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And while Republicans and anti-abortion forces were increasingly working in concert to turn the states to their advantage, abortion rights supporters accused Democrats of all but giving up on local elections.

On the far right, they realized that the most lasting impact of 2010 would be in the states, said Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator and the executive director of the States Project, which was founded by Democrats in 2017 to try to win back control of legislatures. On our side, state power was a footnote. The lesson we took was Focus more on midterms; the lesson they took was Wield power in states. And today, both sides are reaping what we sowed.

Abortion rights groups lacked the infrastructure their opponents had in the states. NARAL had cut its number of state affiliates nearly in half between 1991 and 2011. And with Democrats in the glow of winning Congress in 2006 and electing the nations first Black president two years later, abortion rights groups were having trouble convincing big donors and grass-roots supporters alike that Roe was in trouble.

Donors liked to support congressional and presidential elections, and tended to go away when they perceived that the threat had disappeared. When you were trying to convince them they had to put money into Kansas or Nebraska, they were like, Thats futile, said Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL at the time.

Opponents of abortion rights had always proved easier to mobilize than supporters. In polls and focus groups, NARAL asked women who were sympathetic to its cause what it would take to get them to be more active in protecting Roe v. Wade. Consistently, Ms. Keenan said, We received answers saying, If they overturn it.

Some younger activists were pushing abortion rights groups to stop apologizing for or seeking compromise on abortion. To the new generation, abortion was health care, and bodily autonomy was not something to be compromised. The Democratic Party platform in 2012 left in safe and legal but took out rare.

When you were trying to convince them they had to put money into Kansas or Nebraska, they were like, Thats futile.

Anti-abortion groups exploited this, portraying the Democrats position on abortion as anytime, anywhere, under any circumstance, and paid for with government funds. By contrast, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a 20-week ban looked reasonable, in keeping with what polls showed Americans wanted.

Two thousand ten was the year that the light came on about the reality of abortion law in the nation, she said. It was the year that the polarization between the extreme abortion absolutism and the Republican Party position was a winning contrast. Its the first year that sitting officeholders could see that this issue really helps us. And it just got stronger every election cycle because we would not relent with that contrast.

Republicans running in right-leaning districts backed increasingly strict laws to appeal to reliable anti-abortion voters and avoid primary challenges. By 2016, one analysis found not a single Republican state legislator willing to identify as pro-choice.

In the nearly 50 years between the Roe decision and its reversal on Friday, states enacted 1,380 restrictions on abortion. Almost half 46 percent were enacted since 2011.

Professor Devins, of William and Mary, revisited the question of abortion politics in 2016, this time in a paper for The Vanderbilt Law Review. He stuck by his 2009 assessment, but the middle ground he had written of approvingly then had disappeared. Today, red state political actors are not interested in compromise, Professor Devins wrote in 2016. With the rightward shift in the Republican Party, abortion rights had become about partisan advantage, along with voter identification laws, tax reform and elimination of public-sector unions.

In 2015, the Florida Senate had taken just one hour to approve a 24-hour waiting period on abortion, with Republicans rejecting all eight amendments offered by Democrats. Wisconsin had passed its ban on abortion after 20 weeks without a single Democrat. And a bill in Texas to prohibit abortions based on fetal abnormality was brought up for a committee vote after the House had recessed and Democrats were absent.

Its conventional wisdom to say that the courts decision in Roe caused the polarization over abortion, said Reva Siegel, a law professor at Yale. But the court did not cause that polarization. It was the Republican Partys quest for voters political party competition that savaged Roe. Once the attack on Roe was underway, the defense needed to be full tilt in politics as well as in the courts and in all political arenas, state, local and federal. Because over time the attack on Roe has become more than an attack on abortion; it has become an attack on democracy.

By 2019, proponents of the incremental strategy for undoing Roe were losing to those who wanted the frontal attack. With two new conservative justices, the Supreme Court was tilted toward the latter. Momentum was on their side, and states began passing legislation designed to force the court to act. Twenty-week bans had led to 18-week bans, eight-week bans, and now six-week bans.

