The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could have a significant impact on how mifepristone is prescribed in the United States.
The post Highlights from SCOTUS Oral Arguments in High-Stakes Abortion Pill Case appeared first on Breitbart.
The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case dealing with the Food and Drug Administration’s removal of safeguards on chemical abortion drugs.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, four national medical associations and four individual doctors sued the FDA for removing almost all safety standards for pregnant women taking the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol.
Safeguards formerly included initial in-person visits to make sure the mother did not have an ectopic pregnancy or other serious medical condition, as well as follow-up check-up visits for internal bleeding and infection.
Pro-abortion advocates gathered at the Supreme Court on Tuesday to rally in support of unrestricted chemical abortion drugs. Multiple pro-abortion protesters who spoke with The Daily Signal said they wanted women to have unfettered access to the drugs and pushed back against the idea that safeguards were necessary.
Pro-life advocates who spoke with The Daily Signal emphasized the need to protect women’s health, sharing stories of women who have suffered severe medical complications from taking the drugs without proper medical supervision.
“Today, I argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of doctors and medical associations who are witnessing firsthand the harm to women caused by the FDA’s recklessness,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley said in a press statement on Tuesday.
Hawley accused the FDA of violating federal law and its duty to keep women safe by removing crucial safeguards.
“Regardless of one’s views about abortion, we should all agree that women’s health matters,” she emphasized. “Women deserve for the FDA to do its job. Women deserve for the federal government to look out for their health and safety.”
At the Supreme Court on Tuesday, The Daily Signal spoke with Catherine Herring, a woman whose husband allegedly sought to drug her seven times after he found out she was pregnant. Herring said she became violently ill after the first attempt to abort her baby, and then kept watch until she ultimately caught him on video putting abortion drugs in her drinks.
WATCH:
“I was the victim of abortion pill poisoning in Texas,” Herring said. “My husband poisoned me seven times with abortion pills, in attempt to kill my daughter, Josephine.”
“He said the pregnancy would … make him look like a jerk,” she said.
“He was using an enormous amount of powder each poisoning,” Herring told the The Daily Signal. “I got violently ill. I ended up in an emergency room, with a urine sample that was black in color.”
Regarding the child Herring was pregnant with when poisoned, she said “Josephine is the sweetest little 18-month-old. She has a lot of health issues, a lot of developmental delays. She has spent many months in the hospital, in ICU. She has a feeding tube in her abdomen… I’m so grateful she’s alive.”
Kelly Lester, a rape victim, post-abortive mother, and former abortion clinic worker, also shared her experience with the rally attendees.
Lester, who aborted her unborn baby through a chemical abortion, explained that she felt her traumatic experience must have been unique since she never heard anyone else discussing how isolated and terrifying it was.
“If this was the norm, we would hear about it, there would be people out there talking about how dangerous it was, how painful it was, how traumatic it was,” she said. “But I wasn’t hearing that, so I thought that my experience must have been isolated.”
“While working in the abortion industry as the receptionist, I dispensed the abortion drug regimen,” Lester shared, “I handed these women a bag and I told them the same lies that had been told to me. I told them it’s going to be like a heavy period, you’re going to have light cramping. It’s going to be simple and easy. It’s the best thing for you.”
“I believed the lies that I was fed,” Lester said.
The post Victims of Chemical Abortions Speak Out as Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments appeared first on The Daily Signal.
I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid Colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.
A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot-soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump’s core legal argument—state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged “insurrectionists,” absent specific implementing legislation from Congress—is nothing short of remarkable.
For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal “experts” assured us that the 14th Amendment “insurrection clause” argument for Trump’s ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump’s removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart-turned-Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court’s logic was “masterful,” “brilliant,” and “unassailable.” Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.
In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for “unassailable” logic!
One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy’s would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself. The fact that party activists across numerous states pursued the extraordinary tactic of literally banning their leading opponent from the ballot is emblematic. But the anti-Trump criminal prosecutions and other unsavory lawfare tactics Democrats are also now weaponizing give the game away: Democrats hate democracy and harbor immense disdain for normal Americans’ beliefs.
