While You Slept, SCOTUS Greenlighted Putting Bounties On Abortion Providers

Posted on by Cristina Cabrera

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.

McConnell’s SCOTUS Long Game Pays Off

In a 5-4 ruling just before midnight, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to Roe v. Wade by refusing to block Texas’ anti-abortion law.

  • Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett declined to accept the emergency challenge to the new law.
    • They issued a brief, unsigned order emphasizing that they weren’t reaching a decision on the merits.
  • Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.
    • Each of the four dissenters issued their own signed opinions.
  • Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the “stunning” ruling in which “a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
    • The decision was “a breathtaking act of defiance” of “the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas,” she wrote. 
  • An especially scathing Justice Elena Kagan asserted that the conservative majority “barely bothers to explain its conclusion” that “rewards Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from judicial review by deputizing private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.”

What Makes The Texas Anti-Abortion Law So Unusual

The novel enforcement mechanism not only bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, it also empowers citizens to sue anyone they believe provided access to an abortion. On top of that, it creates elaborate hurdles to challenging the law in court.
  • If the citizen is successful in their lawsuit, the defendant has to pay them $10,000.
  • That’s not just doctors or health providers who literally perform the procedure; it includes anyone who merely brought the patient to the clinic, for example.
  • The hurdles to challenging the law worked! The conservative majority bought them, for now.
  • In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts cited the hurdles as good reason for keeping the status quo in place until legal challenges could wend their way through the courts.

In Case You Still Weren’t Sure If Beltway Punditry Was A Joke

Hey, remember when a bunch of political pundits insisted during the Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Barrett confirmations that women’s rights advocates were just being hysterical?

Must Read

“67 abortions in 17 hours: Inside a Texas clinic’s race to beat new six-week abortion ban” – The 19th

50 Capitol Insurrectionists Have Now Pleaded Guilty

The number of guilty pleas in the feds’ mammoth investigation into the attack reached 50 yesterday after a Wisconsin man pleaded to a misdemeanor for breaching the Capitol building.

  • Six of the 50 insurrectionists who pleaded guilty have been sentenced.
  • Nearly 600 people have been arrested in connection to the siege, according to CNN. 

Blue Lives Matter Victimhood Narrative Takes Another L

Despite what the “Back the Blue” brigade claims about the George Floyd protests causing a mass exodus of sad cops, there was barely a drop in employment at local police departments last year.

  • In fact, the dip was less than one percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy lost six percent of its workers overall last year during the pandemic.

So Much For “Motivating” People To Go Back To Work During A Pandemic

States that stripped extra unemployment benefits amid COVID-19 haven’t seen more job growth than those that didn’t, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Millions Of COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Are Getting Dumped

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 15 million doses of the vaccine in the U.S. have been thrown away since March, according to NBC News.

  • More than half of those doses were discarded in June and July, more than March, April, and May by far.
  • It’s unclear why those doses are getting wasted. They can be thrown away due to manufacturing or storage errors that ruin the dose, so that 15 million figure isn’t necessarily the result of vaccine hesitancy.
  • The numbers are self-reported by pharmacies, vaccine providers, and states, so we don’t have a full picture of just how many doses got tossed out.

A LARPing Republican

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) seemed to confirm yesterday the Washington Post’s report that he went off on a lone Afghanistan rescue mission.

  • In the caption of a selfie he posted on Instagram, Mullin declared that he was “heading home” from an undisclosed location. “Have we been helping get Americans out of Afghanistan, yes,” he wrote.
  • He hashtagged the post with “#Ordinarypeopledoingextraordinarythings.”
  • The Post had reported earlier that Mullins tried to bully the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan into allowing him to bring cash into the country in his mission to rescue an American woman and her four children from Afghanistan.
  • Mullins was reportedly unsuccessful in his demand, so it’s unclear how he (supposedly) made it to Afghanistan.

Let’s See Where This Goes

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Under Scrutiny Himself, Biggs Demands McCarthy Oust Both GOPers On Jan. 6 Panel

Posted on by Summer Concepcion

House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Biggs (R-AZ) on Wednesday demanded that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) boot Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) — the two Republicans serving on the Democratic-led Jan. 6 committee — from the GOP conference, following the panel’s reported inclusion of Biggs in its request for telecommunications companies to preserve the phone records of Republican lawmakers. Continue reading “Under Scrutiny Himself, Biggs Demands McCarthy Oust Both GOPers On Jan. 6 Panel” →

Election Truthers Are Spilling Sensitive Data Everywhere, And They’re Not Sorry

Posted on by Matt Shuham

In May, a Michigan judge dismissed a Trumpy lawsuit over the 2020 election results in Antrim County, Michigan, where a clerk’s error had briefly resulted in a miscount of the vote. “Expert” witnesses in the suit had seized on the discrepancy, which they claimed was the result of Dominion voting machine technology “purposefully designed” to tamper with vote totals.

Continue reading “Election Truthers Are Spilling Sensitive Data Everywhere, And They’re Not Sorry” →

Cheney Calls On McCarthy To Condemn Cawthorn’s Talk Of Political ‘Bloodshed’

Posted on by Matt Shuham

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) thinks every member of Congress ought to condemn Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) recent remarks in which he referred, among other things, to busting Jan. 6 insurrectionists out of jail and potential “bloodshed” over “rigged” and “stolen” elections.

Continue reading “Cheney Calls On McCarthy To Condemn Cawthorn’s Talk Of Political ‘Bloodshed’” →

Man Who Disrupted Reporter’s Ida Live Shot Almost Caused ‘Environmental Disaster’ In Ohio

Posted on by Summer Concepcion

Benjamin Eugene Dagley, who local police say is the man seen angrily confronting MSNBC correspondent Shaquille Brewster during live coverage of Hurricane Ida in Mississippi, was also charged in Ohio in 2017 for nearly causing what one Cleveland newspaper described as a “potential environmental disaster.” Continue reading “Man Who Disrupted Reporter’s Ida Live Shot Almost Caused ‘Environmental Disaster’ In Ohio” →

Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021

Posted on by Josh Marshall

With the American war in Afghanistan and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan now definitively over, I’ve been trying to put the entirety of the last four weeks into some perspective. As you can see I’ve been fairly dug in on the proposition that the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection. Pulling the plug on a failed or misconceived mission isn’t pretty. But it is inevitable. The ugliness is built into the failure rather than a consequence of recognizing it. Most of what we’ve seen is an attempt to deny the failure (mostly hawks) or imagine that withdrawing would be orderly and free of consequences. But with all this reasoning, what parts were handled poorly? What could have been better organized or cleaner?

Perhaps this is only a matter of stepping back and with the benefit of clear eyes and more perspective and, well … agreeing with myself. But honestly, I think I really agree with myself. The airlift evacuation appears to have transported well over 110,000 people out of the country, an astonishing feat under any circumstances and probably unprecedented for a civilian airlift in a kinetic military context and in the context of state collapse.

Continue reading “Taking Stock Of The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout Of August 2021” →