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How Roe v. Wade Survived 43 Years of Abortion Wars

by Alejand55Z Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Forty-three years ago today, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. The landmark case established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. Ever since then, anti-abortion politicians and activists have tried to chip away at Roe. States have passed more than 1,000 restrictions on the procedure and the Supreme Court has ruled on several other abortion cases, each time further limiting abortion access.

What is clear, however, is that after Roe v. Wade, the availability of safe and legal abortions radically changed health outcomes for women. In a book that collected stories from the illegal abortion era, a man who assisted with autopsies at a hospital described seeing many women die from botched abortions. “The deaths stopped overnight in 1973,” he said. “That ought to tell people something about keeping abortion legal.”

Today, discussions of women’s safety are more often heard in statehouses enacting further restrictions on abortion. The medical safety of women framed many of the arguments cited at the Texas Capitol in 2013, when the state Legislature debated, and ultimately passed, HB 2. This omnibus abortion bill imposed costly requirements on clinics—such as hospital-admitting privileges and stringent construction rules—which the medical community overwhelmingly deems to be unnecessary. Since its passage, 23 of the state’s 41 abortion providers have closed, and others are likely to follow if the measure is upheld after the Supreme Court reviews HB 2 this year. The high court’s ruling could deal a serious blow to the guarantee of the right to a legal abortion enshrined 43 years ago. Either way, many players will be affected—patients, providers, lawyers on both sides of the debate, legislators, the courts, and even lobbyists.

Over the years, Mother Jones has covered the abortion wars from many of their perspectives. Here’s a look back at some of those stories:

The women

In 2004, Eleanor Cooney wrote an essay entitled “The Way It Was” about the illegal abortion she had as a 17-year-old in 1959, 14 years before Roe. The year before her story appeared, President George W. Bush, flanked by smiling Republican senators and congressmen, had signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban into law, banning the dilation and extraction abortion method usually used in the second trimester. The measure heralded a new era of legislative efforts aimed at stifling abortion access. “Like some ugly old wall-to-wall carpeting they’ve been yearning to get rid of,” wrote Cooney, “they finally, finally loosened a little corner of Roe. Now they can start to rip the whole thing up, roll it back completely, and toss it in the Dumpster.”

The providers

In 1981, 14 clinics in Mississippi provided abortions. In 2013, only one remained, thanks to legislation that chipped away at the providers’ ability to keep their doors open. In “Inside Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic,” former Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard profiled the providers fighting to keep the clinic open, the doctors who flew in from out of state to perform the procedures, a woman who made the decision to terminate her pregnancy, and one of the protesters, who stood outside the clinic every day, tossing miniature plastic babies at car windows.

The doctors

In 2003, 76-year-old gynecologist Dr. William Rashbaum was still working, and his practice included providing late-term abortions, something he’d been doing for the 30 years since Roe. He was one of the oldest living providers of second-trimester abortions in the United States before his death in 2005. In “End of the Road,” Rebecca Paley profiled the doctor in the final years of his career, visiting his practice and chronicling his fierce commitment to helping women.

The courts

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled on a pivotal abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Robert Casey was the governor of Pennsylvania at the time, and Planned Parenthood sued the state over five provisions in a recently passed abortion law. The high court ruled that states could pass abortion regulations, provided these did not place an “undue burden” on women’s access to the procedure. The ruling opened the door for a wave of abortion restrictions across the country. Right around this time, attorney Harold Cassidy was going through a drastic evolution: A former pro-choice liberal, he had started going to court to defend mothers, including surrogates and birth mothers of adopted kids. He then became one of the anti-abortion movement’s most prominent and successful lawyers. In “The Man Who Loved Women Too Much,” Sarah Blustain profiles Cassidy and his decades-long legal push to restrict abortion access by turning the pro-choice argument on its head: arguing that abortion violates women’s rights.

