super-precedents. And what's a super-precedent? It's whatever the faux-originalists say they are. For example, the personal musings of an utterly creepy misogynist who advocated for executing unmarried women for suspected witchcraft in the 1600s is now "super-precedent" because that's how far back you need to go to find something modern misogynists can use to erase all the more well-heeled precedents that have been decided since.

But the other nominees peddled similar bullshit. Roe was "precedent," and "settled," and it was all fictions that a few particular senators were very, very eager to pretend to believe because being gullible, brick-headed twits is their whole professional persona. Our betters are expected to lie without consequence, because everyone else in the room wants to lie without consequence, too.

Brett also claimed that every single witness to his multiple sexual assaults was a liar, which Lindsey Graham personally found so courageous it brought him to beet-red tears.

These are more cagey than the Barrett version, and it’s probably because Republicans scurried so quickly to confirm Barrett before the presidential votes came in that she had barely any time for coaching. The others went through the usual coaching drills to make sure they had honed their evasions to the standard equally dishonest senators wanted to hear.

Alito is almost a special case because in his time on the court he, along with ex-justice Scalia and the now sedition-linked Clarence Thomas, sought to throw out precedents with such abandon that not even precedents the three had signed onto mere weeks beforehand were safe. The trio perfected the art of using bizarre historical errata as justification for erasing a hundred years (or four hundred years) of subsequent law, never worrying about whether the logic conflicted from case to case. It’d be almost insulting Alito to suggest that he came into the court with any “judicial” philosophy at all.

Elie Mystal comes in to talk the Supreme Court, guns, and our Constitution on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast

The Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, gutting abortion rights nationally and allowing abortion bans to go into effect in multiple states. It was a moment we’ve known was coming since Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell packed the Supreme Court, and one we’ve very specifically known was coming since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked at the beginning of May.

Democrats had every opportunity to get ready for this. Too many are showing they’ve failed. President Joe Biden has remarks scheduled for 12:30 PM ET, and reports say the White House has been preparing actions to take in response to the decision. We’ll see how that goes. But other Democrats have already definitely failed the test.

Contribute now to support abortion funds providing financial assistance to people seeking abortion care.

RELATED STORY: Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending abortion rights for millions

How’s this for urgency?

Next month! Wow, guys, way to get on it!

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement calling this “one of the darkest days our country has ever seen,” but offering no action plan beyond a call to vote for Democrats in November. That’s it. That’s the plan.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed some of Schumer’s language, but did at least say, in her statement, “While Republicans seek to punish and control women, Democrats will keep fighting ferociously to enshrine Roe v. Wade into law.” It’s not specific, but at least there’s some recognition that Democrats should be doing … something.

A joint statement from the Democratic National Committee and other party committees warned, “The 2022 election will now determine whether new, cruel, and punishing restrictions will be put in place on women and families. With Republicans in power, states could make abortion illegal without exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and women and doctors could be charged with a crime if they have or perform an abortion.”

Apparently they missed the part where many states have already put new, cruel, and punishing restrictions in place, including abortion bans without exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, ever the comedian, responded with a quip: “This opinion doesn’t bring us back to the 1950s. It brings us back to the 1850s.” How long have you been saving that one for, Amy? In the time you were saving it, did it not occur to you that “the Supreme Court guts a major right, the prelude to major suffering” was not the time for a joke?

About 50 minutes later, perhaps having read the replies, Klobuchar followed up with a line from the dissent from the liberal justices, “[O]ne result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” She added, “We cannot give up. Especially not now.”

Sen. Joe Manchin said he “trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans.” Joe, maybe you should be alarmed that you trusted two people who were obviously lying. 

And Manchin is planning to work with Republicans to codify Roe v. Wade into law. Yeah, sure, Joe. You’re definitely going to get 10 Republican votes to put into law the thing they explicitly packed the Supreme Court to overturn.

It’s true that at this point there’s not a lot Democrats can do. A Supreme Court on which, as Stephen Wolf noted, “5 of the 6 GOP-appointed justices were confirmed by senates where the GOP majority won fewer votes & represented fewer people than the Dem minority. 3 were also appointed by a president who lost the popular vote” has rendered the verdict and the way the U.S. system works right now, the president and Congress (especially with a Senate in which Republicans representing far fewer people than do Democrats can block virtually any legislation) have limited options. But every option should be on the table. If Manchin feels that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied under oath, he should consider eliminating the filibuster or creating a carveout to codify Roe. Shouldn’t their lies give him license to do something he wouldn’t consider under other circumstances? The problem goes beyond abortion rights, though, which is why what Manchin should really do is support expanding the Supreme Court, by any procedural means necessary.

RELATED STORIES: 

Abortion now absolutely illegal in multiple states with no exceptions as Court decision roils U.S.

Birth control and marriage equality are very much in danger. Just listen to Clarence Thomas

The Trump-packed Supreme Court has gone rogue. The other coequal branches must fix it

Updating your knowledge of redistricting on Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast

Abortion

The Supreme Court’s Argument For Overturning Roe v. Wade

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jun. 24, 2022, at 12:11 PM

The Supreme Court just overturned one of the most famous and controversial rulings in modern history. A five-justice majority of Republican appointees ruled that Roe v. Wade and a following case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were wrongly decided. It’s a political earthquake — one that will reverberate for months and years to come, reshaping American lives in ways that are easy and not so easy to predict.

Now, according to the Supreme Court, there is no constitutional right to abortion. Over the protests of Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but not to overturn Roe, the status quo of the past 49 years is gone. (The three liberal justices dissented in full.) That shift will cause an immediate change in many Americans’ lives. As of 11 a.m. Eastern on Friday, abortion is already almost completely illegal in at least four states. By the end of July, it will be almost completely illegal in at least another nine. And the fight over how far abortion rights should stretch or shrink will flare up in many states, surely shaping some of this year’s most important midterm races.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/overturning-roe-means-abortion-access-us-fivethirtyeight-85676655

We will have plenty of coverage of the aftershocks in the coming days, and our colleagues at ABC News have already begun their round-the-clock coverage. But before we focus on the aftermath of the decision, it’s worth dwelling on the decision itself. Friday’s ruling is a manifestation of the devotion to constitutional history that the court’s conservatives have become known for, and it’s packed with hints about what could be in store for the future of abortion and other legal precedents.

