As we documented repeatedly in the days and weeks after the Alabama Supreme Court found that embryos created as part of in-vitro fertility treatment are considered “children” and protected as such in wrongful death suits, Republicans stepped upon rake after rake, stumbling their way into a full faceplant on the issue. And for good reason: It’s cartoonishly hard to support the kind of fetal personhood ideology underlying the Alabama ruling while also supporting the procedure for what it is — a safe and widely supported way for couples experiencing fertility issues to conceive.
Continue reading “Trump Couched His Non-Answer On Abortion In IVF Messaging Cleanup”Thank You, Folks
As I’ve told you a number of times over the last three weeks, we launched this year’s Annual TPM Membership Drive with an ambitious goal of signing up 1,000 new members. Today, a bit before noon, we hit our goal. It was even ahead of schedule. We truly appreciate it. We appreciate our members and especially those thousand new members. It’s a very important milestone for the company’s finances. But it is also a big shot in the arm for our whole team. Because this doesn’t happen by accident. We’re a small operation. And this is the product of every member of our team from editors and reporters to techs and designers and producers and publishing staff operating at their peak and operating as a very integrated and collaborative team. I really could not be prouder of every one of them.
Before I share a few other thoughts, two points: First, the drive was scheduled to run through the 15th. Since we’ve hit our goal I’m not going to be pushing you to sign up anymore in the Editors’ Blog. But the 40% discount we’ve been offering will continue to apply through the 15th.
Continue reading “Thank You, Folks”Trump Bets That Voters Will Buy His Feigned Moderation On Abortion
Two things are undoubtedly true: Donald Trump has no “religious conviction” leading him to oppose abortion (The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell says voters often assume that he’s paid for abortions in her focus groups), and he knows the Dobbs decision and everything stemming from it make for terrible electoral politics for his party.
Continue reading “Trump Bets That Voters Will Buy His Feigned Moderation On Abortion”What Exactly Do the Christian Nationalists Want?
Over the past month, I’ve been speaking with people who describe themselves as Christian nationalists, with Christians who are vehemently opposed to that movement, and with those who seem to agree with its overall aims but dislike the term.
Continue reading “What Exactly Do the Christian Nationalists Want? “Fibber Tim and the Suddenly Hilarious Montana Senate Race
This is one of the most amazing stories to come down the pike in I don’t know how long, published over the weekend in The Washington Post. The short version is that Tim Sheehy, probable Republican nominee for Senate in Montana, is a comical liar and is trying to cover up that lie with a story so preposterous that it’s kind of a joy to run through because it’s so hilariously bad.
Seriously, I’m not overstating the case.
Let’s dig into the details.
Continue reading “Fibber Tim and the Suddenly Hilarious Montana Senate Race”At the Finish Line!
We’ve signed up 996 new members so far in the drive. Just four more to go. Can we get there before the eclipse?
Judge Shopping Is Destroying The Courts’ Credibility. Judges Shrug, GOP Senators Cheer.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Forum shopping: Every lawyer does it. Plaintiffs’ lawyers file cases in the courts where they think they’re most likely to win. Defendants try to get cases moved to more favorable places or dismissed altogether.
But judge shopping? Picking not just a court but the individual judge who hears the case?
Surely litigants aren’t allowed to do that.
Yet judge shopping is the norm in many federal courts throughout the country.
Lately, Republican state attorneys general and conservative activists have been exploiting quirks in rules about how cases are assigned to judges to challenge federal government policies on abortion, immigration, gun control, transgender rights, and more in front of hand-picked, sympathetic, Republican-appointed judges, primarily in Amarillo and Wichita Falls, Texas.
Last month, the Judicial Conference of the United States (a group of judges who oversee the operation of the federal courts), adopted a policy that was widely reported as stopping the ability of plaintiffs to judge shop.
Predictably, the beneficiaries of judge shopping — namely, Republicans — decried the policy as politically motivated and urged district courts to ignore it. Democrats, for their part, demanded that the chief judge of the district encompassing Amarillo and Wichita Falls (the Northern District of Texas) adopt new case assignment rules right away.