The states

Earlier this month, a Guttmacher Institute report pointed out that since 2010, more anti-abortion laws have been passed than in any other five-year period since the Roe decision. These restrictions have created a new landscape of severely restricted abortion access in a number of states. Last fall, former Mother Jones reporter Molly Redden traveled to report on what life is like for women facing unplanned or unwanted pregnancies in these states. She spoke to women who went thousands of miles or crossed state lines to get abortions, going from Texas to Washington, DC, from Indiana to Ohio, and more. “Most abortions today involve some combination of endless wait, interminable journey, military-level coordination, and lots of money,” wrote Redden. “Four years of unrelenting assaults on reproductive rights have transformed all facets of giving an abortion or getting one—possibly for good.”

Anti-abortion crusaders

At one point, the most visible members of the anti-abortion movement belonged to Operation Rescue, an extreme activist group that would protest in front of clinics. Increasingly, it became clear that the harassment of women and doctors at clinics distracted from the anti-abortion mission. But other organizations that focused on attacking abortion legislatively, rather than physically, gained prominence. One of them is Americans United for Life. Founded in 1971 and run mostly by women, AUL is “one of the most effective anti-abortion organizations in the country,” writes Kate Sheppard, even though its budget of about $4 million pales in comparison to many other anti-abortion groups. AUL’s mission is to end abortion in the United States, and its main strategy for doing so is helping states chip away at Roe by passing various abortion restrictions. Sheppard profiled AUL in 2012, right after it had one of its most successful years on record: In 2011, 92 restrictions on abortion were passed in states nationwide, 24 of which were either written or promoted by AUL.

Abortion politics

In the summer of 2015, the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress released a series of secretly recorded and deceptively edited videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue—a practice that would be illegal. The videos inflamed the abortion debate and resulted in numerous state and congressional investigations and efforts to defund the largest women’s health care organization in the country. Six states tried to defund Planned Parenthood, seven states investigated the women’s health provider (none found evidence of fetal tissue sales), and three congressional committees launched their own inquiries.

One of these committees summoned Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards to testify in September 2015. House Republicans grilled Richards for more than four hours about how Planned Parenthood spends its federal funding. The most aggressive interlocutor was Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who—as Kevin Drum explained—also used a series of completely incorrect charts to make the erroneous point that Planned Parenthood’s primary business is abortion.

Pseudoscience

Florida marriage therapist Vincent Rue has appeared in a number of states in the past few years assisting them in defending anti-abortion laws. In a 2014 article, Molly Redden explains how his research—which claims to show that women who go through the procedure eventually suffer from mental illness—has been thoroughly discredited by several courts and health organizations. Still, states continue to pay for his expertise: “Republican administrations in four states—Alabama, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin—have paid or promised to pay Rue $192,205.50 in exchange for help defending anti-abortion laws,” Redden wrote.

The Supreme Court:

In March, the high court is set to hear arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole. The case, brought by Texas abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health and the Center for Reproductive Rights, challenges HB 2, the Texas abortion bill whose onerous restrictions could shut down all but 10 of Texas’ abortion clinics, leaving women in large swathes of the state without an abortion provider. Many advocates are calling this the most important abortion case in nearly 25 years. The plaintiffs are challenging HB 2 as a violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortion restrictions can’t place an “undue burden” on abortion access. If the Supreme Court upholds the Texas law, it could widen the already murky “undue burden” standard, opening the door for similar regulations in other states. “This case represents the greatest threat to women’s reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago,” wrote Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a November statement. “Laws like the ones being challenged in Texas are designed to subvert the Constitution and end the right to a safe and legal abortion.”

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How Roe v. Wade Survived 43 Years of Abortion Wars

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Supreme Court Throws Out Arkansas’ Abortion Ban

by JeffDeSalis3584 Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In February 2013, Arkansas passed the Human Heartbeat Protection Act, a bill outlawing abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy if a heartbeat is detected. The new law came at a fine moment for the state’s anti-abortion legislators: In recent months, they’d passed a bill doubling the state’s mandated abortion waiting period, and had passed a 20-week ban on abortion.

