The New Yorker has an excerpt of the Peter Baker Susan Glasser book about Trump which addresses his relationship with the US military. Some of this stuff we knew but it’s still startling to see the leader of the flag-waving, “why do you hate the troops so much?” party:
The gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. The divide was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States itself. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of staff, John Kelly—like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general—about his vision for Independence Day. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.
Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.
“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic. “So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.
“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”
Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.
“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”
Yep. And a couple of years later, Trump tried to overturn a legal election and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. Who could have predicted?
Luckily, he is very stupid:
The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
The WaPo tick tock of the effort to persuade Manchin to negotiate the IRA contains this fascinating little tidbit:
Democrats did not want to squander their final opportunity to fulfill the pledges they had made to voters ahead of the 2022 election, so Schumer began work on a smaller measure — one focused on lowering prescription drug prices and insurance premiums. Biden endorsed the approach in a statement on July 15 that omitted any mention of Manchin, stressing: “The Senate should move forward, pass it before the August recess, and get it to my desk so I can sign it.”
But some in the party, long frustrated by inaction on climate change, embarked on a pressure campaign targeting Manchin anyway. A wide array of Democrats including Sens. Carper and Christopher A. Coons of Delaware, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Tina Smith of Minnesota, and Ron Wyden of Oregon each worked with their aides to canvass environmental groups, energy companies and economists who might have be able to change Manchin’s mind.
Some Democrats enlisted the likes of Summers, a former treasury secretary who had been warning about inflation for a year, to make the case to Manchin that climate spending would not imperil the economy. Others targeted Gates, the former Microsoft chief executive who has a number of clean-energy investments. He eventually rang the West Virginia senator to make the case for climate investments; his office declined to comment.
Hickenlooper, meanwhile, turned to top executives from PG&E, DuPont and other firms. “They were kind of mopey,” the senator recalled in an interview, though he urged them to call Schumer and Manchin and encourage them to keep pursuing a deal. “You can sit on your hands, or be useful,” Hickenlooper said.
A few tried more personal outreach. Only weeks earlier, Coons had huddled with Manchin on a trip to Brussels and Switzerland, discussing policy during hours of conversation. So Coons broached the topic of the fast-warming planet on Monday, July 18, making a direct plea to Manchin during a closed-door meeting in the Hart Senate Office Building.
“There are folks in our party who are saying all sorts of terrible things about you, who believe you were stringing us along for a year and that you were never going to come to a deal because of your state or because of your conflicts of interest,” a source recalled Coons saying. The comment appeared to reference long-standing concerns about Manchin’s ties to the coal industry.
Coons then told Manchin: “I can’t think of a better way for you to prove them all wrong than to sign off on a bold climate deal. Prove every critic wrong.”
Manchin thought for a second, the source said, then responded, “It would be like hitting a homer in the bottom of the ninth, wouldn’t it?”
This suggests that the Democratic base scorn of Manchin proved to be useful. That’s the inside outside game that Democrats have to play if they are going to be successful in the face of silly divas who grandstand. It’s always been that way…. (Remember Joe Lieberman, Bob Kerrey, David Boren, Ben Nelson …. on and on and on?) Sometimes it doesn’t work but this time it did. Thank God.
Nothing good is good enough. Nothing Democrats accomplish is worthy of praise. It’s an old story. Passage of the Inflation Reduction Act may make Joe Biden “one of the most legislatively successful presidents of the modern era,” but what we know for sure is it’s bad news for Democrats. If past is prologue, it won’t be just Republicans saying so.
Some on the left revel in being the turd in the punchbowl, in finding the cloud in every silver lining. So, despite what Senate Democrats just passed for improving people’s lives, we will hear more from certain quarters more about the bill’s deficiencies, compromises and sellouts. Opponents tuned into that twitchiness mean to exploit it.
