Supreme Court Decides to Let Texas Women Die

A new Supreme Court decision effectively means that Texas women will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that emergency abortions violate the Lone Star State’s already draconian abortion laws, upholding a ban on the life-saving procedure even in emergency circumstances.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court ruling, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in June to punt a challenge to a similarly restrictive medical emergency abortion clause in Idaho. That decision temporarily allowed emergency abortions to continue while a lower appeals court retried the case.

The administration also pointed to federal mandate, reminding the court that hospitals must provide life-saving emergency medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The government further noted that legal precedents set by the Texas Supreme Court mean doctors within the state do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide the critical care required to save her.

Yet none of that seemed to matter to the ultra-conservative bench, who ruled in favor of heightened restrictions without detailed reasoning, reported the Associated Press.*

Texas had asked the Supreme Court to leave the order in place, arguing that their law left exceptions in place that prioritized the health of pregnant patients. But accessing Texas’s emergency abortion clause loophole isn’t cut and dry. Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Cox’s case was the first such lawsuit since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Despite her apparent eligibility—and a court decision allowing her to receive the critical care—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, promising to prosecute doctors with felony charges if they were caught performing the procedure.

Doctors argue that the medical exemptions in the state are unclear, leaving them in legal jeopardy and effectively stalling access to abortions in Texas by proxy.

* This article originally misstated the justices’ vote breakdown.

JD Vance over the weekend admitted that Donald Trump would stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told a reporter on Saturday that “we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.

“That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around; it will remain a consistent view,” Vance said to RealClearPolitics.

Vance’s remarks fly in the face of how other Republicans, including Trump, have tried to present more moderate views on abortion. Last week, Trump claimed that he would veto a national abortion ban. Republicans have experienced loss after loss as anti-abortion ballot initiatives fail at the state level in red states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana.

Planned Parenthood itself provides many vital services outside of abortion, from preventative screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer to birth control. The organization depends on government reimbursements and grants for 34 percent of its revenue, according to its 2023 annual report. These include Medicaid as well as other federal grants and programs.

Republicans have been trying to end public funding for Planned Parenthood for a long time but have only succeeded in a handful of states, most recently Missouri. It’s something they’ve been trying but failing to do at the federal level.

The former president has been all over the place on abortion rights. In the past, he’s also called for regulation of the procedure to be left to the states, said that a “six-week [ban] is too short,” and struggled to make sense when speaking about the abortion pill mifepristone. Trump’s position on abortion, though he attempts to obfuscate it, is opposing reproductive rights. He’s appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s courted the religious right, and he depends on the support of conservatives. Over the weekend, Vance finally said in clear terms what Trump intentionally tries to hide.

Not only has Elon Musk been pushing election misinformation, now his mother is getting in on the action by encouraging her followers to commit election fraud.

Maye Musk, mother of the bouncing billionaire, posted on X Saturday in response to her son’s call for people to register to vote in Georgia, to say that voters don’t actually have to register at all.

“The Democrats have given us another option. You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal,” Maye Musk wrote. “Maybe we should work the system too.”

Users on X were quick to correct Maye Musk, pointing out not only that it’s obviously illegal but that at best it was a stupid thing to say, and, at worst, she was inciting people to break the law.

“Actually, this comes from Gavin Newsom,” Maye Musk wrote in a response to one of her many, many angry replies. “What you are saying is that he should be jailed for his new law that prevents ID when voting, so illegal immigrants can vote many times. I guess you don’t understand sarcasm.”

Last month, California Governor Newsom passed a law banning local governments in California from enacting voter identification rules because there are already state laws in place that require voter identification. The new law would prevent each locality from having its own set of requirements, which could potentially disenfranchise voters.

A bad sense of humor seems to run in the family. Last month, Elon Musk found himself in hot water after “joking” that there aren’t any assassination attempts made against Kamala Harris, which unsurprisingly got him in trouble with the feds.

While executive branch figureheads float around the American South in the wake of Hurricane Helene promising relief, one Washington politico’s actions could actually make all the difference for thousands of victims—but he doesn’t seem to be doing a thing about it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will not be calling the House back early to vote on emergency hurricane relief, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

The speaker said that the damages from the storm have to be “tabulated” before Congress can pass supplemental aid to help the victims, adding that he believes the situation is weeks away from that being achieved.

Johnson will visit western North Carolina on Wednesday, a region that was devastated by Helene and its subsequent floods. More than 100 people died in the storm’s aftermath. Across the six states that the Category Four storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

More than 300,000 people remained without power in Georgia and the Carolinas by Sunday evening, with nearly half of those customers in North Carolina, reported CNN.