The 12-week ban, however, was at the time the most restrictive abortion ban passed not only in the state, but in the nation. A pair of Arkansas doctors challenged the bill as unconstitutional and two lower courts prevented the ban from going into effect. Today, the Supreme Court rejected Arkansas’ bid for reconsideration of the abortion ban. The high court’s decision not to take this case, Edwards v. Beck, and to uphold lower courts’ decisions to throw out Arkansas’ law, could send a signal and help curb early abortion bans in other states.

“Arkansas politicians cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they want to uphold,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), said in a statement on Tuesday. “The Supreme Court has never wavered in affirming that every woman has a right to safely and legally end a pregnancy in the US—and this extreme abortion ban was a direct affront to that right.”

When this bill was first passed, pro-choice advocates and medical professionals pointed out that at 12 weeks most fetuses may have a heartbeat, but none are viable. Viability is the critical point when a fetus is sufficiently developed so it can survive outside the womb. In 1973, Roe v. Wade introduced viability as a standard and established that women have the right to an abortion until the end of their second trimester of pregnancy—about 27 weeks. Nineteen years later, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the high court shifted the time limit discussion from trimesters to one of viability, ruling that states can only outlaw abortions of viable fetuses.

But what is the exact point at which a fetus is viable? In Casey, the court ruled that viability begins at 23 or 24 weeks, slightly before the end of the second trimester, in part because medical advances have made it possible for some pregnancies to be viable at that point.

When proposed in 2013, the Arkansas bill moved swiftly through the state legislature, even though the 12-week cut-off clearly violated the Supreme Court’s decision on fetal viability. It was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe in March 2013, but within two days, the Legislature overrode his veto and passed the bill into law. A month later, two local physicians and some of their patients sued the state medical board, asking the court to bar the law from going into effect. In 2014, two courts—first a district court, and later the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals—threw out the ban, ruling that there was no evidence a fetus can be viable at 12 weeks.

Oddly enough, the Arkansas Medical Board made no effort to make a scientific case for 12-week viability. “The only factual record presented in this case was by plaintiffs,” wrote one 8th Circuit judge, pointing to the testimony and data the doctors had presented showing that a 12-week fetus can’t survive outside the womb. “The State offered no competing evidence” on fetal viability, wrote the district court judge.

In asking the Supreme Court to review this case, Arkansas made the argument that viability is an outdated standard and that the law should allow states to get involved with a woman’s decision-making at an earlier point in her pregnancy. The brief noted: “This case is about the impropriety of a judicially-imposed rule that sets in stone ‘viability’ as the point before which the State’s profound interests must give way to a woman’s desire to terminate her pregnancy.”

Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings on viability, 15 states have since 2010 passed abortion bans that would outlaw the procedure at 20 weeks, or earlier. Many of these so-called “fetal pain” bills—model legislation originally drafted by the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee—base the 20-week cut-off on the medically incorrect assertion that a fetus can feel pain at that point in its development. Now that the Supreme Court has rejected this case, the viability standard established over decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence remains intact—for now.

After today’s decision, advocates on both sides of the abortion debate are turning their focus back to a pivotal case challenging a Texas abortion law that is before the Supreme Court this term, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole. Arguments are scheduled for March 2, and a decision will be announced later this year.

“We now look to the Justices to ensure Texas women are not robbed of their health, dignity, and rights,” said CRR’s Northup in today’s statement.

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Supreme Court Throws Out Arkansas’ Abortion Ban

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If Money Is Speech, the First Amendment Is a Billionaire’s Dream

by CarolBiddlecomb Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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The argument for a union shop is pretty straightforward: even if you hate your union, they perform collective bargaining for everyone, including you. Since you benefit from that bargaining, you should be required to pay union dues. After all, if dues are optional, why would anyone pay? Why not just let all the other suckers pay while you reap the benefits free of charge?

