MAGA Report Cards — Abortion

State of the State: Texas Is 40th Overall. Greg Abbott and Texan Republicans in Congress Aren't Helping.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:59:28 +0000

Texas is big and Texas is rich. But on the things that decide whether a Texas family gets by — enough food on the table, safe care for a pregnant woman, a fair start for a kid — Texas keeps landing near the bottom.

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Add up the 17 measures we track across all 50 states and Texas ranks 40th. That number describes where the state already is. It does not, by itself, prove any one politician put it there.

Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015, and many of the decisions behind those numbers are his rather than Washington's: whether Texas expands health coverage, who regulates the grid, where school money goes, what a doctor is allowed to do for a miscarrying patient.

Republicans also hold 24 of Texas's 37 filled U.S. House seats, both of its Senate seats and the attorney general's office. One House seat is empty, and that's a story too. Here is what all of them did on top of the numbers above, and what each has been busy with instead.

What Texas's Republicans in Congress voted to cut

Texas is already 49th of 50 states on food insecurity, from the USDA's own data — second-worst in the country at feeding people — and it already has the highest uninsured rate of any state, for children and adults alike. Its Republicans in Congress then voted for a budget bill that cut both health coverage and food assistance. Take them one at a time.

KFF's allocation of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates projects that Trump's budget bill will leave 480,000 more Texans without health insurance by 2034 — 1.4 million once you count the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025 and that the bill did not extend. Texas also stands to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

That lands on a state where, in 2024, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey put 13.6% of Texas children and 21.6% of working-age Texas adults without any coverage at all — the highest rate in the country in both cases, against national rates of 6.0% and 11.3%. And the hole is not only Washington's doing. Texas, under Abbott, is one of the few states that never expanded Medicaid, which the Texas Tribune reports has contributed to that rate. Turning the expansion down was a decision made in Austin, and it is his.

Another $10 billion is stuck on top of that. The Trump administration is holding up Medicaid payments Texas hospitals were counting on, which the Texas Hospital Association counts at $27 million a day. Ken Paxton fought that exact case against the Biden administration, won it, and put out a news release calling it a "major nationwide legal victory." Against this administration, he has filed nothing.

On food: 1 in 4 Texas kids faces hunger, and about 3.47 million Texans — 11% of the state — get SNAP benefits every month. The same bill squeezed that program too.

Every Texas House Republican named below voted for it.

What 49th on women's health looks like

Texas ranks 49th of 50 states on women's health and reproductive care, from the Commonwealth Fund's state scorecard. Second-worst in the country. Here is part of why.

Texas has a near-total abortion ban, and Abbott signed it. On May 19, 2021 he signed the law that banned abortion after about six weeks and paid members of the public at least $10,000 to sue any doctor who performed one. "Our creator endowed us with the right to life," he said at the signing ceremony. The law took effect that September. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a criminal law followed, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison.

Doctors then started waiting. ProPublica's statewide analysis of hospitalizations for second-trimester pregnancy loss found that after the ban, the rate of sepsis in those cases jumped more than 50%.

Josseli Barnica's case is what that waiting looked like. She was 28, a mother, and 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to a Houston hospital on September 3, 2021, days after the law took effect, with a miscarriage her doctors recorded as "in progress." More than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica that her doctors should have emptied her uterus then to head off an infection. Instead her husband arrived from a construction site to hear what she said the medical team had told her: "They had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion."

She waited 40 hours. Three days after she delivered, she died of an infection — sepsis, her autopsy said, with "retained products of conception." The experts who reviewed her records called her death preventable, and called the case "horrific," "astounding" and "egregious."

Barnica never asked for an abortion. Neither did Nevaeh Crain, who was 18, or Porsha Ngumezi. Texas's own Medical Board has since disciplined three doctors over the care those last two received — one for discharging Crain while she had a 103-degree fever and had screened positive for sepsis. Each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education.

Even the Republican-led Legislature conceded something was wrong and passed a bill to clarify the ban's medical exceptions. The ban itself stands.

The data centers

The biggest new fight in Texas isn't in Washington. It's over giant warehouses full of computers that run artificial intelligence, and the electricity and water they drink.

Greg Abbott spent years bringing them here. In November 2025 he stood next to Google's CEO and called Texas "the epicenter of AI development." The grid operator now says companies have asked to pull 474 gigawatts off the Texas grid — more than five times the most electricity Texas has ever used at once — and about 90% of those requests are data centers. We laid out that record here.

Then, in August of an election year, Abbott announced a pause and an audit. Regulators set the delivery date for the report at December 10. Election Day in Texas is November 3. Texans vote 37 days before the state tells them what it found.

Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner, a Republican, called the pause "smoke and mirrors" and said Abbott is stalling so his donors' projects can be grandfathered in.

The public schools

More than nine in ten Texas kids sit in a public school. The state spent this year moving money the other way.

The private school voucher program is Abbott's. He campaigned on it, and on May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion bill creating it, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. Texas launched the program for 2026-27 with that $1 billion. In September 2026 the state's comptroller, Don Huffines, asked the Legislature to double the program's base funding to more than $2 billion. Nearly 110,000 students have been funded and more than 106,000 families are on the waitlist. Paying for the waitlist too, the comptroller's office said, would come to about $4 billion over two years.

Here is the part that decides who this is for. State data shows that 70% of the families who have joined the program or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home-schooling. This is not mostly money helping kids leave a failing public school. It is mostly money for families who had already left.

Meanwhile the public schools are cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, educator training and special education, and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. Before last year's bill, Texas students had gone six years with no comprehensive funding increase at all.

And Texas is short of teachers. The state employs more educators on H-1B visas than any state in the country, and districts use those visas for jobs they have already tried and failed to fill locally — above all bilingual education, which sits on Texas's own official teacher shortage list, in the state with the largest share of students learning English in the country. Abbott says he wants "exactly zero", and he wants it to reach the teachers already standing in Texas classrooms. In the rooms Texas cannot staff, it would become illegal to keep the teacher who took the job.

Three of the Texans below — Keith Self, Randy Weber and Brandon Gill — went a step further and cosponsored a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

Texans are still paying for the last grid failure

Before the data centers, there was Winter Storm Uri. 246 people died. Craig Goldman chaired the Texas House Energy Resources committee in the session that followed, and his committee advanced a bill that put $3.5 billion of the gas companies' storm costs onto customers' bills through April 2039. The weatherization rules passed after the storm have caught almost nothing, and a 2025 state audit found why: regulators issued two violations across 8,732 inspections, and never compared what companies actually did to the state's own best practices. The gas companies set their own standard, and passed.

Texans will be paying that off for another 13 years, while the grid takes on the biggest new load in its history.

The agency that let that happen is Abbott's too. He appoints the Public Utility Commission's board, which was expanded from three members to five after Uri, and the Tribune reported that he took over the search for the grid operator's chief executive — a process he has no formal role in — with one person involved saying he had "total veto power."

What it costs to live here

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Abbott named the thing Texans tell pollsters they care about most and promised to fix it. "Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability," he said. He has been governor since January 2015. Here is what those eleven years did to three of the bills that arrive at a Texas house.

Property taxes. Abbott signed an $18 billion package in 2023 and called it the largest property tax cut in state history. By the comptroller's own count, statewide property tax levies were $51.2 billion in his first year in office and $89.4 billion in 2025. He is now running on cutting them in half by zeroing out school property taxes on homesteads, a promise that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the state's 4.1 million renters.

