Tag Archives: supreme-court

Thanks to Trump, the Supreme Court Just Left Trans Kids Hanging in a Big Way

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Monday kicked a historic transgender rights case back to a lower court, after the Trump administration changed the federal government’s position on whether trans students can use bathrooms matching their gender identities.

The highly anticipated case, which had been scheduled for a Supreme Court hearing later this month, centers on a 17-year-old transgender boy named Gavin Grimm who is suing for access to the boys’ bathroom at his school in Virginia. Grimm’s case argues that the school’s decision to block him from that bathroom violates Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in public schools. Had the Supreme Court chosen to hear the case, it would have been the first time the justices had ever considered a question about trans rights.

Grimm, who was born a girl but identifies as a boy, started using the boys’ bathroom at school his sophomore year, after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria and recommended that he be treated as a boy. But when parents at his school complained, his school board intervened, saying he’d either need to go back to the girls’ room or use a private bathroom near the nurse’s office. The school board said it was trying to protect the privacy of other students.

Last May, the Obama administration put out a directive warning that public schools could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from using the bathrooms of their choice. The directive said Title IX prohibited discrimination based on gender identity, not just based on sex. But in February, President Donald Trump’s administration changed the federal government’s position, saying that it wasn’t sure how to interpret Title IX and that schools could go back to blocking trans kids from bathrooms. Because the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had relied heavily on the Obama administration’s interpretation in its decision about Grimm’s case last year, the Supreme Court on Monday ordered the circuit court to reconsider the case. Now it’ll be up to that lower court to decide what Title IX means, and whether the law prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.

Over the past couple of years, the debate over transgender rights and bathrooms has heated up nationally. Only one state, North Carolina, has enacted legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their birth sex instead of their gender identity. But at least 11 other states have considered similar legislation already this year , and schools across the country have instituted similar policies. In an amicus brief filed last week, parents wrote about how their trans children have been humiliated and stigmatized as a result. Many others also submitted briefs in support of Grimm, including nearly 200 members of Congress, dozens of major corporations, 18 states and over 30 US cities, the NAACP, and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).

The issue isn’t just about bathrooms. “It’s about the right of trans people to exist in public spaces,” Grimm told reporters on a press call on Monday. Without access to bathrooms, he says, it’s hard for trans people to sit through class, run errands, or hold jobs.

The case will not come before the Supreme Court again this term, Grimm’s attorneys say, and possibly not for another few years. “We will not have our day in the high court this term but we will continue to fight in the lower courts,” Chase Strangio, one of his lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote. “Today our momentum was sent on a detour,” he added in a tweet, “but nothing can stop it. We will fight. We will win.”

Grimm was sitting in class on Monday morning when text messages started flooding his phone with the Supreme Court’s announcement. He was disappointed but vowed to keep fighting. Whether it takes another year or 10, he says, “I’m in it for the long haul.”

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Thanks to Trump, the Supreme Court Just Left Trans Kids Hanging in a Big Way

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

Mother Jones

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States, died Saturday at at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.

McCorvey was a complicated symbol for the political fight over abortion rights. Following the high court’s 1973 decision, she became the face of the pro-choice movement. At the time, she represented the struggles faced by ordinary women confronted with unwanted pregnancies. Abortion was illegal in Texas in almost all cases when she learned she was pregnant in 1969. Poor and with a ninth grade education, she didn’t have the means to seek abortion across state lines. The legal battle dragged on for three years; by the time she won, she had long since carried the pregnancy to term. She gave the baby up for adoption.

But in 1995, McCorvey reversed her stance on abortion after discussing the Bible with Pastor Flip Benham, the director of Operation Rescue, an aggressive pro-life group that had moved in next door to the women’s health clinic where McCorvey worked. She soon quit her job at the clinic and was baptized by Benham. She became a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion movement, penning a book about her ideological transformation and traveling the country giving speeches to religious groups.

Like McCorvey’s own views on abortion, popular opinion about a woman’s right to choose has been the subject of much conflict and debate since the landmark 1973 case. And while a strong majority of Americans still agrees with the Roe decision, dismantling the right to an abortion is now an explicit objective for both the new administration and the Republican-led congress.