There’s another version of this argument that’s even more straightforward: if union shops are illegal—as they are in so-called “right to work” states—it’s all but impossible to set up a union. This is why the Chamber of Commerce and pretty much all Republicans are great fans of the open shop. It basically destroys the ability of unions to operate.

But what about public employee unions? What if you object to your union’s political views and don’t want to sponsor them? The answer, in many states, is that you can partially opt out of union dues, paying only an “agency fee” specifically designated for collective bargaining activities.

Problem solved? Not quite. What if you think that even collective bargaining is inherently a political stance when you’re bargaining with the government? Should you be allowed to opt out of union dues entirely? Today the Supreme Court heard arguments on this, and it didn’t go well for union supporters:

The justices appeared divided along familiar lines during an extended argument over whether government workers who choose not to join unions may nonetheless be required to help pay for collective bargaining. The court’s conservative majority appeared ready to say that such compelled financial support violates the First Amendment.

Collective bargaining, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, is inherently political when the government is the employer, and issues like merit pay, promotions and classroom size are subject to negotiation.

The best hope for a victory for the unions had rested with Justice Antonin Scalia, who has written and said things sympathetic to their position. But he was consistently hostileon Monday. “The problem is that everything that is bargained for with the government is within the political sphere,” he said.

In one sense, there’s nothing new to say about this. The liberal-conservative split on the Supreme Court has hardened over the past couple of decades, and we simply don’t see very much principled opposition to party lines anymore. Conservatives hate unions, so conservative Supreme Court justices are going to rule against unions whenever and wherever possible. They’ll make up the reasons afterward.

But there’s another sense in which this is interesting: it’s yet another step in the evolution of the conservative Supreme Court’s insistence that money is speech. In Citizens United and subsequent cases, they’ve all but wiped out any possible regulation of campaign finance on the grounds that campaign donations fund campaign speech. So if you can’t regulate political speech, you can’t regulate political money either.

Now they seem set to do the same for unions. If collective bargaining is inherently political speech, then you can’t force people to fund it. That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment.

I wonder how far this can go? After all, you can make a case that spending money is nearly always implicit speech: my purchase of a Snickers bar is a public declaration that Snickers bars are delicious, and my company’s dodgy advertising claims are a declaration of deeply held corporate emotions. So much for regulation of sugary snacks or false advertising.

Money is speech. Speech can’t be regulated. Therefore, money can’t be regulated. It’s a pretty simple syllogism. And, possibly, a pretty handy one.

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If Money Is Speech, the First Amendment Is a Billionaire’s Dream

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

by SharronMacartney Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will examine the bedrock principle of “one person, one vote” in a major case that could yield the Republican Party a critical advantage in future elections. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the court is being asked to change how states draw legislative districts in a way that would boost the electoral power of white, rural voters, who lean Republican, at the expense of Latinos and African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic. The plaintiffs behind this high-stakes legal challenge are an unusual pair. One is a Texas tea party activist who has promoted a conspiratorial film suggesting President Barack Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a supposed propagandist for the Communist Party. The other is a security guard and religious fundamentalist who believes the Earth doesn’t revolve around the sun and that unicorns were real.

Texas residents Sue Evenwel and Ed Pfenninger want the court to create a uniform national standard for drawing legislative districts based on the total number of eligible voters in them, as opposed to the total number of people, which is the standard that Texas and many other states use now. Such a change would effectively diminish the political clout of urban areas, which have large populations of people who can’t vote, such as felons, children and noncitizens.

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

by MorganTobin Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kansas Republicans believe they have created a law that their own high court cannot review.

In the latest twist of the topsy-turvy constitutional showdown between the GOP-controlled state legislature and the state Supreme Court, the Kansas attorney general has asked the entire Kansas Supreme Court to recuse itself from hearing a key case.

The power struggle between Kansas Republicans and the state’s highest court goes back to a years-long battle over education funding. The state Supreme Court has repeatedly ordered the legislature to spend more money on public education, a request that conflicts with Republicans’ desire to cut taxes. In 2014, the legislature passed a bill stripping the Supreme Court of the administrative authority to appoint chief judges in Kansas’ 31 judicial districts, a move Democrats saw as a power play by the legislature to intimidate the top court during the ongoing fight over school spending. Chief District Court Judge Larry Solomon challenged the constitutionality of the judicial administration law, arguing that it violates the state’s separation of powers.