Original post:
How Did Roe Fall? Before a Decisive Ruling, a Powerful Red Wave. - The New York Times

The first fetal heartbeat law banning abortion at what was at the time a flagrantly, almost laughably unconstitutional six weeks was proposed 26 times before it found a state legislature willing to advance it. Signed into law in North Dakota in 2013, the ban was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, more states began to warm to the idea of outlawing abortion much earlier than was previously imaginable. Many more.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on Friday, 12 states had passed laws banning abortion at 6 weeks. Five states had passed near-total bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy. Thirteen had trigger bans on the books that would automatically snap into effect banning abortion if and when the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Several states had all three. Many, if not most, of those laws were written by organizations like Americans United for Life.

For decades, Americans United for Life had worked quietly, diligently, incrementally: drafting model legislation (including those six-week heartbeat bills), coaching Republican lawmakers on how to advance it in their home states, and helping defend the legislation when it is inevitably challenged in court. A 2019 investigation found AUL was responsible for the vast majority of some 400 anti-abortion bills introduced in 41 states.

Their project was wildly successful: On Friday, some states had so many layers of conflicting previously-unenforceable laws on the books that some abortion clinics suspended operations the moment news broke, turning patients away out of fear of ending up on the wrong side of one of those laws.

If there is a moral to this story, it might be to take the anti-choice groups who worked for decades to help overturn Roe v. Wade at their word. And in the words, on Friday, of AULs president, Catherine Glenn Foster, their work has truly just begun.

At a Heritage Foundation panel on Life After Roe last week, Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel for Americans United for Life, discussed the possibility of a constitutional amendment banning the procedure nationwide. For that, Forsythe said thoughtfully, Were going to have to secure 38 states. (Vice President Mike Pence and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, with whom Pence reportedly has close ties, both called for a similar nationwide ban Friday.)

Forsythe was bullish too about the idea of further restricting medication abortions either at the state or federal level. The states have been working over the past decade to limit chemical abortions in a number of ways, said Forsythe. But its also within Congress power, expressly in the Constitution, to pass a federal law on that. And at the earliest possible opportunity, Congress should pass a federal law.

One day before the Heritage Foundation event, the National Right to Life Committee, the oldest and largest anti-abortion group in the country, released its own roadmap for the right-to-life movement post-Roe to protect mothers and their children from the tragedy of abortion.

The 29-page model law represents a dramatic escalation of many of the tactics already mainstreamed by anti-abortion groups. It proposes a total nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions other than to prevent the death the mother. It would prohibit the prescription and distribution of mifepristone and misoprostol the two-step abortion pill protocol (trafficking in abortifacients), and it would treat as a criminal anyone who might give instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.

Many of the provisions seem ridiculously, patently unconstitutional Oh, theyre just going to criminalize free speech? like those fetal heartbeat laws did ten years ago.

Lawyers who work in the reproductive rights realm are taking them seriously. I cant overstate how extreme this bill is, Jessica Arons, ACLU senior policy counsel, tells Rolling Stone. Its a complete ban on abortion with no regard for the health of the patient. Theres only an extremely limited life exception a patient would basically have to be dying on the table for doctors to be able to intervene, and by then it could very well be too late.

Like Texas abortion bounty law, SB 8, the National Right to Life Coalitions law promotes the use of civil lawsuits to discourage abortions. There is a more narrow range of individuals who would be eligible to file suits under the bill, but includes friends and family as well as the fetus biological father, Arons says, without any exception for if there was rape or other sexual violence or intimate partner violence so its something that can easily be used as a tool to further abuse in an abusive relationship. Thats just a starting point The chilling effect of this kind of ban would be extensive.