In the month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, GOP lawmakers have put forward measures aimed at pulling federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and repealing the Affordable Care Act, including its requirement that insurance plans cover contraceptives. They have also introduced bills that would make abortion illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy and would ban the standard abortion method used by doctors in the second trimester.

A Supreme Court majority that would be open to overturning Roe is becoming increasingly likely, as well. This is something Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign as part of his largely successful effort to win over skeptical evangelical voters. As a candidate, he made four promises to the anti-abortion community: He pledged to nominate anti-abortion justices; defund Planned Parenthood; sign the 20-week abortion ban; and permanently enshrine into law the Hyde Amendment—a 40-year old budget rider that Congress has repeatedly used to bar federal tax dollars from funding most abortions. Assuming that Judge Neil Gorsuch is confirmed this spring, it may only take the departure of one pro-abortion-rights justice to tip the balance on the court against Roe.

During the campaign, the formerly pro-choice Trump brought on Mike Pence to shore up his anti-abortion bonafides. As governor of Indiana, Pence signed some of the country’s strictest abortion restrictions into law, including a measure requiring burial or cremation of aborted fetus remains and a ban on abortions due to fetal anomaly. In a September 2016 speech, Pence told an evangelical conference in Washington, DC, “I want to live to see the day that we put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law, and we send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.”

Last month, Pence became the highest-ranking government official to ever address the annual March for Life in person. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence said at the anti-abortion gathering, pointing to the “historic election of a president who stands for a stronger America, a more prosperous America, and a president who, I proudly say, stands for the right to life.”

Roe has been seen by many as an imperfect decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the foremost legal warriors for gender equality, has criticized the decision for changing too much, too quickly. After founding the ACLU’s women’s rights project in the 1970s, Ginsburg focused on fighting sex discrimination with an incremental strategy. She brought several cases to the Supreme Court, building up a body of court victories that together established a sweeping legal and moral understanding of sex discrimination as something that is both illegal and wrong. Roe, she said at a conference in 2014, “established a target” for abortion opponents because it ditched this incremental approach, instead imposing a drastic change on states across the country. She suggested that if the high court had moved a little more slowly, today the idea of reproductive choice wouldn’t be so controversial. “A movement against access to abortion for women grew up, flourished, around a single target,” Ginsburg said.

After her victory as Roe’s main plaintiff, McCorvey joined the movement that sprung up to oppose Roe. Her death comes at a time when that movement, with help from the Trump White House, could achieve many of its long-held goals.

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

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Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

Mother Jones

President Trump lost his appeal today to keep his immigration ban in place:

A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate President Trump’s targeted travel ban, delivering the latest and most stinging judicial rebuke to his effort to make good on a campaign promise and tighten the standards for entry into the United States.

….The decision is likely to be quickly appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court remains short-handed and could deadlock. A 4-to-4 tie in the Supreme Court would leave the appeals court’s ruling in place.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a ruling on whether Trump’s immigration order is legal. It’s not even a ruling on whether it should be blocked pending the result of other lawsuits. It’s a ruling on an emergency stay of the temporary restraining order issued last week by a district court in Seattle. For now, the TRO remains in place unless the Supreme Court overturns the cicuit court and grants the emergency stay. Later we’ll get a full hearing on the TRO, and following that we’ll get trials on the various lawsuits challenging the legality of the immigration order.

UPDATE: This has been rewritten to more accurately explain what happened here.

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Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

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Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

Mother Jones

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During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wadeautomatically,” and he released a list of 21 candidates he would consider for a spot on the high court. The conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, as well as the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, helped draft the list. But since the election, some pro-life activists have been pushing the Trump team to jettison most of the people on his short list on the grounds that they aren’t sufficiently committed to overturning the landmark 1973 abortion ruling.