But the legislature doubled down. Earlier this year, it passed a judicial budget that would cut off funding for the entire Kansas court system if the courts struck down the judicial administration bill—a situation that would seize critical state functions such as criminal prosecutions, civil disputes, real estate sales, and adoptions. That led to the bizarre moment in September when a district court ruled the administrative bill unconstitutional, putting all the funding for the state courts in sudden jeopardy. The situation threatened to devolve into a judicial catch-22, in which no court could rule on the legality of the laws because those laws had defunded them. To avoid that situation, the judge put a hold on his ruling invalidating the law until the state Supreme Court could hear the case—except that the state of Kansas is now arguing that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have its say.

Rather than let the case proceed to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Derek Schmidt argued in a brief last week that the justices should not hear the case because the law involves the court’s authority. Schmidt’s brief also notes that the chief justice of the Supreme Court criticized the law when it passed, betraying his bias against the law.

Under Kansas law, Supreme Court justices can appoint district court judges to sit in their place when they recuse themselves. But Schmidt argues that a district court judge shouldn’t be involved either, because the law involves appointing chief judges at the district court level. Instead, Schmidt proposes that judges on the Kansas Court of Appeals—just below the level of the Supreme Court and above the district courts—review the case. (Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2013, the Republican-controlled legislature changed the selection process for appeals court judges. Before then, a commission nominated potential judges for the governor to choose from; now the judges are appointed directly by the governor, currently Republican Sam Brownback. The judges most sympathetic to the Republican legislature may be those at the appeals court level.)

Lawyers fighting the judicial administration bill believe the recusal request is frivolous. As they wrote in a brief this week, “centuries of precedent make clear that it is the province and duty of this Court to decide cases that involve the scope of the Court’s authority, jurisdiction, and duties vis-à-vis the other branches of government.” In a response filed Thursday, the state held firm that the highest court should not hear the case.

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

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The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

by Brenton1405 Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear its first abortion case in nine years. At issue in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole is HB 2, an omnibus Texas abortion law that made national headlines in 2013 after Texas Sen. Wendy Davis spent 11-hours filibustering the bill that eventually passed anyway.

Since 1992, the court has ruled on three abortion cases, each time affirming further abortion restrictions. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a divided court upheld the right to abortion, but left it to the states to set abortion restrictions, saying that these regulations can’t put an “undue burden” on abortion access. This broad ruling opened the door for the hundreds of so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws that states have passed in recent years—onerous regulations placed on abortion providers, often purporting to protect women’s health. In its last ruling in 2007, the court upheld a law outlawing dilation-and-extraction second-trimester abortions. If the court continues its pattern of voting against abortion rights and rules to allow Texas to move forward with several burdensome abortion restrictions, it will open the door for other states to do the same, dealing a serious blow to the right to legal abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

“The Court now has the opportunity to decide whether we will continue to allow elected officials to play politics with women’s health,” wrote Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a statement. “This case represents the greatest threat to women’s reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago. Laws like the ones being challenged in Texas are designed to subvert the Constitution and end the right to a safe and legal abortion.”

In this case, the justices are expected to focus on two of the Texas law’s most onerous requirements: that abortions be performed in ambulatory surgical centers, hospital-like facilities that specialize in outpatient surgery, and the requirement that abortion providers obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Many medical professionals argue that these restrictions put unnecessary burdens on abortion providers: Building and maintaining an ASC is expensive, given the strict requirements regarding features like hallway width and ventilation. Nor do ASCs enhance the standard of care for abortion; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups have repeatedly noted that the procedure can be safely performed in a typical doctor’s office. The admitting privileges’ provision gives hospitals in conservative communities or with a religious affiliation the power to effectively stop abortions by denying the necessary admission privileges to doctors.