What the ruling said

At its heart, Roe v. Wade was about how much states could restrict abortion. In that ruling, states were prohibited from banning abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy and their ability to regulate abortion was limited during the second trimester. That structure changed with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a Supreme Court case decided in 1992, which replaced the trimester framework with a single dividing line: fetal viability. Even with that change, Americans had a constitutional right to abortion up to a certain point in pregnancy for almost 50 years. 

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a Republican appointee, explained that this right simply never existed. “Abortion presents a profound moral question,” he wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion.” Roe, he wrote, wasn’t simply wrong — it was so wrong as to amount to an “abuse of judicial authority.”

This week’s ruling — officially known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — relied heavily on a historical view of abortion rights. Alito argued that approach is crucial for understanding why abortion couldn’t be constitutionally protected. “Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law,” he wrote. “Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.” Some historians have argued that Alito’s view of this history — which was also laid out in a draft opinion that leaked in early May — isn’t complete. But it’s worth emphasizing because another major opinion released yesterday, overturning a concealed-carry law in New York, also relies heavily on history.

Alito acknowledged that a major precedent was being overturned, but he argued that it had to be done because the justices who decided Casey actually made a mistake by relying too heavily on precedent. The court is not required to uphold a previous ruling simply because it’s already on the books, he wrote. In fact, “the Constitution and the rule of law demand” that the question of abortion be returned to the states.

The ruling is likely to be unpopular. Alito addressed that too: “We cannot exceed the scope of our authority under the Constitution, and we cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.” That was another place, he argued, where the justices who decided Casey got it wrong. In that ruling, the majority explicitly noted that overturning Roe would be politically seismic and could undermine the court’s authority. 

Now, Alito and the other four justices who signed onto his opinion are risking just that.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-court-overturns-roe-wade-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-85666091

What the ruling means for the future

Most Supreme Court decisions rule on the case at hand while also dropping hints about how the Supreme Court might rule on the same topic in the future. This one is no different. In his majority opinion, Alito included several caveats about what the ruling in Dobbs could mean for other precedents that relied on the same judicial framework as Roe. But concurring opinions by Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh suggest that there could be some disagreement among the conservative justices about what should happen next.

Kavanaugh, for his part, took pains to stress what the opinion didn’t say. The Constitution, he wrote, is “neutral” on the issue of abortion. Roe was a mistake, he said, because it took the power to decide whether abortion should be legal from the democratically elected branches of government. But that doesn’t mean it’s illegal everywhere, either. “The Court’s decision today does not outlaw abortion throughout the United States,” he wrote. He added that just as the court doesn’t have the authority to say that abortion is a constitutional right, it also doesn’t have the power to “declare a constitutional prohibition of abortion.” Kavanaugh also signaled how he, at least, is thinking about other legal questions that could come up in Dobbs’s wake, including whether states can bar their residents from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion. (His view: No, under the constitutional right to interstate travel.)

Kavanaugh is clearly trying to head off concerns that the court will outlaw abortion, but in Thomas’s concurring opinion, he signaled that he would like to use the ruling in Dobbs as an opportunity to reconsider other constitutional rights. “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” he wrote, referring to rulings that, respectively established constitutional rights to contraception; to engage in intimate, consensual sexual conduct; and to same-sex marriage. This could persuade advocates to bring cases challenging those precedents in the future.

Alito, for his part, clearly wanted to head off speculation about what would happen to these precedents, which the three liberal dissenters warned could now be in danger. The court’s other conservative justices are not necessarily champing at the bit to reconsider these precedents. But the question is in the air — and seems likely to come up again in the future.

Roberts, for his part, did not want to overturn Roe. In his concurring opinion, he bemoaned the broad scope of the court’s new abortion ruling. He agreed with the decision to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, but he questioned why it was necessary to go further. The viability line established in Casey was “misguided,” he said, but he also argued that his conservative colleagues were violating the principle of judicial restraint by overturning Roe and Casey entirely. “The Court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system — regardless of how you view those cases,” he wrote.

Roberts was essentially asking his conservative colleagues to slow their roll. The liberal justices, writing in dissent, warned that the swift action in Dobbs will have serious consequences. The decision, they wrote, “says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

The fact that the chief justice couldn’t convince the other Republican appointees to slow down is its own signal about where the court is going. Once the most high-profile precedent in two generations has been overturned, what might the conservative bloc be interested in changing next?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-court-overturns-roe-wade-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-85666091

It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”

Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”

[Read: Beware prophecies of civil war]

All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6 insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.

Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years. By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states, where state-government control has typically been divided.

Measured that way, the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent. On its own, the blue nation would be the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only China. The red nation would rank third. (Podhorzer also offers a slightly different grouping of the states that reflects the more recent trend in which Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)

[From the July/August 2021 issue: How America fractured into four parts]

The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections. And that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections, he calculates.

The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who studies the differences among states, told me that red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.

[Read: America’s red-blue divide is about to get starker]

Defenders of the red-state model can point to other measures that show those places in a more favorable light. Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth (though that’s been heavily concentrated in their blue-leaning metro areas). And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.

But the big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.

The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)

Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red. All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so. All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so. Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former. No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights if the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, as expected, overturns Roe v. Wade. Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.

The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.

Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, told me that the experience of Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid. As the distance widens between the two sections, she said, “there are all kinds of potential for really deep disruptions, social disruptions, that aren’t just about our feelings and our opinions.”

To Podhorzer, the growing separation means that after the period of fading distinctions, bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”

With some complex but telling statistical calculations, he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support. Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures. Grumbach reached a similar conclusion in a recent paper analyzing trends in small-d democracy across the states. “It’s a really stacked deck in these states because of this democratic backsliding,” Grumbach said.

