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“It’s Really Creepy”

Yes, yes it is.

So is this:

Going Sane

The autocratic shift is not irreversible

DNC vice chairman Ken Martin and N.C. Democratic Party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton. (Photo: William West, Rocky Mount Telegram)

“Wisconsin may be stepping back from the abyss,” writes Bill Leuders at The Bulwark. New maps passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, mean Wisconsin’s legislative races will be the most competititve in years. Republicans previously engineered years’ worth of lopsided representation in a state in which Democrats like Evers can win statewide races. Now, “more than forty incumbent lawmakers, mostly Republicans, [have] to either move or run against each other.”

The change is not because Republicans have had a change of heart. So why did Republicans who rejected Evers’ appointments and refused funding for the University of Wisconsin’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts go along now? Because Democrats wrested back control of the state Supreme Court last April when voters statewide “overwhelmingly elected liberal Janet Protasiewicz” to the court:

They feared that the state supreme court’s new liberal majority would choose maps that were even less friendly to their side. “It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned, or led to the guillotine,” explained Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard. “We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.” He was speaking figuratively.

Having leverage counts. Ask Donald “91 Counts” Trump. Using it while you’ve got it counts more.

On Saturday at North Carolina Democrats’ State Executive Committee meeting in Rocky Mount, Democratic National Committee vice chairman Ken Martin, also chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), urged the assembled choir to cheer up:

Ken Martin, who was the featured speaker for the state executive committee’s winter meeting, said Saturday that he believes Democrats have the tendency to be the “woe is me” and “the half-glass empty” party.

At the meeting, held at Rocky Mount High School, Martin spoke of hearing party members saying, “This Democrat is too young. This Democrat is too old. This Democrat is too progressive. This Democrat is too conservative.”

Those complaints are hurting the party, he noted.

“We’ve got to stop that,” Martin said. “We’ve got to stiffen our spine, raise our heads, be proud to be Democrats — and we have to start evangelizing and stop agonizing.”

Martin said that the Democratic Party has an amazing story to tell — “and that’s each of your jobs as party leaders,” he added.

What the Rocky Mount Telegram does not report is Martin’s celebration of the DFL’s progressive policy wins in 2023 with a one-seat Senate margin, control of the House, and Democrat Tim Walz in the governor’s mansion. Democrats delivered “huge investmentstax rebatespaid leave, and abortion rights” and more. CBS News reported:

For the DFL, the 2023 legislative session was anything but low-key, with a wave of progressive bills passed. Cannabis was legalized, abortion access became state law, gun control measures, including expanded background checks and a red flag law, were passed. So was paid family leavefree meals for all K-12 students, felon voting rights and driver’s licenses for the undocumented

Legislative majorities are fleeting, Martin noted. It is crucial to use them while you have them. Don’t hold back. Underreach is worse than overreach.

“It is essential that we step back and recognize the tremendous progress we’re making. We need to celebrate our successes — and we need to make sure everyone else knows about them as well,” Martin insisted. “You see, if we’re not willing to take joy in our accomplishments, how can we expect anyone else to?”

Look what Biden has accomplished with his one-seat Senate margin and a House Republican blockade.

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Dirty Secret

Pay no attention to that foreign-born worker

Washington Post online top headline this morning.

“You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible,” says Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The Washington Post’s online front page this morning blares that immigration is fueling the “roaring” U.S. economy. And you thought there was a border crisis, a crisis hyped by Republicans who believe it can wait for the November election.

“About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data,” The Post reports. By the middle of 2022, rapid growth in the foreign-born labor force “closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic“:

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

Even so, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border topped 2 million in fiscal 2023 for the second straight year.

Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border to most migrants when crossings are particularly high. House Republican leadership called the legislation “dead on arrival,” which seemed all but guaranteed after former president Donald Trump came out strongly in opposition.

Opinion polls show that voters widely disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border, and Trump, who is closing in on the Republican nomination, is touting plans for aggressive deportation policies if he wins in November. Republicans have increasingly campaigned on the idea that immigrants have hurt the economy and taken Americans’ jobs. But the economic record largely shows the opposite.