“The common-sense measures Texas has put in place elevate the standard of care and protect the health of Texas women,” wrote Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement released following Friday’s Supreme Court’s announcement. “We look forward to demonstrating the validity of these important health and safety requirements in Court.”

The number of abortion clinics in Texas has already been cut by more than half, as elements of HB 2, such as restrictions on medication abortion, a 20 week abortion ban, and the admitting privileges requirement, have gone into effect over the last two years. Before the law, there were 41 clinics in Texas. Today, there are 18. As my colleague Molly Redden reported in September, this has created large swathes of the state where women must travel hundreds of miles to get abortion care. If the Supreme Court upholds HB2 in full, including the ambulatory surgical center requirement, the number of abortion clinics in Texas could fall to ten.

The Supreme Court has intervened on HB 2 twice before. In October 2014, the court reinstated a district court’s ruling that blocked the ambulatory surgical center provisions of HB2 from going into effect and triggering more clinic closures while the Fifth Circuit court considered the case. At that time the high court also overturned the admitting privileges requirement for two Texas facilities. In June 2015, after the Fifth Circuit ruled to allow the HB2 provisions to go forward, the Supreme Court put an emergency stay on these requirements, to remain in effect while the court decided whether to take on Whole Woman’s Health for a full review.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers in Texas have been preparing to comply with HB2’s new requirements since mid-2014, when the law was originally slated to go into effect. Planned Parenthood, for instance, has spent millions to build or refurbish several ambulatory surgical centers in the state. Mother Jones traveled to Texas to observe these preparations for HB2. Check out our video footage below. (Some of the video numbers have since changed slightly.)

The court has not yet announced whether it will also take Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Currier, a case that centers on a Mississippi law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, but given that they’ve taken the Texas case, it is unlikely. Mississippi currently has only one abortion clinic, and its abortion providers are board-certified OB-GYNs. But because hospitals in the area have been unwilling to grant—or sometimes even process—the doctors’ applications for admitting privileges, if this law stands, it will close down Mississippi’s last abortion clinic. In July 2014, the fifth circuit court of appeals ruled that the law was unconstitutional, upholding a lower court’s ruling.

A decision in the Texas case will come down in the first half of 2016, likely making reproductive rights a central issue in the presidential election. “Although this is the first step in a much longer process,” said Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, the main plaintiff in the case. “I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will uphold the rights that have been in place for four decades and reaffirm that every woman should be able to make her own decision about continuing or ending a pregnancy.”

This is a breaking story. We will update this post as the story develops.

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The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

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Tyson Foods Wants the Supreme Court to Let It Keep Stealing Workers’ Wages

by DavidSpann Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Workers have filed dozens of lawsuits against Tyson Foods alleging millions of dollars in “wage theft” for its failure to keep wage and hour records and to properly pay workers for overtime as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). On Tuesday, Tyson came before the US Supreme Court and argued that the justices should make those lawsuits go away. Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo is truly a David-versus-Goliath lawsuit, with about 3,000 low-income, often immigrant workers going up against the world’s second-largest meat processor, which has more than $30 billion in annual sales.

Tyson has asked the nation’s highest court to throw out a lawsuit that resulted in a $6 million jury verdict against the company in Iowa for cheating its workers out of earned overtime. Tyson doesn’t just want the case thrown out, though. The verdict at issue amounts to peanuts for the multinational corporation—a little more than two hours’ worth of Tyson’s annual profits. The company also wants the court to issue a broad ruling that would effectively immunize it against future class actions for wage and hour theft, and make it much harder for workers everywhere to join together to bring such claims. If it wins this case, Tyson could have it both ways: It could effectively continue to violate the FSLA and escape liability for it in court.