Judd Legum cautions at Popular Information this morning to be careful where you heard it before sharing:
For more than a week, a group called United for Clean Power has run an extensive online advertising campaign arguing the reconciliation package negotiated by Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), which contains historic investments in clean energy, doesn’t go far enough. The ads, which have run on social networks like Facebook and at the top of prominent publications like Politico, urge progressive Democrats in Congress to “demand environmental justice or kill the reconciliation bill.”
While the legislation could go further, it provides $369 billion in funding to decarbonize the economy, making it “the single biggest climate investment in U.S. history, by far.” With Republicans favored to retake the House of Representatives in 2023, it may represent the last chance for significant legislative action to combat climate change for years. That is why the most aggressive climate advocacy groups, including the Sunrise Movement and EarthJustice, are urging Congress to approve it immediately.
Why would a group that purports to be dedicated to clean power oppose the largest investment the United States has ever made in clean power? A closer look at the group’s advertising campaign raises more questions. For example, this is an excerpt from the sponsor’s message that United for Clean Power included in numerous Politico newsletters: “The time to take action on planet-saving climate legislation is NOW. Demand true environmental justice from your Democrat colleagues or block the Reconciliation bill.” Saying “Democrat colleagues” rather than “Democratic colleagues” is an affectation of Republican political operatives, not climate activists.
Reader beware, says Legum, after digging into the origins of United for Clean Power.
Actual climate and clean energy advocates, including several from the Environmental Defense Fund, Climate Nexus, and Climate Power, have never heard of United for Clean Power. And the actual clean energy lobby, American Clean Power, denied any involvement with the group.
Caveat emptor never goes out of fashion.
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Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance posed a question on Sunday afternoon that I chew on frequently. (Yesterday morning, in fact.) Conveniently, author Teri Kanefield issued a tweet thread last night addressing Vance’s question (below) in some detail.
I don't understand this willingness of Senate Republicans to ruin the lives of people who voted for them in order to own the libs. https://t.co/tZuIIf0tAF
I think I do. Can I give it a shot? It has to do with the purpose of government. For some people (like us) purpose of government is to help people. We think fairness is possible, and that the government’s job is to try to create fairness. Others have a different worldview. 1/
Hierarchy people, in contrast, think there’s a natural order: Some people belong on top. Others are at the bottom.
They think that people with money and power have that money and power because they deserve it. 2/
An example: The white supremacy theories that informed the Confederacy.
Hierarchy people don’t believe equality is possible because they don’t think people are equal.
They think the purpose of government is to allocate power and maintain the hierarchy. 3/
When a government helps people, they think the government is taking away from the “makers” and giving to the undeserving.
When people lower than them on the hierarchy demand equality, they think those people want to “replace” them. 4/
Nineteenth-century America was a strict hierarchy (specifically, a patriarchy) with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom.
White women were kept out of the professions which kept them dependent on men, which gave men control over them. 5/
Nineteenth-century laws reinforced the hierarchy.
For example, rape laws were designed to protect (white) men from false accusations. They weren’t designed to protect women from attack. Rapes were evaluated based on where the victim and attacker were on the hierarchy. 6/
I won’t go into the details of rape laws, but you get the idea. I’ll add, though, that the laws were based on the idea that men were natural aggressors and the woman’s job was to guard the good.
Then along came the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements . . . 7/
. . . and the patriarchy was smashed.
We’re riding the backlash.
The current GOP wants to go back to the good old days of the patriarchy.
That’s why they want to outlaw abortion, make medicine expensive, and dismantle the regulatory agencies created by the New Deal. 8/
If you take a long view of history and consider how long we lived in a patriarchy (from the before start of the nation until the past few decades and we’re still not out of it yet) you can see how rapid the changes have been.
The rapid changes have unsettled some people. 9/
They really think the liberals are destroying everything good about America.
(And now I’ve written my blog post for next weekend so what will I do with my spare time this week?) 10/
Precisely: Lots of poor Whites supported the confederacy, which put power into the hands of a very few men (not them).
But think of it: They had no trouble getting a woman.