So far, President Joe Biden has deployed 1,500 troops to help with recovery efforts, alongside more than 6,100 National Guardsmen and 7,000 federal personnel. The Biden-Harris administration has also distributed more than $137 million in federal assistance to support the beleaguered region, the White House announced in a press release Sunday.

Meanwhile, Johnson has continued to undermine one of the federal agencies tasked with responding to the storm surge. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Johnson elevated a false claim launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration had diverted emergency relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid immigration efforts.

“The streams of funding are different, that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson told the conservative network. “But the problem is with the American people, see, and what they’re frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster. Not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border. That’s what the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, and Secretary Mayorkas have been engaged in.”

In response, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told ABC News that the charge was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took a break from spreading lies about Hurricane Helene to dip her toe into a new conspiracy theory.

“Raw Milk does a body good,” wrote the Georgia representative on X Sunday afternoon, posting a photo of a large glass of milk. “Make America Healthy Again!”

The far-right has long touted their devotion to only drinking unpasteurized milk, which skips the process of killing off harmful bacteria and does not in fact do a body good. Greene’s post was hit was a massive fact-check in the community notes section of X, clarifying that “raw milk consumption is linked to a number of foodborne illnesses (e.g., Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella) that can result in serious complications and death.” X users added a long list of links with evidence of how dangerous drinking raw milk can be.

As Melody Schreiber reported for The New Republic in July, drinking unpasteurized milk can also put the consumer at an unnecessary risk for H5N1, or the bird flu. In states where it is legal to sell raw milk, there were 3.2 times more outbreaks of illness linked to the milk over a span of 20 years.

Dairy was a hot topic this weekend for Republicans, who only seem to be getting weirder, as Trump invited a QAnon conspiracy theorist to speak at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally alongside Elon Musk on Saturday.

“We will protect your raw milk,” said Scott Presler of Gays for Trump, in attempt to court the Amish vote in the swing state.

In recent years, the deregulation of the dairy industry and shift away from pasteurization has turned into a new culture war for the right. How long until Trump tells his followers to drink it, like he told them to drink bleach?

This post has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to dodge a question from George Stephanopoulos about who won the 2020 election, a worrying sign for November’s coming election.

On Sunday morning, Johnson was asked on ABC if he could “unequivocally” say that Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost in 2020. His answer was less than forthcoming.

“See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said. “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.

“I think this thing, this game that’s played all the time, I’m not gonna engage in it,” Johnson added.

Johnson is echoing every Republican who wants to curry favor with Trump. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, refused to answer a similar question during last week’s vice presidential debate and was called out by Tim Walz, who called it a “damning nonanswer.” (After being hounded by a comedian later in the week, Vance confessed that he believes Trump won the election.) Trump’s campaign staff refuses to answer the question too, as do many Republicans such as Senator Tom Cotton, who dodged it on Sunday’s Meet the Press. 

These signals from leading Republicans don’t bode well for next month and could signal more serious efforts to undermine unfavorable results, just like in 2020. In a worrying sign, pro-Trump election deniers are working as election officials in key swing states and are already disrupting the voting process in places like Georgia. They could cause further problems if they don’t get the results they like.

President Joe Biden isn’t convinced that there’ll be a fair and free election in November given Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric, and his violent political history.

Making his first appearance in the White House briefing room since he took office in 2021, Biden pointed to the Republican ticket’s avoidance of committing to a peaceful transfer of power as the reason for his concern.

“The things that Trump has said, and the things that he said last time out when he didn’t like the outcome of the election, were very dangerous,” Biden said, adding that JD Vance has made similar statements in recent days. “So I’m concerned about what they’re going to do.”

Earlier Friday, Vance refused to answer whether he agreed with Trump that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” The day before, he was caught by comedian Jason Selvig admitting that he believed Trump won that election. The caught-on-tape confession emerged days after the Ohio politico refused to answer a direct line of questioning from vice presidential debate moderators about whether he would challenge this year’s election results.

“Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully, in the public square, and that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said,” Vance said, without making mention of any of the multiple instances in which Trump has publicly defended his supporters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Later in the debate, Vance still refused to yield, even during a heated back and forth with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who noted that former Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to certify the election results was the reason why Vance was on the stage instead of the Indiana politician.

“Where is the firewall if he knows he can do anything, including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it?” Walz asked on Tuesday. “That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?”

“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump,” Walz said.

In a leaked recording, Donald Trump joked about the death of a man at one of his rallies, during a dinner with donors in August.

The Guardian reports that Trump flew to Aspen on a jet once owned by Jeffrey Epstein (his usual jet had engine trouble) for the dinner on August 10, which guests had to donate between $25,000 and $500,000 per couple to attend. The publication obtained a 12-minute recording of Trump’s speech at the dinner. 