Homeowners insurance. "The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said on August 24, 2026, ordering the insurance commissioner he appointed to do something about it. In 2025 the Legislature killed both bills that would have addressed it: a roof-hardening grant program that passed the House, and a rate-approval bill that passed the Senate. Insurance was not among the seven emergency items Abbott named that February, and not among the eighteen reported on his summer special session call either.

The electric bill. The data centers above run on a sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost the state $3.2 billion over two years, and the grid operator's own $33 billion transmission expansion shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers. Abbott now says data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers." He also wants to break up the San Antonio utility that says it has the cheapest residential rates in the state, on behalf of retail providers whose political action committees have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Three bills, one shape. The problem built for a decade while he held the office that could act on it, and the answer arrived in the campaign.

The seat that isn't being filled

On April 14, 2026, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned from Texas's 23rd District. He quit amid allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer who later took her own life, an affair he had denied and then essentially admitted in a talk-show interview. Abbott has still not called a special election, and the seat is not on track to be filled until January — roughly 260 days empty. A Democrat resigned in California the same day. Voters there have already picked his replacement.

That is the empty seat: about 800,000 Texans with nobody voting for them.

The Republican nominee waiting for that seat is Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber who called a child a "c*m trophy" while attacking Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook shooting. When reporters asked Texas Republicans about it, they walked away. He has also called Social Security "a joke" after his own campaign website promised to protect it.

The rules of the election itself

Texas ranks 46th of 50 on voter turnout. Its Republicans have spent the year working on the map and the polling places rather than the turnout.

In 2025 the Legislature redrew the congressional map mid-decade to target five Democratic-held seats. Two federal judges blocked it, finding "substantial evidence" that it was racially gerrymandered in a 160-page opinion. The Supreme Court cleared it for use in the 2026 midterms anyway, over the dissents of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson.

Underneath that, the same work is happening county by county. Galveston County held its March primary under one map and adopted a different one in June, telling a court the reason was to "increase partisan performance." Tarrant County's Republican majority voted to cut 92 Election Day polling places, taking the state's biggest swing county from 316 sites in 2022 to 224 this November.

The rolls themselves are moving too. More than 1.2 million Texans sit on the state's voter suspense list, over 6% of all registered voters, with the election weeks away. Abbott has said Texas caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls. His own office had confirmed 581.

The candidates up for reelection

Texas sends 24 Republicans to the U.S. House. The seventeen running for reelection in 2026 have a report card on this site. Here's something about each of them:

August Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee and wrote the blueprint for the next budget bill, saying the point of the process is that Democrats can't block it.
Beth Van Duyne called this "the golden age of DOGE." The Government Accountability Office then reported that DOGE couldn't show its work on 96% of its claimed grant savings.
Brandon Gill filed a bill to stop people from buying a hot meal with food stamps. The option he calls a loophole exists for SNAP recipients who are elderly, disabled or homeless.
Brian Babin's campaign paid the Federal Election Commission $26,700 after a donor pleaded guilty to funneling $37,000 in corporate money to it through his own employees.
Craig Goldman — the Uri bill above. His one law in Congress so far killed an efficiency rule the Energy Department said would save $1.3 billion.
Jake Ellzey announced a "historic investment" in rural health care. He voted twice for the law that made it necessary, which cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid.
John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013. When 150 constituents held one for him, they brought a life-size cutout.
Keith Self calls the national debt "an existential threat to our Republic," voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Lance Gooden is under House Ethics investigation. The committee won't say what it's about; Gooden says it's his spending. His first move was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."
Michael Cloud wrote a bill that would put every federal agency on a countdown to abolition — including the ones that warn Texas about hurricanes.
Monica De La Cruz told donors on leaked audio that "it's not that people don't like me, it's that people don't know me yet." She has never held an in-person town hall.
Nathaniel Moran spoke against site-neutral Medicare payment, the one change that would lower what patients pay for the same service. The hospital lobby has given him $20,000.
Pat Fallon sits on the Oversight panel built to work hand in hand with DOGE and went on Fox Business to call it a chance to "fix our Republic".
Pete Sessions put it in writing that a $7 billion Ponzi schemer was "a man of great strength, character and financial stability".
Randy Weber has represented the Texas coast for 13 years. He called $5 million for the Ike Dike a win; the barrier carries a $35 to $57 billion price tag.
Roger Williams, a second-generation auto dealer, slipped an exemption for car dealers into a rental-car safety law at midnight. It got him an ethics investigation and was stripped out.
Ronny Jackson kept paying for a private Amarillo dining club with campaign money after the ethics office told him to stop, and changed what he called it.

And the party's Senate nominee is Ken Paxton, the sitting attorney general, whose own party's voters picked him over a record of indictments, an impeachment and abuse-of-office findings that we laid out in full.

Above them all on the ballot is Greg Abbott, who has been the Governor of Texas since 2015. He signed the six-week abortion ban that pays strangers $10,000 to sue a doctor, in the state that ranks 49th on women's health. He signed the $1 billion voucher bill, where 70% of the families taking the money had already left the public schools. He spent years recruiting the data centers, then flip-flopped when it became politically convenient. And he is running on affordability after property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion in his first year to $89.4 billion, and home insurance premiums rose 79%.

Compare Texas to Other States →

A Texas Deputy Searched 80,000 Surveillance Cameras for a Woman Who Took an Abortion Pill. Then an AI Wrote Part of the Report About It.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:01:31 +0000

In May 2025, a deputy at the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in Texas ran a search across a national network of more than 80,000 license plate cameras to find a woman. She was not wanted for a crime. She had taken an abortion pill.

The person who wanted her found was her abusive partner.

On September 2, 2026, 404 Media's Jason Koebler reported what the sheriff's own records say about that search — documents obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. Two things in them are worth sitting with.

The deputies knew there was nothing to charge her with

The incident report was written in part by an artificial intelligence tool — Axon's Draft One, which generates police narratives from body camera audio. Sergeant Damien Bethel used it. Here is what the machine wrote about that day's conversation:

Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law.

So the same case file contains both a nationwide camera search for her and the deputies' own conclusion that she had broken no law. The passage saying so was drafted by software.

That is the part that should stop you. A search of 80,000 cameras is a serious use of state power. Part of the document recording it was produced by a tool that turns audio into prose, and the prose it produced contains the admission that no law had been broken.

Flock's CEO told police customers a different story

Flock Safety is the company that runs the camera network. Its chief executive, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly told the story a different way. In leaked audio of him briefing the company's law enforcement customers — obtained by 404 Media, recorded by Signal Akron — he said the woman "was in an abusive relationship and the family was concerned that she was in danger."

That reframes everything. A worried family looking for a woman in danger is a sympathetic reason to search. It is also not what happened.

The police records contain no mention of a concerned family. The request came from her abusive partner. The company's CEO described a search initiated by the abuser as one initiated by relatives worried about the abuse.

Flock's police customers heard the version with the concerned family in it.

Why the camera network matters more than the one case

The point of a system like this is that a local deputy can query cameras far outside his jurisdiction. One officer in one Texas county reached 80,000 cameras nationwide.

Now put an abortion ban next to it. Eighteen states ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and Idaho makes it a crime — two to five years in prison — for an adult to transport a pregnant minor toward an abortion her parents do not know about, with no defense that the abortion itself happens in a state where it is legal. In 2025, an estimated 142,000 people crossed a state line for abortion care. The infrastructure to track a car's movements across the country already exists, is privately operated, is sold to any department that can pay, and — on the evidence of this case — gets used on a woman nobody could lawfully charge, at the request of the man abusing her.

This particular search happened in a state where, as the deputies themselves worked out, taking the pill is not a chargeable offense. The system does not check that first. The deputy does, afterward, in a report an AI helps write.