Under the law, organizations like Planned Parenthood might be treated as criminal syndicates. (The whole criminal enterprise needs to be dealt with to effectively prevent criminal activity, so RICO-style laws were adopted to provide effective remedies against the whole criminal enterprise, an introduction to the model law explains. This illegal abortion industry will be well-funded and well-organized, operating as an illegal abortion enterprise that will need to be stopped to prevent illegal abortions from occurring.)

Already, some states like Missouri, have considered making it a crime to help someone travel out-of-state to obtain an abortion. The National Right to Life Coalitions proposed law would extend that logic a step further, threatening providers, Arons says, who are acting lawfully under their own state laws.

On Friday, Julie Rikelman, Senior Director of U.S. Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights and the lawyer who argued Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization before the Supreme Court, told Rolling Stone, The reality is that we are going to see some of those laws enacted, and they will be challenged, but the ultimate constitutionality of those laws will end up being decided through litigation by the Court.

Put another way: the laws can only be as extreme as the Supreme Court is. And with this Supreme Court, thats not a very comforting thought.

Both the National Rights to Life Committee and Americans United for Life organizations that have routinely put out model legislation where they continue to float up these test balloons to see how far what they can get away with, Arons says. Over time, they normalize their extreme ideas. And they do have a captive audience of lawmakers who are willing to run these tests for them, and to push the envelope and to try to pass legislation, and see what the courts will uphold.

This is their roadmap, Arons says. They are emboldened, they are not trying to hide it.

Excerpt from:
Ban Abortion Pills, Prosecute Planned Parenthood: This Is The Future Republicans Want - Rolling Stone

MIAMI - The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, but women still have the right to an abortion in Florida.

However, a new state law will limit that to 15 weeks, and now it's totally up to the state to decide if that needs to be restricted even more.

"This is extreme to take away a survivor of sexual assault's right to have an abortion is beyond cruel and unusual punishment, I am a survivor of sexual assault I know how long it takes to heal both physically and mentally from what that is," State Sen. Lauren Book said.

Book is a Democrat representing parts of Broward County, to her it's devastating, but Republican State Senator Ana Maria Rodriguez who represents part of Monroe and parts of Miami-Dade Counties agrees with the ruling.

"I think it is good that this was reverted back to the state, I think the notion that abortions will now be banned across the country is completely incorrect, each state will have the ability to decide basically at what juncture abortions will be limited," Rodriguez explained.

In the past legislative session, Florida passed a 15-week limit on abortions, effective July 1st.

"Here in the state of Florida, nothing will change, the mother will still have the ability to have an abortion up to 15 weeks regardless of the reason, it could be for no reason at all," Rodriguez told CBS 4.

"You can't tell me by 15 weeks that I have to decide what to do or what not to do, that's the government sticking a gun to my head and telling me what I need to do," Book countered.

The new law makes no exceptions for rape, incest, or human trafficking, and lawmakers could still amend or change abortion limits again next session. That's likely given the conservative majority.

"I believe we are going to be fighting for an all-out ban, those 6 weeks, those 8 weeks bans, that have been talked about, that the sponsors of this bill wanted in the legislature are coming down the path," Book said.

Rodriguez doesn't think the issue will come up again, because the changes were made in preparation for a Supreme Court ruling.

"I don't anticipate that our legislature will go back and make it more difficult, I think this is the right balance between the mother's reproductive rights and unborn child's rights," Rodriguez said.

At last check, two lawsuits have already been filed against the new law and could even be challenged by existing state law.

"Florida has an explicit privacy protection in its constitution so we'll see arguments that regardless of what the Supreme Court says about the federal constitution the state constitution the right to reproductive freedom," Florida International University Law Professor Howard Wasserman said.

Jacqueline Quynh is a CBS Miami reporter. My philosophy about news is simple: I aim to tell a story while focusing on the people who graciously let me into their lives.

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Abortion ruling opposed by Dems, welcomed by Republicans - CBS News

Rep. Tom Rices (S.C.) loss to state Rep. Russell Fry last week marked the first primary defeat among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump, invigorating other Trump-backed challengers as the political futures of four more incumbents who voted to impeach hang in the balance.