Tyson is one of three significant legal assaults on class actions before the court this term, waged by big businesses seeking to make it more difficult for workers and consumers to join together to sue them for misconduct. Weighing in on Tyson’s side in the case are other corporate giants, including Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

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Tyson Foods Wants the Supreme Court to Let It Keep Stealing Workers’ Wages

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Biden’s Abortion Record Could Cause Him Problems in a Presidential Bid

by ElwoodHartnett2 Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Democrats fret about Hillary Clinton’s electoral prospects, Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as a viable alternative and steadily risen in the polls. Unlike the outright socialist Bernie Sanders, Biden and Clinton have largely fallen into the Democratic consensus on policy issues over their decades in politics. (Their one noted area of divergence, on how aggressive America’s foreign policy should be, has not been a dominant topic so far in the presidential election.)

But there’s one domestic issue on which Biden has occasionally strayed from the Democratic mainstream during his more than 40 years in politics. Biden has been an inconsistent supporter of reproductive rights, sometimes backing the legal right of women to choose how to handle a pregnancy, while often hewing to his Catholic faith and moralizing against all abortions. Even today, when he and Clinton would most likely agree on most of the policy substance of ensuring access to abortion clinics, Biden sticks to a pro-life view in his personal politics.

During the early part of his career, abortion rights groups griped about Biden as an unreliable ally. “Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us,” a Planned Parenthood official said in 1986.

When he first entered national politics, Biden was willing to stand alongside politicians who wanted to make abortion illegal. In a Washingtonian profile published the year after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a nationwide right to abortion, Biden unequivocally criticized the ruling. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion,” he said. “I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

He put that view into practice in 1982, voting in the Judiciary Committee for a proposed constitutional amendment that would have overturned Roe v. Wade by declaring that the Constitution offered women no inherent right to abortion, and that the federal government and states would be free to regulate or ban abortion as they pleased. Under that amendment, state laws that restricted abortions would have superseded more permissive federal laws.

But Biden moderated his anti-abortion stance over the years. “I was 29 years old when I came to the US Senate, and I have learned a lot,” he said in 2007. “Look, I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.”

By the mid-1980s, Biden had become a somewhat more reliable defender of reproductive rights, at least as a constitutional matter. In his role as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden pointedly questioned conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s opposition to the majority decision on Griswald v. Conneticut, a ruling that struck down bans on birth control. Biden has since regularly boasted of his efforts to derail Bork. “Had he been on the court,” Biden said in his 2008 vice presidential debate with Sarah Palin, “I suspect there would be a lot of changes that I don’t like and the American people wouldn’t like, including everything from Roe v. Wade to issues relating to civil rights and civil liberties.”

Biden defended the constitutional right to an abortion during his presidential run in 2008. “I strongly support Roe v. Wade,” Biden said during a 2007 debate, when asked if he’d have an abortion litmus test for Supreme Court nominees. “I wouldn’t have a specific question, but I’d make sure that the people I sent to be nominated to the Supreme Court shared my values and understood that there is a right to privacy in the United States Constitution.”

But he’s never abandoned his personal opposition to abortion, even while supporting abortion rights policies for the government. “With regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position on abortion as a—what we call de fide doctrine,” Biden said in the 2012 vice presidential debate against Paul Ryan. “Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews.”

He’s hardly become the sort of clear-cut defender of reproductive rights that Democrats typically demand, particularly at a time when those rights are under assault, with frequent Republican attacks on Planned Parenthood. “I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being,” Biden said during an interview with the Catholic magazine America ahead of the pope’s recent visit, “but I’m not prepared to say that to other God­-fearing, non­-God­-fearing people that have a different view.”

Biden might claim that he doesn’t let his own religious views affect his policy positions, but his record in the Senate tells a slightly different story. During the 1990s and 2000s, Biden received hit-and-miss marks from abortion rights groups that scored congressional votes. NARAL Pro-Choice America often granted him perfect scores for his votes in the mid- and late 2000s. But there were several years when Biden received abysmal marks from the reproductive rights advocacy group. In 2003, he got a 36 percent rating (on a scale from 0, for total disagreement, to 100, for complete alignment). He struggled throughout the 1990s as well, getting a 43 percent score in 1996, a 34 percent score in 1997, and a 46 percent score in 1999. NARAL wasn’t alone in taking issue with Biden’s voting record. Planned Parenthood Action Fund also gave Biden less-than-perfect scores, including a 58 percent average between 1993 and 1998.