Texas has been buying this quietly

Texans have been paying for these cameras without being asked. A board appointed by Greg Abbott turned a $1 fee on every car insurance policy into at least $30 million of Flock cameras — money collected to fight catalytic converter theft, spent on a network that logs where people drive. Abbott shut the program off the night before the Texas Tribune published the story.

Shutting off one funding stream does not delete the cameras, the searches already run, or the records of where people went.

What the record shows

In May 2025, a Johnson County, Texas deputy searched more than 80,000 license plate cameras nationwide for a woman who had taken an abortion pill, at the request of her abusive partner. The incident report — written in part by Axon's Draft One AI — records that deputies had determined no Texas law made her chargeable. Flock Safety's chief executive later told the company's police customers that the woman's family had asked for the search out of concern for her safety. The sheriff's records mention no family at all.

Source

Jason Koebler, "Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion," 404 Media, September 2, 2026. Records obtained by Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald. Image: Spumoni Collective for 404 Media.

The 18 States That Banned Abortion at Six Weeks or Earlier Now Have Nearly Double the Ectopic Pregnancy Death Rate of the States That Didn't.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:58:55 +0000

An ectopic pregnancy is when a fertilized egg implants somewhere it cannot survive — most often in a fallopian tube instead of the uterus. It is almost never viable. Left alone, it grows until the tube ruptures, and the woman bleeds internally. Treated in time, it is routine. One shot of medication, or a short surgery, and the patient goes home.

Doctors have a phrase for a death from this. "A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event," Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN, told ProPublica.

It is no longer a never event. On September 9, 2026, ProPublica published an analysis of death records showing that almost 200 women died after an ectopic pregnancy from 2020 to 2025 — about twice the roughly 100 who died in the previous six years.

Where the women are dying

The deaths are not spread evenly across the country. ProPublica separated the states that ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier from the states that never enacted a ban at all, and compared the death rates for 2023 through 2025. Six states whose bans came later, were struck down quickly or never took effect are in neither group.

	Ectopic pregnancy deaths per million live births
States with a strict abortion ban	13.1
States without a ban	7.1

The eighteen states in the first group are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

In those states the death rate is close to twice what it is in a state that did not pass a ban.

Texas: 310 more patients who hemorrhaged

Deaths are the end of the line. Before a woman dies after an ectopic pregnancy, she hemorrhages.

ProPublica looked at Texas hospital records and found that 310 more patients suffered substantial blood loss after an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 and 2024 than in 2018 and 2019 — an increase of about 29%.

Those cases will never appear in a death count. They are the near misses, and there are far more of them than there are deaths.

Why a ban would touch this at all

Many of these states' bans say in terms that they do not apply to ectopic pregnancy. Treating one is not an abortion under those laws.

That is not the mechanism. The mechanism is what happens in an emergency room at 2 a.m. when the ultrasound is ambiguous and the doctor is doing arithmetic about a felony.

"Seeing a mass is not the only reason to have high suspicion for an ectopic pregnancy," emergency physician Dr. Rebecca Nerenberg told ProPublica. Early on, an ectopic pregnancy often does not show up clearly on a scan. Experts told ProPublica that doctors should be able to treat when other symptoms are present — plateauing pregnancy hormone levels, bleeding, abdominal pain — because the downside of waiting is a ruptured tube and catastrophic bleeding. Under a criminal ban, waiting for certainty starts to look like the safer choice — for the doctor.

Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act in 2025 to clear this up. The state medical board's guidance still turns on what the ultrasound shows, which is the exact situation where the scan shows nothing yet.

We have a Republican member of Congress who lived this

The mechanism is not a theory. It happened to a sitting Republican congresswoman, and she has described it herself.

In May 2024, Kat Cammack was five weeks pregnant in a Florida emergency room when doctors found the pregnancy was ectopic and her life was at risk. They knew what she needed. By her own account they hesitated because they "were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail." She looked up the Florida statute on her phone and called the governor's office. Hours later she got the drug.

Cammack was a member of Congress with the governor's number. She still waited. Florida is one of the eighteen states in the top row of that table.

Her conclusion was that the law was fine and the doctors were misinformed. ProPublica has now counted what happens to women who do not have the governor's number.

The people who wrote these laws are still going

The eighteen bans are state laws, but the Republicans who run for federal office keep promising to take them national.

Todd Blanche told a private prayer call he would work to make the Dobbs decision "permanent in every single state" before being confirmed as Attorney General. Cammack's own Dismemberment Abortion Ban Act would make a standard second-trimester procedure a federal crime punishable by two years in prison, with no exception for rape, incest or the patient's health. Tom Tiffany backed a national ban and then deleted it from his website when he started running for governor.

None of them are proposing to ban treatment for ectopic pregnancy. That was never the danger. The danger is the criminal penalty sitting next to the doctor's decision, and every one of these proposals adds more of it.

What the record shows

Almost 200 women died after an ectopic pregnancy in the United States from 2020 to 2025, roughly double the number in the previous six years. In the eighteen states that ban abortion at six weeks or earlier, the death rate for 2023 through 2025 was 13.1 per million live births, against 7.1 in states without a ban. In Texas alone, 310 more patients suffered substantial blood loss after an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 and 2024 than in 2018 and 2019. These bans make exceptions for treating an ectopic pregnancy. They did not have to ban it — attaching a prison sentence to the decision was enough.

Source

"Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It's Worse in States With Abortion Bans," ProPublica, September 9, 2026. Chart: ProPublica.

These 188 Republicans Voted to Lock the Supreme Court at Nine Seats While Republican Appointees Hold Six of Them

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:11:10 +0000

On September 2, 2026, the House voted on a change to the United States Constitution. Not a bill. Not a spending fight. An amendment to the founding document itself — one that would have written a single sentence into it: "The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine justices consisting of one chief justice and eight associate justices."

It failed, 212 to 206. Amendments need two-thirds of the House, and it did not come close. But 211 Republicans voted for it, and 188 of them have a report card on this site.

The number nine is not in the Constitution

That is the part worth sitting with. The founders wrote Article III and left the size of the Supreme Court blank on purpose. As the federal courts' own historians put it, the Constitution "leaves for Congress to determine the size and responsibilities of the Court."

And Congress has determined it, over and over. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created a Court of six. A seventh justice was added in 1807. An eighth and a ninth in 1837. A tenth in 1863. In 1866 Congress shrank it back to seven. In 1869 Congress settled on nine, and there it has stayed ever since.

Five changes. Every one of them made by ordinary law, by the elected representatives of the people, exactly as the founders designed it.

What they were actually voting on

The amendment would not have frozen the justices themselves. Justices still die. Justices still retire. Seats still come open, and whoever is president when that happens still fills them. That much stays the same.

What the amendment would have frozen is the number — and, more to the point, it would have taken that number out of Congress's hands and put it somewhere Congress cannot reach. An ordinary law can be changed by the next Congress. A constitutional amendment can only be undone by another constitutional amendment: two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Thirty-eight of them.

So the question is not really about the number nine. It is about who gets to decide, and when they decided to stop deciding.

The timing

Six of the nine sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Three of those six — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — were put there by Donald Trump. The other three justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were appointed by Democrats.

That six-to-three majority is not an abstraction. It is the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional right to an abortion in this country and handing the question to state legislatures. Six of them ruled for Mississippi. Five of the six voted to throw out Roe itself — Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts would not go that far, writing that he would "take a more measured course."

Republicans chose this moment — with that Court seated and that record on the books — to try to bolt the door shut behind it.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania said on the floor that the amendment would "lock in for a generation or more a right-wing majority." Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called it "another partisan power grab." The office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told members it would "strip Congress of yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people's representatives."

