#Missouri Supreme Court ruling

[in-sightpublishing]

FFRF applauds Missouri abortion referendum ruling

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing Publisher Founding: September 1, 2014 Publisher Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada Publication: Freethought Newswire Original Link: https://ffrf.org/news/releases/ffrf-applauds-missouri-abortion-referendum-ruling/ Publication Date: September 11, 2024 Organization: Freedom From Religion Foundation Organization Description:…

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #24

June 21-28 2024

The US Surgeon General declared for the first time ever, firearm violence a public health crisis. The nation's top doctor recommended the banning of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, the introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons. President Trump dismissed Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in 2017 in part for his criticism of guns before his time in government, he was renominated for his post by President Biden in 2021. While the Surgeon General's reconstructions aren't binding a similar report on the risks of smoking in 1964 was the start of a national shift toward regulation of tobacco.

Vice-President Harris announced the first grants to be awarded through a ground breaking program to remove barriers to building more housing. Under President Biden more housing units are under construction than at any time in the last 50 years. Vice President Harris was announcing 85 million dollars in grants giving to communities in 21 states through the  Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO) program. The administration plans another 100 million in PRO grants at the end of the summer and has requested 100 million more for next year. The Treasury also announced it'll moved 100 million of left over Covid funds toward housing. All of this is part of plans to build 2 million affordable housing units and invest $258 billion in housing overall.

President Biden pardoned all former US service members convicted under the US Military's ban on gay sex. The pardon is believed to cover 2,000 veterans convicted of "consensual sodomy". Consensual sodomy was banned and a felony offense under the Uniform Code of Justice from 1951 till 2013. The Pardon will wipe clean those felony records and allow veterans to apply to change their discharge status.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.8 Billion in new infrastructure building across all 50 states, 4 territories and Washington DC. The program focuses on smaller, often community-oriented projects that span jurisdictions. This award saw a number of projects focused on climate and energy, like $25 million to help repair damage caused by permafrost melting amid higher temperatures in Alaska, or $23 million to help electrify the Downeast bus fleet in Maine.

The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion to support domestic sources of nuclear fuel. The Biden administration hopes to build up America's domestic nuclear fuel to allow for greater stability and lower costs. Currently Russia is the world's top exporter of enriched uranium, supplying 24% of US nuclear fuel.

The Department of Interior awarded $127 million to 6 states to help clean up legacy pollution from orphaned oil and gas wells. The funding will help cap 600 wells in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, New York and Ohio. So far thanks to administration efforts over 7,000 orphaned wells across the country have been capped, reduced approximately 11,530 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions

HUD announced $469 million to help remove dangerous lead from older homes. This program will focus on helping homeowners particularly low income ones remove lead paint and replace lead pipes in homes built before 1978. This represents one of the largest investments by the federal government to help private homeowners deal with a health and safety hazard.

Bonus: President Biden's efforts to forgive more student debt through his administration's SAVE plan hit a snag this week when federal courts in Kansas and Missouri blocked elements the Administration also suffered a set back at the Supreme Court as its efforts to regular smog causing pollution was rejected by the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling that saw Amy Coney Barrett join the 3 liberals against the conservatives. This week's legal setbacks underline the importance of courts and the ability to nominate judges and Justices over the next 4 years.

[whenweallvote]

Just three hours before the deadline, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled abortion will be on the ballot this November. 🗳️

This November, voters in Missouri will have an opportunity to make their voice heard on abortion and reproductive healthcare like birth control.

Missouri is one of at least 10 states to vote on reproductive health-related measures this fall. There are just eight weeks left until Election Day — make sure you are registered and ready to vote right now at the 🔗 in our bio.

[odinsblog]

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.

The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject.

The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.

(continue reading)

[coralreeferband]

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.

Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]

[See more below the cut.]

NOTE: Remember that back in the 1850s/1860s the Democrats were the party that supported slavery. The Democrats and Republicans switched positions on civil rights in the late 20th century.