In mid-December, Andrew Schlafly, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life and son of the late anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, wrote an open letter to Trump, signed by more than 70 anti-abortion activists, urging him to appoint a Supreme Court justice with a “proven pro-life record.” In a notsosubtle reminder that pro-life voters may have played a huge role in putting Trump in the White House despite his obvious moral failings, Schlafly wrote:

Exit polls in the election showed that 21% of voters felt that this issue of the Supreme Court was ‘the most important factor’ in determining for whom they voted. Among that group of voters, you defeated your opponent by a landslide of 15%, 56-41%.

“I’m worried that Trump’s advisers will pull a Souter,” Schlafly explains, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Justice David Souter. Souter was something of a blank slate when he was nominated, and he proved to be far more liberal than Republicans had believed. When it comes to the Supreme Court, Schlafly and his supporters don’t want to leave anything to chance, which means a nominee who doesn’t just profess pro-life convictions, but has a documented track record of ruling in abortion cases. But Schlafly suspects some of the people advising Trump on a court pick want “a stealth candidate, someone without a record,” who would generate less opposition in a confirmation hearing.

Among those he’s singled out for supposedly pushing such a candidate is Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society—which Schlafly insists is “not a pro-life organization,” despite Leo’s stated opposition to abortion. (Leo did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among those whom Schlafly has targeted on Trump’s short list are some pretty stalwart conservative federal judges, including Diane Sykes, a 7th Circuit judge who reportedly ranks as one of Trump’s top two choices. Schlafly believes Sykes is not pro-life because as an Indiana state court judge she sentenced two anti-abortion protesters to 60 days in jail for a clinic protest. Later, on the federal bench, she also helped strike down a law defunding Planned Parenthood—another black mark against her in his book. Another potential nominee, 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, won’t be pro-life on the bench, according to Schlafly, because he doesn’t invoke the term “unborn child” in his decisions or public comments.

Candidates who meet Schlafly’s litmus test are few and far between, but there are two women from the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, Judges Edith Jones and Jennifer Elrod, who make the cut. Jones is a conservative poster gal who has been floated as a candidate for a GOP Supreme Court slot so many times that she’s been dubbed the “Susan Lucci” of Supreme Court nominations, after the soap opera star who was nominated 18 times for an Emmy before finally winning. As Tim Noah explained in Slate in 2005, “Presidents have been not choosing Jones since 1987,” back when Ronald Reagan needed a Supreme Court nominee to replace Robert Bork, whom the Senate rejected as too much of an extremist.

Today, Jones’ far-right views would make the late Bork look like a bleeding-heart liberal. In 2006, Jones made the Texas Observer’s list of worst judges in the state for rulings such as the one that upheld the execution of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial. Her performance in a sexual-harassment case was also noteworthy. “After hearing testimony that a woman had endured, among other things, a co-worker pinching her breast at work, Jones retorted, ‘Well, he apologized,'” wrote the Observer.

In 2014, lawyers and law students filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Jones over a speech she gave at a 2013 Federalist Society event. Jones allegedly said the death penalty provided a “positive service” to defendants because they are “likely to make peace with God only in the moment before imminent execution.” She also allegedly said, “African Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime” and “prone to commit acts of violence.” (Because there was no recording of Jones’ remarks, the complaint against her was dismissed.)

But for anti-abortion activists, her record is stellar: She was part of a three-judge panel that upheld a 2012 mandatory sonogram law in Texas, forcing doctors to give women seeking an abortion medically unnecessary information designed to persuade them to change their minds. In 2014, she was on a panel of judges considering a challenge to a Texas abortion law that closed 22 abortion clinics in the state. During oral arguments, she told lawyers for the Texas clinics that the 300-mile round trip some women would have to endure to reach a clinic under the new law was no big deal if they drove fast. The road, she said, was flat.

Elrod, who is also on Schlafly’s short list, wrote a circuit opinion in a preliminary phase of the case upholding that controversial law, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court last year in Women’s Whole Health v. Hellerstedt. In her opinion, Elrod gave almost complete deference to the state’s argument that the abortion-closing law was designed to protect women’s health, despite having no evidence to support that claim. She wrote, “In our circuit, we do not balance the wisdom or effectiveness of a law against the burdens the law imposes,” suggesting that the difficulties women might face obtaining an abortion in Texas were not relevant to her deliberations.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Judge Charles Canady is one of Trump’s potential candidates who meets with Schlafly’s approval as well. Canady, as a member of Congress in 1995, coined the term “partial-birth abortion” when he sponsored legislation banning dilation and extraction abortions in which doctors removed an intact fetus after collapsing its skull to minimize health complications in the woman. As a state court judge, he blocked a young woman from getting an abortion without her parents’ consent. His anti-abortion credentials are rock solid.