It’s a presidential election year, so Republicans are playing all their greatest xenophobic hits for their conservative base.

Border apprehensions are not an issue Joe Biden can ignore, however. Perception is reality in politics. Both Biden and Donald “91 Counts” Trump, his likely Republican opponent this fall, will visit the border today to blame each other.

Another Washington Post story:

Biden will visit Brownsville, making his second trip to the border since becoming president. His trip is part of a recent effort to take the initiative on the issue of illegal immigration, which polls suggest has been politically damaging for him.

Trump, the leading Republican presidential contender, will visit Eagle Pass, a city that has become a symbol of Republican defiance against Biden’s handling of immigration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, seized a park in the city earlier this year, shutting out U.S. Border Patrol agents who had long used it as a staging point.

Biden’s visit underscores his political vulnerability after enduring sustained Republican attacks over record levels of migrants at the border. Biden recently embraced a tough bipartisan Senate proposal on immigration, saying he would use its provisions to shut down the border if crossings reached a certain level.

Republicans, who had demanded that border enforcement measures be added to a foreign aid package, blocked the measure after opposition from Trump, who said he feared its passage would help Biden address a political liability.

Republicans want their weapon.

Biden is exploring executive actions available for slowing the migration and asylum volume, but his authorities are limited. The booming U.S. economy is both a product of and an irresistible draw for migrants not just from Mexico, Central and South America, but from elsewhere in the world. Biden cannot remedy political and economic instability south of the border nor the impacts of climate change with a pen stroke. But as president, he’ll get the blame. He just cannot seem to win credit for the booming economy.

The same is true of Biden’s limited leverage over the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The U.S. has defense commitments with Israel going back over half a century that it will not abandon because Israel’s temporary leader is acting like a monster. Biden has won blame for not cutting off the Netanyahu government cold turkey, and little credit for non-public and as yet unsuccessful efforts to stop the slaughter of innocents. Ukraine may not be a NATO country, but U.S. military aid to fend off Russian aggression is cheap and in ours and NATO’s interests, yet a Republican-controlled House wants none of it. How quickly Russophiles among the Party of Trump have forgotten “fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” And Ukrainians are not asking us to do any of their fighting.

Biden wanted to be president. This is what it’s like.

If Republicans hate the immigrant flow now, just wait until Vladimir Putin’s troops move farther west.

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The Texas Stasi

If you liked East Germany ca. 1958, you’re going to love Texas in 2024

Spying on your neighbors, creating a paranoid society, was a prime method of control in the Soviet era. We used to think that was a bad idea:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender minors to state authorities if it appears the minors are receiving gender-affirming medical care. 

The directive was part of a letter Abbott, a Republican, sent Tuesday to the Department of Family and Protective Services, calling on it to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of any reported instances of minors undergoing “elective procedures for gender transitioning.”

Abbott’s letter follows an opinion released Monday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which stated that allowing minors to receive transition care such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery is child abuse under state law. 

Paxton issued the opinion after the Legislature failed last year to pass a bill that would have made it a felony alongside physical and sexual abuse to provide such care to minors. An opinion is an interpretation of existing law; it does not change the law itself but can affect how it is enforced.

In Tuesday’s letter, Abbott tasked licensed professionals who work with children — including teachers, nurses and doctors — and “members of the general public” with reporting such claims. He added that state law “provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.”

[…]

Adri Pèrez, policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQ equality at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said Paxton is trying to distract from the problems plaguing his campaign. He is awaiting trial for a 2015 indictment on charges of securities fraud, and he is under investigation by the FBI over allegations of bribery and abuse of office. Paxton’s office did not return a request for comment.

“There’s no court in Texas or the entire country that has ever found that gender-affirming care can constitute child abuse,” Pèrez said.

Brian Klosterboer, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement that neither the opinion nor the letter have a legal effect and “cannot change Texas law nor usurp the constitutional rights of Texas families.”

