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Been busy working on getting speakers for the Environmental Forum so I forgot about working on and sending out a newsletter over what's coming up.
Friday is Friday the 13th, and considering how the month has been going we best all be careful. lol
Saturday is a MAJOR Day of Action for abortion protests, voter registration drives and so forth. Bans Off Our Bodies Rallies
Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of May so the Boujee On The Bay Market will be at the train depot in Port Lavaca 11am to 3pm. It's fun, I bought some jam, food, and a candle last month.
Monday is the first day of early voting for the May 24th Primary Runoff. Monday May 16-Friday May 20th 8am to 5pm at the Courthouse.
Thomas Ray Garcia who was a primary candidate for State Board of Education District 2 has endorsed his former opponent Pete Garcia. This was done on March 3 but I only recently found it out.
Mobilize link to schedule and get reminders about our monthly meetings and other events.
Private FB Group for Democrats in Calhoun County to chit chat. Please post here. Memes are welcome.
If you are upset about the news that broke last night, you are NOT alone. Don't forget our May Meeting is tonight at the Port Lavaca library. The social/snacks starts at 5.30pm with the meeting itself starts at 6pm.
The following is in our newsletter.
The Fall of Roe & Casey and What's Next
Those with uteruses are about to find ourselves in a world where our rights are considerably less. Roe and Casey are about to fall.
"The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and obtained by POLITICO."
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes. https://t.co/nl3JFLx9xg
The document leaked to Politico is almost certainly an authentic draft opinion by J. Alito that reflects what he believes at least 5 members of the Court have voted to support — overruling Roe. But as Alito’s draft, it does not reflect the comments or reactions of other Justices. tweet
“We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito writes. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
Yeah, that's bullshit.
Overturning Obergfell (same-sex marriage), Lawrence v. Texas (same-sex sexual activity), Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception), and Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage) are also on the to-do list of these extreme ideologues.
This is just Alito's draft & in the process of getting 5 votes, opinions can change. Nonetheless, that he's contemplating fully overruling Roe & returning women to 2nd class citizenship is absolutely appalling. No less devastating for knowing it was possibly coming.
THREAD My Thoughts on @politico story saying the Court voted to say Roe v. Wade is fully overruled.
I’ve quickly scanned the draft opinion and it appears legitimate. This means there was a preliminary vote to fully overrule Roe V Wade and that a majority of the Court agreed.
There are lots of signals the opinion is legit. The length and depth of analysis, would be very hard to fake. It says it is written by Alito and definitely sounds like him. It’s 60+ pages long.
~
This opinion says states can criminalize abortion, with no rape or incest exception. It is exactly the hardline position I’ve been saying the Court is going to impose for the last 3 years. It will set women back in profound ways. Congress must act ASAP.
Cable news now covering it.
This kind of leak is unprecedented.
Thoughts:
If this is real it’s a clerk leak and it could be designed to push a modification. Like in Fulton v City of Philadelphia.
And if it’s real it means the gloves are off lol in terms of norms and the Court. Buckle up folks.
Republicans are coming after Sotomayor next. They are already "theorizing" it was her clerk that leaked that republican attempts at establishing a christian taliban in the US are succeeding.
Next they will remove the "theory" and just claim it to be true, regardless of facts
I’ve been informed it’s *weird* that Politico natsec reporter Alex Ward broke the SCOTUS story and my new working theory is that it wasn’t a Sotomayor clerk but that the SCOTUS email system is compromised.
Barricades outside SCOTUS since the leak was published.
The Supreme Court building now has more protections from unwanted occupants than an American woman's uterus.
Hillary Clinton: Not surprising. But still outrageous.
This decision is a direct assault on the dignity, rights, & lives of women, not to mention decades of settled law. It will kill and subjugate women even as a vast majority of Americans think abortion should be legal. What an utter disgrace.
"donate to local abortion funds in the 13 states with trigger laws now, asap, pronto:
Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming
(gonna thread)"
It's actually 26 states with trigger laws or abortion bans still on the books.
1. As a student of propaganda this one is fascinating.
Exclusive: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows https://t.co/HK36OnBWLI via @politico
2. First, if Roberts was in the majority he would likely have written the opinion. Why leak it?
First, this will likely move the Democrats into a better position to pick up in the Senate and IMO hold the House. So I could imagine a GOP strategist realizing that and trying to
3. dull the outrage. For a progressive, I can imagine that it could be a signal to @JoeBiden @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer to pass a law to moot the case. It would be great theater to watch people like Joe Manchin, Sinema and Susan Collins twist themselves in knots to justify the
4. the filibuster in these circumstances. I took my first big-league Con Law course about 37 years ago. Never seen anything like this and as a political scientists it's potentially a very big deal for November.
Do not think that this move to disempower women, will end with women. Or the move to disempower Blacks, will end with Blacks. Or trans, or LGBTQ...
This is a backlash of those who believe in and benefit from white cis male Christian patriarchy. It is coming for everyone else.
The Christian nationalist right is building Gilead in America and the Supreme Court is their deliberately, relentlessly, Federalist Society, Bush, Trump, McConnel-created weapon. And this is just the start. Buckle up women, LGBTQ people and people of color. We're all on the menu.
Connecticut has become an abortion sanctuary state.
A significant part of Mississippi's anti-choice argument to the Supreme Court was that women can "have it all" now and that pregnancy and child-rearing no longer impact economic opportunity. https://t.co/xGNxdeo5t5
This was published BEFORE today's news.