Women literally couldn’t say no because they had no options. . . 11/
The astounding thing about this very accurate assessment is that the vast majority of those who support the “hierarchy people” are not, and never will be, nor invited to be, among them. https://t.co/elmTJ3f67j
One bit of advice not on my to-do list: Hold on to your ideals.
The hierarchal worldview is deeply cynical. The fairness view is idealistic.
We can never have perfect fairness, so fairness people run the danger of becoming cynical. Positive change requires ideals. 18/
So don’t get cynical.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream.
He probably had a few nightmares as well, but it was his dreams that inspired people to work for a better country. 19/
Totally agree. Idealism has to be rooted in reality.
The belief that change can happen all at once is completely unrealistic and leads to cynicism.
History teaches us that change happens slowly and with great effort because there is always pushback.
20/
In Kanefield’s analysis, the contesting perspectives come down to personality types: “hierarchy people” versus “fairness people.”
However it’s framed, the essence of current tensions, of the white-Christian nationalist backlash, is about power: who gets to dominate whom. Nothing new about it.
George Lakoff’s clunkier explanation of the contesting worldviews comes from childrearing: a “strict father” versus a “nuturant parent” approach (he avoids the more obvious “nurturing mother.”) Priority One for conservatives is maintenance of the hierarchy.
I’ve come to use a formulation for status anxiety that I first saw Sean McElwee reference: “last-place aversion.”
Lyndon Johnson had his own:
If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you. — Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas to Bill Moyers (1960)
In the U.S., skin color is a convenient shorthand for knowing who’s who in the social order when you enter a room. People will pay good money, as Johnson saw, even resort to violence, to defend their place on the social ladder from people trying to climb up from below.
And when they try?
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!” Ned Beatty bellowed in Network (1976).
Col. Jessup’s “You can’t handle the truth!” speech from A Few Good Men (1992) frames the attitude hierarchy people have toward those below them on the social ladder. Deep down in places hierarchy people don’t talk about at parties, they want Others on the bottom. They need them on the bottom so they can go to sleep at night knowing it’s not them. Those just above the bottom rung are the fiercest about defending their status.
Try to be better than that.
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Passage of the Inflation Reduction Act will make Biden one of the most legislatively successful presidents of the modern era. We once noted that the mismatch between the size of Biden’s ambitions and his margins in Congress made it seem like he was trying to pass a Rhinoceros through a garden hose. It ended up being more like a pony, but it’s still pretty impressive.
To wit:
— American Recovery Act: $1.9 trillion
— Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: $550 billion
— Chips and Science Act: $280 billion
— Inflation Reduction Act: ≈$700 billion
That’s a nearly $3.5 trillion agenda. The scope of the issues addressed is notable: the pandemic and its economic fallout, highways, bridges, broadband, rail, manufacturing, science, prescription drug prices, health insurance, climate change, deficit reduction and tax equity.
He also expanded NATO, passed a new gun safety law and passed a bill to address the effects of vets exposed to toxic burn pits. Five out of seven of these laws — all but the two biggies, the ARP and IRA — received significant Republican support.
There’s not much debate anymore over whether Biden has been a consequential president. In the long run, his first two years may be remembered as akin to LBJ when it comes to moving his agenda through Congress.
That’s amazing.
But, as you might imagine. This is Politico so you know it’s bad for the Democrats:
The current political question is how much it will matter in the short term.
Passing legislation is no guarantee of electoral victory. All modern presidents, with the exception of GEORGE W. BUSH after 9/11, saw midterm losses two years after being elected regardless of how successful they were with Congress. For members facing reelection, voting with the president can just as easily be a political burden as a political boost. One study after the Democrats’ 2010 midterm drubbing suggested that the more a Democratic House member voted with BARACK OBAMA on his top priorities, the more likely they were to lose. Last year, Biden literally mailed checks to every American and he was repaid with lower approval ratings than any of his predecessors at this point.
In the spring, JOHN ANZALONE, Biden’s pollster, told us the political environment for Democrats was the worst he’s seen in 30 years. We talked to him this morning and his assessment has changed dramatically.