The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

Now that the Supreme Court has decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturned Roe v. Wade, remember all those people who said that the Supreme Court would not overturn Roe and that those of us warning about that danger were being alarmist and a little silly? Well, please note that many of those are the same people who are now dismissing the possibility that the court will overturn other rights, like marriage equality and birth control access. Their judgment and prescience fall far short of their confidence.

Because yes, the end of Roe is just a warning sign of what this extremist court will do. Justice Clarence Thomas made that clear in his concurring opinion on Dobbs.

RELATED STORY: Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending abortion rights for millions

Thomas argues that the Supreme Court should go beyond ending abortion rights and end those other rights that so many people have been warning that Republicans and this court would next move to dismantle: birth control, marriage equality, the very right to same-sex intimate relationships.

“In future cases,” Thomas writes, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

Griswold v. Connecticut is a 1965 decision that married couples have a right to privacy, including on decisions about contraception, and that a Connecticut law banning contraceptive access even for married couples was thus unconstitutional.

Lawrence v. Texas was a 2003 decision striking down a Texas law banning sexual acts between people of the same sex. In colloquial terms, it was an anti-sodomy law.

Obergefell v. Hodges was the 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

What all of these decisions have in common beyond that they gave people rights that Thomas does not want them to have is that the court’s decisions invoked “substantive due process,” a legal argument Thomas thinks is in itself illegitimate. (Though it’s likely that if substantive due process were protecting a right Thomas supported for a group of people he liked, he would embrace hypocrisy.)

Substantive due process is the legal theory that people’s rights are constitutionally protected beyond purely procedural means: “The theory of substantive due process holds that substantive as well as procedural rights are protected by the U.S. Constitution,” Ballotpedia explains. “This argument is based on the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and reasons that these amendments guarantee that life, freedom and property cannot be infringed upon by the government without sufficient justification—regardless of the process by which they are infringed upon.”

Thomas wants to undo every decision made on this basis, he says. He doesn’t mention it, but Loving v. Virginia, the 1965 Supreme Court case legalizing interracial marriage, has also been classified as a substantive due process case.

Following his call to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas continues, citing his own previous concurring opinions.

“Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7), we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 9). After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”

So yeah. Thomas is not being shy about his plans, and while this is not the argument on which Dobbs was decided and Roe was overturned, this concurring opinion represents one of the justices in the strong majority setting out an agenda that is exactly what abortion rights advocates and others have been warning was coming. Remember this when the centrist scolds tell you you’re exaggerating the dangers of Republican-appointed judges.

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The fifth day of public hearings by the House select committee on Jan. 6 may not have been the flashiest. There was little footage of the actual violence on the day of the assault, the threats directed at election workers, and none of the surprise videos from members of Trump’s own family admitting that they knew his claims of a stolen election were a lie. And still, somehow, this was both the most disturbing and the most damning day of testimony so far.

The core of the day focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to turn the Justice Department into an instrument he could use to reinforce the conspiracy to overturn the election results. That included an expanded look into the scheme created by attorney John Eastman to create a faux constitutional crisis on Jan. 6 by employing slates of false electors. However, the testimony also spun out the plot within the Department of Justice itself, where Trump worked with environmental lawyer Jeffery Clark on a plan to replace acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen with Clark so that Clark could use the department to back false claims of election fraud. The pure quid pro quo nature of the deal between Trump and Clark has been in evidence for some time, but hearing the people involved in holding back the scheme still seemed revelatory. 

More than anything else, day five seemed to be about showing the mechanisms by which Trump sought to manipulate the Department of Justice and subvert the election—and about the men who lined up to help. From Rep. Scott Perry’s part in pressing for the internal Department of Justice coup to the role played by right-wing author Ken Klukowski, who was brought into the department expressly to support Clark, the hearing laid bare both the depravity and the desperation behind Trump’s attempt to co-opt the Department of Justice.

And, for anyone who still doubted, it made clear that the committee has all the receipts on congressional Republicans who went begging for a pardon.

The most extraordinary thing about the most damning testimony on Thursday may have been just who delivered it. Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue were hand-picked by Trump to fill those roles after it became clear that previous Attorney General William Barr wasn’t going to back Trump’s claims of election fraud. Only Trump was frustrated to find that neither Rosen nor Donoghue were at all anxious to jump into a seditious conspiracy. 

The pair told Trump that they had also investigated the claims put to the Justice Department—including ludicrous suggestions like the one involving votes being changed by an Italian satellite—and found nothing at all suggesting any significant election fraud. Even so, Trump pressed them to write a letter saying that the Department of Justice had found fraud. When that was refused, Trump instructed them to write a letter saying that they were investigating significant fraud, saying that he and Republicans in Congress would take it from there. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump instructed them. 

When Rosen still refused to sign on, Perry presented Trump with someone guaranteed to be willing to sell out his country for the right price: Jeffrey Clark. In exchange for being jumped ahead several levels to become the new attorney general, Clark would sign the letter Trump wanted. Klukowski, the author of a book insisting that Barack Obama would “subvert the Constitution” if reelected in 2012, was inserted into the department on Dec. 15 specifically to provide backup to Clark.

Klukowski went on in anticipation of Clark’s ascension, drafting a letter that urged state officials in Georgia to take steps to overturn the election results. That letter contained false claims that the Department of Justice was investigating significant election fraud in that state and—in case officials didn’t know what to do next—instructed them on how to call a special session so they could approve a slate of all new, all Trump electors.

Klukowski also severed as a connection to the drafter of the overall “January 6 scenario,” Eastman. Emails showed that Klukowski provided a link between Clark’s plan to solicit false electors and Eastman’s plans for Jan. 6, which leaned on those false electors as justification for throwing out the vote in seven states.

What halted the Clark-Klukowski aspect of the overall plan was a revolt inside the Justice Department, one that bonded longtime staff and the just-appointed Rosen as they pushed back against Trump’s scheme to shred every remaining ounce of integrity and respect within the department. In the process, Donoghue got to deliver the most stinging rebuke.

"You're an environmental lawyer,” Donoghue said to the completely unqualified Clark in a White House meeting where Trump was trying to hand him the entire Department of Justice. “How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill.”

