We Love Innovation … Until It’s About Abortion

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

“We won’t go back!” The cry echoed from protesters around the country after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, ending the 50-year constitutional right to abortion.

But the Supreme Court isn’t just letting red states take their inhabitants back 50 years, to a time when only a few states offered any access to abortion at all. It’s worse than that.

They’re rolling us back despite decades of technological and medical progress that made abortion incredibly safe and effective, and that allowed it to be woven into other medical procedures where being pregnant is dangerous or not an option.

As other medical advancements like ultrasounds developed apace, abortion provided an option to women facing an otherwise horrible fate: cancer patients forced to choose or forego critical, life-saving treatment that’s also poisonous to a fetus; expecting mothers learning that their developing fetus has an abnormality and will not survive, allowing them to opt for abortion rather than carrying the pregnancy to term.

The universe of abortion-adjacent medical advancements stretches even further: consider methrotrexate, a drug found to be indispensable to those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. It can also cause abortions, so it is now under dire threat. Or in-vitro fertilization, which went from single-digit success rates, above 50 percent for women under 35 — a medical success story now at risk of being legislated out of existence by abortion bans.

Abortion is fundamentally a story of innovation and a once undreamed-of medical advancement. Bringing it out of the shadows let doctors get really good at it, and made it a fundamental part of a whole raft of health care.

The Court isn’t just sending us back to 1972. It’s sending us back with half a century of new knowledge at our backs — much of which has greatly alleviated women’s pain and suffering — that doctors and health care providers can no longer use. We’re not just going back. It’s worse.

Read my feature on this idea here. 

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Who Let The Krakens Into The White House?

The answer, at least partly, is Garrett Ziegler, a 26-year old employee of Peter Navarro’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing. Ziegler used guest access privileges to let Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne into the White House on Dec. 18 for a multi-hour screaming match over whether Trump should use the full force of federal law enforcement to try to stay in power. Ziegler says that he simply sent a link to Flynn’s team that would get them a clearance.

Since then, Ziegler has transformed himself into something of a one-man clearinghouse for all things Hunter Biden, publishing an archive of what’s supposed to be the contents of his laptop. He’s also delved into ItalyGate, and associated with figures in the QAnon universe. He’s created a foundation named after Marco Polo to house his activities. At least some of these activities – including conducting an “investigation” in Italy into whether military satellites zapped voting machines in 2020, thereby electing Biden – cost money, and it’s not clear where it’s coming from in Ziegler’s case.

— Josh Kovensky

Mischief Manchined 

We are a tentative Charlie Brown, creeping up to the football. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) holds it in place with his forefinger, beckoning us forward.

But check out our grass stains — we’ve been burned before.

Believing that Joe Manchin has actually accepted a deal with Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) feels unbelievably naive. First he killed Build Back Better, after stringing everyone along for months. Then he killed the skinny version of the bill two weeks ago, prompting personal recriminations from his fellow Democrats. But this time … he means it?

And the bill is good! A far cry from the transformational BBB, but it contains nearly $400 billion of mostly green energy incentives, will let Medicare negotiate down prescription drug costs, will extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years, keeping coverage affordable (and avoiding the previously discussed two-year extension, which would set up another coverage cliff for just before the 2024 election).

A week ago, we all thought the only reconciliation bill that could pass would include the ACA extension and maybe some prescription drug stuff. It was a bitter pill to swallow while wildfires rage, flood waters rise and people languish in blistering heat waves all over the world.

Now there’s a real bill? With some really good climate stuff? What’s up, Lucy?

Of course, there are some more potential spoilers waiting in the wings. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has maintained a notably petulant silence, reportedly frustrated and shocked that she wasn’t fêted alongside Manchin. What’s the point of stymying Democrats’ most ambitious policy proposals if you don’t even get special treatment?

And Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), allergic to staying out of the spotlight for too long, could very well get SALTy about the omission of a provision addressing the state and local tax deduction cap, a hobbyhorse in his high-earning district.

But for now, habemus dealum. That Manchin and Schumer even did a dorky Zoom handshake to seal. Good grief! 

— Kate Riga

Pennsylvania’s GOP Guv Nominee Finally Distances Himself From Anti-Semite

Months after paying the right-wing social media website Gab $5,000 for “campaign consulting,” Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, has finally distanced himself from the site’s anti-Semitic founder, who he’s praised in the past, including in a lengthy interview with the founder, Andrew Torba.

“Andrew Torba doesn’t speak for me or my campaign,” Mastriano said Thursday, attempting to pull a rotten tooth that’s lingered for much of his campaign. Torba isn’t shy about his beliefs: “We’re building a parallel Christian society because we are fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one,” he wrote last year, way before Mastriano’s campaign linked up with him. Democrats and the media, Mastriano whined, had used his association with Torba “to distract Pennsylvanians from suffering inflicted by Democrat policies.”

— Matt Shuham

• A Wisconsin sheriff who’s argued for months that the state’s top elections officials should be charged criminally actually celebrated a local right-wing activist who admitted that he filled out ballot request forms using other people’s names. The activist, Harry Wait, went online to request absentee ballots for himself in the names of Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and Racine Mayor Cory Mason (D). “Basically, I committed a crime when I ordered them,” Wait said. Read more here. 
• In the Liberty University files: At Liberty University, Veterans’ Complaints Keep Coming. The evangelical school earns substantial revenues from former members of the military whose tuition is supported by the GI Bill, but it continues to generate complaints from aggrieved vets.
• We’re keeping an eye on this: Twenty-two Republican attorneys general on Tuesday sued the federal government over new anti-discrimination guidance meant to protect LGBTQ people benefitting from federally funded food assistance programs. The new guidance, announced in May, applies to all state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, which administers funds for free school meals as well as the SNAP program, previously known as food stamps.
• And finally: Congrats Gaetz, You Mocked A Teen’s Weight And Helped Her Raise $100k In Abortion Funds!

Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) organizer Matt Schlapp* ain’t bothered that the special guest at his upcoming event, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, recently gave a speech ranting against “race mixing” that one of Orbán’s own advisers described as “pure Nazi text.”

And if you are bothered and think that maybe giving Orbán a massive platform to spew more racist “great replacement” rubbish is a bad idea, have you considered that maybe you’re a fascist, actually?

“Cancel culture is the judge and jury of speech. The most tragic part is that the left is guilty of the fascism they always charge,” Schlapp tweeted on Thursday in defense of a world leader who’s actively trying to cancel racial solidarity and democracy itself.

*Or, as the great Simon Malloy once said, “the sound made by two pork chops falling onto a linoleum floor.”

— Cristina Cabrera