At one point, Trump spoke about surviving an assassination attempt at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in July, where a gunman killed firefighter Corey Comperatore and injured two other Trump supporters while trying to shoot the former president. He said that members of his Mar-a-Lago club sought to make a contribution to Comperatore’s widow. 

“I said absolutely, and they gave me a check for a million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Maybe even more impressively, we put out a GoFundMe, and we raised more than $6 million for the group that got hurt, which is essentially three people,” Trump said.

Then he described meeting Comperatore’s wife, Helen, and decided to make a joke about the whole thing.

“So they’re going to get millions of dollars, but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman, I handed her the check—we handed her the check—and she said, ‘This is so nice, and I appreciate it, but I’d much rather have my husband.’ Now, I know some of the women in this room wouldn’t say the same,” Trump said.

The roomful of guests, who included casino owner Steve Wynn, businessman Thomas Peterffy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Representative Byron Donalds, Representative Lauren Boebert, and former Senator Cory Gardner, broke out in laughter. Trump wasn’t done, though.

“I know at least four couples,” Trump said. “There are four couples, Governor [Abbott], that I know, and you’re not one of them. At least four couples here would have been thrilled, actually.”

It wasn’t the first time he had made that joke, as he had used it at least once before at an August 1 rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But it definitely sounds more callous when one realizes that Comperatore was a working-class firefighter and Trump was joking at a private event full of wealthy donors and politicians. 

Trump also used disparaging and profane language to describe immigrants, at the dinner, even making up a false story about 22 people who supposedly were released from prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and came to the U.S.

“We said, ‘Where do you come from?’ They said, ‘Prison’. ‘What did you do?’ ‘None of your fucking business what we did.’ You know why? Because they’re murderers,” Trump said, adding, “I hate to use that foul language.”  

President Joe Biden gave a startling answer when confronted with concerns that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might be trying to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Earlier this week, Senator Chris Murphy said there was a possibility that Netanyahu would not be willing to sign a cease-fire deal before our presidential election, potentially to try to “influence” the results.

During a White House press briefing Friday, Biden was directly asked about those concerns.

“Do you agree, do you have any worries that Netanyahu may be trying to influence the election, and that is why he has not agreed to a diplomatic solution?” asked CBS’s senior White House correspondent Weija Jiang.

“No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think Bibi should remember that,” Biden replied.

“And uh, whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know,” Biden said. “But I’m not counting on that.”

The vague nonanswer follows previous reporting that Biden is well aware of Netanyahu’s possible angle to help Trump.

Biden has reportedly told confidants that he believed that Netanyahu never wanted a cease-fire deal and was hoping to prolong Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza, not only to save his own political career but to give Trump a hand in November’s election.

Biden’s inability to secure a cease-fire between Israeli and Palestinian leaders has become a political liability for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, particularly in the battleground state of Michigan, which is home to the largest populations of Palestinian and Lebanese Americans in the country.

Despite concerns that the prolonged war could be giving Trump a boost, Biden and his administration have been unwilling to use any kind of leverage—including the billions of dollars in U.S. weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid—to compel Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians. Israel has expanded its military actions to Lebanon, where it has killed hundreds of people in the last week alone.

Ohio Senator JD Vance skirted addressing Melania Trump’s startling abortion views on Friday. The Republican vice presidential nominee told a crowd in Lindale, Georgia, that he had no intentions of sparring with the former first lady over their staggeringly different perspective on the hot-button issue.

“I love Melania, I think she’s a great wife to the president, I think a great example of grace under an incredible amount of pressure, but Melania is entitled to her own views in the same way the people of Georgia are entitled to their own views,” Vance said. “And I don’t believe I have to attack or disagree or criticize anybody on this issue because our campaign is focused, again, on inflation, on securing the border, on making life more affordable, on bringing more jobs to the state of Georgia and the whole country.

“Look, I think she’s a smart person. I think she’s gonna express her views, and she’s entitled to do it. But it doesn’t change how I talk about this issue or how this campaign talks about the issue,” Vance added.

Ahead of the release of her upcoming memoir, Melania, the former first lady posted a video to her X account defending the “individual freedoms” of women to do what they wish with their bodies while championing abortion access. In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Donald Trump confessed that he had encouraged her to “write what you believe” with regard to the new book.

The sudden, casual flip has left the rest of the conservative machine, including Vance, in a bind. Abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans that November, resulting in major losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Postelection, at least some members of the conservative party had a stunning reversal, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

But much of the Republican Party, especially the MAGA movement, has refused to give it up. Vance, for one, has previously likened abortion to murder and has supported efforts to strip abortion access away from women. In 2023, the Ohio politico called for a “minimum national standard” on abortion restrictions, and his run for U.S. Senate in 2022 included language on his website that described him as “100 percent pro-life.”