Who pushed it

The amendment was written by Arizona's Andy Biggs, who is now running for governor of his state. He introduced it on the first day of this Congress and picked up exactly two cosponsors along the way: Georgia's Rick Allen and Kansas's Derek Schmidt. The House Judiciary Committee sent it to the floor on a 15-to-8 vote in June, and Speaker Mike Johnson brought it up for a vote on September 2.

Biggs argued the change was about fairness across administrations. "If a sitting majority can change the size of the Supreme Court the moment it dislikes rulings, what happens the next time the other side is in power?" he asked. In a statement after the committee vote, he said special interests were "threatening to pack this iconic American institution to ensure favorable outcomes for their causes," and that his amendment would "protect the Court's legitimacy."

North Carolina's Mark Harris said the push from the left was meant "to consolidate power and intimidate the court."

Here is the trouble with that argument. There is exactly one bill in this Congress to add seats to the Supreme Court. Texas Democrat Al Green introduced it on May 4, 2026, it would raise the number from nine to thirteen, and it has picked up zero cosponsors. It was referred to the House Judiciary Committee — the committee Republicans run — and it has not moved since. No hearing. No markup. No vote.

So nothing was being stopped on September 2. What was on the floor was a permanent change to the Constitution, offered by the side that currently holds the advantage, at the exact moment it holds it. If the principle really is that the rules should be the same no matter who is in power, the year to write it down is not the year your own appointees hold six of the nine seats.

Only one Democrat, Rep. Don Davis of North Carolina, voted yes.

Who voted to freeze the Court

188 Republicans with a report card on this site voted for the amendment. Here they are, grouped by state:

Alabama: Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt

Alaska: Nick Begich

Arizona: Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar

Arkansas: Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack

California: David Valadao, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Tom McClintock, Vince Fong, Young Kim

Colorado: Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert

Florida: Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Carlos Gimenez, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin

Georgia: Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

Indiana: Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

Kentucky: Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer

Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise

Maryland: Andy Harris

Michigan: Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett

Minnesota: Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

Missouri: Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

New York: Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis

North Carolina: Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

Ohio: Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson

Oklahoma: Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry

South Carolina: Joe Wilson, Ralph Norman, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons

Tennessee: Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett

Texas: August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

Virginia: Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin: Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

House Roll Call 293, September 2, 2026 — the official record of every member's vote
Full member-by-member XML from the Clerk of the House
The text of H.J.Res. 1 as reported to the House
The Federal Judicial Center on Congress's power over the Court's size

Andy Biggs Deleted the 'Defending Life' Page From His Campaign Website. Everything on It Is Still His Record.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:08:32 +0000

If you visited Andy Biggs' congressional campaign website in November 2025, you found a section titled "Defending Life." It carried anti-abortion talking points and boasted about his work to defund Planned Parenthood.

Go to his campaign website today and biggsforcongress.com sends you to his campaign for governor of Arizona. Look under "Issues." There is nothing there about abortion at all.

The Copper Courier's Robert Gundran found the old page in the Wayback Machine and then did the obvious thing: checked whether the record behind it had changed too.

It hadn't.

What was on the page he took down

Biggs has held office in Arizona since 2003 — the state House from 2003 to 2011, the state Senate from 2011 to 2017, and Congress since 2017. Across all of it, on this one subject, he has been consistent.

In the legislature he backed parental consent requirements and limits on insurance coverage for abortion.

In Congress:

He co-sponsored the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act, which would require providers nationwide to perform an ultrasound, make cardiac sounds audible, and describe an embryo's dimensions before a patient could consent to an abortion. A provider who skipped any of it could face civil penalties.
He backed the Life at Conception Act, which would redefine "person" to include a fertilized egg — the zygote and blastocyst stages, before implantation — and extend 14th Amendment protection to every stage of pregnancy. That could produce a national abortion ban by another route. We wrote in July about the five separate times he co-sponsored it, most recently in January 2025.
He voted for a law requiring clinicians to tell patients that a medication abortion could be "reversed" — a claim that is unproven and dangerous.
He repeatedly supported defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides low-income women with annual checkups, cancer screenings and pregnancy care.

None of that came off a website. It is in the bill records and the roll calls.

Arizona voted the other way, and he was asked about it

In 2024 Arizona voters passed Prop 139, writing a constitutional right to abortion into the state constitution — by a margin that, Reproductive Freedom For All's Arizona director says, carried every single legislative district in the state.

The Arizona Capitol Times asked Biggs' campaign whether, as governor, he would support an attempt to repeal Prop 139.

His campaign advisor did not answer the question, and insulted Gov. Katie Hobbs instead.

That is the same maneuver as the website. Not a reversal — a silence.

What a governor can actually do here

Prop 139 limits how far any Arizona governor can go. It does not make the office irrelevant, and the Copper Courier's reporting lays out exactly where the reach still is.

Signing bills the current governor vetoes. In 2025, House Republicans advanced what critics called a backdoor abortion ban: it would require AHCCCS, Arizona's Medicaid program, to bar Medicaid dollars from any provider that performs or "promotes" abortion. A clinic that so much as educated patients about abortion could be blocked from taking Medicaid patients for anything — checkups, cancer screenings, prenatal care. Hobbs vetoed it. A Governor Biggs would not have to.

Amendments nobody sees coming. In 2021, state Sen. Sine Kerr — now Biggs' running mate for lieutenant governor — attached an amendment to HB 2140, a bill about license plate designs, that would have made it a felony for a physician to perform an abortion after detecting a fetal heartbeat. The Senate Appropriations Committee adopted it. The bill was never scheduled for a floor vote and died. The tactic didn't.

Undoing an executive order with a signature. In 2023, Hobbs signed an order moving all abortion-related prosecutions to the Arizona Attorney General's office, taking that power away from county attorneys. Attorney General Kris Mayes has said she will never prosecute abortion. A governor can cancel an executive order on day one.

The courts. Gov. Doug Ducey expanded the Arizona Supreme Court and reshaped the commission that screens judicial nominees. Those judges are still there.

And an unconstitutional law is not a harmless one: opponents have to contend with years of litigation while the law stays in place. Athena Salman, Arizona director for Reproductive Freedom For All, points to a pending challenge over whether nurse practitioners can provide early abortion care — they're trained to, and Arizona law bars it. It was filed at the end of February 2026, and Salman says oral arguments aren't scheduled until May 2027.

The rest of the record he isn't advertising

The Copper Courier notes what else is on Biggs' 23-year ledger: he opposed funding for the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund, voted against making Juneteenth a federal holiday, denies climate change, and personally blocked a bill banning texting while driving for new drivers with learner's permits. He chaired the House Freedom Caucus.

What the record shows

Andy Biggs spent more than two decades building an anti-abortion record — ultrasound mandates, a bill defining personhood from fertilization, votes for medication-abortion "reversal" language, and repeated attempts to defund Planned Parenthood — and boasted about part of it on a page called "Defending Life." That page is gone from his campaign site, and his governor's site says nothing about abortion. Asked directly whether he'd support repealing the constitutional protection Arizona voters passed in 2024, his campaign declined to answer and attacked his opponent instead. The record he removed from the website is the record he would bring to the governor's desk.

Source

Andy Biggs scrubbed abortion from his site, so we checked his record — Robert Gundran, The Copper Courier, August 24, 2026. Photo "Andy Biggs" by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Asked If He'd Work With Abbott to Reduce Texans Coming to New Mexico for Abortions, Gregg Hull Said 'Fully Committed.' Then He Said It Was Out of Context.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:04:22 +0000

On August 11, at a Republican Party of Lea County meet-and-greet in Hobbs, a woman in the audience asked Gregg Hull a very specific question.