It was not just the ruling itself that drove the ferocious opposition to the [Taney] Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and wrote Black Americans out of the national community; it was the political entanglement of the Taney court with the slaveholding interests of the antebellum Democratic Party. [...] Five of the justices were appointed by slave owners. At the time of the ruling, four of the justices were slave owners. And the chief justice, Roger Taney, was a strong Democratic partisan who was in close communication with James Buchanan, the incoming Democratic president, in the weeks before he issued the court’s ruling in 1857. Buchanan, in fact, had written to some of the justices urging them to issue a broad and comprehensive ruling that would settle the legal status of all Black Americans. The Supreme Court, critics of the ruling said, was not trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution as much as it was acting on behalf of the so-called Slave Power, an alleged conspiracy of interests determined to take slavery national. The court, wrote a committee of the New York State Assembly in its report on the Dred Scott decision, was determined to “bring slavery within our borders, against our will, with all its unhallowed, demoralizing and blighted influences.” The Supreme Court did not have the political legitimacy to issue a ruling as broad and potentially far-reaching as Dred Scott, and the result was to mobilize a large segment of the public against the court. Abraham Lincoln spoke for many in his first inaugural address when he took aim at the pretense of the Taney court to decide for the nation: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” [color/ emphasis added]

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[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

For pregnant women in abusive marriages, leaving their is spouse already a difficult decision. Their escape is made even harder in the four states that prevent them from getting a divorce.

Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas all have laws that mandate women seeking a divorce to disclose if they are pregnant, and prohibit judges from finalizing the divorce if they are. No such law exists in Arizona, but judges in practice still will not finalize the divorce of a pregnant woman, according to the American Pregnancy Association.

In Missouri, a law from 1973 requires couples to disclose “whether the wife is pregnant" while filing, and the two must finalize "any arrangements for the custody and support of the children." Justices count the gestating fetus as a child, and have therefore interpreted the law to mean until the pregnancy is finished.

Democratic state Rep. Ashley Aune introduced House Bill 2402 earlier this year, which would remove restrictions around divorcing while pregnant. Aune recently told NPR that "I don't honestly feel very hopeful" about its chance of passing in the Republican-dominated state legislature, but she said she felt compelled to try after hearing harrowing stories from survivors of domestic violence.

"How can you look that person in the eye and say, 'No, I think you should stay with that person,'" Aune said. "That's wild to me."

Activists say that the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 left pregnant women in abusive relationships with even less control over their lives, and less access to vital resources. Marium Durrani, vice president of policy for the National Domestic Violence Hotline told the outlet that the group received a 100% call increase in the year following the ruling.

"We're seeing lots more people citing reproductive coercion, sexual coercion, reproductive abuse, or pregnancy coercion as part of their experience," she said. "I mean, we are getting calls that are very explicitly like 'I am pregnant.' 'I am trying to escape.' 'I cannot get resources where I am or in my state or my locality.'"

If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence, there is help available. The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 800-799-7233. Other resources can be found here.

[darkmaga-retard]

Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris has pledged to keep “fighting” to pay off the debts of college-educated voters with taxpayer money.

The promise from the vice president comes after the Supreme Court shut down a second attempt by the Biden-Harris administration to pay off billions of dollars in unpaid student debts.

The ruling is a blow to Harris’s presidential campaign.

Harris has a support base of young liberal voters who are more likely to have college debt.

Lame-duck President Joe Biden pledged to wipe student debt in 2020.

However, Biden’s efforts to do so have stretched his legal authority, leading to a series of court defeats.

The Supreme Court shut down Biden’s first, sweeping attempt to wipe out $400 billion in loans last summer.

That led Biden to announce a new program, SAVE, that either lowers or eliminates monthly payments entirely based on income level.

Republican states challenged SAVE and won injunctions from federal courts in Kansas and Missouri.

[mandsleanan]

The Affordable Care Act covers sterilization at no-cost if you're in the US.

Article text under cut.

Sitting in the living room of her Cleveland home, 30-year-old Grace O’Malley reflects on when she ruled out having kids of her own.