“I don’t feel like that today,” he said. “Three months ago, we were on the defensive and now we’re on the offensive.”
First, he argued, was the burst of legislation. “Part of the problem that Democrats had,” he said, “including the president, is this idea that we just couldn’t get anything done. And the fact is we got something done.”
“This president has set up in a very short time period for Democratic frontline candidates something they didn’t have a few months ago,” he said. “They were on the defensive on inflation and a host of other issues. And since then the president has helped with CHIPS and the Inflation Reduction Act and a compelling positive message: lowering drug prices, lowering energy prices, making America more energy independent, bringing the supply chain back from China, deficit reduction and making big companies pay their fair share.”
Then there’s the spate of new issues that weren’t as important earlier this year. “Republicans are out of step on abortion, guns, and Jan. 6,” he said.
“We put our last silver dollar in our slot machine and came up big,” Anzalone said. “And they were sitting there with a stack of chips and are down to just one. The turnaround is unbelievable.”
He cautioned that the change was unlikely to show up in the polls this summer. (Indeed, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll has dismal numbers for Biden, including a 37% job approval.)
“But between now and Election Day there will probably be $6 billion spent on communications,” Azalone said. “Democrats will spend about half of that. That’s a lot of money to explain what we’ve done for the American people.”
In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove takes exception with the more upbeat Anzalonian view of the midterms. “So Democrats are pumping this latest Build Back Better incarnation big time, hoping it’ll be the life raft they need,” he writes. Rove thinks the bill can be easily picked apart and turned into an albatross. “Retiring Illinois Rep. CHERI BUSTOS claims it gives her party ‘the Big MO,’ while Virginia Rep. ABIGAIL SPANBERGER proclaimed it will ‘change people’s lives.’” he writes. “Such hyperbole won’t save Democrats; voters will see that the promises don’t match reality.” But Rove also offers this warning: “The Schumer-Manchin deal won’t save the Democrats. But unhinged GOP candidates might.”
Conservative columnist Henry Olsen agrees with pieces of the Anzo and Rove analyses. Tuesday’s results in Kansas are a blinking red light for Republicans, he writes in the WaPo, and “the national GOP should try to take abortion off the table as quickly as possible.” Like Rove, he fears that poor candidates mean that the “GOP is blowing its chance to make the midterms a referendum on Democrats.”
NYT’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman argue that control of the upper chamber rests on “whether Democratic candidates in crucial Senate races can continue to outpace the president’s unpopularity.”
The AP’s Seung Min Kim and Zeke Miller note a central irony in Biden’s string of recent victories: “Over five decades in Washington, Joe Biden knew that the way to influence was to be in the room where it happens. But in the second year of his presidency, some of Biden’s most striking, legacy-defining legislative victories came about by staying out of it.”
This analysis by John Stoehr at the Editorial Board is hopeful and uplifting. I hope he’s right:
I have been skeptical of those claiming, after the US Supreme Court struck down Roe, that a backlash is brewing. It’s not that I believe people aren’t mad about losing legal protection of their right to privacy.
It’s that I believe in the wowzer power of the human mind to convince itself that terrible things aren’t so terrible.
Recent polling seemed to validate my skepticism. While some said people were more likely to see the coming midterms as a referendum on abortion rights, others said the economy was more important (inflation, the price of gas, food, etc.).
Other polls suggested people had lost so much faith in democracy that they might not vote.
Where is the backlash I have heard so much about?
I still think I’m right about polling. It can’t accurately capture public opinion in the middle of regime change – as one political order disintegrates and reintegrates to become a new political order.
I think we have been in a period of transition since at least 2010.
That’s why last night’s referendum in Kansas is so important.
Suddenly, lost faith in democracy feels premature, even silly.
More than two-thirds of voters in Kansas said no to a proposal to change the state constitution in order to let state legislators pass laws severely restricting or even outright banning abortion.
Tuesday’s vote ensures that Kansas will be a sanctuary for (limited) abortion rights in a midwestern sea of state restrictions or bans.