Republicans are coming for abortion rights (and every other constitutional right we hold dear) in all 50 states. The GOP will ban abortion at the federal level if they regain power. That means McConnell & Cruz would control your rights even in Blue states. https://t.co/gxLCWY9G3G
SCOOP: Top antiabortion leaders and GOP lawmakers have been meeting behind the scenes to strategize for a national abortion ban, mobilizing around a proposal that would outlaw the procedure at 6 weeks.
Here’s what I’ve learned about their plans https://t.co/U58pxdMVAQ
States have taken the lead in restricting abortion ahead of the SCOTUS decision. They will make the first moves after Dobbs — but GOP lawmakers plan to respond with federal legislation soon after that. 2/
While there was initially momentum behind a 15-week ban, sources told me that has shifted recently bc of the TX ban. Antiabortion leaders said they’ve seen little political fallout in TX, and argue the public has grown more comfortable with a 6 week ban. (Ofc many disagree) 3/
Sen. Lankford told me he has discussed a national 6 week ban at multiple meetings with his GOP colleagues in the lead up to the SCOTUS decision. Another source told me Sen. Ernst will be the one to propose the legislation in the Senate. 4/
Students for Life, one of the largest antiabortion groups, circulated a letter to every Republican member of congress at 8am this morning, urging them to support strict national measures, including the “heartbeat bill.” 5/
The conversation has been happening with possible Republican presidential candidates as well. One top leader said she’s discussed a national ban with 10 likely candidates, including Trump. Most are supportive of the idea, she said. 6/
Will pause here to say that a strict nationwide ban would be extremely difficult to pass, requiring 60 votes in the senate and a Republican president. But antiabortion leaders are eyeing the midterms and 2024 — and they’ll be using these kinds of proposals as a rallying cry. 7/
There is still some debate among antiabortion/GOP leaders about which national cap would be best: 6 or 15 weeks. Activists say they’ll use the midterms as a test run, watching how each type of proposal plays with voters. 8/
As Planned Parenthood told me when I asked for comment, none of this is particularly surprising. It’s an end game that abortion rights advocates have anticipated all along. Now it’s just out in the open. 9/9
Jane, underground abortion network, is going to rise again.
The no-frills advertisement, printed at times in student and alternative newspapers, went straight to the point: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane.” A telephone number followed.
This was nearly half a century ago, when abortion was illegal almost everywhere in the country and alternative newspapers were in their heyday. There was no Jane, though, not literally anyway. Yet at the same time, Jane was anybody.
“It was an Everywoman name,” used for everyone who once formed an underground network that provided clandestine abortion services, Laura Kaplan said. Ms. Kaplan was part of it and wrote about the experience in a 1995 book, “The Story of Jane.” That group, referred to by some as the Jane Collective, operated in Chicago and carried out thousands of abortions from 1969 to 1973. Many of the procedures were performed by medical nonprofessionals. They may have been the housewife next door, the college student down the block, the local schoolteacher.
The next time you choose to throw away your vote by voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or sitting on your hands because you think all parties are the same, remember you’ve already cost the women of America their reproductive liberties.
So... the first lawsuit I'd like to see is from a Jewish woman who has access to an abortion provider denied in a Christian Theocracy state sue that the Christian rules inhibit her religious freedom under the free exercise clause of the 1st Amendment.
She'll lose, because the conservative Supreme Court justices are nothing if not dripping wet hypocrites. But it's still the right argument to make.
The second lawsuit I'd like to see is from a woman who would like to remove not the fetus, but the placenta which is malfunctioning. That should be an equal protection claim because a man would be allowed to remove malfunctioning organs from his body.
The 3rd lawsuit should be a straight 8th amendment claim: A rape victim should argue she's being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment for somebody else's crime.
And to round it out, the 4th lawsuit should be a straight 13th Amendment claim that a person is being forced to labor against their will for no compensation, in violation of the constitutional prohibition on forced labor.
Dems could keep the house if they federalized abortion clinics and put them in abortion hostile states. Full stop.
There is not a single state where support for a federal ban on abortion has more than 30% support among the public.
Alito's draft declares that, inter alia, the right to marry a person of a different race, the right to contraception, and the right not to be forcibly sterilized, all lack "any claim to being deeply rooted in history" – which is the same reason he overrules the right to abortion. https://t.co/NJZS8sWJMo
After casting some drive-by shade on the existence of these other fundamental rights, Alito then says: don't worry, all of these other rights are different, they don't involve the "critical moral question" like abortion does, so just relax about the others, they're fine. https://t.co/NGeuARk3ZC
Dear Republicans, It’s the middle of the night and a lot of angry voters are at the Supreme Court right now. You made this a partisan court and they will remember in November. This isn’t going away… #RoeVWade https://t.co/PClKGKQs4r
10 key passages from Alito's draft opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade https://t.co/EChyKpnljr @joshgerstein
How rare is a Supreme Court breach? Very rare https://t.co/ULYdTle7aJ @joshgerstein
Gavin Newsom on California's next steps:
NEW: We are proposing an amendment to enshrine the right to choose in the California constitution.
We can’t trust SCOTUS to protect the right to abortion, so we’ll do it ourselves.
Women will remain protected here.
A party that takes away abortion rights but refuses to provide support for pregnant women who need help with medical care including birth expenses, housing, food, child care & schooling, employment, etc, is most definitely not pro-life.
Amazon will reimburse staff in the US who travel for a wide range of non-life threatening medical treatments including elective abortions.
A message to Amazon staff said that the firm will pay up to $4,000 (£3,201) in travel expenses each year for treatments not available nearby.
Several other companies have announced plans that ensure staff have access to abortions.
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