The marquee race will be Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) versus Trump-endorsed candidate Harriet Hageman, an attorney and former national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee who also has the support of more than 100 House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

But before the Cheney-Hageman race on Aug. 16, primaries on Aug. 2 in Michigan and Washington state will test the strength of Trump endorsements against Reps. Peter Meijer (Mich.), Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.).

Frys outright win of the vote in the solidly red South Carolina district encompassing Myrtle Beach came as a surprise to some political observers. Rice outraised Fry and spent nearly three times what Fry did on his campaign. Internal surveys from the Fry campaign and a Trafalgar poll showed Fry with double-digit leads over Rice, though not enough to avoid a runoff. But on primary day, he won 51 percent of the vote.

That could be a good sign for MAGA challengers in the four upcoming races, all of whom can point to bright spots in polls. But not all are well-positioned in terms of fundraising.

A January poll of Michigans 3rd Congressional District sponsored by the Democratic abortion rights group EMILYs List found former Trump political appointee John Gibbs with an initial 13 percent support to 26 percent for Meijer, who was elected in 2020.

But after being informed of Meijers impeachment vote and Trumps endorsement for Gibbs, Gibbs shot to the lead with 37 percent support to 19 percent for Meijer.

Getting that message out, however, takes money, and Meijer a member of the wealthy and recognizable family whose name is that of an eponymous supermarket chain is in a better financial position. He had $1.5 million in cash on hand at the end of the last reporting period on March 31, compared with $81,935 for Gibbs.

Still, the Gibbs campaign is incredibly confident, campaign manager Taylor Frasier said in a statement.

Like Tom Rice, Peter Meijer has been a rubber stamp for RINO Republicans his entire SHORT career, Frasier said.

Meijer, who will face a more Democratic-leaning district if he wins his primary, focused on his military service and legislative resume in his first campaign ad released last week, and is projecting confidence about the race.

Every district is different, every challenger is different But were very mindful of what weve seen in other races, Meijer told CNN following Rices loss last week.

Loren Culp, a former small-town police chief in Republic, Wash., is also severely lagging in fundraising in his race against incumbent Newhouse, despite an endorsement from Trump. Newhouse, who was first elected in 2014, had $928,319 in his campaign account as of the end of March, while Culp had just $23,544.

But internal polls from the Culp campaign make him optimistic about a path to victory.

The most recent poll from April by Spry Strategies found Culp leading the primary field with 28.1 percent support and Newhouse in second place with 22.6 percent support. That would push them to the general election due to Washingtons nonpartisan top-two primary system. Head-to-head, Culp led Newhouse 38.3 percent to 37.3 percent, with a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

The electorate is moving to the right and becoming more conservative in this already very conservative district, Culp said in a statement. This presents a problem for Mr. Newhouse because hes lost his base voters who supported Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.

Tom Rices race is very informative of what is going on across the country including right here in Washington State, Culp added.

Newhouse has mostly stayed out of the national spotlight and steered away from Trump-related topics. In a campaign video posted on the front page of his website, he used footage from an April appearance on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show talking about a bill to stop China from buying U.S. farmland.

The Trump-backed challenger in the other Washington race is in a much better financial position.

At the end of the last fundraising reporting period on March 31, retired Green Beret Joe Kent had $1 million, while Herrera Beutler, who was first elected in 2010, had $2 million.

A May poll from the Trafalgar Group found Kent leading the primary field with 27.6 percent to 21.9 percent for Herrera Beutler.

The Cheney-Hageman race will be the most watched and most expensive.

Two recent polls from PACs opposing Cheney show Hageman with a strong lead among likely Wyoming GOP primary voters.

A May 24-25 WPA Intelligence poll sponsored by Club for Growth PAC found Hageman with 56 percent support to 26 percent for Cheney. A June 1-2 poll by Fabrizio, Lee & Associates from Wyoming Values PAC similarly found Hageman at 56 percent support and Cheney at 28 percent.