O’Malley has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition that weakens the body’s connective tissue, and can get much worse postpartum. About three years earlier, when she was in her mid-twenties, her condition worsened. O’Malley’s doctors told her that if she did get pregnant, her uterus could rupture and her child would be more likely to be born prematurely.

O’Malley was on hormonal birth control up until last May. But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she knew an abortion ban was likely coming in Ohio and she might not be able to end a pregnancy if her birth control failed. She booked an appointment with her gynecologist.

“I went in that day and I knew right away I wanted a more permanent solution,” said O’Malley. “I was like, ‘I actually want to talk about getting surgery.’ And the nurse was surprised, and she was like, ‘Oh, okay.’”

Dr. Clodagh Mullen, an obstetrician-gynecologist at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, said since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision — which took away the constitutional right to abortion and returned the issue to state governments — many of her patients have been increasingly worried about access to reproductive healthcare and seeking more permanent solutions.

“Some patients will say, ‘Oh, could you stash some IUDs for me?’” Mullen said. “They get very nervous that [birth control] is just going to go away overall. Nobody can re-implant your tube once it's been taken out, so I think that they have that comfort of there's no way anybody can take this part away from me.”

Legislators in some Midwest states have floated bans on birth control, which, so far, haven’t gone anywhere. Mullen doesn’t anticipate that access to contraception will disappear.

“But I get why people have that fear, as I also probably didn't really think that Roe was going to get overturned, if you had asked me this four or five years ago,” she said.

What Mullen is seeing in Cleveland is mirrored across the country. The Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed more than 500 gynecologists across the U.S. in the spring and about half of doctors in states with abortion restrictions reported the number of patients seeking sterilization has increased since Dobbs.

That includes states like Indiana and Missouri - where abortion is banned with very limited exceptions, and states like Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin where bans are currently being disputed, or where residents feel they may lose the right to an abortion. Ohio voters just approved an amendment to the state constitution, which guarantees access to abortion.

Three Ohio health systems that track contraception — MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, University Hospitals in Cleveland, and Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus — reported a sharp rise in the number of patients seeking tubal sterilization.

Contraception decisions

There aren’t many big health risks to the type of sterilization procedure Mullen performs. Doctors mostly worry about regret. Most studies found that when doctors followed up, a small percentage of women wished they hadn’t gone through with the procedure.

The majority are like O’Malley, who had some complications post surgery, but said she never second guessed her decision.

“I've never really thought about it, honestly,” said O’Malley. “It’s become kind of a fact of my daily life. It’s like, ‘Hi, I'm Grace. I have red hair and I can't have kids.’”

O’Malley is happy her doctor respected her choice. She believes the political climate helped.

She shared the story of her best friend who sought sterilization in her late 20s, about five years ago. She said her friend had to meet with several doctors before one agreed to do the procedure, and even then, made her wait another year in case she changed her mind.

“My friend did not have that kind of grace,” O’Malley said. “Her doctor probably thought, ‘You would have other options. If you got pregnant and decided that it's really not what [you] wanted, then you could get an abortion.’ Whereas for me, that might not be the option.”

Men decide, too

Men’s contraception patterns are also changing, according to physician reports.

Dr. Sarah Sweigert, a urologist at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said doctors at her office performed double the number vasectomy consults and procedures as they had before the ruling.

She points to a Cleveland Clinic study, which showed that, in the summer following the court decision, the average age of men getting the procedure has dropped from late 30s to mid-30s compared to the same period the year before. The study also showed there was a significant increase in the number of men under 30 and men without children seeking vasectomy consultations post Dobbs. Sweigert has seen that trend first-hand in her practice.

“I think as more women speak out about perhaps not wanting to be on various forms of birth control for decades, I think that men are more aware of vasectomies and perhaps are doing their part,” she said.

Vasectomies are generally safer than female sterilization and have a much quicker recovery.

But Mullen isn’t surprised that so many women want the procedure themselves – they are the ones who would have to carry the pregnancy and handle the ensuing health impacts.

O’Malley feels that acutely. She had been in vulnerable situations in the past. She was sexually assaulted in college and went through a period where she was homeless. O’Malley said her choice was an act of self-protection.

