Aisha Sultan on religious extremists and the holy war that’s already underway.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There’s no reason to be shocked by the extremists in Alabama who would force a girl raped by her father to bear his child. This is the holy war they’ve been waiting for. And this is the endgame that all religious zealots seek — the ability to control the most intimate, the most brutal, the most private decision a woman can ever face.
Since Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional, the anti-abortion warriors have plotted for ways to upend it. And now, Donald Trump, of all people, has delivered their moment. They needed judges who share their view of America as a theocracy, in which their interpretation of God’s will supersedes all others.
White, conservative Republican men can finally decide for all the women what God says about when life begins. The 22 white Republican men in Alabama’s state Senate know better than any woman what God wants, and they’re ready to jail any doctor who defies them.
When Sultan is dealing with national issues, she’s usually the best. This week is no exception.
One could also ask, if a fertilized egg is a person, then how many attempted murders has a woman with an IUD committed? How many murders has a couple who has undergone IVF committed?
These are the next frontiers for their jihad to protect embryos.
Verily. Go forth and read the rest. Then come inside for more pundits.
Jonathan Chait isn’t a fan of every aspect of Bernie Sander’s education plan.
New York Magazine
Bernie Sanders today is announcing the foundation of his K-12 education plan, which is to crack down on public charter schools. If enacted, the Sanders plan would snuff out one of the most successful social policy innovations in decades, and close off a lifeline of opportunity for hundreds of thousands of poor urban children.
The charter-school sector varies enormously from state to state, but on average, charter schools yield better outcomes for urban students (though not for other students). States with the worst-regulated systems fare no better than traditional neighborhood schools. But the best-managed charter systems produce dramatically better outcomes for low-income urban children than the same students receive in neighborhood schools.
Chait is making a pretty selective interpretation of the value of charter schools here. Sure, they don’t work for everyone. But if you take one particular subset of students over a short timeframe … How about we fix urban schools so that charter schools—that still under perform suburban schools and tend to show a steep decline over time—aren’t their best option?
Laurie Roberts checks in with her local Republican senator on the Alabama abortion law.
Arizona Republic
Just days after lamenting that Arizona voters didn’t have a chance to get to know her last year, Sen. Martha McSally on Wednesday was presented with a golden opportunity to introduce herself.
On that day, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill outlawing abortion – even for a girl or a woman who is raped or the victim of incest. The law is the most extreme of its kind and the talk of the country. For good reason. The Alabama abortion ban is clearly aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 law that made abortion legal. But it also could upend next year’s elections.
It's only natural to ask McSally about it. Democrats are horrified at the lengths to which Alabama went. Republicans have been … mostly silent. Perhaps it's because they know this issue will resonate with women and not in a good way, if you happen to be a Republican.
Personally, I like the way that Kerry put it.
So, what does Arizona’s appointed senator think about Alabama's abortion ban? Does she agree that a 12-year-old who is raped by her uncle should be forced to give birth? That a doctor who would dare terminate that pregnancy should be put in the slammer for 99 years?
On Wednesday, a Washington Post reporter caught McSally in a Capitol hallway and asked her about Alabama's new abortion law. Cue the dodge:
“That’s a state issue,” McSally replied.
Expect to hear something similar from a lot of Republicans.
Renée Graham has something much more direct to say about these new laws.
Boston Globe
Banning abortion won’t stop it from happening any more than Prohibition eliminated alcohol consumption.
What it will do is endanger women, push families toward financial ruin, and turn doctors into criminals. Personal agency will collapse under government intrusion, as this nation slips back into an unfathomable time when women were butchered or died before they had a safe and legal option to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Women of means will still find needed services, while poor women will suffer the most. And with murder by current and former partners already a leading cause of death among pregnant women, an abortion ban may only exacerbate that grim statistic.
The rest is certainly worth reading.
Joan Walsh on the spectacle of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham telling Trump Jr to ignore a subpoena.
The Nation
The degradation of Senator Lindsey Graham should no longer surprise us. Once the president’s implacable foe, now he’s his strongest ally. Once perceived as a Republican maverick alongside the late Senator John McCain, Donald Trump has turned him into a lackey.
Still, we ought to reserve some surprise for occasions like Monday, when the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, himself a lawyer, told a private citizen to defy a Republican senator and to break the law. And that’s what Graham did when he advised Donald Trump Jr. to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, run by his Republican colleague Richard Burr. We should pause to be horrified. For the record, in the past Graham claimed that both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton could be impeached for defying subpoenas. But that was in the b.t. era: before trump.
I’ve often wondered what Trump has on Graham. But the ugliest possible answer is … nothing.
Michael Tomasky on one of the candidates who has so far received little attention.
Daily Beast
As frightening as this historical moment is in so many ways, it’s hopeful in one respect. We may finally be at a point when a majority of people are ready to ditch supply-side economics. The economy is doing very well right now, so it seems in one sense a counterintuitive argument. But Americans are increasingly recognizing that even this good economy is mostly good for the top 10 percent, especially the top 1 and .1 percent; and that if you live in one of these 50 counties or hundreds of others like them where the unemployment rates are more than twice the national average and the poverty rates are above 25 percent, the economy doesn’t feel that great at all.