Put simply, they don’t want to leave the country’s fate in our hands.
Hence, the current bizarre spectacle of Democrats ostentatiously bragging about the need to save “our democracy” while simultaneously pursuing some of the most anti-democratic stratagems in modern American history. Anything, it seems, to prevent the American people themselves from deciding the 2024 election.
To the warped Democratic mind, nothing is more “democratic” than preventing the actual demos from having its say. The horror!
An on-air MSNBC panel during the left-wing network’s Super Tuesday coverage was paradigmatic. Analyzing exit polling from Virginia, hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki could not believe voters ranked immigration as their top issue. “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia,” Maddow quipped, as the others guffawed along with her.
Liberal elites to Americans suffering the myriad consequences of a wide-open southern border: Drop dead.
That’s literally “drop dead,” actually, in the case of Laken Riley, the former nursing student tragically killed two weeks ago by an illegal alien in Athens, Georgia. (Say her name, liberal media.) That’s literally “drop dead,” as well, for the majority of the 110,000-plus Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2022—70% of which were caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids trafficked across the border.
The reality is that during Joe Biden’s presidency, which has overseen the most illegal immigration and the most beleaguered southern border in American history, every town is a “border town.” The MSNBC clowns might delude themselves to the contrary, as they retire at night to their gated communities, driven by their chauffeurs. But that reality is still reality.
Those Americans who want their border secure, their communities safe, and their wages spared suppression by illegal alien labor are the “rubes” whom liberal elites are so passionate about denying from the democratic process that they will invert democracy itself to do so.
Destroy democracy in order to save it—don’t you see?
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The pro-Biden media perpetually pat themselves on the back. They are a gift to the people, the essence of democracy, as in, “We inform the voters and then we expect the voters to make smart choices” (the ones we recommend). But when journalists lose, they have a disturbing tendency to argue democracy lost.
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously disapproved of the Left’s latest desperate attempt to rip Donald Trump’s name off the ballot, pushed by blue states, among them Colorado and Illinois. Their novel theory was that the 14th Amendment contains Civil War-era verbiage about keeping “insurrectionists” off the ballot.
To the average American, it might seem odd that it’s somehow “protecting democracy” to remove the Republican front-runner’s name from the ballot. That looks like throwing large obstacles in the way of democracy, not protecting it.
After the 2020 election, the geniuses at Time magazine called it “fortifying democracy” when the “progressives” engaged in elaborate strategies to prevent Trump from victory.
Journalists struggled to cope with this resounding legal defeat. CNN host Dana Bash told her frustrated liberal audience, “Unfortunately for America, the Court isn’t necessarily wrong that this is the way the Framers wanted it to be.” Those Framers, so annoying.
At another point, professor Larry Sabato groused to Jim Acosta on CNN, “You can’t save people from themselves. If they’re determined to reelect him after he organized that insurrection, then there’s nothing to stop the people from doing that.”
To sum up, democracy’s erstwhile defenders lament “the people are stupid.” Some hotheads like Keith Olbermann decried the Supreme Court as “corrupt and illegitimate” and demanded it be “dissolved.” Who are the authoritarians now?
For now, the moping pundits are focused on those alleged idiots voting in primary elections, where Trump has dominated, but they’re probably also despondent over the latest polls from Democratic newspapers like The New York Times, which found Trump leading Joe Biden by 5 points. Pollsters find Biden often loses to Trump in the swing states that will decide the race. He’s 21 points underwater on his approval rating.
Forget inflation or immigration. Team Biden wants to stick to this arrogant “democracy” posturing as the singular issue of 2024. In a New Yorker puff piece by Evan Osnos, Biden strategist Mike Donilon, the “high priest of Bidenism,” claimed the fall campaign should center on what he calls the “freedom agenda.” The Democrats aren’t the “freedom” party, unless it’s the right to abortion or to place LGBT pornography in school libraries.
