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What you need to know about Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland

by SidneyFelan Posted on March 16, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama announces Judge Merrick Garland of the United States Court of Appeals as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

What you need to know about Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland

By on 16 Mar 2016commentsShare

President Obama is nominating former federal prosecutor and chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Merrick Garland to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat. In his Wednesday announcement at the White House, Obama emphasized that Garland is “is widely recognized not only as one of America’s sharpest legal minds but someone who brings to his work a spirit of decency, modesty, integrity, even-handedness, and excellence.”

Here’s what else we know:

He’s a moderate. 

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Garland has spent most of his career in public service, and according to SCOTUSblog, his record shows that he is “essentially the model neutral judge.” This fun little New York Times graph shows Garland somewhere between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan on the ideological scale; however, he appears to have some conservative tendencies when it comes to criminal justice, and as a federal judge he rarely voted in favor of criminal defendant appeals, according to ThinkProgress. Obama was likely seeking a nominee Republicans have supported in the past in the hopes their opposition now would look even more politicalized and extreme. In fact, seven sitting Republican senators confirmed him for the D.C. Circuit in 1997. Just one week ago, Senator Orrin Hatch praised Garland, calling him “a fine man.”  And as Ed Whelan — a former Justice Department appointee under George W. Bush — once said, Garland is “the best that conservatives could reasonably hope for from a Democratic President.”

But that doesn’t mean Republicans won’t fight the nomination anyway. 

Republicans are planning to not even hold hearings for the nominee until after the election. They hope to win the White House and appoint a conservative judge, so they don’t care much how qualified the nominee may be. After Obama introduced an emotional Garland in the White House Rose Garden, Mitch McConnnell issued the Republican response, which was basically, “Hellllll no.” McConnell even referred to what he has cleverly named “the Biden rule,” a reference to Joe Biden’s 1992 statement that an outgoing president shouldn’t fill vacant Supreme Court seats. Hatch, a former Senate Judiciary chairman, issued a statement Wednesday, that Garland “is a good man, but he shouldn’t be brought up in this toxic environment,” adding, “I’d probably be open to resolving this in the lame duck.” Climate change-denying Sen. James Inhofe also got in on the action, tweeting, “While I will evaluate the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, the next president should be the one to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.” No surprise there.

Greens can breathe easy. But not too easy.

Garland is an avid outdoor enthusiast, as President Obama mentioned in his speech — and if you appreciate nature, it seems like you’re more likely to want to save it, so that’s a good thing. Garland also wrote a 2004 D.C. Appeals Court decision ruling that, under the Bush administration, the EPA neglected smog standards as required by the Clean Air Act. That’s also a good thing. In addition, Garland was on the federal appeals court that upheld mercury and air toxics standards for power plants in 2014, which was a big win for the EPA (and the planet).

In 2010, amid rumors that he may be nominated for the Supreme Court, Tom Goldstein wrote for SCOTUSblog that Garland has often sided with the EPA over the course of his judicial career: “On environmental law, Judge Garland has in a number of cases favored contested EPA regulations and actions when challenged by industry, and in other cases he has accepted challenges brought by environmental groups.  This is in fact the area in which Judge Garland has been most willing to disagree with agency action.”

With Obama’s Clean Power Plan in the balance, this nomination is hugely important — which is exactly why Republicans in Congress will oppose him. And if they get their way, the closest Garland may get to SCOTUS robes is the coat check on visitor day.

As the Sierra Club wrote in a statement, “President Obama has done his job, now it’s time the U.S. Senate does its job by holding a hearing and a timely vote for this well-qualified, impressive nominee as soon as possible.”

We’ll see.

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What you need to know about Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland

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Samantha Bee Just Perfectly Explained What’s Wrong With the War on Women

by MarcoClare Posted on March 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments for Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a case many are describing as the most consequential abortion decision to face the high court in decades.

To help explain what’s at stake for women and how the case could could affect abortion clinics nationwide, Samantha Bee recently dedicated a segment of her new show to a conversation with one of the legislators who crafted HB 2, the 2013 Texas anti-abortion law central to the dispute. But once Bee sat down with Texas Rep. Dan Flynn, it became obvious that he didn’t know too much about women’s health, reproduction, or the lack of evidence that the HB 2 restrictions, which have radically curtailed reproductive rights in his state, are medically necessary.

“I’m not a doctor,” he said at one point. “I don’t know, but I’ve listened to many doctors tell me about the procedures that happen when you do an invasive surgery.”

Bee looked stunned. “You don’t seem to know anything specifically about abortion really at all, and yet you did all this with building regulations,” Bee responded.

For more on the war on women and background on Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, read our deep-dive here.