Schlafly complains that Trump’s advisers, including the Federalist Society’s Leo, are pushing him to tap younger judges while ignoring older, more proven judges such as Jones, who is 67, or Canady, 62. He wrote recently, “Mr. Leo’s approach runs afoul of conservative principles, which recognize that the longer someone is in D.C., the more liberal they generally get. That’s apparently true for some think tank executives as well, by the way.”

The anti-abortion movement as a whole has not gotten on board with Schlafly’s campaign, largely because everyone on Trump’s Supreme Court list is very conservative and likely to be hostile to abortion, even if they have not yet ruled on it. The signatories of Schlafly’s letter to Trump are B-listers of the anti-choice movement. Many of them represent state chapters of his late mother’s organization, the Eagle Forum, or the much-diminished Operation Rescue. But the most politically powerful anti-abortion groups such as Americans United for Life, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council have not weighed in on his picks. Even anti-abortion stalwart Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, has shied away, despite being approached by Schlafly for support, saying that Schlafly’s letter “doesn’t reflect my judgment on all of the candidates.”

Ed Whelan, a former Scalia law clerk and attorney in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Justice, has been one of the most outspoken conservative critics of Schlafly’s abortion purity campaign. He declined to comment for this story, but in his “Bench Notes” column in National Review, Whelan has explicitly defended potential Trump nominees from Schlafly’s attacks. He points out, for instance, that Schlafly’s own mother approved of the judges on Trump’s list before she died. In her last book, The Conservative Case for Trump, she and her co-author wrote, “It is to Trump’s credit that his shortlist is as good as it is.”

And he counters Schlafly’s criticism of the 7th Circuit’s Sykes by noting that while Sykes did rule in a case involving abortion protesters, “she didn’t sentence them for protesting abortion. She sentenced them for cementing their legs to the front of a car parked at the entrance to an abortion clinic and thus shutting down the clinic. What sentence does Schlafly believe Sykes should have imposed?”

But Whelan’s primary opposition to Schlafly’s campaign is that he believes the anti-abortion purists “want judges to indulge pro-life values to misread the law in order to reach pro-life results,” something he argues Scalia would never have approved of. Schlafly dismisses Whelan’s criticism as sour grapes: “Ed Whelan was a strident opponent of Trump himself.”

On Wednesday, during his first press conference since July, Trump said he would announce his Supreme Court choice during the first week or two after the inauguration. It’s unclear whether he’s taking Schlafly’s input under advisement. Neither Trump nor his advisers have responded to Schlafly. But Schlafly notes that his letter was featured on Fox News, and he’s hopeful it’s making an impact. “Nothing else a president does even compares to the significance of this decision,” Schlafly says, noting that its ramifications could last 30 years or more. Yet he thinks when it comes to the potential justices, Trump’s team hasn’t done its homework on the abortion issue, and he’s simply trying to fill in the research gaps. “Everybody knows that’s what’s at stake,” he says. “A very thorough vetting process is in order.”

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Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

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This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

Mother Jones

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Abortion providers have had a rollercoaster year. On the one hand, a landmark abortion rights case in Texas saw an affirmative ruling from the Supreme Court, overturning restrictions that aimed to put clinics out of business across the United States. At the same time, conservative statehouses pushed through legislation that aimed to decrease abortion access and defund Planned Parenthood, the largest women’s health provider in the country. Months after the Supreme Court ruled in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that the restrictions in Texas qualified as undue burdens and were therefore unconstitutional, Donald Trump was elected president, assuring voters of his staunch support for anti-choice legislation and deflecting allegations of sexual assault.