“It’s not like I sit around thinking that the worst case scenario is going to happen,” she said. “But I would want to know that I was going to be safe and I wasn't going to end up in a situation where I was pregnant and I would have no path to go.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jazsmin Halliburton and Matthew Sanders at KMIZ:

The Missouri Supreme Court has overturned a lower court decision that would have removed a question on legalizing abortion from the November ballot. The court heard arguments Tuesday morning and Chief Justice Mary Russell issued a decision a little after 2 p.m. Tuesday. The judges voted by majority to reverse Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh's decision, issued last week. The court ordered Tuesday that the question should appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. Amendment 3, which covers abortion, was certified by the Secretary of State's Office after thousands of petition signatures. The initiative petition that was used to get access to abortion on the ballot received over 380,000 signatures. The amendment would guarantee a right to an abortion until fetal viability.

Rachel Sweet with Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group that led the petition drive to get the question on the ballot, said in a statement the decision is a "victory for democracy and reproductive freedom in Missouri." “This ruling is a validation of the more than 380,000 Missourians who signed the petition," the statement says. "This fight was not just about this amendment—it was about defending the integrity of the initiative petition process and ensuring that Missourians can shape their future directly. The Missouri Republican Party called the decision "devastating." "This ruling marks the most dangerous threat to Missouri's pro-life laws in our state's history," the party says in a statement. "Make no mistake -- this amendment, bankrolled by radical out-of-state interest groups, is a direct assault on Missouri families and the values we hold dear."

[f1ghtsoftly]

All The Feminist News You Missed This Week 2/23/24

From a US Perspective

Hey all, sorry for the lateness, I had a deluge of stuff to work on for some projects/events I’m putting on in the spring and summer!! Will be back to a Friday afternoon release next week!

US News:

NYT profile on suggestive instagram accounts for minors, and the parents that run them.

Read Here (PAYWALLED)

Alabama: Alabama Supreme Court Rules That Embryos Are People

Oklahoma: Trans Teen Dies After Bathroom Beating

Relevant Context: Nex Describes The Incident In Detail Shortly Before Death

Ohio: Adult Film Star Kagney Linn Karter Dies By Suicide at Just 36

Washington: Women Win Class Action Against Tech Company Oracle

Missouri: Kansas City Unveils First Women’s Sports Stadium

New Jersey: New Lawsuit Against Glouster County Prosecutor Alleging Anti-Woman/Anti-LGBT Discrimination

South Carolina: First Federal Trial For Hate Crime Killing of Trans Woman is Underway In Columbia

Nikki Haley backs Alabama Supreme Court, Asserts Embryos Are People

International:

Australia: Woman Murdered by Husband in After Repeatedly Going to Police

Indonesia: Meet The All Female Firefighting Crew in Borneo

Tunisia: Oscar Nominated Film Depicts Women’s Radicalization By The Islamic State

France: French Film Awards Under Pressure Due To Sex Trafficking Scandal

England: British Woman Loses Appeal For Citizenship After Joining Islamic State

Japan: Women Participate in Traditional Japanese Festival For The First Time in 1,250 Year History

Want this sent to your email each Friday? Subscribe here

[tomorrowusa]

Ohio voters handed anti-abortion Republicans a stinging defeat. Those voters approved Issue 1 which puts reproductive freedom into the Ohio Constitution. The just passed amendment also protects the right to contraception and fertility treatment.

Results are still coming in. But with 85% of the votes counted, about 55.5% of Ohioans voted to protect reproductive freedom. And most of the remaining uncounted votes come from large urban counties which approved Issue 1 with over 65% of the vote.

Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Ohio became the seventh state where voters decided to protect abortion access after the landmark ruling and was the only state to consider a statewide abortion rights question this year. The outcome of the intense, off-year election could be a bellwether for 2024, when Democrats hope the issue will energize their voters and help President Joe Biden keep the White House. Voters in Arizona, Missouri and elsewhere are expected to vote on similar protections next year. Ohio’s constitutional amendment, on the ballot as Issue 1, included some of the most protective language for abortion access of any statewide ballot initiative since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Opponents had argued that the amendment would threaten parental rights, allow unrestricted gender surgeries for minors and revive “partial birth” abortions, which are federally banned. Before the Ohio vote, statewide initiatives in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont had either affirmed abortion access or turned back attempts to undermine the right. Issue 1 specifically declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including birth control, fertility treatments, miscarriage and abortion.

It's a great victory for women and freedom in general. And it's a bad omen for GOP prospects in 2024.

Donald Trump carried Ohio both in 2016 and 2020. But the Republican insistence on controlling women's bodies will probably hurt the party there and elsewhere. And any attempt by the GOP to moderate its stand on abortion will result in major pushback by radical fundamentalist Christians who would like to return to the societal standards of the 17th century.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #29

July 26-August 2 2024

President Biden announced his plan to reform the Supreme Court and make sure no President is above the law. The conservative majority on the court ruled that Trump has "absolute immunity" from any prosecution for "official acts" while he was President. In response President Biden is calling for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that Presidents aren't above the law and don't have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. In response to a wide ranging corruption scandal involving Justice Clarence Thomas, President Biden called on Congress to pass a legally binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court. The code would force Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political actions, and force them to recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interest. President Biden also endorsed the idea of term limits for the Justices.

The Biden Administration sent out an email to everyone who has a federal student loan informing them of upcoming debt relief. The debt relief plan will bring the total number of a borrowers who've gotten relief from the Biden-Harris Administration to 30 million. The plan is due to be finalized this fall, and the Department of Education wanted to alert people early to allow them to be ready to quickly take advantage of it when it was in place and get relief as soon as possible.

President Biden announced that the federal government would step in and protect the pension of 600,000 Teamsters. Under the American Rescue Plan, passed by President Biden and the Democrats with no Republican votes, the government was empowered to bail out Union retirement funds which in recent years have faced devastating cut of up to 75% in some cases, leaving retired union workers in desperate situations. The Teamster union is just the latest in a number of such pension protections the President has done in office.

President Biden and Vice-President Harris oversaw the dramatic release of American hostages from Russia. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan held since 2018, Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Alsu Kurmasheva convicted of criticizing the Russian Military, were all released from captivity and returned to the US at around midnight August 2nd. They were greeted on the tarmac by the President and Vice-President and their waiting families. The deal also secured the release of German medical worker Rico Krieger sentenced to death in Belarus, Russian-British opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, and 11 Russians convicted of opposing the war against Ukraine or being involved in Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption organization. Early drafts of the hostage deal were meant to include Navalny before his death in Russian custody early this year.

A new Biden Administration rule banning discrimination against LGBT students takes effect, but faces major Republican resistance. The new rule declares that Title IX protects Queer students from discrimination in public schools and any college that takes federal funds. The new rule also expands protections for victims of sexual misconduct and pregnant or parenting students. However Republican resistance means the rule can't take effect nation wide. Lawsuits from Republican controlled states, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, means the new protections won't come into effect those states till the case is ruled on likely in a Supreme Court ruling. The Biden administration crafted these Title IX rules to reflect the Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock case.

The Biden administration awarded $2 billion to black and minority farmers who were the victims of historic discrimination. Historically black farmers have been denied important loans from the USDA, or given smaller amounts than white farmers. This massive investment will grant 23,000 minority farmers between $10,000 and $500,000 each and a further 20,000 people who wanted to start farms by were improperly denied the loans they needed between $3,500-$6,000 to get started. Most payments went to farmers in Mississippi and Alabama.

The Biden Administration took an important step to stop the criminalization of poverty by changing child safety guidelines so that poverty alone isn't grounds for taking a child into foster care. Studies show that children able to stay with parents or other family have much better outcomes then those separated. Many states have already removed poverty from their guidelines when it comes to removing children from the home, and the HHS guidelines push the remaining states to do the same.