“​​But they spread fear and misinformation and could spur false reporting of child abuse at a time when DFPS is already facing a crisis in our state’s foster care system,” Klosterboer stated. “The law is clear that parents, guardians, and doctors can provide transgender youth with treatment in accordance with prevailing standards of care. Any parent or guardian who loves and supports their child and is taking them to a licensed health care provider is not engaging in child abuse.”

Spreading fear is the whole point.

Here’s a post from the Adam Smith Institute, a right wing think tank considered to have been the intellectual foundation of Margaret Thatcher’s program in the 1980s:

The opening of its files after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism staggered the world with the scale of its operations. It was estimated to have had 500,000 informers, although a former Stasi colonel put the figure as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.

Its purpose was to stamp out ruthlessly any dissent in the German Democratic Republic, described by Sir Alec Douglas-Home as “neither German, nor Democratic, nor indeed is it a republic.” It was in fact a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, like the other Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. Its secret police infiltrated most aspects of East German life, such as schools, universities and recreational organizations such as sports and computer games clubs.

Its agents filmed people though holes drilled in hotel rooms or in their apartments. It intercepted people’s mail and telecommunications. It had a Division of Garbage Analysis that searched garbage for signs of Western foods or other suspicious items. It stored people’s scents so that sniffer dogs could track their movements. It trained, armed and sheltered Western terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. It ran prison camps for political dissenters. It funded neo-Nazi groups in West Germany to desecrate Jewish sites in a bid to discredit the West.

The activity of spying on, intimidating and imprisoning their own citizens is something that had been practised by all Communist governments, including the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies, Communist China, and Cuba—which received help from the Stasi in setting up its own secret police. More recently it has been done in Venezuela. This is not something that just happens to be done; it is part and parcel of Communist totalitarianism that it cannot tolerate dissent and has to seek out and expunge it, no matter what the cost is to the human rights of their citizens.

It’s not the Commies anymore, is it? They have become what they once despised.

Trump’s Money Worries

He’s got problems, personally and politically

No wonder he’s acting crazy:

If President Joe Biden has any advantage going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s that former President Donald Trump’s legal fees and primary challenges are a significant drain on the Trump campaign’s finances. 

Indeed, with money playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, particularly presidential contests, both Trump and Biden are facing a very similar problem, albeit for different reasons, and to varying degrees. While both are raising less money than past candidates, and both are spending considerable sums, only Trump has to split his spending between politics and rapidly mounting legal costs. 

Despite worrisome poll numbers in a head-to-head matchup with Trump — Biden trails 44 percent to 46 percent according to the RealClearPolitics average — and just 40 percent of Americans approving of Biden’s job performance, by the end of January, Biden and his various campaign arms have accumulated $130 million in cash, raising $42 million over the last month alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.  

Moreover, 97 percent of all of Biden’s donations are coming from donors giving less than $200, and in January alone, more than 420,000 individual donors made contributions, underscoring the small-money, grassroots support Biden can count on. 

To be sure, Biden’s numbers are staggering compared to the Trump campaign, previously considered a fundraising behemoth after raising $774 million in the 2020 cycle. Today however, FEC filings show that Trump has about $30.5 million cash on hand and raised a dismal, if not extremely concerning, $13.8 million over the last month.  

Worse, Trump’s campaign spent nearly $3 million more than it raised in January, taking in just under $9 million, but spending more than $11 million, as they continue spending on the Republican primary and his mounting legal fees. 

Notably, over the last two months, the Trump campaign’s biggest expense was $4.7 million in Iowa and New Hampshire fending off Nikki Haley’s primary challenge. Not far behind, a Trump-connected PAC doled out $2.9 million to pay for the former president’s legal fees just in January alone. 

These rising costs come at the same time Trump’s personal fortune is set to take a massive hit. In recent weeks, he lost two civil trials for fraud and defamation, amounting to $438 million in penalties that, due to campaign finance laws, he cannot use campaign funds to pay.  