Overall, the hearing spent some time introducing the players, but made it extremely clear that the select committee has all the receipts. All the players. All the pages of the playbook. They know all the steps that were underway to make Eastman’s scheme a reality. How Trump tried to use the Department of Justice to spread false claims. How Republican congressmen lined up to help. How Republican state party members lined up to sign fake certificates claiming to be “duly elected” to give the votes of their state to Trump. And how Republicans came begging for a pardon after the Jan. 6 coup failed.

They have all the evidence needed to reveal a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States and install Donald Trump as unelected ruler.

In that conspiracy, the violence on Jan. 6 wasn’t the end goal; it was a tool. As seen in previous hearings, that violence was carefully solicited and crafted to create pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence and wavering Republicans in Congress. It was also designed to create an impression of chaos that Trump could use to justify going beyond the law.

But all of that was window dressing. The real scheme, the heart of the conspiracy, was happening right in the Oval Office, where Trump was directing officials to lie and cheat so that he could remain in power. Lawyers may not seem as colorful as guys wearing face paint and horns, but for democracy, they are far more dangerous.

More than any previous hearing, Thursday laid out all the pieces of Trump’s efforts to end American democracy. It showed that what Eastman put on paper wasn’t just a theory. Trump tried—tried repeatedly—to make it reality. And, like the past hearing that focused on how Trump attempted to bully state and local election officials, this hearing showed just how frighteningly close Trump came to succeeding.

Rosen could just as easily have agreed to write the letters Trump wanted. And if he had … 

Border Patrol union president and active border agent Brandon Judd continues to make no secret of his extremist ideology, now speaking at a conference organized by a designated anti-immigrant hate group. Zachary Mueller, political director for immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice, is among voices noting that Judd appeared at a recent gathering organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Tanton network organization that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

And like Mueller has diligently documented, this is not a one-off for the agent. “Judd has also participated in political ads this cycle that normalize political violence.” Mueller notes “his increasing prominence in the Republican party,” including participating in an event with Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Jim Jordan.

RELATED STORY: Border Patrol union president goes on Fox News to spew white supremacist 'replacement theory'

“Every one of the speakers at his press conference has promoted the racist (and false) ‘replacement’ and ‘invasion’ conspiracy theories, which were cited as the inspiration for multiple white nationalist terrorists, including those in Buffalo and El Paso,” Mueller tweeted. Cruz echoed this invasion rhetoric just hours after the racist mass murderer killed Black shoppers in Buffalo. The remark was no fluke: Cruz later shared and reshared the right-wing radio show clip where he made the comment.

”There was also no follow-up on the complete BS they pushed, including Judd, who lied about a correlation between fentanyl and unauthorized migration,” Mueller continued. “The opioid crisis is a serious problem, but the one thing it is not is an immigration issue.”

Like we noted earlier this month, it’s overwhelmingly U.S. citizens, not migrants, who are getting caught with drugs, available data has showed. “Out of the 42 incidents in which a person's nationality was reported, 33 (79%) involved US citizens. Just 3 incidents involved a smuggler without legal status,” one immigration policy expert shared at the time.

Of course, none of that matters to Judd, he has a narrative to spread (and a racist one at that), appearing on Fox News this past spring to openly promote the false, racist “great replacement” theory. You know, the same one “cited as the inspiration for multiple white nationalist terrorists, including those in Buffalo and El Paso,” Mueller notes.

Even before that, Judd—who is once again an active border agent and employee of the federal government—appeared in a right-wing ad where a political candidate shot at actors portraying President Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. The U.S. Senate candidate, Arizona Republican Jim Lamon, absolutely reveled in the outrage. Of course he wanted the attention, because when Republicans aren’t busy trying to overturn democracy, they live to troll liberals. But as we noted at the time, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t forcefully speak out when we see vile acts by sick fucks like Lamon and Judd.

“Judd is no stranger to FAIR and has participated with the hate group before, which was founded by the late John Tanton, a eugenicist and white nationalist who published, sold, and distributed an English edition of the racist French ‘great replacement’ novel ‘Camp of the Saints,’” Mueller continued. My colleague David Neiwert has also noted that Judd urged right-wing Texas governor Greg Abbott to “absolutely” declare an invasion at the southern border, once again echoing the rhetoric of racist mass killers.

“The ‘invasion’ declaration idea is being heavily promoted by the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank led by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Homeland Security official under Trump,” Neiwert said. The very strange anti-immigrant loudmouth was found by both a nonpartisan watchdog and a federal court to have been serving unlawfully in that administration. “Abbott has not committed to the plan, however,” Neiwert continued. “Most legal observers note that the term invasion is reserved to mean an ‘armed hostility from another political entity.’”

But Republicans really are falsely claiming that asylum-seeking families and other migrants are hostile threats, despite their voters being the ones who sacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Shit, GOP lawmakers themselves were in on the attempted coup, as recent House hearings have continued to confirm. But you won’t hear that from Judd or any of his pals. 

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NEW YORK — A library on Long Island has voted to remove “all Pride displays” as well as Pride-related books from its children’s sections. The Smithtown Library Board of Trustees voted 4-2 Tuesday to ban any and all displays related to LGBTQ Pride from kids’ areas at Smithtown Library buildings, a move that was met with fierce backlash and call for action by advocates. The New York Library Association slammed Smithtown’s move, calling it “a direct violation of NYLA’s commitment to intellectual freedom and the freedom to read that libraries are entrusted to uphold.” The organization reaffirmed i…

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Here’s a pretty good wrap-up of Thursday in the “pro-life” Supreme Court majority:

Yes, the court decided that death row inmates have a say how they die (as long as they are put to death) and that you don’t really have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and also that the Second Amendment means that anyone can carry a gun anywhere they want to, any time and states have no say about it. Very soon they will rule that states do have the final say in forcing pregnant people to give birth, regardless of circumstance. Never mind the Constitution, precedence, or anything remotely relevant to the fact that we live in the 21st century.