Vice-President Harris announced the Biden Administration's agreement to a plan by North Carolina to forgive the state's medical debt. The plan by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would forgive the medical debt of 2 million people in the state. North Carolina has the 3rd highest rate of medical debt in the nation. Vice-President Harris applauded the plan, pointing out that the Biden Administration has forgiven $650 million dollars worth of medical debt so far with plans to forgive up to $7 billion by 2026. The Vice-President unveiled plans to exclude medical debt from credit scores and issued a call for states and local governments to forgive debt, like North Carolina is, last month.

The Department of Transportation put forward a new rule to bank junk fees for family air travel. The new rule forces airlines to seat parents next to their children, with no extra cost. Currently parents are forced to pay extra to assure they are seated next to their children, no matter what age, if they don't they run the risk of being separated on a long flight. Airlines would be required to seat children age 13 and under with their parent or accompanying adult at no extra charge.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is giving $3.5 billion to combat homelessness. This represents the single largest one year investment in fighting homelessness in HUD's history. The money will be distributed by grants to local organizations and programs. HUD has a special focus on survivors of domestic violence, youth homeless, and people experiencing the unique challenges of homelessness in rural areas.

The Treasury Department announced that Pennsylvania and New Mexico would be joining the IRS' direct file program for 2025. The program was tested as a pilot in a number of states in 2024, saving 140,000 tax payers $5.6 million in filing charges and getting tax returns of $90 million. The program, paid for by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, will be available to all 50 states, but Republicans strong object. Pennsylvania and New Mexico join Oregon and New Jersey in being new states to join.

Bonus: President Biden with the families of the released hostages calling their loved ones on the plane out of Russia

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from E&E News/Politico:

The Supreme Court is facing calls to undermine EPA’s efforts to curb planet-warming emissions from the power sector for a second time.

But at least some legal observers questioned whether the Biden administration’s power plant rule will meet the same fate on the high court’s “shadow” docket as the Obama-era Clean Power Plan did nearly a decade ago.

“For the Supreme Court to grant a stay would be shocking, and truly ominous,” Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said of President Joe Biden’s rule.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) and Republican state attorneys general filed parallel requests Tuesday to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket to stop EPA’s rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new gas-fired power plants. [The states asking the court to take the case are: West Virginia, Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.]

America’s Power and the National Mining Association are expected to file their own joint application to the court this week.

The applicants are asking the justices to put the Biden rule on ice while they and other opponents make their case to a lower court that EPA exceeded its authority. That would include the time it would take for the Supreme Court to consider any appeals.

If they get their way, EPA critics could repeat the massive victory they won in 2016, when the Supreme Court stayed the Obama Clean Power Plan — a move that prevented the regulation from ever going into effect. The court later invalidated the rule in 2022 in West Virginia v. EPA.

“This rule poses a significant threat to affordable and reliable electricity for millions of Americans, especially as power demand skyrockets across the nation,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said of the Biden rule in a statement Tuesday.

“A Supreme Court stay is necessary to prevent immediate harm to the nation’s electric grid and the American economy,” Matheson continued. “The path outlined by the EPA is unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable.”

A court order freezing the Biden rule could mean delays in establishing federal standards to address pollution from the nation’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And if former President Donald Trump wins a second term, his administration would likely ensure that the rule is never implemented.

[beardedmrbean]

ST. LOUIS — Christopher Dunn has spent 33 years in prison for a murder he has claimed from the outset that he didn’t commit. A hearing this week will determine if he should go free.

St. Louis prosecutors are now convinced Dunn is telling the truth, but lawyers for the Missouri Attorney General’s Office disagree and will argue for keeping him behind bars. Dunn, 52, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the state prison in Locking, Missouri, but is expected to attend the hearing before Judge Jason Sengheiser that begins Tuesday.

The hearing follows a motion filed in February By St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore. A Missouri law adopted in 2021 allows prosecutors to request hearings in cases where they believe there is evidence of a wrongful conviction.

Dunn was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of 15-year-old Ricco Rogers in 1990, based largely on the testimony of two boys who said they witnessed the shooting. The witnesses, ages 12 and 14 at the time, later recanted, claiming they were coerced by police and prosecutors.