A vote is so much better than a poll. It is concrete. It is indisputable. It is conclusive. It’s an expression of the will of a democratic people. In this case, it was the will of the residents of a conservative state in which Republican voters outnumber Dem voters two to one.
A look in the weeds offers more reason for hope.
First, Kansas referendums don’t usually turn out votes as general elections do. But according to the AP, turnout last night was “within reach” of 50 percent. Fifty-two percent is normal for state generals.
Second, voter registration “surged” after the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to Scott Schwab, the Kansas secretary of state. That surge was, moreover, “heavily Democratic,” according to USA Today. A stunning 70 percent of new voter registration was among women.
Third, these Democratic women powered the no-vote in the state’s suburbs even though these same suburbs went to Donald Trump in 2020.
“Suburbs of Wichita and Topeka heavily voted no,” USA Today reported. “In Franklin County, where Trump won with 68 percent of the vote, 56 percent voted to uphold the right to an abortion.”
For those of us worried about the future of democracy, especially the will of a democratic people to take their destinies into their own hands, last night’s results are about as good as any of us can expect.
White women, conservative or liberal, seem to be mad as hell. They’re not going to take it anymore. Plus, they know which party is going to protect them and their rights.
It’s not the party of a former president whom they had previously and overwhelmingly supported.
Above all, they know democracy is how to get what they want.
Even though these women are registering as Democrats, and even though they know which party is going to protect them and their rights, last night’s referendum offered a curious, ironic feature.
An insistence that voting down the referendum wasn’t partisan.
A spokeswoman for Kansas for Constitutional Freedom, a bipartisan coalition, said the issue is one of commonsense. “I think that most Kansans don’t necessarily see this issue as partisan,” Ashley All said.
AA: “I know that that is kind of the frame we all tend to put on it, but that is actually not the way most people think about it,” she said. “So we really have tried to make sure that we speak to a broad audience.”
That’s important for a couple of reasons.
On the one hand, abortion may be emerging as a true wedge issue that Dems can use to pry GOP voters away from their party just enough to support Dem midterm candidates who will in turn vote to codify Roe into federal statute.
On the other hand, abortion may be emerging as a truly reasonable issue released from the burdens of partisanship – an uncontroversial issue on account of a majority wanting it to be settled – such that it drags the Democratic Party into that sweet, sweet middle of politics.
Abortion could be to our political order what civil rights (Black rights) was to the previous political order – a catalyst for change.
“Conservatism” didn’t rise from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s failed bid for the presidency. It rose from the triumphs of the civil rights movement and its backing by the Congress and the Supreme Court.
The political order launched by Ronald Reagan’s election, and consolidated by Bill Clinton’s, was the result of a white-power backlash against decades of advancement in individual liberty – advancements that rightwing politics has labored to reverse.
Voters of the kind who live in the suburbs of Wichita and Topeka were satisfied with a conservative political order that punched down as long as it didn’t change in ways considered fundamental since Roe.
But now that rightwing politics has achieved what it set out to – now that it is advancing toward the criminalization of other individual freedoms that had been settled, like when you can have kids, who you can marry and even which books you can read such moderate voters (ie, white women) seem to be rethinking their commitments.
I hope they continue rethinking.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself. It could be that Kansans voted against this referendum because it was easy to. It wasn’t attached to a candidate, thus freeing voters from having to explain their votes.
But even so, last night was important.
It reminded us to keep the faith – democratic faith.
We the people have the power. We the people have the power, no matter how dark things seem. (The GOP knows this, by the way. That’s why they work so hard to rig the rules of democracy without seeming to have worked so hard to rig the rules of democracy.)
We often get bogged down in the details of politics. Gerrymandering. Campaign fundraising. The press corps’ status quo bias. Polling that shows that Americans have lost faith in democracy. And so on.
When we do, we forget why we’re fighting.
We fight not so much to stop the authoritarian collectivism that’s creeping across the republic, though there’s no choice but to fight.
We fight out of love. Democracy is love – if we love, too.