This is not the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a modern day Star Chamber, a tool of the far-right being used to “enforce unpopular political and ecclesiastical policies.” In 1641, Parliament abolished that private court of the king because it was out of control. Congress can’t abolish the Supreme Court, but it can fix it. At least two liberal justices have made veiled pleas in their dissents to recent decisions for Congress to do just that.

In the oral arguments in Vega v. Tekoh, the case the court just used to essentially nullify Miranda rights for suspects, Justice Elena Kagan could see what was coming. She warned her colleagues that denigrating Miranda “would have a kind of unsettling effect not only on people’s understanding of the criminal justice system, but on people’s understanding of the court itself and the legitimacy of the court and the way the court operates and the way the court sticks to what it says.”

She sounded that alarm bell in her dissent in Vega. The court has done it now, it has broken a fundamental precedent and with it a fundamental right.

Today, the Court strips individuals of the ability to seek a remedy for violations of the right recognized in Miranda.The majority observes that defendants may still seek “the suppression at trial of statements obtained” in violation of Miranda’s procedures. ... But sometimes, such a statement will not be suppressed. And sometimes, as a result, a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison. He may succeed, on appeal or in habeas, in getting the conviction reversed. But then, what remedy does he have for all the harm he has suffered? ...

The majority here, as elsewhere, injures the right by denying the remedy.

Kagan and her colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor have been warning about the court’s lost legitimacy for months now, because the court has become increasingly dangerous and from where they sit, they know how much more damage can be done.

Their warnings have fallen on deaf ears within the court. The extremist majority—five of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote—is drunk on the power they now have. They have only begun in their path to sending us back to the 19th century (or if Alito has his way, the 17th). Still to come this session are their abortion and Clean Air Act decisions. By the end of this month, pregnant people will have fewer rights than gun owners, and the Biden administration will no longer have the power to protect the air we breathe.

None of these decisions reflect the opinion of the majority of Americans. What the Trump and McConnell-packed court is hell bent on doing is far, far out of the mainstream, even among Republican voters. 

And Republicans are making sure that there is going to be more of it, enshrined in law at every level.

The response from Democrats can’t simply be this, what we got from President Joe Biden on Thursday:

We have made our voices heard. Just this month, in more than 450 cities hundreds of thousands of us used our voices again. The Supreme Court did not hear that. The Supreme Court does not give a damn.

The answer is for the president and for the Congress to act like the coequal branches of government that they are, to use the tools that the Constitution bestows on them and check and balance the rogue Supreme Court. 

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In their attempts to distance themselves from President Donald Trump's false theories about a stolen election, Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner have failed. While the couple told the Jan. 6 committee that they urged Trump not to take advice from Rudy Giuliani and did not share his views on a stolen election, new evidence and reports say otherwise. 

In an interview clip obtained by The New York Times, Ivanka Trump can be heard saying her father should "continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” with regard to the 2020 election. The clip filmed in mid-December 2020 was among the footage handed over by British filmmaker Alex Holder to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The footage directly contradicts Ivanka’s testimony to congressional investigators made in April 2022. During that time she told the House committee she had "accepted" former Attorney General Bill Barr's assessment that Trump's claims of election fraud were wrong.

When asked how Barr’s statement impacted her, Ivanka said: "I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying." The pre-recorded testimony was played in the panel's first public hearing earlier this month; it was a part of a voluntary eight-hour interview. 

According to Business Insider, Trump responded in anger to her testimony and claimed she did not understand elections.

However, while Ivanka attempted to distance herself from her father’s theories and said she agreed with Barr, theTimes found that Ivanka Trump spoke to Holder on Dec. 10, 2020, nine days after Barr made the assessment that convinced her that the election was indeed not stolen.

"I think that, as the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless," Ivanka Trump said after being asked about Trump's efforts, the Times reported. "And I think a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that's not right, it's not acceptable."

"And he has to take on this fight. Look, you fight for what you love the most and he loves this country and he loves this country's people, and he wants to make sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted," she continued. She then added that he “will continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted and that’s what he should do.”

Holder acknowledged Tuesday that he had turned over footage that included never-before-seen interviews with Trump, members of the Trump family, and then-Vice President Mike Pence. The interviews were filmed before and after the events of Jan. 6. The footage obtained by the Times was merely a clip from one of them. What was in the full footage was not disclosed.

"As a British filmmaker, I had no agenda coming into this. We simply wanted to better understand who the Trumps were and what motivated them to hold onto power so desperately," Holder said. "We have dutifully handed over all the materials the committee has asked for and we are fully cooperating."

According to Politico, Holder was subpoenaed last week and is set to testify before the panel on Thursday.

The news of the clip comes at a time when Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney expressed fear that his gravestone will say he "lied for Trump.” During an interview with The New Yorker Giuliani, referring to things he said for Trump, expressed fear that he was “not always being truthful about it.”

"I am afraid it will be on my gravestone. 'Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump.’ Somehow, I don't think that will be it. But, if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead."

"I figure I can explain it to St. Peter," he continued. "He will be on my side, because I am, so far ... I don’t think, as a lawyer, I ever said anything that’s untruthful. I have a sense of ethics that is as high as anybody you can imagine. I've been doing this forever. I am doing what I believe in. I may not always be right, but I am doing what I believe."

But Ivanka Trump and Giuliani are not the only ones to have lied to save themselves or support Trump. While Kushner also claimed no connection, he was actually “directly” involved in Trump’s early attempts to overturn the election. According to Vanity Fair, he even “took charge in overseeing the development of plans to keep Trump in office” in the week following the Nov. 3, 2020, election.

On Wednesday, the FBI handed subpoenas to an unknown number of people who took part in the Jan. 6 conspiracy as false electors. Subpoenas are reported to have gone out to members of the Republican Party in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, and Nevada. In addition, federal agents seized evidence, including the phone of the Republican Party chair in Nevada. 

Finally, rightwing “think tank” The Center for Renewing America confirmed that “more than a dozen DOJ law enforcement officials” searched the home of former Justice Department (DOJ) official Jeffrey Clark on Wednesday.