Donilon predicted that as the election nears, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.” And who is assigned the task of putting “images in people’s minds”? That would be the pro-Biden press.
They could certainly argue that two entire years of the media putting Jan. 6 “images in people’s minds” might have prevented a “red wave” in the midterm elections. But how does that cancel out all the other issues that matter to voters?
Osnos reported that Biden was holding a notecard with all of Trump’s trolling talk—his tweeting about “terminating” some voting rules in the Constitution, his joking with Sean Hannity about being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of illegal immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”
All these remarks go into heavy rotation (and exaggeration) in the left-wing press—and Biden is still losing. That might be because Democrats don’t want any democracy on many issues. They want debates shut down. That’s especially true of our “no equal time” press.
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The post Democracy-Denying Democrats Lose in Court, Go Bonkers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision Monday shut down state efforts to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot but left a few options open for Democrats seeking to disqualify him, which some began exploring soon after the ruling dropped.
Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin already said he is working on a bill that would create a pathway to disqualify candidates, stating it is “good news” the Supreme Court did not challenge the Colorado court’s finding that Trump engaged in insurrection. Rather, the Supreme Court ruled against Colorado on the basis that it is Congress, not the states, that has the power to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against federal officials and candidates.
“[T]he Supreme Court punted and said, it’s up to Congress,” Raskin said on CNN Monday following the ruling.
The ruling kept open the option of states enforcing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against their own officials and candidates, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, the left-wing group that filed the action against Trump in Colorado, has already been filing lawsuits to do. For federal officials, it held Congress is responsible for enforcement.
“I am working with a number of my colleagues, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell, to revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed Insurrection is disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Raskin said Monday.
Democratic California Rep. Zoe Lofgren likewise told Politico Monday that it “does not at first read appear that the court indicated a viable path to implement Section 3 of the 14th Amendment absent enactment of a law outlining procedures to do so.”
Before the ruling, some senior Democrats suggested in comments to The Atlantic that they would not certify a Trump victory on Jan. 6, 2025, if the Supreme Court failed to provide clear guidance on whether or not he committed an insurrection. The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling put boundaries on how Congress can enforce Section 3: requiring it be enforced by legislation that shows “congruence and proportionality” to the conduct in question.
Notre Dame Law professor and election law expert Derek Muller told the Daily Caller News Foundation rejecting certification remains “possible” but would be an “uphill climb” for Democrats.
“The court seems to suggest that legislation to enforce Section 3 must be appropriately tailored,” he said. “It’s not clear the Electoral Count Reform Act, if used to enforce Section 3, would fit that bill.”
“That said, Democrats objected or attempted to object to election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016, so I think it remains entirely possible that if Trump wins, at least some will attempt to do so,” he continued. “But any objection even to get a debate now needs 20% of each chamber to sign an objection, and to sustain an objection requires a majority in both houses, which seems nearly impossible.”
Some legal scholars thought the Supreme Court intended to shut the option down by specifying the kind of legislation required. The liberal justices seemed to have similar concerns when they wrote the majority’s opinion rules out “enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”
“By holding that Section 5 enforcement legislation is the sole mechanism by which federal office-holders can be disqualified, the decision forestalls such potential scenarios as a Democratic Congress refusing to certify Trump’s election,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote for Reason.
Practically, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation he doesn’t think Democrats have the votes to take such action.
“[Raskin] doesn’t have a hope of passing any such bill unless Democrats get rid of the filibuster in the Senate,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Moreover, if he writes a bill that specifically goes after Trump, he may run into constitutional problems with a violation of the ban in Article I, Section 9 on bills of attainder and ex post facto laws.”
Regardless, any effort Congress makes is likely to spark legal challenges of its own, on which the Supreme Court will have the “last word,” University of California, Los Angeles law professor Rick Hasen wrote Monday.
“We may well have a nasty, nasty post-election period in which Congress tries to disqualify Trump but the Supreme Court says Congress exceeded its powers,” Hasen said.