Look at this:

In 2019, Trump’s campaign committee collected $72 million in donations of $200 or less, according to OpenSecrets.

That amount represented a portion of the more than $378 million that was raised from around the time Trump filed to run for reelection in 2017 through Dec. 31, 2020, from small-dollar donors, according to the data. Much of that funding from small-dollar donors arrived in the election year 2020, with the campaign reeling in more than $264 million over the course of those 12 months from people who gave $200 or less to Trump.

But fast forward several years, and from November 2022 through the end of last year, Trump’s presidential campaign collected just $27 million in donations from those who gave $200 or less, according to the data.

That’s a difference of $45 million, and represents a 62.5% drop in small-dollar donations, from the year before the 2020 election, to the year before the 2024 election.

I’m sure he’ll end up raising a lot of cash and he’ll be able to get suckers to pay for his legal fees too. But it’s telling that he, of all people, is falling way behind Biden in the money wars. What this say to me is that there is more enthusiasm on the Democratic side than people think and that includes people with a lot of money and many small donors.

I think the so-called enthusiasm gap is a “vibe” and not a very meaningful one. No, Democrats aren’t running around with gigantic Biden flags and they don’t deck themselves out in Biden gear from head to toe (or buy their way into his beach club, dressed like low-rent Real Housewives) like a bunch of teenage Swifties.

What they do is vote and they’ve been crawling over hot coals to vote since the 2018 election.

Not Mincing Words

That ad is from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy. T

The ad from Campaign for Democracy, which was shared first with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” features a young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed, screaming for help while a narrator tells viewers, “Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to receive the reproductive care they need. Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage.”

“These guys are not just restricting the rights, self-determination to bear a child for a young woman, but they’re also determining their fate as it relates to their future in life by saying they can’t even travel,” Newsom told “Meet the Press” on Saturday.

Campaign for Democracy plans to run the ad in Tennessee because of two bills active in the state legislature — one in the state House and one in the state Senate — that would create the crime of “abortion trafficking,” or helping minors obtain abortions without parental consent.

The bills propose that any violation of the law, which would criminalize “recruiting, harboring, or transporting a pregnant minor, within the state, for the purpose of concealing an abortion from the minor’s parents,” would constitute a Class C felony, which carries a mandatory minimum six-year prison term.

“These travel restrictions [are] modeled after a version that passed and Idaho is now being proposed in Tennessee and Oklahoma and Mississippi,” Newsom said.

“That’s how serious this moment is. And we need to be even more aggressive,” he continued.

Those laws are the stuff of Handmaid’s Tale nightmares. This is happening in America in 2023.

Take Action, Fergawdsakes!

Get that discharge petition going, Democrats.

The Laptop Smear From Hell

With the news that the House Judiciary Committee Republicans are a bunch of useful idiots, those former intelligence officials who sounded the alarm about this whole Hunter Biden smear campaign feel vindicated:

The allegation that Smirnov was spreading new falsehoods about Joe Biden with an election looming hearkened back to an episode from the 2020 election, when the question of whether Russian spies were trying to smear Joe Biden was first raised.

Derogatory information, purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop, had surfaced in a New York Post article. Soon afterward, 51 former intelligence officials signed and blasted to the media a letter warning that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The letter continued: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

The laptop data included embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden with prostitutes — and emails that detailed his business dealings in Ukraine and China. The mainstream media largely ignored it, while Twitter and Facebook put restrictions on the sharing of the New York Post story.

After mainstream news organizations verified portions of the laptop material, the letter became a focus of anger among Donald Trump and his supporters. They branded the group of mostly Biden supporters as “spies who lie” and accused them of election interference, saying their letter suppressed coverage of a story that reflected poorly on their candidate.

The House Judiciary Committee hauled some of them in for sworn interviews, and in May published a report titled, “How senior intelligence community officials and the Biden campaign worked to mislead American voters.” Some received death threats.

Now, many of those former officials say they feel vindicated by the allegations against the FBI informant.