Clark’s part in the Jan. 6 conspiracy was supplemental to the role of the false electors, whose assigned task was to create an excuse for throwing out the electoral votes in seven states, as part of the scheme created by Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman. Clark, an environmental lawyer several levels down at the DOJ at the time, proposed that Trump remove then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with the completely unqualified Clark. Clark then promised to throw the weight of the DOJ behind false claims of voter fraud, giving Trump room to refuse to leave office and to call for new elections.

Now Clark is being investigated by the people who know exactly what he did and who he is—his former colleagues at the DOJ.

Clark’s new employers in the Republican welfare program at The Center for Renewing America rushed to claim that the raid on Clark’s home consisted of “criminalizing politics” because all Clark wanted was “to investigate voter fraud.” Which is a good example of walking as far from the truth as is possible.

The truth is that Clark saw Trump’s desperation to get the DOJ to sign on to the conspiracy, and how frustrated Trump was that Rosen refused to play ball. So Clark offered Trump an absolutely classic “you wash my hands, and I’ll wash yours” arrangement whereby Clark would fly multiple tiers upward to land in the AG role and Trump would get a statement claiming the DOJ was investigating significant voter fraud.

To support this idea, Clark focused on Georgia and both he and Trump pressured then U.S. attorney Byung Pak to back their play. Clark went so far as to pre-draft a letter falsely saying the DOJ was investigating significant voter fraud in Georgia. At one point, Clark was so confident that Trump was about to pull the trigger, that he graciously offered to allow Rosen to hang around as his second in command.

The only thing that stopped Trump from executing this scheme and replacing Rosen with Clark was the timely release of a public statement from Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger. Having been badgered and threatened by Trump, Raffensperger went public. Word of what Trump and Clark had been planning spread around the DOJ, and multiple senior officials at the department made it clear they would resign rather than go along. In the end, Rosen confronted Trump directly. Trump backed down.

As House select committee on Jan. 6 chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said during Thursday’s hearing, Trump tried to use the DOJ to back his scheme. "Donald Trump didn't just want the Justice Department to investigate,” said Thompson. “He wanted the Justice Department to help legitimize his lies, to baselessly call the election corrupt.”

Whether Clark was subpoenaed to testify or produce information isn’t known. However, among those who did receive a subpoena on Wednesday was Georgia Republican Party chair David Shafer. Shafer reportedly played a central role in organizing the false elector effort in Georgia. 

Enlarge / An Aeroflot Boeing 777-300ER aircraft is preparing to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation in June 2022. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty)

An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014.

For eight years, YU-APH flew without any issues—until it landed at 10:37 pm on May 25, 2022, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. It had flown in from Belgrade and was due to take off again on a late-night return within the hour. But there was a problem: The pilot had reported an issue with the plane’s engine casing that needed to be fixed. The supplier of the broken part, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, reportedly refused to fix the problem, citing sanctions against Russia resulting from its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plane was stuck. (Collins Aerospace did not respond to a request for comment.)

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New York State Rifle v. Bruen is poorly reasoned. But its implications are potentially catastrophic.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is a devastating decision for anyone who cares about reducing gun violence.

It massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”

The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — are likely to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

The case involves a 109-year-old New York state law which requires anyone who wishes to carry a handgun in public, whether openly or concealed, to demonstrate “proper cause” before they can obtain a license to do so. An applicant must show “a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.”

Similar laws exist in five other states — California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — plus the District of Columbia. Together, these jurisdictions make up about a quarter of the US population, and a much higher percentage of the country’s urban population. In effect, that has meant very few residents of those states have been able to legally carry a handgun in public.

Writing solely for the Court’s Republican appointees, Justice Clarence Thomas strikes down New York’s century-old law. He also establishes a whole new (confusing) framework for evaluating gun control laws. Bruen establishes a “text, history, and tradition test” that purports to be rooted in, well, the text of the Constitution, and the history of English and early American gun laws.

In reality, however, Thomas’s new test takes extraordinary liberties with the text of the Second Amendment, which explicitly states that the purpose of the right to bear arms is to protect service in a militia.

And when it comes to “history,” “the Court’s near-exclusive reliance on history is not only unnecessary, it is deeply impractical,” as Breyer chastises Thomas in dissent. That’s because judges are ill-equipped to conduct the kind of multi-century historical survey that Thomas’s new framework demands.

Worse, Thomas announces that the government bears the burden of showing that any gun law “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” But if “tradition” is so important, why must New York’s 100-year-old law fall? As a practical matter, moreover, that Thomas places the burden of proof on the government means many gun laws are likely to fall because, when the historical record is unclear, the government loses.

Thomas’s opinion takes extraordinary liberties with both constitutional text and history

Thomas declares that “when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.” To sustain a gun regulation, moreover, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” It’s worth examining each of these rules in turn.

The Second Amendment states that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, it is the rare constitutional provision that not only declares the existence of a right, but also states the reason why this right exists. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect “a well regulated Militia.” That’s what the plain text of the Constitution provides.

But Thomas’s opinion in Bruen, much like the Court’s earlier decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), thumbs its nose at the text of the Constitution.

Heller itself was a landmark case for gun rights. Decided 217 years after the Second Amendment became part of the Constitution, it was the first Supreme Court case in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. Before Heller, the Court understood this amendment to protect a much more limited right tied to militia service.

As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias, and the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”

But Heller upended that. And quoting from Heller, Thomas writes that “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” And therefore gun regulations should be judged according to whether they undermine this atextual purpose invented by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court.

Similarly, Thomas writes that courts should determine whether a modern-day gun regulation fits within the nation’s historical traditions by drawing “historical analogies” to early American gun laws.

Thomas’s opinion suggests that these analogies may need to be drawn to laws that existed in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified; or that they may need to be drawn to laws that existed in 1865 — when the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires states to comply with the Second Amendment, was ratified. It declines to resolve questions about which date matters, however, adding another layer of confusion for judges forced to apply Bruen.