Not a general one about cooperating with neighbors. A specific one:

"You mentioned abortion tourism. When you become governor, what will your relationship with Governor Abbott be like? And will you commit to meet with him to address the problem of abortion trafficking to New Mexico and do what we can to reduce Texans coming to New Mexico for abortions?"

Hull's answer, in full, began: "Yeah. Oh no, I'm fully committed to working with Governor Abbott."

He said his team had "already reached out" to Abbott. He said that if Abbott is reelected this fall, "absolutely, we're committed to working with Governor Abbott on all of these issues."

And he closed with this:

"As I said before, I'm pro-life, so we're gonna see what we can do."

The walk-back

A week later, on August 18, the New Mexico Political Report and The Paper. called him about it. Hull said the comments were taken "out of context."

"There was one guy there from Texas — he specifically asked me, are you willing to work with Governor Abbott? I said I'm always willing to work with anybody. Of course they're going to take that out of context, but it is what it is."

Two problems with that.

First, the person who asked was a woman, not "one guy," and the outlet published the transcript. Read it again above. She did not ask whether he'd work with any governor. She asked him to commit to meeting Abbott specifically to reduce the number of Texans getting abortions in New Mexico.

Second, "I'm always willing to work with anybody" is not what he said. What he said was "fully committed," then "absolutely, we're committed," then "I'm pro-life, so we're gonna see what we can do."

Nobody misquoted him. The full transcript is published. What changed between August 11 and August 18 is who was listening.

He also told the reporter that his outreach to Abbott's office was just a hello: "I've reached out to him just to say hello, to make contact, but I haven't had any response back."

Why Hobbs, of all places

The room where Hull said this is not a random room.

Hobbs is one of the New Mexico towns that tried to shut abortion clinics down on its own. In late 2022 and early 2023, Hobbs and Clovis passed ordinances with tough licensing requirements aimed at abortion clinics, built around the Comstock Act — an 1873 federal anti-vice law. Lea County, where Hobbs sits, added a $300 fine for each use of the mail to help someone get an abortion. Roosevelt County went furthest, letting private citizens sue a clinic for at least $100,000 per violation.

On January 9, 2025, the New Mexico Supreme Court blocked all of them, unanimously, because state law overrides them.

So Hull was standing in front of the county that lost that case, being asked to bring in the governor of Texas. And he said he was fully committed.

What "state funds" actually means here

Hull told the reporter his real objection is narrower — he doesn't want New Mexico taxpayers paying for abortions for people from other states.

"Right now our state funds out-of-state parties coming in to pay for those procedures here in the state. I don't think our taxpayers should be paying for that. If we have out-of-state individuals coming here and receiving services at the expense of New Mexicans, that's a problem for me."

Understand the scale of what that touches. New Mexico borders two states with total abortion bans — Texas and Oklahoma — and it has become one of the country's main destinations for people traveling for care as a result. The Guttmacher Institute counted 8,230 patients who traveled from out of state to get abortion care in New Mexico in just the first six months of 2023, one of the largest increases in interstate travel anywhere in the country.

That is the population Hull is describing. A policy aimed at "out-of-state parties" in New Mexico is not a small carve-out — it points at a large share of everyone the state's clinics see, and the woman who asked the question in Hobbs clearly understood that. She said so out loud: "reduce Texans coming to New Mexico for abortions."

"Unless the legislature flips"

Hull's other defense is that he couldn't change the law anyway. "The legislature has passed the law, and unless the legislature flips, this doesn't change." He told the reporter it wasn't fair to say he'd roll back reproductive rights because "I wouldn't have the authority to do that without legislative support."

That is a statement about arithmetic, not about what he wants. He is not saying he wouldn't. He is saying he couldn't — yet. In the same breath he said he isn't currently backing specific candidates or legislation on the issue.

A governor has a veto pen, an appointments list, a budget, and a bully pulpit. Hull is telling New Mexicans that none of that counts because the legislature is the legislature. He is also telling a room in Hobbs that he's pro-life and "we're gonna see what we can do."

Both of those cannot be the honest version.

This is the pattern

It is the same move we've watched Hull make on other issues. He wouldn't rule out "scaling back" Medicaid in the state where Medicaid covers 42% of residents — more than any other state in the country. He wants voter ID across New Mexico, the state that wrote the first Native American Voting Rights Act. And he'd like to cool AI data centers with fracking wastewater in a state running out of water.

Say the hard thing to the friendly room. Soften it for the reporter. Hope nobody plays the tape.

This time somebody printed the transcript.

Hull faces Democrat Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary, in November.

Source

Kevin Hendricks, "Hull says he is 'fully committed' to working with Texas Gov. Abbot to stop New Mexico aid for Texans seeking abortions in New Mexico", The Paper. and New Mexico Political Report, August 18, 2026. Photo: Source New Mexico.

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.

Rob Bresnahan Said Washington Shouldn't Decide Abortion. Ninety-Three Days Later He Voted for a Federal Abortion Law.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:03:11 +0000

On July 7, 2026, Rob Bresnahan launched something called the "Women for Rob" Coalition — more than 80 women across the five counties of Pennsylvania's 8th District, organized around his re-election campaign and his record.

One of the co-chairs put the pitch this way: Bresnahan's work on a hospital breast care center "is just one small example of the ways he has been a champion for greater investments in women's health services."

Three and a half weeks later, a teenager from Waverly Township wrote to The Times-Tribune to say she had checked the record.

"As a teenage girl, I don't understand how any woman can trust him to improve the lives of women and families when he voted for legislation that threatens their access to basic health care. Rob is no friend to women, despite what his campaign would like you to believe."

— Sarah Heine, in The Times-Tribune, August 2, 2026

She's right, and the record is worse than her letter has room for. Here it is.

What he told voters in October 2024

Bresnahan and then-Rep. Matt Cartwright met for the district's only debate on October 22, 2024, at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. Asked about abortion, Bresnahan was unambiguous:

"I would not support a federal ban on abortion under any circumstances."

And he explained the principle behind it:

"I don't believe a federal representative in Washington, D.C., should be making those decisions."

"You put it on the ballot, you allow the voters to decide what's best for their state."

That is not a hedge. That is a stated theory of his own job: a member of Congress has no business legislating on this, and the voters of each state should decide.

He beat Cartwright two weeks later.

What he did ninety-three days later

On January 23, 2025 — his third week in office — the House voted on H.R. 21, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. It passed 217 to 204. Every Republican who voted, voted yes. Bresnahan was one of them.

H.R. 21 is a federal law about abortion. That's what it is. It reaches into delivery rooms in all fifty states and threatens doctors with a fine and up to five years in prison over how they handle the most wrenching late-pregnancy cases. We've written in detail about what the bill actually does to a family choosing comfort care for a dying newborn — including that a born-alive infant has been a legal person under federal law since the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, which H.R. 21 cites by name. The new work this bill does is the treatment mandate and the prison term it lays on physicians.

More than a dozen medical groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, called it "a dangerous government intrusion into medical care."

Ninety-three days earlier, in a hall in Wilkes-Barre, Bresnahan had said a federal representative in Washington should not be making those decisions. Then he went to Washington and made one.

Then he closed the Medicaid door at the clinic on North Main Street

The bigger vote came in July.

On July 3, 2025, Bresnahan voted for the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which passed the House 218 to 214. Buried inside it was a provision barring Planned Parenthood from billing Medicaid for a year — as Heine's letter put it, a ban on "federal Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion health care services."