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The post Liberals Explore Other Ways to Disqualify Trump After Supreme Court Shoots Down Colorado’s Ballot Ban appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Last week I observed in “Liberal Fragility” how liberal law professors supposedly break down in tears they are so depressed that the Supreme Court has taken a turn away from the palmy days of their beloved Warren Court (which, recall, Barack Obama once said did not go far enough in the direction of true “equality”). Just imagine how much Xanax is being ingested after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that leaves Trump on the ballot.
I expected something like this from Keith Olbermann:
Dissolve the Court! Remind me again who is the threat to democracy and trasher of “democratic norms”? Almost makes you long for the good old days of court-packing.
But I hadn’t expected that a supposed conservative could be equally idiotic, but then the side-effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome, for which there is no vaccine, appear to be even worse that I thought:
The Supreme Court has held 9-0 that the Colorado Supreme Court erred in blessing the disqualification of Donald Trump from the state’s primary election ballot under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s opinion is per curiam. Justice Barrett concurs in part and concurs in the judgment. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson concur in the judgment (i.e., the result). The Court’s opinions are posted online here.
The Court’s per curiam opinion commanded a majority and its reasoning represents the law. It rests substantially on the exclusive power of Congress to enforce section 3 against candidates for federal office, “especially the presidency.”
Does the opinion leave open the possibility that Congress might refuse to certify Trump as president if he were to be elected president on the ground that he is guilty of insurrection? If Congress has not prescribed any means other than conviction of the crime of insurrection to make the determination underlying application of section 3, I doubt it. See opinion at 10. However, I may be mistaken. Perhaps the opinion cannot be read that broadly.
The opinion concludes (emphasis in original, citations omitted):
All nine Members of the Court agree with that result. Our colleagues writing separately further agree with many of the reasons this opinion provides for reaching it. So far as we can tell, they object only to our taking into account the distinctive way Section 3 works and the fact that Section 5 vests in Congress the power to enforce it. These are not the only reasons the States lack power to enforce this particular constitutional provision with respect to federal offices. But they are important ones, and it is the combination of all the reasons set forth in this opinion—not, as some of our colleagues would have it, just one particular rationale—that resolves this case. In our view, each of these reasons is necessary to provide a complete explanation for the judgment the Court unanimously reaches.
Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: Although he characterizes it as a 5-4 decision, Andrew McCarthy supports my reading of the per curiam opinion: “What that means is that if Donald Trump were to win the presidential election, congressional Democrats would not be able — in the next January 6 joint session of Congress — to refuse to ratify his victory on the grounds that he is an insurrectionist. Under the Court’s holding, it is now a prerequisite to enforcement of the Section 3 disqualification that a person must have been convicted under the insurrection statute.”
One of the big stories in the New York Times today is another Clarence Thomas smear, but with a twist: “Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages.”
The story is about Crystal Clanton, who graduated from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in 2022. She is coming off a clerkship with Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, who calls her “an outstanding law clerk.” Justice Thomas has now hired her to clerk on the Supreme Court.
For the last seven years, Crystal Clanton has been dogged by reports of an email that she allegedly wrote, in which she supposedly said, “I hate black people.” The Times story admits that they have not seen any such message, and are relying on reporting by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, perhaps the least trustworthy source in America.
In 2017, Clanton was running field operations for Turning Point USA. Mayer did a hit piece on Turning Point that included a variety of allegations, including the one against Clanton. Mayer claimed to have seen a screen shot of the text. The story has dogged Clanton ever since. When she was offered a clerkship on the 11th Circuit by Judge Pryor, seven left-wing members of Congress lodged an ethics complaint against Pryor, based on Clanton’s alleged text. That complaint was investigated by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the complaint to be without merit and dismissed it.
This January 2022 story has the details. Clanton left Turning Point after the claim against her was first made, but the Second Circuit found it to be false:
The Turning Point executive “had determined that the source of the allegations against (Clanton) was a group of former employees,” [Second Circuit Chief Judge Debra] Livingston wrote. “One of these employees was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not.”
Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton when they interviewed and hired her. And both determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton were untrue and found she was highly qualified to serve as a clerk for them, Livingston wrote.
“There is nothing in the record to dispute any of this,” she noted.
Charlie Kirk is also quoted in that story:
“The media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue,” Kirk wrote. “I have first-hand knowledge of the situations reported on and I can assure that the media has made serious errors and omissions. The sources of these reports are a group of former employees that have a well-documented desire to malign Crystal’s reputation.”
The employee who was fired had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” Kirk wrote.
Crystal Clanton got to know Ginny Thomas when she worked at Turning Point, and she was evidently so distraught about her departure from that group that she lived with the Thomases for nearly a year. So Thomas knows her well. He wrote a letter in connection with the Second Circuit investigation:
“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
Clanton didn’t respond to the Times’s request for comment in the story they published today, but back in 2017 she told The New Yorker that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am, and the same was true when I was a teenager.”
So there the matter rests. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that the Left never forgets. No matter that she was cleared by an investigation by one of the nation’s courts of appeals; once the Left gets its hands on a smear it never lets go. It will never stop trying to destroy your life. And of course, The New Yorker and the New York Times are two of the worst offenders.
Also, what makes this old story worthy of the Times’s A section? Only the fact that Justice Thomas is involved. The Times doesn’t care about a law clerk of whom few people have heard, but it cares deeply about smearing the country’s top conservative African-American. But what, exactly, are we supposed to infer from the Times story? That Clarence Thomas is weirdly favorable to those who hate black people?
A final irony: Supreme Court justices have no doubt hired any number of clerks who have written and spoken favorably about DEI, which actually is racist. But there is no controversy there: on the contrary, endorsing that form of racism is a badge of honor.
In 2001, 2005 and 2017, some Democrat House members objected to the certification of electoral votes for the winning Republican presidential candidate. Those objections, while “denialist,” were only symbolic. But Democrat leaders in the House are now suggesting that if they control that body following November’s election–as they well might–they may refuse to allow a victorious Donald Trump to take office.
The Atlantic did the original reporting, behind a paywall. This is from the Election Law Blog:
Murray and other legal scholars say that, absent clear guidance from the Supreme Court, a Trump win could lead to a constitutional crisis in Congress. Democrats would have to choose between confirming a winner many of them believe is ineligible and defying the will of voters who elected him. …
In interviews, senior House Democrats would not commit to certifying a Trump win, saying they would do so only if the Supreme Court affirms his eligibility. But during oral arguments, liberal and conservative justices alike seemed inclined to dodge the question of his eligibility altogether and throw the decision to Congress.
“That would be a colossal disaster,” Representative Adam Schiff of California told me. “We already had one horrendous January 6. We don’t need another.” …
The choice that Democrats would face if Trump won without a definitive ruling on his eligibility was almost too fraught for Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to contemplate. He told me he didn’t know how he’d vote in that scenario. As we spoke about what might happen, he recalled the brutality of January 6. “There was blood all over the Capitol in the hypothetical you posit,” Raskin, who served on the January 6 committee with Schiff, told me….
The Democrats have become so insane on the subject of Donald Trump that it is hard to know which of their mutterings to take seriously. But if Trump wins the election and a Democrat-controlled House refuses to certify his election on the ground that he is an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment, we will be past the point of a constitutional crisis. If that happens, the only realistic path forward will be disunion, possibly accompanied by civil war, but preferably not.
This is one reason why the Supreme Court should put the 14th Amendment theory out of its misery, once and for all. It is obvious that the drafters of that amendment meant the just-concluded Civil War, in which 600,000 Americans lost their lives, when they referred to “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. In contrast, the January 6 protest was not one of the 50 most destructive riots of the last few years, and the only person killed was Ashli Babbitt. Not a single participant in the protest was arrested in possession of a firearm. Some insurrection!
In the interest of preserving the Republic, the Supreme Court should rule definitively that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment does not apply to Donald Trump.