No public evidence has emerged pointing to a Russian government role in how the laptop materials were made public. But the former officials say the materials fueled stories consistent with Russian efforts to accuse Biden of corruption that persist to this day — and that therefore they were justified in sounding the alarm.

Ken Dilanian tweeted this further explanation this morning:

NBC also published this today:

Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts. 

The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.

A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said this month that Russia has launched a barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June.

With Donald Trump opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine and claiming that he once warned a NATO leader that he would “encourage” Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn’t pay its share in defense spending, the potential rewards for Russian President Vladimir Putin are high, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.

“Not that they didn’t have an incentive to interfere in the last two presidential elections,” said Schafer, who tracks disinformation efforts by Russia and other regimes. “But I would say that the incentive to interfere is heightened right now.”

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that there’s “plenty of reason to be concerned” about Russia’s trying to interfere in the 2024 election but that he couldn’t discuss evidence related to it. He added: “We’re going to be vigilant about that.”

U.S. officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a “deepfake” audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a “hack and leak,” such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016. 

The details of what they are doing should motivate all of us to take our bullshit detectors in for a tune-up. We’re going to need them to be working perfectly.

He’s Weaker Than They Say, Folks

The GOP primaries are giving us some interesting information

Of all the 2024 political events I believed were irrelevant, the GOP primary campaign has been at the top of the list. But I was wrong. As it turns out these primaries, which have commonly been touted in the media as decisive evidence of the Donald Trump juggernaut going into the fall election, are illustrating a major weakness in his coalition and its one that we have been seeing since the day after he won the 2016 election. There is a substantial faction of Republicans and Republican leaning voters who simply cannot stand him.

Yes, he is overwhelmingly popular among his MAGA base which makes up about three quarters of the GOP and the majority of them are blindly devoted to the man no matter what he does. They are not just enthusiastic about voting for him they are ecstatic. The media sees this as a sign that he is virtually unbeatable even to the extent of pushing the narrative that he is the front runner for the general election and Joe Biden is on the ropes despite the polls saying that the race is very close.

It’s not that he is in any danger of losing the nomination. He is on track to wrap it up very quickly and has won every race so far going away. His last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, insists that she isn’t “going anywhere” (always a weird thing for a losing candidate to say) but after her defeat in her home state on Saturday, her biggest donor, the Koch Network, is pulling out and it’s only a matter of time before she runs out of money. Trump is going to be the nominee.

But we knew that. There was never any doubt from the time he announced his candidacy. He’s been the president in exile running the Republican Party from his gaudy social club in Mar-a-Lago from the moment he left Washington on January 20, 2021. And except for a few brief moments after January 6th and the 2022 election, his popularity among the faithful barely waned. It was always his for the taking and if he didn’t stand to make a higher profit from fundraising if he declared later in the cycle he would have declared his candidacy immediately, as he did when he first became president.

Given that the majority of Republicans believe Trump actually won the 2020 election, he’s basically running as an incumbent. Now that we’ve had the first Republican primaries a pattern is emerging that suggests that as an incumbent candidate, Trump is weaker than the narrative that’s been laid out would have us believe.

Donald Trump can’t win the general election with just his hardcore MAGA base. He must expand his coalition and he’s not getting that done. In every state so far, he has under-performed expectations. Nevada was a very weird situation with both a primary and a caucus so it’s hard to discern what the electorate was saying there but in Iowa, New Hampshire and S. Carolina, a solid 40% voted against Trump.

It’s a primary so that’s not unusual. But who makes up that 40% is a problem for Trump. He’s completely lost self-identified liberals which isn’t surprising. But moderates have abandoned him as well, along with the GOP leaning Independents. And the ongoing shedding of college educated and suburban voters has not abated. It doesn’t matter so much in the MAGA centric GOP primary, but he cannot afford to lose those voters in the general election. His numbers aren’t adding up.

He dominates rural America but that’s it. As Axios put it:

If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.

Fortunately, that is not a majority of American voters.