WVIA reported what those services are at Planned Parenthood Keystone: prenatal care, birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, STI testing. Keystone had seen 5,253 Medicaid patients in fiscal 2024, and for the first eight months of the ban it kept treating them unpaid — until, Reed later told the Times Leader, "we just couldn't afford to keep doing that, and so we began referring them out."

Keystone is the affiliate that operates the Wilkes-Barre Health Center at 101 N. Main Street — in Bresnahan's district, and the closest Planned Parenthood clinic for anyone in Luzerne County. Its services list includes birth control, STD testing, prenatal and postpartum care, and wellness and preventive care.

"We will do everything we can to maintain continuity of care and ensure our doors stay open," Keystone's president and CEO, Melissa Reed, said at the time.

Note what the coalition co-chair praised him for in July 2026: investments in women's health, specifically a breast care center. Breast exams are on the list of things his vote stopped Medicaid from paying for at the clinic in his own district.

A year of it, measured

The ban ran until July 3, 2026. The Times Leader reported what a year without Medicaid did nationally, comparing October 2025 through April 2026 with the year before:

Birth control pills dispensed: down about 25%
IUD and other long-acting contraception visits: down 26%
Breast exam visits: down 20%
STI testing: down 10%
Nearly 30 clinics closed

Forty percent of Keystone's patients had been on Medicaid before the ban. It lost $1.2 million in Medicaid and Title X funding. One business day after the ban lapsed, Medicaid patients were back to 20% of its caseload — "that number is just continuing to grow," Reed said. The Wilkes-Barre clinic's own page still carries the notice: Medicaid accepted again starting July 6, 2026.

That is the cost of the vote, and it is not abstract. It happened to specific people in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties who put off a cancer screening because the appointment stopped being covered.

This is a habit, not an accident

The pattern here — say the reassuring thing to a swing district, then vote the other way — is the throughline of Bresnahan's first term.

He campaigned on banning congressional stock trading, then became one of the most active traders in Congress and took a victory lap on a "ban" that wouldn't have touched his own conduct. In February 2025 he pledged that "if a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it" — and his own office's numbers said more than 200,000 Medicaid recipients live in the 8th District, over a quarter of its population. He voted for the cuts in May and again in July.

He isn't the only Republican in a tough seat trying to put distance between himself and this record. In Michigan, Bill Huizenga deleted his campaign website's anti-abortion page the day after a poll showed him trailing. Bresnahan's version is to build a coalition instead.

What the coalition doesn't say

Read the "Women for Rob" announcement again. It lists hospital services, working families, "access to quality healthcare." It does not mention H.R. 21. It does not mention the vote that stopped Medicaid at the Wilkes-Barre clinic. It does not mention the debate stage where he promised he wouldn't legislate on this at all.

A campaign gets to choose what it puts in a press release. Voters get to choose what they weigh. A teenager in Waverly Township did the weighing in under 200 words and got it right.

We deserve better than a congressman who says one thing at King's College and votes the other way ninety-three days later.

Sources

This post draws on the "Women for Rob" coalition announcement as published by The River Reporter (July 7, 2026), Sarah Heine's letter in The Times-Tribune (August 2, 2026), and WVIA's coverage of the 2024 debate and of Planned Parenthood Keystone. Photo: Jordan Wilkie / WVIA.

Russ Fulcher Led the Brief Asking the Supreme Court to Let Idaho Turn Away Pregnant Women in Emergencies. Six Got Airlifted Out of State.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:22:10 +0000

In February 2024, Russ Fulcher and Sen. Jim Risch led a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Moyle v. United States. They rounded up 93 House members and 24 senators to sign it.

The question in front of the Court was narrow and enormous: when a pregnant woman arrives at an Idaho emergency room in a medical crisis, does federal law still require the hospital to stabilize her — even if the treatment she needs is an abortion, and Idaho law makes that a felony?

Here is how Fulcher described the case in his own press release:

"The case of Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States involves an elective, induced abortion which is against Idaho law."

That is not what the case was about. Elective abortion was never what the United States was asking for. The case was about women whose water broke months before viability, women bleeding, women going septic — and doctors who did not know how close to dead a patient had to be before they could act without going to prison.

We know exactly what happened while Fulcher's side was winning, because Idaho's largest hospital system counted.

Six people, three months

The federal law at issue is EMTALA — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, signed by Ronald Reagan. It requires any hospital that takes Medicare money to stabilize anyone who shows up in an emergency, regardless of ability to pay. It was written to stop "patient dumping."

A federal judge had blocked Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban in EMTALA emergencies. On January 5, 2024, the Supreme Court put that block on hold while it took the case — so from January until late June, Idaho's ban applied in the ER.

Dr. Jim Souza, chief physician at St. Luke's Health System, described what that did to his doctors:

"Is she sick enough? Is she bleeding enough? Is she septic enough for me to do this abortion and not risk going to jail and losing my license? When the guessing game gets too uncomfortable, we transfer the patients out at a very high cost to another state where the doctors are allowed to practice medicine."

The numbers he gave in April 2024:

All of 2023, with the injunction in place: one pregnant patient airlifted out of Idaho.
Three months without it: six.

"If we annualize that, we can anticipate up to 20 patients needing out of state care this year alone," Souza said. And he was blunt about what it costs the patient: "Putting somebody in a whirlybird and flying them to another state creates an obvious delay in care that puts the patient's health and life at risk."

Six Idahoans in a medical emergency were put on aircraft and flown to another state because the doctors standing in front of them were afraid of a felony. That happened during the window Fulcher's brief was asking the Court to make permanent.

What the Court actually did

On June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court dismissed the case without ruling on it and put the block back in place, 6-3. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would have decided the case rather than dismiss it, called the result delay rather than a victory.

So Fulcher lost — but only for a while, and only on the merits nobody reached.

After the 2024 election, Trump's Justice Department moved to dismiss the government's case entirely, on March 5, 2025. That dissolved the injunction protecting Idaho doctors. St. Luke's had seen it coming and filed its own suit against Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador.

On March 20, 2025, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a new order shielding St. Luke's doctors from prosecution. He cited the six airlifts as proof of the harm. And he wrote this:

"When EMTALA passed, these 'undesirable' patients were the indigent. Today, they are pregnant women."

On the state's argument that doctors just have to use good-faith judgment about whether a patient will die, Winmill was withering:

"The Defense of Life Act plainly requires that an abortion is 'necessary to prevent the death.' If 'imminent' is not the standard, how close must the woman be to death for the abortion to be 'necessary'? There is no way for physicians to know this, and the price of falling on the wrong side of the line is a felony conviction."

Read the order's limits carefully. It protects St. Luke's and its providers only, because St. Luke's is the only plaintiff. St. Luke's runs 8 of the 39 Idaho hospitals that take Medicare. If you are pregnant in Idaho and your emergency happens at one of the other 31, you are relying on a doctor with no court order behind them.

That's the Idaho Fulcher fought for.

Idaho's law has no health exception

Idaho's ban applies at every stage of pregnancy. It has an exception to prevent the patient's death. It does not have one to protect her health.

A physician who gets it wrong faces two to five years in prison, loss of their medical license, and civil penalties. The Idaho Legislature has repeatedly declined to add a health exception despite doctors asking for one. St. Luke's says the laws have already driven physicians to practice in other states.

The most common scenario doctors describe is a patient whose water breaks before the fetus can survive. Left alone, it can turn into an infection that damages the kidneys and reproductive organs and can end her ability to have children at all.

None of that is elective.

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Fulcher's abortion record is not a matter of interpretation. He has:

Cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would extend constitutional personhood from "the moment of fertilization" — with no carve-out for embryos created through IVF.
Called the fall of Roe "a momentous victory for life," adding: "I am proud that Idaho has already enacted legislation that prohibits abortion upon the repeal of Roe."
Cosponsored a bill making states' federal family-planning money conditional on reporting abortion data to the CDC.