But in a letter sent to Senate Democrats last week, the Northern District’s chief judge refused to make any changes, citing a “consensus” among the district’s judges to maintain the status quo. You may not be surprised to learn that Republican presidents appointed ten of those eleven judges.
In short, despite the fanfare surrounding the Judicial Conference’s policy on random case assignment, nothing has changed.
That’s unfortunate. There is no fairness or impartiality among the judges favored by Republicans.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo — who, among other extremist rulings, struck down the FDA’s decades-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone — was an anti-abortion activist before he was appointed by President Trump.
And Judge Reed O’Connor in Wichita Falls struck down the Affordable Care Act in 2018 — six years after the Supreme Court largely upheld that law. (Judge O’Connor’s 2018 ruling was reversed on appeal.)
But high-profile, politically charged cases are not the only cases in which judge shopping wreaks havoc. As we’ve shown in a series of law review articles, judge shopping happens all the time in the obscure but important field of patent law.
In the mid-2010s, for instance, over a thousand patent cases per year — a quarter of all patent cases nationwide — were filed before Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas (population 23,000). More recently, Waco, Texas, has become the capital of U.S. patent litigation, with Judge Alan Albright receiving nearly one in four patent cases filed nationwide. Though the district encompassing Waco (the Western District of Texas) recently adopted rules that prevent shopping for Judge Albright, early indications are that judge-shopping patentees are heading back to Marshall and to Midland, Texas — both places where it’s possible for a plaintiff to pick their judge.
To bring cases in, the judges like Gilstrap and Albright slant procedures and rulings to blatantly favor patent owners. The patent owners filing cases in Texas are primarily nonpracticing entities (pejoratively, “patent trolls”) — entities that don’t make anything and exist only to assert patents.
And judges have ample incentives to bring patent cases into their courtrooms.
Being known as the judge in a specific area of law brings fame and notoriety. A large patent caseload brings economic benefits to local lawyers, the community, and even the judges themselves. And the “expert” reputation a judge develops can bring lucrative career opportunities when the judge retires from the bench.
The current situation is untenable. No one should be denied access to abortion medication or the opportunity to seek asylum or the entrance to the bathroom of their choice simply because a conservative activist got to pick the judge. Judge shopping in patent cases also harms us all: not only does it corrupt our court system, many patent cases wouldn’t be filed at all if judge shopping weren’t possible. The cost of that needless litigation is baked into everything we buy, from eye medicine to iPhones.
Ideally, the Judicial Conference would do more than adopt a policy suggesting that courts adopt case assignment systems that prevent judge shopping — it would adopt a rule requiring all cases to be randomly assigned among multiple judges.
Though this would be an easy fix, the Judicial Conference seems to doubt whether it can require district courts to do anything to stop judge shopping.
That’s too bad. The federal courts are facing a crisis of legitimacy. Ending judge shopping would restore some semblance of neutrality.
Trump Refuses To Let Anti-Abortion Politics Wreck His Bid To Avoid Jail
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What Winning Looks Like
Like the infrastructure week of lore, Trump’s promise to finally take a position on what a post-Dobbs world should look like had all the makings of a kick the can down the road epic. That turned out to be both true and selling Trump a bit short. In a video released this morning, Trump seems to have made “kick the can” his official position.
He didn’t come out in favor of a 15-week ban. He didn’t come out for or against anything in particular, other than “winning.” His default position, he claimed, will be to leave it to the states. Some states may enact more liberal abortion laws and some may enact more conservative ones, and that’s okay with him, Trump said.
Trump telegraphed his “winning” equation in a weekend post:
This line from this morning’s video is for ages, an attempt at bombast followed by an immediate collapse into fecklessness: “Whatever they decide must be the LAW OF THE LAND, in this case the law of the state.”
But let’s not leave the misimpression that Trump spoke in coherent sentences or a logical structure. He threw out a few conceptual frameworks, like “life” and “babies” and “winning.” But he stopped short of endorsing a nationwide ban. To try to make up for it, he smeared Democrats with the false claim that they favor executing babies after birth. He literally said that.