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Samantha Bee Just Perfectly Explained What’s Wrong With the War on Women

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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

by KarolynHDG Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have officially announced that they aren’t willing to even hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee—no matter who it is.1 There’s all the usual argle bargle about needing to “protect the will of the American people” blah blah blah, but none of that matters. They’re doing this because they want to do it and they have the power to do it. I doubt that Democrats would act much differently under similar circumstances.

That said, you can add me to the huge crowd of observers who are puzzled by the political tactics here. The obvious question is: Why refuse to even hold hearings? That just makes Republicans look sullen and obstructionist. Why not hold hearings normally, drag them out a little bit, and then vote down whoever Obama nominates? The result is the same, but Republicans look more like senators and less like small children throwing a temper tantrum.

I suppose the answer is that this is a good way of firing up their base, and they think that’s more important than appealing to the center. Fair enough. But that raises another question: What’s the best way to fire up the Republican base? I’m not trying to troll anyone here, but it seems like the answer is to hold hearings. That would keep the whole Supreme Court issue front and center for months on end. The base would be faced almost daily with the prospect of what a liberal justice would do; talk radio would go nuts; and there would be endless chances to find specific problems with the nominee—many of which would coincidentally require the production of reams of files and records to trawl through.

Democrats, conversely, would have less to get fired up about. Sure, they’d be unhappy, but they wouldn’t be able to carp endlessly about Republican obstruction. Their guy is getting a hearing, after all.

So it seems like holding hearings normally would be a better way to fire up the GOP base and a better way to keep the Democratic base a little quieter. It probably wouldn’t make a huge difference either way, but it’s still a win-win. What am I missing here?

1After which they undoubtedly went out for a beer and shared their bewilderment about the fact that so many Republicans have been trained to vote for a guy like Donald Trump. What could possibly have driven them in such a direction?

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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

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Breaking: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Is Dead at 79

by JohnnieVernon5 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a ranch outside Marfa, Texas, on Saturday, according to multiple news reports. He was 79. The death was confirmed by Texas governor Greg Abbott, in a statement posted to Twitter on Saturday afternoon:

According to an ABC affiliate, KVIA, Scalia died in his sleep last night after a hunting trip.

This is a breaking news post, and we will be updating it with new information as it becomes available.

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Breaking: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Is Dead at 79

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The Supreme Court Just Did Serious Damage to the Fight Against Climate Change

by LawannaCrossley Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court dealt a blow to President Barack Obama’s climate agenda Tuesday evening by putting his flagship greenhouse gas emissions rules on hold. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices granted the stay in response to a lawsuits by coal companies and two dozen coal-reliant states. The plaintiffs have argued that by setting new limits on carbon pollution from power plants, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is overstepping its authority to control the electricity sector.

The ruling is far from a death knell for the Clean Power Plan, as the policy is known. Rather, it allows power companies and state official to hold off on preparing for the new regulations until the courts decide whether the administration went too far. The cases will most likely end up in front of the Supreme Court sometime next year, so there’s still plenty of time before the plan’s fate is sealed.

According to Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, the Court’s track record on EPA regulations is pretty favorable for environmentalists.

“Every regulation from EPA is attacked legally,” she said. “There might be delays, but there is almost always a rule that come out the other end.”

But in the meantime, the ruling could throw a wrench in the delicate diplomacy surrounding the global climate agreement reached in Paris in December. One defining feature of the Paris summit that made it the most successful round of climate talks in two decades was the leadership of Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials. It was the Clean Power Plan that gave other countries confidence that the US was finally willing to do something about its own massive carbon footprint. In other words, the plan was supposed to be Obama’s proof that the US would follow through on its Paris promises. Now, the trust of other big polluters—China, India, the European Union—could be shaken. That could have a chilling effect on climate action around the globe.

“I think the stay raises doubts in other countries’ minds,” said Jake Schmidt, international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I’m already getting a lot of questions and confusion from policy analysts abroad. There will be a lot of outreach to explain what this really means.”

Their concerns may well be justified—even if the Supreme Court ultimately does rule in favor of the administration. That’s because, regardless of the case’s final outcome, yesterday’s stay will make the Clean Power Plan more vulnerable if a Republican wins the presidential election in November. All of the leading GOP candidates have vowed to roll back Obama’s climate agenda. (Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both promised to carry it forward.)

The problem is the timeline, explained Robert Stavins, director of Harvard’s Environmental Economics program. Until yesterday, state regulators and power companies were in the early stages of putting together their plans to comply with the regulation. But with the stay in place, power companies can push off the investments and upgrades required by the plan—switching coal-fired power plants to natural gas, improving efficiency on the electric grid, building more wind and solar energy, etc. That means that by the time the next president takes office, the power companies will have sunk less capital into implementing the plan, and will have less incentive to see it survive than if they had already made those investments, Stavins said. With that potential roadblock out of the way, a Republican president would have an easier time killing the plan.