He is also hard to ask about it. Fulcher takes constituent questions by telephone, on calls where the questions are screened.

Republicans who've lived this from the patient's side describe it exactly the way Souza's doctors did. Florida Rep. Kat Cammack says her own ectopic-pregnancy care was delayed because the ER feared prison — and she still wrote a bill to put doctors in prison. The fear is not a misunderstanding of these laws. It is what these laws do.

The bottom line

Russ Fulcher did not just vote for something. He organized it. He put his name at the top of a brief, gathered 117 members of Congress behind it, and asked the Supreme Court to rule that an Idaho hospital may send a woman in a medical emergency away untreated.

For nearly six months in 2024 he effectively got his wish, and Idaho's biggest hospital system responded by putting patients on aircraft.

He described that case to Idahoans as being about "elective, induced abortion." Six people in helicopters say otherwise.

Sources

U.S. Congressman Russ Fulcher and Senator Jim Risch Lead Bicameral Amicus Supporting Idaho's Pro-Life SCOTUS Case — Fulcher's own office, February 27, 2024
As emergency airlifts for pregnant patients increases in Idaho, U.S. Supreme Court abortion case starts — Boise State Public Radio, April 24, 2024. Photo: Getty Images via NPR.
New court order shields certain Idaho doctors from prosecution for emergency abortion care — Idaho Capital Sun, March 21, 2025

David Taylor Wrote a Bill to Put People in Federal Prison for Driving a Pregnant Teenager Across a State Line

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:10:34 +0000

On August 12, 2025, seven months into his first term, David Taylor introduced a bill that would create a new federal crime.

The crime is driving.

H.R. 4964, which Taylor named the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, adds two new chapters to the federal criminal code. Here is what it says, in the bill's own words:

"Whoever knowingly transports a minor across a State line, with the intent that such minor obtain an abortion, and thereby in fact abridges the right of a parent under a law requiring parental involvement in a minor's abortion decision, in force in the State where the minor resides, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both."

Ohio's 2nd District sent a freshman to Congress. This is what he did with the seat.

Who actually goes to prison under this bill

Read the exceptions and the shape of the thing becomes clear.

The bill specifically says the pregnant girl herself cannot be prosecuted. It also says her parents cannot be prosecuted — unless the parent is the one who committed incest with her, which the bill makes a separate crime in its next section. So the person facing a federal charge is whoever else helped her get in the car — an aunt, a grandmother, an older sister, a friend's mother, a teacher, a clinic volunteer.

The only exception to the transport offense is if the abortion "was necessary to save the life of the minor because her life was endangered by a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself."

That's it. There is no exception for rape. There is no exception for incest.

There are two affirmative defenses, and both require paperwork most people helping a frightened teenager would never have. You can defend yourself if you got assurance directly from one of her parents that the required consent or notice already happened — or if you were handed documentation showing a court in her home state waived it.

In other words: get a signature from the parent she is afraid of, or produce a court order, or risk a year in prison.

The bill quietly protects the wrong people

There is a detail in the text that deserves more attention than it has gotten.

The bill lets "any parent who suffers harm" from a violation file a civil lawsuit against the person who drove. The single carve-out is that a parent may not sue if "the parent has committed an act of incest with the minor."

So Congress thought about abusive parents, and every time it did, it wrote incest and stopped there. The civil suit is barred only for a parent who committed incest. The separate crime the bill creates in its next section is for a person who committed incest and then drove the child across the line himself. A father who beats his daughter, throws her out, or has told her she'd be dead to him is none of those things — he can still sue the aunt who helped her. And nothing in the transport offense itself softens for a girl who was raped by anyone other than her own parent.

Ohio has already been here

Ohio law requires a parent's written consent, or a court order, before an unemancipated minor can get an abortion. Under Taylor's bill, that Ohio requirement would follow an Ohio girl across every state line in the country, enforced by federal prosecutors.

Ohio has already sent a child across that line.

On June 30, 2022, a 10-year-old girl from Columbus traveled to Indianapolis to end a pregnancy caused by rape. She was six weeks and three days pregnant — days past Ohio's limit at the time. Her case became national news, Ohio's attorney general said there wasn't a "whisper anywhere" of it, and then Columbus police arrested a 27-year-old man who confessed to raping her at least twice.

A 10-year-old cannot drive herself to Indianapolis. Her mother took her. It was her mother who had reported the rape to Franklin County's Children Services, which referred it to Columbus police on June 22, and her mother who traveled across the state line with her to see the doctor.

That is the one fact that would have kept this case out of Taylor's bill. H.R. 4964 says a minor "and any parent of that minor, may not be prosecuted or sued." A parent drove, so under the bill nobody goes to prison.

Which is the whole point of what the bill actually does. It is not written for the child whose mother believes her, reports the rape and gets in the car. It is written for the one whose mother doesn't — and it turns the aunt, the grandmother, the older sister or the teacher who drives instead into a federal defendant, facing up to a year in prison unless she can produce that same mother's consent or a judge's waiver from Ohio first. That the girl is ten and has been raped would not, by the text of Taylor's bill, matter.

What the research says about these laws

Taylor's press release frames the bill as protecting children from "coercion from oppressors trying to evade accountability from parents and the law."

The people who study these laws describe something close to the opposite. In October 2025, Human Rights Watch and If/When/How published a report on state parental-notification laws and judicial bypass. Its findings:

Notification works like consent in practice. Providers and advocates told researchers that when a parent can withhold money, restrict a young person's movement, or cut off access to transportation, that parent effectively holds a veto whether the statute says "consent" or only "notify."
The requirements deter young people from seeking care at all — in one case, clinic staff believed a young person was so frightened by parental involvement that she "may have remained pregnant against her wishes."
Judicial bypass, the supposed safety valve, means a teenager standing in a courthouse explaining herself to a judge. The report describes a young survivor of sexual violence "forced to relive the trauma of her ordeal — the sexual violence, her mother's lack of support — before a judge."
Bypass delays care, often by a week or more. In some cases the delay leaves a young person ineligible for medication abortion, and pushes her into multiple appointments on consecutive days at higher cost.

Taylor's bill takes that system and adds a federal prison sentence for the person who helps.

Ohio voters said the opposite

In November 2023, Ohioans wrote reproductive rights into their state constitution. Issue 1 passed with 56.8% of the vote — 2,227,384 people — enshrining a right to abortion, contraception, miscarriage care and fertility treatment.

Fourteen months later, Ohio's newest congressman went to Washington and wrote a bill to add a federal crime to the abortion statute books.

He is not alone in the direction he's pushing. We've written about the growing part of the right that wants to prosecute women themselves. Taylor's bill doesn't go that far — it explicitly exempts the girl. It goes after everyone standing between her and a parent she may have very good reasons to fear.

Where the bill stands

H.R. 4964 was referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Taylor introduced it with twelve cosponsors, including Andrew Clyde, Doug LaMalfa, Jodey Arrington, Robert Aderholt, Mary Miller, Ron Estes, Russ Fulcher, Jake Ellzey, Christopher Smith and Sheri Biggs.

On January 15, 2026, it picked up a Senate companion from Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida, joined by Sens. Bill Cassidy, Kevin Cramer, Jim Risch, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Deb Fischer, James Lankford and Pete Ricketts. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, March for Life, the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life have all backed it.

The bottom line

Taylor says no one should be taking children across state lines "to receive secret abortions behind the backs of that child's parents."