That would almost be worth Trump. Almost.
Enter Colorado Senator Michael Bennet. One morning a while back I’d dropped the kid off at school and I tuned in to Morning Joe. I heard a voice saying: “Trump is not the cause of our problems. The cause of our problems is 40 years of economic immobility for 90 percent of the American people. Stagnant wages over that period of time. Periods when we had economic growth, but for most Americans, those were periods of recession. We have to fix that. It’s going to take us a generation to do it.”
Oh my God. Naturally I thought this person was brilliant, because he was talking exactly the way I write. As the segment ended I heard them say thank you, senator, but they didn’t say a name. I emailed a guy I know who works on the show and asked. Yep, he wrote, that was Michael Bennet.
Virginia Heffernam on why Alabama chose this moment to destroy women’s rights.
Los Angeles Times
As anticipated on Oct. 6, 2018, the day alleged sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, high-stakes gynecology is back in the news.
On Wednesday, Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, signed into law a bill that could jail for life anyone who performs an abortion. Reminder: Abortion is a 20-minute procedure for ending a pregnancy or, conversely, restarting a menstrual period. It’s one of the safest, least eventful procedures in all of medicine.
Every study has demonstrated that even before Justice Beer sat down, this was an activist court ready to overturn any precedent. There’s no doubt when the case of Collins v Honesty reaches Kavanaugh’s all important desk calendar, the idea of “settled law” will get ten full minutes of hearty laughter before the court starts handing out those handmaiden uniforms.
The Alabama law comes timed with proposals and passed legislation in red states across the country restricting access to abortion, in some cases after as little as six weeks of pregnancy and even in cases of rape or incest. Since politicians are newly fascinated by our monthly cycles, we might as well note this too: Girls and women often have no idea they’re pregnant at six weeks.
The flood of new, sweeping restrictions is widely seen as what the legal scholar Dahlia Lithwick calls a Supreme Court “squeeze play,” an attempt to get the justices, five of whom are conservatives, to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that ruled that Americans have a Constitutional right to privacy when making decisions about pregnancies.
The Alabama law is so bad precisely because they want it to get rejected at the lower courts so they can rush it to the spring break desk. It’s a kind of evolution of the cruelest.
Charles Pierce explains how not to cover women candidates.
Esquire
There are days on which I think that every Democratic political consultant should be placed on a slow-moving, fast-melting ice floe and shoved off in the general direction of Greenland. In a week in which the issue of women's rights ignited like it hasn't ignited in decades, we get this morass of piffle in the Washington Examiner. Also, for god's sake, don't listen to academics, either.
Women presidential candidates face double pressures, according to Louisiana State University political communication assistant professor Nichole Bauer. First, they risk being perceived as not forceful enough to become the next occupant of the Oval Office. Secondly, they cannot be considered too aggressive out of fear of alienating voters. "They have to fit into this image of what being a president looks like," Bauer said. "They have to seem to be the cookie baker in chief and the commander in chief at the same time," she added, referring in part to the famous comment Hillary Clinton made about baked goods as Bill Clinton campaigned for the White House in 1992. "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," she said.
Jesus H. Christ on a Hibachi, that quote is 27 goddamn years old. I know that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the super-villain of the past few decades, but can't we let her up on that one at least? The quotes from the consultants are even worse, and one of them is a longtime friend of mine.
I usually try to avoid quotes that embed other quotes … but that one was extra special.
Leonard Pitts gets the closing word on the new law in Alabama.
Miami Herald
The Republican Party’s appeal, it has occasionally been argued in this space, stems largely from an implicit promise: Vote for us, and we will repeal the 20th century.
This was meant as truth wrapped in snarky hyperbole. But, as has become distressingly apparent over the years, it’s actually truth wrapped in truth.
The latest evidence thereof arrived with a jolt last week in the form of the so-called “Human Life Protection Act,” passed by the Alabama state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey. Even by the standards of an era of emboldened encroachment upon a woman’s right to choose, the bill stands out as the most sweeping and restrictive abortion ban of modern times.
No abortions. Not in cases of rape. Not in cases of incest.
Of course, they only beat Missouri by a matter of days, but Missouri’s bill is designed to be intentionally cowardly, by hiding behind rulings on the Alabama bill. It’s also designed to be costly, by having multiple fall back positions embedded in the law, each of the designed to generate its own court case.
So Alabama is prepared to force some 12-year-old girl, raped by some malignant excuse for a father, to give birth to any child thereby conceived — in effect, raping her again. And any doctor who helps her in defiance of the law faces a possible 99-year prison term.
This is obviously intended as a shot across the bow of Roe v. Wade, a shortcut to the Supreme Court where, between the seat Republicans stole from President Obama and the one into which they wedged a credibly accused attempted rapist, they hope to finally achieve their long-held goal of ending federal abortion protections.
Alabama does believe in some abortions. They certainly aborted their ethics.
Sorry for the paucity of comments this week. Stomach bug. Just be glad that the only kind of virus that travels by Internet are the ones your computer can catch. Blergh.