His disagreements with those groups largely centered on two measures: partial-birth abortions and federal funding. Throughout his time in the Senate, Biden regularly supported the so-called Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being directed to abortions. “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them,” Biden wrote in 1994. He also regularly sided with abortion opponents in the 1990s and early 2000s on bans on partial-birth abortion, or medically intact dilation and extraction. Biden approved final passage of the ban on these late-term abortions when it became a law in 2003. (Hillary Clinton voted against the measure.)

Biden avoids labeling himself as solidly pro-choice, preferring to present himself as a moderate on the issue. “I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than 30 years,” he wrote in his 2007 book Promises to Keep. “I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion, but I will also vote against a constitutional amendment that strips a woman of her right to make her own choice.”

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Biden’s Abortion Record Could Cause Him Problems in a Presidential Bid

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Kansas Republicans May Have Just Shut Down the State’s Court System

by OmerNGAosnffx Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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What happens to a legal appeal when there’s no court to hear it?

That’s the tricky question before Kansas Republicans today as they grapple with the results of their own law, which threatens to shutter the state court system.

On Wednesday night, a district judge in Kansas struck down a 2014 law that stripped the state Supreme Court of some of its administrative powers. The ruling has set off a bizarre constitutional power struggle between the Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. At stake is whether the Kansas court system will lose its funding and shut down.

Last year, the Kansas legislature passed a law that took away the top court’s authority to appoint chief judges to the state’s 31 judicial districts—a policy change Democrats believe was retribution for an ongoing dispute over school funding between the Supreme Court and the legislature. (Mother Jones reported on the standoff this spring.) When the legislature passed a two-year budget for the court system earlier this year, it inserted a clause stipulating that if a court ever struck down the 2014 administrative powers law, funding for the entire court system would be “null and void.” Last night, that’s what the judge did.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt warned that last night’s decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch.” That would lead to chaos. As Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for the Kansas judge who brought the legal challenge against the administrative law, put it, “Without funding, our state courts would close, criminal cases would not be prosecuted, civil matters would be put on hold, real estate could not be bought or sold, adoptions could not be completed.”

Both parties in the case have agreed to ask that Wednesday’s ruling remain on hold until it can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, so that there is a functioning court to hear the appeal. On Thursday, a judge granted the stay. Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case and advocates for judicial independence are preparing a legal challenge to the clause of the judicial budget that withholds court funding. Sometime in the next few months, the state Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the legislature has the right to strip the Supreme Court of its administrative authority, and whether it can make funding for the courts contingent on the outcome of a court case.

“We have never seen a law like this before,” Randolph Sherman, a lawyer involved in fighting the administrative law, said in a statement, referring to the self-destruct mechanism in the judicial budget. “It is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis.”

This story has been updated.

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Kansas Republicans May Have Just Shut Down the State’s Court System

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Kentucky Clerk Continues to Defy Supreme Court by Refusing to Issue Marriage License to Gay Couple

by Karin72Ssuvckt Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Monday night denied an emergency application from a defiant Kentucky clerk who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Today, Kim Davis, of the Rowan County Clerk’s office, is once again refusing to comply with a lower court’s order by denying marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight.

When asked by a same-sex couple on Tuesday morning under whose authority she was failing to obey the high court, Davis answered, “under God’s authority.” She then told the crowd to leave and threatened to call the police.

The Supreme Court denied Davis’s application to turn away same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses because it did not align with her religious beliefs. Her appeal marks the first time since June’s historic Supreme Court decision that the justices have had to deal with the issue again.

If she continues to defy the court, Davis could be found in contempt and face possible jail time and fines. A hearing is set for Thursday.

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Kentucky Clerk Continues to Defy Supreme Court by Refusing to Issue Marriage License to Gay Couple

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