The “let the states decide” position is in many ways the long-standing position of anti-Roe Republicans. At least ostensibly. It was in reality a thin veil of pseudo-federalism and a poor disguise for the true goal of outlawing abortions. Trump has now embraced that as a fallback position, but it placates no one and is strongly held only insofar as it serves his electoral ambitions.
Remember: Trump must win to avoid prison. He’s not going to let abortion politics foil his strategy to save himself.
All In a Day’s Work
Shot: Trump claims that violating the gag order in the hush-money case will make him a “modern day Nelson Mandela.”
Chaser: Trump tells donors he wants immigration from “nice countries,” like Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway.
Trump Pressured Nebraska Pol On Electoral Vote Change
From the Nebraska Examiner:
Former President Donald Trump picked up a phone to pressure a Nebraska state senator to revive a winner-take-all system of awarding its Electoral College votes for president, sources told the Nebraska Examiner on Friday.
Trump, the sources said, called State Sen. Tom Brewer, who chairs the State Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, and urged him to take action to get a winner-take-all bill up for debate in the waning days of the 2024 session. …
Brewer, the sources said, responded that it doesn’t work that way. … Trump then reportedly told Brewer, who is term-limited this year, that his political career was over.
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2024 Ephemera
- MT-Sen: Former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, the leading GOP contender against Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), claims he was shot while deployed in Afghanistan but covered it up for years, including lying to a Glacier National Park ranger that he had accidentally shot himself. Does this make zero sense to you? You are not alone!
- TPM’s Kate Riga: This Election Will Prove If Florida Is Still Winnable For Democrats
Ukraine Is So Screwed If Trump Is Elected
Nothing about a Trump II foreign policy will be grounded in U.S. national interest, a coherent vision, or a particular school of thought. It will be transactional, self-serving, and highly steered by Russia, whether directly or indirectly, as a trio of weekend stories in the WaPo made clear:
- Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine
- Russian trolls target U.S. support for Ukraine, Kremlin documents show
- Top Republican warns pro-Russia messages are echoed ‘on the House floor’
Where No Man Dare Tread
The intrepid Hunter Walker ventures into the new 336-page Jesse Watters book.
Only The Best People
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is a delightful presence wherever she goes:
At the December soiree, which was the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala, multiple witnesses saw a server tell Boebert they would not bring her any more alcohol, with one witness telling CNN the server told the congresswoman they believed she had been overserved. Throughout the night, Boebert also kept attempting to snap selfies with Trump, who was sitting at the same table as her. Eventually, Trump’s security detail stepped in and asked Boebert to stop, according to the witnesses, who attended the event and saw the interaction take place.
A Prophet In Our Own Time
In case you missed the obvious signs of earth-shaking and sun-blotting, God sent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to help fill in the blanks for you. He indeed works in mysterious ways:
The Cutest
No one deserved to experience the surreality of an earthquake like the great John McPhee, whose 60-year nonfiction portfolio is anchored in geology writing. But for all his time in the field, the 93-year-old McPhee’s first quake came Friday in his native New Jersey, of all places:
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Trump: Abortion Yada
If you haven’t seen it yet, Donald Trump put out a video this morning in which he says a lot of gobbledegook, takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, and then says the abortion bans should be left up to individual states. We can draw the obvious intent: Republicans are terrified about the politics of abortion rights. He wants to take credit for overturning Roe and then say, essentially, my role is done now so leave me out of it. We will now see a lot of press tut-tutting toward anyone who points out the obvious point that Trump didn’t discuss the kind of blue-state abortion ban he has privately said he’ll support and sign if he’s reelected President. He avoids discussing plans to ban abortion drugs, which are now the primary way women get abortions in the country, or prevent them from being mailed to women in states with abortion bans.
Continue reading “Trump: Abortion Yada”As Elections Loom, Congressional Maps Challenged As Discriminatory Will Remain In Place
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
With the Republicans holding just a two-vote majority in the House of Representatives, voters will go to the polls in November in at least two congressional districts that have been challenged as discriminatory against people of color.
Continue reading “As Elections Loom, Congressional Maps Challenged As Discriminatory Will Remain In Place”