The week after the election, we called Dr. Willie Parker—a Harvard-educated OB-GYN from Alabama in his 50s who has been providing abortions full time since 2009. He practices in clinics in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, has confronted demonstrators blocking his access, and sued the state of Mississippi to keep the sole clinic in that state open. We wanted to hear how abortion providers are preparing for the next chapter of the battle against reproductive rights. As board chair for Physicians for Reproductive Health, Parker has been at the forefront of the national fight to preserve a woman’s right to choose. Here’s what he had to say about the likely new realities in women’s health during the future Trump administration.

What’s the conversation like among providers right now?
Most people can’t even talk. We’re still figuring it out. But I think people are trying to think beyond and say, “OK, given the inability to overturn the election, and given our ability to prognosticate based on how he’s operated politically, most of us have to think worst-case scenario.” But there’s also really no way of knowing what he’s going to do—he’s been sufficiently vague in his policy positions. We can take some prognostic indication from some of the things that he’s said, like in his 60 Minutes interview where he talked about his intention to appoint a pro-life justice to align the court to overturn Roe. I think of it as a low-hanging fruit. He has every intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as much because it’s known as Obamacare as because he wants to try and deconstruct the legacy of President Obama. But that has implications that mean women who were accessing family planning and contraception as a preventative service with no co-pay will lose access to that coverage. We will only see an exacerbation of the things we were engaged in trying to prevent—like unplanned pregnancy and the need for abortion, which creates a societal dilemma. If you’re making abortion illegal and undermining the various things that will allow the prevention of that need, it can only be a situation that goes from bad to worse.

There are a lot of misconceptions around contraception and abortion care, not only in the general public, but also among our lawmakers. Do you think there will be an uptick in anti-science attitudes?
There’s a saying that you can’t awaken somebody who’s pretending to be asleep. I’m full of clichés—I was raised by a Southern black woman, and they had a saying for everything.

I get you, I’m from Tennessee and Mississippi, I grew up on those sayings too.
Oh, so you’re my homegirl! laughs

There’s a willful ignorance. We indulge people who are willfully misrepresenting the facts. I don’t think those anti-choice congress people are as much benignly misguided as they are intentionally and willfully ignorant of the facts of reproduction. That lends itself very well to them being ideologically driven and carrying out agendas that, if they were to be really be honest about the facts, would be a tougher sell. But I think anti-intellectualism can be rewarded by the outcome of the election that’s going to result in people being appointed who can reinforce that agenda. We’re going to see more of that willful ignorance if we don’t push back and fight. The worst thing we can do is to assume that the electoral college votes resulting in the election of Donald Trump represents a mandate. It does not. He did not get the majority of the popular vote; that went to Hillary Clinton. That means those votes represent the consciousness of the nation, which is that abortion should be legal, that contraception and family planning are health issues and prevention, that a woman’s right to reproductive privacy is the law of the land and should remain such.

Have any of your patients expressed any fear since the election?
I’ve seen patients once since the election, and then, it was only abortion patients. But certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction. I know people who were previously considering IUDs are considering them again. I know the requests for those kind of visits are up. People are concerned about how much control over their reproductive lives they’re going to lose as a result of this election outcome.

Do you think this puts states that are down to one clinic, such as Mississippi, in even more danger?
The fight in Mississippi will be more protracted. I’m the physician plaintiff in the lawsuit that keeps the Mississippi clinic open, and we prevailed twice in the Fifth Circuit—once with just the three-judge panel and once with the full Fifth Circuit panel. Despite that, the state tried to push it up to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court did not take that in lieu of the Texas case. So the definitive nature of the Texas case should have made things OK in Mississippi, but the state of Mississippi has decided to go forward. Now, I think their hope will be rekindled and renewed around the fact that potentially there will be an overturning of Roe, and there will be the appointment of a conservative justice who alters the balance of the court. There now will be a political hope based on the change in the presidential administration—hope that maybe wasn’t there before the election. But I don’t think anything will change immediately. President Obama, in his first remarks since the election, in order to reassure people and help them understand how government works, said the US government is like an ocean liner, not like a speed boat. It’s harder to turn around than people might think. Hopefully, many of the decisions have been structured in a way to make them resilient, so they’re not as vulnerable to the capricious whim of political administrations.