In any event, there are fairly obvious reasons why it is hard to draw reliable analogies between modern-day regulations and laws from earlier centuries. Federal law, for example, prohibits civilian ownership of machine guns. But the machine gun was invented in 1884. So a judge searching for early American laws regulating automatic weapons will come up empty, because machine guns did not exist during either the Founding Era or the Reconstruction Era. Does this mean that a ban on machine guns is unconstitutional?

Thomas also writes that “when a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century, the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” In other words, modern gun laws that address problems that existed in the 1700s are likely to fall, unless similar laws existed in the 18th century.

For this reason, Thomas concludes that a handgun ban like the one struck down in Heller is unconstitutional because the framers did not ban handguns in order to combat the problem of “firearm violence in densely populated communities.”

But this reasoning is anachronistic. According to the 1790 census, New York City had only 33,131 residents around the time when the Second Amendment was ratified. The second-largest city, Philadelphia, had fewer than 29,000 residents.

Eighteenth-century Americans, in other words, simply did not confront the problem of “firearm violence in densely populated communities.” The most densely populated communities in the 18th-century United States had roughly the same number of people as a small town in modern-day America.

Both Thomas’s majority opinion and Breyer’s dissent spend a simply nauseating number of pages combing through nearly a millennia worth of gun laws. Both opinions, for example, discuss a 1328 law providing that Englishmen may not “ride armed by night nor by day, in Fairs, Markets.” Thomas declares a 1689 English law permitting “Protestants” to “have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions, and as allowed by Law” to be a “watershed” law that formed the basis for a modern individual right to own firearms. Breyer quotes from a 1786 Virginia law prohibiting individuals from going “armed by night nor by day, in fairs or markets, or in other places, in terror of the Country.”

But this litany of long-forgotten laws does little to clarify the question of what the framing generation (or perhaps people during Reconstruction) thought about the right to carry a firearm without a permit on city streets. The bottom line is that the six Republican appointees surveyed many centuries worth of gun laws and concluded that they support the Republican Party’s preferred stance on firearms; while the three Democratic appointees surveyed the same laws and concluded that they support the Democratic Party’s preferred stance on firearms.

In fairness, Thomas does offer a workaround for the problem that many modern weapons — from machine guns to intercontinental ballistic missiles — did not exist until very recently and therefore were not regulated by early American lawmakers.

The lesson of history, Thomas claims, is that the Second Amendment protects the right of civilians to carry weapons that “are ‘in common use at the time.’” So an amendment that may have protected the right to own a musket in 1790 now protects the right to own a handgun, because handguns are now commonly used by civilians. Similarly, even Thomas would likely concede that the Second Amendment does not permit civilians to own tanks, nuclear warheads, or other weapons that are not commonly possessed by civilians in 2022.

Judges will no doubt have an easier time determining what kinds of guns are in common use in 2022 than they will determining what 18th-century gun laws have to say about the B-2 stealth bomber. But Thomas’s need to rely on such a workaround from his “text, history, and tradition” framework only emphasizes the uselessness of that framework.

So what happens to gun laws now?

One silver lining for proponents of gun regulation is that Thomas’s opinion embraces language that first appeared in Heller, which permits some gun laws such as prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nevertheless, Thomas’s emphasis on historical analogies isn’t just likely to confuse lower court judges. It could endanger many laws that enjoy broad bipartisan support.

As Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and expert on the Second Amendment, notes on Twitter, much of the bipartisan gun bill that is currently making its way through Congress could be endangered by Thomas’s opinion. Among other things, early American laws rarely offered much, if any, protection to victims of domestic violence.

And it is worth emphasizing again that Thomas’s opinion places the burden of proving that a gun regulation “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” on the government. So state lawyers, who are untrained as historians, and who may know very little about how to research gun legislation from the 1700s, will now have to learn those skills on the fly. And if they fail to offer enough historical evidence to convince a judiciary dominated by conservative Republican appointees, their state’s law could be forfeit.

The bottom line is that “dangerous and unusual” weapons such as machine guns, fighter jets, and anti-aircraft missiles will probably remain beyond civilian reach. But vast swaths of American gun laws are now in terrible danger.

Here at Daily Kos, we have long covered the heinous efforts from conservatives to bar hungry students from eating. When it comes to school lunch in the United States, there’s a lot to criticize: the provided breakfast, lunch, and snacks are not always healthy, and they’re not even always available to all those in need. We’ve covered stories of schools threatening to bar students with school lunch debt from attending field trips and proms, as well as instances where children say they felt ashamed or embarrassed after being told their meal of choice wasn’t available to them because of their lunch debt. We’ve seen a school district threaten parents of students with lunch debt with the foster care system (yes, really). It’s grim.

Somehow, Republicans have managed to make it even more dire. In this case, as reported by Politico, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas is considering whether or not to block funds for school lunch programs because he doesn’t like that the Biden administration is trying to protect trans youth from discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Lovely!

RELATED STORY: Republicans have really outdone themselves with their latest anti-trans health care bill

Before we delve into the details of Marshall’s mean-spirited debate, let’s review where we’re at with free and reduced school meals right now across the nation. As Daily Kos covered previously, COVID-19 pandemic waivers provided schools with much more autonomy when it comes to getting hungry children and teenagers fed, including making free meals available to go or at community spaces, like public libraries. These waivers have been especially useful in keeping students fed over the summer.

Waivers also allowed all students to eat for free, eliminating the need for families to tackle application paperwork. Applications for programs like free lunch can be a significant barrier in terms of language literacy and paperwork, not to mention how many people simply won’t apply because of social stigma or concerns about bullying.

Now, President Joe Biden did not include these free-meals-for-all waivers in the budget he signed earlier this year, and since then, lawmakers did not extend them. In short, this has been confusing and frustrating for both parents and teachers, as administrators have had to scramble to figure out new systems for providing free and reduced breakfast and lunch, in addition to the hypothetical mountain of paperwork.

More recently, as covered by NPR, a handful of lawmakers have joined together to introduce the Keep Kids Fed Act, which they hope to pass out of both the House and the Senate and get to Biden before June 30. Why June 30? That’s when the pandemic waivers are set to expire. This is a bipartisan effort, including Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Republican Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, and Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. 