The news from Kansas suggests we are relearning how.
I hesitate to put this up but I think it’s important that you know what’s really at the bottom of the Hunter Biden obsession. It’s The salacious details on his laptop give them thrills you wouldn’t believe. They want to “investigate” officially so that everyone in America will know about it. And needless to say they want to make Joe Biden cry like they made Edmund Muskie cry. It’s one of their grossest strategies but they just cannot resist humiliating Democrats over sexy stuff. (Why do you think they wanted so badly to see Hillary’s emails?)
Hunter Biden said his obsession with naked selfies was a result of “body dysmorphia,” according to a rambling screed found in the notes of his hard drive.
“I loved to be reassured that my 9-inch very big penis was actually big. It may sound funny to you but its [sic] body dysmorphia … I know my penis is almost twice the size of an average man’s penis,” the first son wrote on July 12, 2018. The note was found in the hard drive of a laptop Biden left at a Delaware computer store in April 2019.
In addition to his web of shady overseas business dealings, one of the most recurring and consistent themes in the abandoned laptop are homemade pornography, selfies in varying states of undress, drug use, and images he took of his manhood in various states of arousal.
Just one day after writing the note, Hunter Biden posted a series of images of himself having sex with an unnamed woman.
Ugh. I won’t put up the pictures. You’ll have to look them up if you want to see them. But rest assured, they’ll come across your timeline at some point. Be prepared.
I have written this many times. But I think Ken White (aka @popehat) says it well:
I suspect that a vast judgment against Jones won’t have much value as a deterrent or proclamation of truth. Jones is loathsomely rich because people want to consume his art. His landscapes of hate and fear and mistrust resonate with a frightening number of Americans. The people who enjoyed his Sandy Hook trutherism didn’t enjoy it because it was factually convincing or coherent; they enjoyed the emotional state it conveyed because it matched theirs. The plodding technicalities of law are probably inadequate to change their minds.
Defamation cases like this one — or Dominion’s case against Sidney Powell, or the parade of defamation claims against Trump — are just, and it’s just that the victims receive compensation. But they don’t solve the problem. America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.
Will asked me what I thought motivated the segment of Republican voters who are openly illiberal. Here’s my response:
I think they are voting on hating other Americans. . . . They have an eschatological view of the country. They know exactly who they hate. And who they hate are not the North Koreans, not the Chinese. It’s not the Russians. Those are the far out-groups. What they hate are the near out-groups. They don’t disagree with them. They hate them. And that’s what they’re voting on.
I’m not describing every Republican. Maybe not even a majority of them. But it’s clearly a share that’s bigger than 2 percent. It’s a share that’s big enough that it has nominated gubernatorial candidates in Arizona and Pennsylvania and a Senate candidate in Georgia. It’s a share big enough to have made Alex Jones and Sidney Powell rich and made Donald Trump president of these United States.
Take Ken White’s admonition and put it on a pillow: “America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.”
That’s because democracy has no solution for how to fix itself when a large enough share of the populace goes sour.
Trump: As another example, the thing they did involving Gretchen Whitmer was fake. Just like those who instigated January 6. It was a fake. pic.twitter.com/mowtEQsGMe
On Friday night, Indiana became the first state in the nation to pass a near-total abortion ban following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed the bill into law, which goes into effect on September 15.
There are some notable exceptions to the ban, allowing women to seek an abortion if the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if a lethal fetal anomaly has been diagnosed, or if the pregnant woman’s life is at “serious risk.”
The bill passed the Indiana House in a 62-38 vote, and later passed the Indiana Senate in a 28-19 vote; no democrats supported the bill, the IndyStar reported.
The new law also specified that abortions can only be performed in hospitals or outpatient centers affiliated with hospitals, meaning abortion clinics will lose their licenses. Furthermore, the law states that physicians will lose their medical licenses if they perform an illegal abortion or do not “file required reports,” as reported by Associated Press. Under the current law, doctors “may” lose their medical license if they perform an abortion; this new law’s language rids any ambiguity.
