Freebies ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Reproductive Rights:  Yesterday, in an opinion drafted by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court unanimously preserved access to mifepristone, one half of the pill combination used for medical abortions which now represent 63% percent of US abortions. That’s the good news, however the bad news is that the reprieve is only temporary because as Kavanaugh noted SCOTUS’s ruling was based on procedural grounds because the anti-abortion doctors behind the case had no standing to sue in the first place since they don’t prescribe the drug and a group’s “desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue.” In his opinion Kavanaugh made it clear that legislatures could restrict mifepristone’s access if they want to, something that Louisiana’s have already done.  Kavanaugh and quite a few of his SCOTUS colleagues have no problem with restricting abortion they just don’t want to tamper with “standing” precedent.  Well, most of them don’t want to do that, in his concurring opinion Justice Clarence Thomas said that he’d be open to doing so to make it harder for groups like Planned Parenthood to sue to prevent restrictions that impact women’s choices. As evidenced by a report cited in yesterday, NY Times the Roe overturning Dobb’s decision is having a significant impact on women’s access to reproductive care.  In 2023 171,000 women traveled out of state to either have an abortion procedure or to obtain abortion pills, that number is more than double what it was in 2019.  It’s not just abortion that has the right bent out of shape; they’re also growing increasingly hostile to in vitro fertilization. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, just voted to oppose IVF over their view that the destruction of any fertilized eggs not implanted is tantamount to murder. Recognizing that IVF is the right’s newest target, yesterday Senate Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote on a bill to protect IVF access nationwide.  As expected all but two Republican Senators, Alaska’s, Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins, voted against it.  Since passage would have required 60 ayes, the bill failed. More Supreme Court decisions are expected today.  Among the still unannounced decisions is one about whether or not emergency rooms can turn away women who need immediate life-saving abortions while another is the much awaited one about presidential immunity.  Justice Thomas may be hoping that if the decisions are controversial enough, they’ll distract from yesterday’s news that he failed to mention three more of the freebie flights he received from billionaire mega donor Harlan Crow in his updated disclosures. We now know about those flights because Crow listed them in response to a Senate inquiry. By the way, Thomas is another one who has a relative caught up in the drug net.  His nephew, Mark Martin, who Thomas says he raised as a son and whose private school education was funded by Crow is in jail, arrested last year on drug trafficking and weapons possession charges after being stopped as part of a juvenile-sex-trafficking investigation. The nephew reports that unlike Joe Biden who’s stands by his son, crack, guns and all, Uncle Clarence hasn’t spoken to him in years.    

Presidential Politics:  President Biden was in Italy yesterday, doing presidential things like trying to lock in a long-term Trump-proof commitment to Ukraine at the G7 summit. And no, despite Fox’ and the Murdoch empire’s efforts to make him look addled, he didn’t wander aimlessly, they just edited their video to make him look bad, maybe because his chief opponent, felonious Trump keeps slurring, threatening to jail his “enemies” and spouting about sharks and other such things.  For his part, Trump was back in Washington,  hobnobbing with and being fawned over by Republican members of the House and Senate who have largely forgiven him for jeopardizing their lives on January 6, 2021, because what’s an insurrectionist riot among friends and weren’t all those nice tourists just over enthusiastic patriots exercising their First Amendment rights?  They celebrated him with a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday, he turns 78 today.  Trump, who’d earlier directed Speaker Mike Johnson to do his best to get his NY guilty verdict undone, bragged about having trashed the political futures of most of the few Republicans who’d voted for one or more of his impeachments and called Milwaukee, the swing state city where the Republican convention will be held, horrible.  Naturally, his Republican fans first claimed he didn’t call the city horrible and then when proof emerged that he did, they said he only meant it as a complement.  Kind of the way the House meant to complement Attorney General Merrick Garland who they voted to hold in contempt for refusing to turn over the tape of Biden’s interview with US Attorney Robert Hur who’d exonerated him from intentionally hiding retained documents from his VP years.  Garland has already turned over the transcripts of those interviews but Trump’s campaign wants the tapes so they can use them in their campaign videos.                 

Fog:  Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been in a Russian prison for 441 days for the crime of being a journalist.  Yesterday, in a major setback for him, Russian prosecutors announced their support for his indictment on espionage charge meaning that a show trial is in his immediate future.  Not a peep about that from Vlad’s abettors in Congress or from Trump who claims that nice guy Vlad is such a good friend of his. Not much progress on the Gaza ceasefire front largely because Hamas keeps playing Lucy with the football, throwing in new conditions that not just Israel but also Biden’s team, which desperately wants one signed, find unacceptable. Not surprising but also very disturbing, the doctor treating the rescued Israeli hostages reports that they were regularly beaten and abused in captivity.  Worth repeating that their captors included a “civilian” family and a Gazan journalist who wrote for several outlets including Al Jazeera.

#BringThemAllHomeNOW