And bringing it back to Marshall, he is considering blocking this bill from passing because he doesn’t like that the Biden administration is daring to protect trans students even a teensy bit from discrimination. 

According to Politico, Marshall tried framing his stance on the issue as though he is not a potential barrier to feeding hungry students. “I’m just afraid that schools in Kansas won’t have school lunches because of this administration’s radical view on transgender issues,” he said in part, adding that he’s afraid they’re going to “raid” the school lunch program over it.

Nothing about the Biden administration is radical, including its stance on trans rights, and especially trans rights in schools. As Daily Kos has continued to cover at length, trans people—and especially trans youth—are especially vulnerable to numerous forms of violence and discrimination, including while at school. Trans youth, for example, report higher rates of bullying, harassment, and assault than their cisgender peers, and are more likely to leave high school without a diploma. They are also more likely to become homeless.

Even still, Marshall is taking the current food crisis as an opportunity to demonize trans folks and pit trans rights against other issues. The reality of the situation, however, is that the USDA has already clarified it won’t remove funding for a school lunch program because the state has enacted anti-trans laws or guidances, like (terrible) ones barring trans girls from participating in girls’ sports or using the correct locker room. 

So, what is Marshall opposing? In terms of actual policy, he’s apparently upset that the USDA seeks to allow trans youth (and their parents or guardians) who have faced discrimination over their gender identity pertaining to school lunch to file complaints. For instance, this could look like being denied a meal or being denied access to a reduced or free meal because of their identity or pronouns. School administrators just need to share their policy to fight against discrimination in this area, and sadly but not surprisingly, Republicans aren’t happy about that.

Any excuse to get people hysterical and get those votes though, right? 

Supreme Court

What the Supreme Court’s Gun Ruling Means For Gun Control

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jun. 23, 2022, at 1:20 PM

The Supreme Court just dramatically expanded Americans’ right to bear arms. In a 6-3 opinion, with the court’s Republican-appointed justices in the majority, the court ruled that a New York law that heavily restricts the ability to carry a concealed handgun in public violates the Constitution. 

This decision is a big deal. Previously, the court had only said that the Constitution protected the ability to have a gun inside the home for self-defense. In that decision, which came down in 2008, the justices didn’t rule on how guns carried outside the home could be regulated. It took almost 15 years for the justices to come back to that question, but now they have. The Second Amendment “protect[s] an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion for Thursday’s ruling. Laws like New York’s, which required people who wanted a license to carry a concealed handgun in public to show they have a good reason, are no longer allowed.

That doesn’t mean there is no way to regulate the carrying of guns in public — Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that explicitly in his concurring opinion. But Thursday’s ruling does change the way regulations are evaluated. Thomas’s opinion states regulations need to be historically consistent with the Second Amendment. That means when they look at a modern gun regulation, judges will have to figure out if another, reasonably similar law was passed earlier in the country’s history. Previously, courts had also considered whether a regulation could be justified for other reasons, but that second layer of consideration is no longer allowed.

What all of this means in practice, though, will have to be worked out by the lower courts, which means there will likely be a flood of new litigation over gun restrictions that could come right back to the Supreme Court.

The decision is a big expansion of gun rights

Gun rights advocates have been waiting for over a decade for this ruling – and it did not disappoint. Thomas, who has been complaining for years about the court’s reticence to clarify the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment, wrote a sweeping opinion that expands gun rights significantly, and could have a big impact on Americans’ lives.

That’s because the 2008 opinion, while it transformed the way that the Second Amendment is interpreted to include an individual right to bear arms, didn’t actually change the status quo very much. There were relatively few laws that restricted the ability to have a gun at home, and the justices were clear that the opinion didn’t extend further. A study that looked at lower court rulings on Second Amendment challenges from 2008 to 2016 found that the Supreme Court’s opinion didn’t really change the way other judges were ruling on gun regulations (though, the study acknowledged, that could also be due in part to the types of cases under consideration).

Before Thursday’s ruling, judges had two factors to consider when evaluating the constitutionality of a gun regulation: Does it fit with the history of the Second Amendment? And does the state have another reasonable justification — like social science data suggesting that the law could reduce gun violence? 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-courts-gun-ruling-remakes-gun-control-americans-85660014

Under the new ruling, state governments can no longer argue that a gun restriction should be upheld because it serves an important interest. Instead, judges will only consider whether “the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In his opinion, Thomas noted that modern regulations don’t have to be a “dead ringer for historical precursors.” But as gun law experts have pointed out, figuring out whether modern gun regulations are similar enough to laws that were passed 200 years ago won’t be a simple matter. The ruling opens the door for every gun regulation that was upheld under the 2008 ruling to be challenged again — in a judiciary that is much more conservative than it was even a few years ago.

New battle lines in the war over gun laws

As with many Supreme Court rulings, we won’t understand the full implications of today’s ruling for a long time. Five other states and the District of Columbia have laws like New York’s, and they will have to pass new regulations for people who want to carry handguns in public. That in itself is not a small thing, since the states include California, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which are populous states with big cities. 

But the conservative justices could have gone further and cut down a huge swath of gun regulations at once, which they did not. “Our holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy a gun,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his concurring opinion. “Nor does it decide anything about the kinds of weapons that people may possess.”

The ruling does, however, create a bunch of new opportunities for advocates who want to limit states’ ability to determine who can carry a gun and where. In his opinion, Thomas said that guns can still be banned in “sensitive places,” but didn’t expand much further on what a “sensitive place” actually is. In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that with a historical approach, this category could turn out to be pretty limited. “Where does that leave the many locations in a modern city with no obvious 18th- or 19th-century analogue?” he wrote. “What about subways, nightclubs, movie theaters, and sports stadiums?”

So the future will depend, at least in part, on what state lawmakers try to do. Lawmakers in a state like New York or California could test the limits of the Supreme Court’s ruling by designating the subway, Broadway theaters or grocery stores as “sensitive places” where heightened restrictions can be applied. The risk for them, of course, is that the next Supreme Court ruling could expand gun rights even further.