Cheney, however, has been a fundraising giant. She raised $10.1 million for her race as of March 31 the seventh-highest sum of all House candidates and had $6.8 million in her campaign account.

Hageman has raised enough to be very impressive in a typical House race, but lags behind Cheney with $2 million raised and $1 million in the bank at the end of March. She is also being supported by several outside PACs, including the House Freedom Caucuss PAC.

This month, Cheney aired her first television ads, featuring testimonials from voters calling her a statesman and praising her commitment to working on legislation.

Hagemans ads have focused mostly on her Wyoming roots and President Biden rather than on her opponent.

One GOP member who voted to impeach Trump, Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), did not have a Trump-endorsed primary challenger. Results for his June 7 top-two nonpartisan primary are still being counted, but he is currently in the lead among Republicans to face Democrat Rudy Salas in the general election.

Four of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach are not running for reelection: Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio), Fred Upton (Mich.) and John Katko (N.Y.).

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Challengers against pro-impeachment Republicans smell blood in the water - The Hill

Ramesh PonnuruBloomberg Opinion

President Joe Bidens job approval is lower than Barack Obamas or Donald Trumps at this point in their presidencies. Each of those predecessors saw his party lose control of the House of Representatives in his second year in office.

Midterm elections typically go badly for the party in power. Its opponents are aggrieved, its supporters disappointed at worst or complacent at best. But the Democrats are facing an additional challenge this year: an issue environment that accentuates their weaknesses.

Inflation is unquestionably the top issue for American voters right now. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 50% of voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on handling it, while only 31% had more faith in the Democrats. Its a big advantage, and its not a fluke.

Inflation has been dormant for a long time in the U.S.: ABC News had not conducted a poll on which party was most trusted on dealing with the problem since the George H. W. Bush administration. It turns out that the Republicans had roughly the same advantage 30 years ago, too.

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It may be, then, that Democrats arent just suffering because inflation has been high on their watch or even because Biden (like the Federal Reserve and many economists) clearly underestimated how long it would stay high. The public could just be primed to trust Republicans on the issue, the way its primed to trust Democrats on, say, Medicare.

Democrats are trying to build their own reputation as inflation-fighters presumably that is a key reason Biden wrote an op-ed about the subject for the Wall Street Journal but also want to get voters to put a higher priority on other issues that are more favorable to their party. Abortion and gun violence top that list.

The same ABC/Post poll found the Democrats with a 10-point advantage on abortion, and many polls suggest they are in sync with public opinion in seeking stricter regulation of guns. On both issues, however, intensity has often been on the side of conservatives.

Democrats are also eager to make a campaign issue out of former President Donald Trump, and his disgraceful effort to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. But this tactic failed last year in Virginia, where Trump is less popular than he is nationally. It seems unlikely that it is going to move voters more this fall.

Republicans, of course, can also try to elevate other issues. They have been blaming progressive prosecutors for rising rates of violent crime and for public disorder, and think San Franciscos recent recall of its district attorney illustrates the potency of this issue. (The ABC/Post poll found that Republicans have a 12-point advantage on crime.) They have also laid the groundwork to attack Bidens immigration policies if conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border get visibly worse.

The issues Republicans want to highlight inflation, crime, and illegal immigration all fit into a larger conservative story about government. Each of them involves a failure by the government at a core task: maintaining the value of the currency, suppressing violence, regulating the border.

They thus reinforce public suspicions about the competence of government and, therefore, about ambitious proposals for government-directed social change. They threaten the publics sense of stability, order and control the very things conservative politicians specialize in offering, if they can avoid coming across as radicals themselves.

Democrats spent several months trying to enact a Build Back Better agenda with high-flown rhetoric about a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact transformational policies that lift up peoples lives. With voters upset about prices at the gas pump, that kind of talk now seems laughable. So, increasingly, does the prospect that Democrats will keep their majority in the US House.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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The Republicans' three-pronged strategy to win back the House, by Ramesh Ponnuru - Press of Atlantic City