So what would you say to women who are worried about what a Trump administration could do to their reproductive health?

I just want to remind people that the task of those who support reproductive rights and reproductive justice didn’t change based on who is in the White House. We have leadership that is not supportive of what we’re trying to do, but the demand for justice shouldn’t be modulated. We can take that as a notion that we don’t know exactly what President-elect Trump is going to do, but we can’t afford to take a position of waiting around to see. We have to work under the assumption that the things that we fought hard for to protect women will be under assault, and we have to bring all our creativity and our energy to bear to preserve those things. No matter who is in the White House.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Excerpt from:

This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

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Trump’s win is a deadly threat to stopping climate change.

A President Clinton would have faced a divided Congress, limiting what she could accomplish in terms of advancing climate action. But with both houses in GOP hands, Donald Trump has no such limitations in what he could do to reverse it.

Most of President Obama’s efforts on the clean energy front were made using his executive powers — powers that will now allow Trump to fulfill many of his promises to completely defund climate action and gut environmental protection.

He’s pledged to pull the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He’s vowed to cut all federal climate spending. He is going to appoint a known climate denier, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team.

Under Trump’s appointees, the EPA’s powers will be rolled back, with weaker enforcement of regulations mandated by the Clean Air Act and upheld by the Supreme Court. Of course, Trump will have his pick on the Supreme Court, too — which could soon decide the fate of Obama’s central climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan.

All of this could set the world back another decade or more on tackling climate change. Democrats can filibuster some. Environmentalists, in full defense mode in the courts, might be able to limit the damage. But limiting is the best we can hope for now.

Originally posted here: 

Trump’s win is a deadly threat to stopping climate change.

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Florida voted down an anti-solar initiative.

A President Clinton would have faced a divided Congress, limiting what she could accomplish in terms of advancing climate action. But with both houses in GOP hands, Donald Trump has no such limitations in what he could do to reverse it.

Most of President Obama’s efforts on the clean energy front were made using his executive powers — powers that will now allow Trump to fulfill many of his promises to completely defund climate action and gut environmental protection.

He’s pledged to pull the United States from the Paris climate agreement. He’s vowed to cut all federal climate spending. He is going to appoint a known climate denier, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team.

Under Trump’s appointees, the EPA’s powers will be rolled back, with weaker enforcement of regulations mandated by the Clean Air Act and upheld by the Supreme Court. Of course, Trump will have his pick on the Supreme Court, too — which could soon decide the fate of Obama’s central climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan.

All of this could set the world back another decade or more on tackling climate change. Democrats can filibuster some. Environmentalists, in full defense mode in the courts, might be able to limit the damage. But limiting is the best we can hope for now.

Taken from: 

Florida voted down an anti-solar initiative.

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Liberals No Longer Allowed to Nominate Supreme Court Justices

Mother Jones

The latest hotness on the right is to promise not just to hold up Senate hearings on Merrick Garland until we get a new president, but to hold up all hearings for all Supreme Court nominees forever if Hillary Clinton wins:

That prospect — which could impact every aspect of American life including climate regulations, abortion and gun rights — was first raised by Senator John McCain of Arizona, then Ted Cruz of Texas and now Richard Burr of North Carolina, who CNN reported Monday talked up the idea at a private event over the weekend.

“If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court,” Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told a group of Republican volunteers, according to CNN.

Marco Rubio, taking his usual craven approach to political landmines, says it would be wrong to blockade everyone, but it would be OK to blockade anyone who’s not a conservative:

“If it’s someone good who understands that their job is to apply the constitution, according to its original intent, then that will be a welcome surprise,” he said. “But barring whether it’s Republican or a Democrat, if they appoint someone who I believe doesn’t meet that standard I’ll oppose that nominee.”

Ross Douthat explains the principled thinking behind this strategy:

There you have it. Liberal views of the law are inherently illegitimate, so Democrats don’t get to pick any more Supreme Court justices. There’s a name for this kind of republic. Starts with a B. Not quite coming to me, though.