One of Trump’s biggest liabilities is his ongoing insistence on flogging the Big Lie about the 2020 election. While it’s true that 70% of Republicans believe President Biden was not legitimately elected, of the 30% who believe he was, the vast majority have voted against Trump in these primaries. Yet, that remains a huge part of Trump’s pitch, even now, and there is a large faction that simply aren’t following him down that rabbit hole.

He won’t shut up about it. On Sunday night he did an interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier who surprisingly grilled him on the subject asking him what he would say to the female suburban voter who feels that way. Trump insisted that he won and angrily repeated his usual litany of lies about stuffed ballot boxes and bogus analyses in the face of Baier’s attempts to push back with the facts. He was trying to give Trump the opening to say something like, “it’s fine if someone believes that but I think my record as president and my plans to make America great again will be enough to convince the voters that I’m the best man for the job” but he just couldn’t do it.

Around 20% of GOP primary voters (59% of Haley voters in S. Carolina) say they won’t vote for Trump in November. Will they vote for him anyway? Who knows? But most of them aren’t voting for him in the primaries so far and he’s going to need every last one if he wants to win back the White House.

Despite all this it’s likely that Nikki Haley will be out of the race after Super Tuesday and everyone is wondering what it is she thinks she’s been doing since the writing was on the wall pretty much from the beginning. She’s clearly not going to be chosen as Trump’s running mate and her recent sharp remarks about him have placed her firmly in the anti-MAGA camp, rendering her future in the current GOP pretty tenuous. But you will notice that aside from her differences with Trump on foreign policy, her critique is simply that he can’t win.

She has said this over and over again and her calculation may be that even if she ends up endorsing him, which is entirely possible, she will still be virtually alone among her peers in going on the record warning the party that he will lose in November. If he wins, it’s all over for her anyway and if not, she has some credibility as the one who sounded the alarm. I don’t know if the party will reward that but what choice does she have?

She’s spent the last year with fellow Republicans and Independents who are telling her they will never vote for Trump again. Maybe she’s convinced they really mean it. After all, it only takes a handful of voters in a handful of swing states for her to be right.

Salon

The Freedom Except Party

Don’t want to intrude on your personal decisions, but….

https://x.com/MollyJongFast/status/1761924148161335434?s=20

Note: The story below is not about new Missouri legislation to prevent divorce during pregnancy, but efforts by a Democrat to remove the existing state ban. The headline frames it badly, but in a clickbait way.

X-user The Volatile Mermaid tweets, “Missouri law says pregnant women can’t get divorced, in case you were under the false impression that Republicans care about protecting life. It’s. All. About. Controlling. Women.”

Freedom. It’s another case of Republicans and “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

WDAF-TV:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – As it stands, Missouri judges cannot legally finalize a divorce if a woman is pregnant.

Three other states have similar laws: Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. While a couple can still file for divorce in Missouri, the court must wait until after a woman gives birth in order to finalize child custody and child support.

When it comes to domestic violence, there’s no exceptions.

“It just doesn’t make sense in 2024,” said State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat representing District 14 in Platte County, and that’s where it becomes a problem for her.

She introduced a bill this legislative session that essentially says pregnancy cannot prevent a judge from finalizing a divorce or separation.

“I just want moms in difficult situations to get out if they need to,” she said.

Abuse the spouse, abuse the child?

A report from Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services says out of 10,098 women surveyed between 2007-2014, nearly 5% were abused either before or during pregnancy. That equates to about 500 women.

“This legislation could literally save lives,” added Matthew Huffman with the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, which works to ensure its advocates have the resources needed to provide services to rape and abuse survivors. “For abusive partners they might be using reproductive coercion and control to keep their partner pregnant so that they can’t ever actually be granted a divorce.”

Aune is working on the problem. Nonetheless:

The bill is still a work in progress, and despite Aune’s passion to change the law she said she doesn’t feel hopeful that it’ll get to Governor Mike Parson’s desk this session.

Still, the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence considered it a ‘top priority.’

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.