In May 2023, then-St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion to vacate Dunn’s sentence. But Gardner resigned days later, and after his appointment by Gov. Mike Parson, Gore wanted to conduct his own investigation. Gore announced in February that he would seek to overturn the conviction.

Dunn, who is Black, was 18 when Rogers was shot to death on the night of May 18, 1990. No physical evidence linked Dunn to the crime but the two boys told police at the time that they saw Dunn standing in the gangway of the house next door, just minutes before shots rang out.

Rogers and the two boys ran when they heard the shots, but Roger was fatally struck, according to court records.

A judge has heard Dunn’s innocence case before.

At an evidentiary hearing in 2020, Judge William Hickle agreed that a jury would likely find Dunn not guilty based on new evidence. But Hickle declined to exonerate Dunn, citing a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that only death row inmates — not those like Dunn sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — could make a “freestanding” claim of actual innocence.

The 2021 law has resulted in the the release of two men who both spent decades in prison.

In 2021, Kevin Strickland was freed after more than 40 years behind bars for three killings in Kansas City after a judge ruled that he had been wrongfully convicted in 1979.

Last February, a St. Louis judge overturned the conviction of Lamar Johnson, who spent nearly 28 years in prison for a killing he always said he didn’t commit. At a hearing in December 2022, another man testified that it was he — not Johnson — who joined a second man in the killing. A witness testified that police had “bullied” him into implicating Johnson. And Johnson’s girlfriend at the time had testified that they were together that night.

A hearing date is still pending in another case in which a Missouri murder conviction is being challenged for a man who was nearly executed for the crime.

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell filed a motion in January to vacate the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who narrowly escaped lethal injection seven years ago for the fatal stabbing of Lisha Gayle in 1998. Bell’s motion said three experts have determined that Williams’ DNA was not on the handle of the butcher knife used in the killing.

[cass-ass]

Criticism means nothing if you show the people you criticize that you will vote for them anyway, regardless of what they do.

By the way, Trump says “finish the job,” while the democrats are actively helping them do it. Y’all just don’t actually care.

You can criticize someone you voted for an intend to vote for. You can not fully like everything about a person that you vote for.

Your vote is to change something in this country and if your change is able to help other people keep their rights, is that not enough? Not only will choosing not to vote or choosing someone else give Trump more of a likelihood of winning; due to Project 2025 and the recent supreme court ruling on the Presidential power- it will also endanger and likely take away the rights of trans people, lgb+ people, POC, and immigrants in the US.

Dooming Everyone is NOT the outlook to have. Save the people you can with the power that you have- you cannot change the system by voting or not. Changing the system and the views of others happens on a local level first.

If your vote for president is not enough, have you looked at the House or Senate seats and seen whether anyone running in your state supports Palestine? Can you vote for Bernie Sanders (vermont), Mckayla Wilkes (maryland), Jamaal Bowman (New York), Cori Bush (missouri), Shahid Buttar (California), Shaniyat Chowdhury (NY), Arati Kreibich (New Jersey) or any others that are staunchly pro-Palestine?

And if you want to do more, then put your money and time into supporting Palestinians and going to protests and calling your local authorities about things. If your politician doesn't support what you do- then TALK about it. With people in your area. With people at the grocery store. With your neighbors. With your local authorities. Go to town hall meetings. Get people to care.

I have multiple signs up supporting Palestine in my office. It gets people to talk about it and show more vocal support. They feel more comfortable being able to bring it up with others. Maybe you could wear a pin, have a banner on your fb or instagram, or show your support in another way.

A large amount of Democrats do not support Israel. While Biden has absolutely not done what he could have with his position to protect Palestinians, Kamala and other democrats have not been in that position yet and deserve a chance and not an assumption that they'll do the same as their predecessors.

I personally do not think that it will be much better- especially given that the House overruled Biden's one refusal to send Israel weapons- but it WILL be better than Trump handing Israel an arsenal and telling them to wipe the Palestinians out. Because Israel absolutely will take advantage of that and more Palestinians will be hurt and killed at a much faster rate.