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Liberals No Longer Allowed to Nominate Supreme Court Justices

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

Mother Jones

Gavin Grimm Steve Helber/AP

For the first time, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of whether transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates.

On Friday, the justices announced they would hear the case of 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, a trans boy in Virginia who sued his school board last year after it blocked him from using the boys’ bathroom at his school. In 2014, doctors diagnosed Grimm, who was born female, with gender dysphoria and recommended that he live and be treated as a boy. Grimm argues that the school board’s bathroom policy singles him out for being different and violates Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding.

The case comes as the national debate about transgender bathroom access has reached a fever pitch. The Obama administration, which has thrown its support behind Grimm, told public schools in May that they could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from the bathrooms of their choice. Twenty-three states have since sued the Department of Education over this directive. They argue that Title IX applies only to sex discrimination, not gender identity discrimination, and that allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms of their choice could violate the privacy rights of other children.

Grimm, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, initially lost his case in district court. But in April, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, kicking the case back to the lower court and urging it to respect the Obama administration’s trans-friendly guidance on bathroom access. The district court then granted an injunction allowing Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom while it considered his case again.

In July, the school board filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to temporarily block Grimm from the boys’ room while they decided whether to review the appeals court decision; otherwise, the school board argued, parents might pull their kids out of school. In August, the Supreme Court agreed and temporarily blocked Grimm from the boys’ room. That decision remains in place until the case is resolved.

If the justices are divided and the case results in a 4-4 split, the appeals court’s ruling in Grimm’s favor would stand.

For Grimm, the decision can’t come soon enough. Right now, he has two options: use a single-stall bathroom or visit the bathroom in the nurse’s office. “I feel the humiliation every time I need to use the restroom and every minute I try to ‘hold it’ in the hopes of avoiding the long walk to the nurse’s office,” he wrote recently. A few weeks ago, he had to go to the bathroom at an evening school football game. “Suddenly a night out with friends was marred by the realization that someone was going to have to take me to a gas station if I needed to use the restroom,” he wrote.

He continued, “If you told me two years ago that the Supreme Court was going to have to approve whether I could use the school restroom, I would have thought you were joking…If the Supreme Court does take up my case, I hope the justices can see me and the rest of the transgender community for who we are—just people—and rule accordingly.”

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

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Virginia Becomes First State to Jettison Abortion Clinic Restrictions Based on Supreme Court’s Ruling

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the Virginia Board of Health voted to get rid of building restrictions on abortion clinics. The board said the regulations, which were passed to make clinics more like hospitals, are unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a landmark abortion case that was decided in June. Since the board of health approved these requirements in 2013, a third of the state’s clinics have shut down.

“This vote demonstrates to the rest of the United States and the world that Virginia is a community where people can live, find employment, and start a family without politicians interfering with decisions that should be made by women and their doctors,” wrote Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a statement.

The Supreme Court’s Hellerstedt ruling struck down two provisions of a Texas abortion law, including one that required abortion clinics to comply with the expensive structural requirements of an ambulatory surgical center, a hospital-like facility often used for outpatient surgery. The court ruled in June that these requirements constituted an undue burden on women’s access to abortion and weren’t shown to improve women’s health. Virginia is one of 20 states that had onerous building regulations for abortion clinics, but Virginia is the first state to take explicit steps to comply with the precedent set by the Supreme Court in June.

Virginia’s board of health postponed a vote on their state’s clinic regulations, originally slated for last month, in order to weigh the effects of the Supreme Court ruling. A memo presented at last month’s hearing noted, “Based on advice received from the Office of Attorney General, additional amendments have been proposed to the regulations to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.”

At Monday’s hearing, Dr. Serina Floyd, an Alexandria-based gynecologist, called on the health board once again to follow the Supreme Court’s precedent. “On behalf of Virginia women, I ask you to hear the Supreme Court ruling and overturn.”

The amended regulations now go to Virginia’s attorney general and Gov. McAuliffe for review.

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Virginia Becomes First State to Jettison Abortion Clinic Restrictions Based on Supreme Court’s Ruling

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