“That’s a subtle chain of causality, but it’s the one that—if understood—may reasonably cause concern to other countries regarding the ability of the USA to live up to its Paris promises,” Stavins said.

Still, at least in the short term, the US doesn’t need the Clean Power Plan to follow through on its initial Paris commitments, Schmidt said. The US will be required to submit its first progress report under the agreement in 2020, a couple years before the Clean Power Plan was originally scheduled to take effect. Moreover, he said, even if countries such as China and India are spooked by the Supreme Court’s new ruling, they’re unlikely to jump ship on their own climate plans.

“When you look at what’s happened over the past couple years, it’s really hopeful that the US is moving forward,” Schmidt said. “But most countries aren’t moving forward solely on the basis of what the US is doing.”

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The Supreme Court Just Did Serious Damage to the Fight Against Climate Change

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

by SondraChesser Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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You can’t avoid campaign finance reform in the run-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. It feels a little weird to type that, given the continuous series of setbacks reformers have suffered on that issue over the last decade, but it’s true. Talk to anyone at a Bernie Sanders rally and it’s the first thing that comes up; on the Republican side, Donald Trump has made his lack of big donors a centerpiece of his campaign.

Even Jeb Bush, whose $100-million super-PAC, Right to Rise, is blanketing the airwaves here in the Granite State (and has a spin-off dark-money group, Right to Rise Policy Solutions), says something needs to be done. Taking questions at a Nashua Rotary Club on Monday afternoon, Bush told voters that it will take a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and stop the glut of dark money entering the political process:

The ideal thing would be to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that allows effectively unregulated money for independent groups, and regulated money for the campaigns. I would turn that on its head if I could. I think campaigns ought to be personally accountable and responsible for the money they receive. I don’t think you need to restrict it—voters will have the ability to say I’m not voting for you because some company gave you money. The key is to just have total transparency about the amounts of money and who gives it, and to have it with 48-hour turnaround. That would be the appropriate thing. Then a candidate will be held accountable for whatever comes to the voters through the campaign. Unfortunately the Supreme Court ruling makes that at least temporarily impossible, so it’s going to take an amendment to the Constitution.

Now, Jeb hasn’t turned into Bernie Sanders. He’d just like unlimited donations that aren’t anonymous, and he’d like whatever is disclosed to be disclosed a lot quicker. The subtext here is that while Bush is benefiting from a nonprofit that accepts anonymous unlimited donations, his backers have expressed a lot of frustration with outside groups supporting Jeb’s rival, Sen. Marco Rubio. Right to Rise chief Mike Murphy said last fall that Rubio is running a “cynical” campaign fueled by “secret dark money, maybe from one person.”

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Even the Guy With the $100 Million Super-PAC Says Campaign Finance Is Broken

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Here’s the Latest Reason Republicans Are Afraid of a Hillary Clinton Presidency

by AnnmarieE89 Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Supreme Court nominations, thanks to a lifetime appointment if confirmed, are always one of the most important parts of presidential administrations elections but rarely get much attention on the campaign trail. But at a campaign stop in Iowa City Friday afternoon, Ben Carson suggested to caucus voters that they had a new reason to fear Hillary Clinton becoming president: put her in the White House and you’ll end up with Barack Obama on the Supreme Court.

If there’s “another progressive president,” Carson said, “and they get two or three Supreme Court picks—one of them being Obama—America’s toast. Your children and grandchildren, they’re toast.”

Carson isn’t the first candidate to suggest this possibility—from either party. Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton said she would consider nominating Obama to the Supreme Court when she was asked about putting Obama on the bench at a town hall in Iowa. “I mean, he is brilliant and he can set forth an argument,” she said. That proved to be fodder for Sen. Marco Rubio at Thursday night’s debate. “Hillary Clinton this week said Barack Obama would make a great Supreme Court justice,” Rubio said. “The guy who systematically and habitually violates the constitution on the Supreme Court? I don’t think so.”

In terms of campaign trail fear mongering, it’s actually not a crazy suggestion. Obama did, after all, teach constitutional law classes before entering politics full-time. And he wouldn’t be the first president-cum-justice, though it’s been quite a long while since the last one, nearly a century. Only William Howard Taft has made that transition, appointed in 1921. But, as MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted, Obama told The New Yorker in 2014 that being a judge would “a little bit too monastic” for him. The White House also shot down the idea earlier this week.

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Here’s the Latest Reason Republicans Are Afraid of a Hillary Clinton Presidency

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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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