But his bill doesn't distinguish between a stranger and a grandmother. It doesn't distinguish between a girl keeping a secret and a girl escaping a house where telling the truth isn't safe. The only abusive parent it names anywhere is one who committed incest, and it treats a year in federal prison as the right tool for a family emergency.

Taylor spent his first year in Congress in the top 8% of all members for stock trading and writing this.

Source

H.R. 4964 — Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, 119th Congress — full bill text as introduced, August 12, 2025
Congressman Taylor introduces pro-family bill upholding parental rights — The Highland County Press
Whose Abortion Is It? The Harms of State-Mandated Parental Notification for Abortion and Judicial Bypass in the United States — Human Rights Watch and If/When/How, October 29, 2025

In March, Scott DesJarlais Signed On to a Bill Banning Abortion From the Moment of Fertilization. He Once Urged His Own Patient to Have One.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:29:07 +0000

On March 4, 2026, Scott DesJarlais added his name to H.R. 722, the Life at Conception Act.

It is a fetal personhood bill, and by August it had 116 House cosponsors. It declares that the terms "human person" and "human being" cover "each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization." That's it. There is no exception for rape. None for incest. None for the health of the pregnant woman. The only carve-out in the entire bill is a line saying a woman herself can't be prosecuted for the death of her own unborn child.

Five months later, on August 6, DesJarlais won his primary in a redrawn 4th District, beating three challengers to secure the Republican nomination for a ninth term.

So it's worth going back over what this particular congressman did before he started writing other people's reproductive rules.

The phone call

In September 2000, DesJarlais was a doctor in Jasper, Tennessee, and chief of staff at Grandview Medical Center. He was also having an affair with one of his patients, and she believed she was pregnant.

He got on the phone with her. The call was recorded. Twelve years later, during his 2012 reelection campaign, the transcript came out.

"You told me you'd have an abortion, and now we're getting too far along without one."

"Well, we've got to do something soon."

Those are his words, as published from the transcript by Roll Call and The Huffington Post in October 2012. His campaign's response at the time did not deny the call happened or that the transcript was accurate. It called the story "gutter politics."

DesJarlais publicly insisted he had not made the recording himself — that he had been "recorded unknowingly and without my consent."

Then the divorce transcript came out.

What he said under oath

On November 15, 2012, nine days after DesJarlais won reelection, the Chattanooga Times Free Press obtained the full transcript of his 2001 divorce trial. In it, under oath, he admitted:

Sexual relationships with at least six people he encountered through his job as a hospital chief of staff — among them two patients, three coworkers, and a pharmaceutical sales representative.
That his ex-wife had two abortions, which he supported. He testified that "things were not going well between us and it was a mutual decision," and called it "a very difficult and poor choice."
That he and his then-wife had, in fact, decided together to record the phone call — directly contradicting what he had told his own supporters a month earlier.

The state medical board reprimanded him. It cost him $500.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with Tennessee's medical regulators. In May 2013 the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners formally reprimanded DesJarlais for unprofessional conduct — sleeping with two of his own patients — and fined him $500, plus $1,000 in investigation costs. He did not contest the findings. His spokesman said simply, "He accepts the ruling of the board."

The board calculated the fine at $250 per patient.

Melanie Sloan of CREW told the Times Free Press what that was worth:

"There are more expensive speeding tickets. Tennessee authorities apparently believe sexual exploitation of women is less serious than speeding."

In 2014, Politico ran a profile of him headlined "The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress?"

Why this matters in 2026 and not just in 2012

It would be easy to file this under old news. DesJarlais would prefer that. On November 30, 2012, three weeks after the election, he told Nashville talk host Ralph Bristol that God had "forgiven me" and asked "fellow Christians" and constituents "to consider doing the same."

Forgiveness is between him and whoever he's asking. It has nothing to do with the bill he signed in March.

Because here is the actual situation. A man who used his position as a physician to sleep with his own patients, who pressed one of them to end a pregnancy, and who supported his wife's two abortions, is now cosponsoring legislation that would give a fertilized egg the full protection of the 14th Amendment — for everybody else. Under that bill, a rape victim in Tennessee's 4th District would have fewer options than the women in Scott DesJarlais's own life did.

He is not alone. We've written before about the Republicans with the worst records on abortion, several of whom have cosponsored the same fertilization-onward bill. What sets DesJarlais apart is not the vote. It's that his own sworn testimony is the counterexample.

The opponent

The Democrat he'll face in November is Victoria Broderick, who won her primary the same night. The Nashville Banner reports she "was first inspired to get involved in politics after Roe v. Wade was overturned." She also ran against him in 2024 and lost by more than 40 points.

The Banner's own account of DesJarlais's record is one sentence long and needs no adjectives: he "weathered intense scrutiny early in his tenure in Congress when it was revealed that the pro-life Republican had encouraged multiple women, including a mistress who was one of his patients, to get abortions."

He weathered it. Seven general elections since the transcript surfaced, and a primary this month. That's not the same as it not being true.

Sources

Rep. DesJarlais secures GOP nod in redrawn TN 4th district, Nashville Banner, August 6, 2026 (photo: Billy Weeks/AP)
H.R. 722 — Life at Conception Act, full text and cosponsors, Congress.gov
Transcript Reveals Scott DesJarlais Urged Mistress to Have Abortion, Roll Call, October 10, 2012
Disciplinary Action Report, May 2013, Tennessee Department of Health — "Scott E. DesJarlais, M.D., Jasper, Tenn. Violation: Unprofessional conduct. Action: License reprimanded; assessed $500 civil penalty, plus costs"

In 2024 John James Told Michigan Abortion Was Settled. On Tape at a July Rally, He Said He'd Never Said That.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:32:56 +0000

John James won Michigan's Republican primary for governor on Aug. 4. Through his last campaign, when anyone asked him about abortion, he had a comfortable answer ready: Michigan already decided this. It's in the constitution. Nothing to see here.

Then a voter at a late-July rally pushed him on it, and someone was recording.

Audio obtained by the Daily Beast — and reported by the Michigan Independent — captures the exchange. A supporter tells James: "I'm a little disappointed that you once called abortion genocide, but now you say it's kind of settled for Michigan."

James replies: "I've never said it was settled."

"Oh really?" the voter says. "So will you do something to get Proposal 3 repealed once you're governor?"

James answers:

"I'm going to do everything to get the most conservative, most pro-life bill passed through the House and Senate that I possibly can."

(The Michigan Independent notes it has not independently verified the Daily Beast's audio.)

He absolutely said it was settled

The "I've never said it was settled" part is the piece that doesn't survive contact with the record.

At a Detroit TV roundtable in April 2024, James said this:

"I think people in the state of Michigan already decided that no party, no person, no president would decide that for Michigan, and Prop 3 passed in 2022. And so despite the fearmongering that you hear on the left, the fact of the matter is that abortion is enshrined in our constitution. If you're a woman in this state, you can have an abortion. In fact, nationwide abortions have actually increased since Roe v. Wade was overturned. There's nothing that can be done legislatively at the federal level, and even if it could, it has no chance of passing."

Read that next to the rally tape. In April 2024: abortion is enshrined in our constitution, there's nothing that can be done. In July 2026, to a room of primary voters: I'm going to do everything to get the most conservative, most pro-life bill passed that I possibly can.

He was not misremembering. NOTUS wrote up the same reversal under the headline "John James Once Compared Abortion to 'Genocide.' Now He Says the Issue Is 'Decided.'" The shift was obvious enough to be a story on its own — before the tape showed him shifting back.

What Proposal 3 actually is

In November 2022, a majority of Michigan voters passed Proposal 3, a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion. It was a direct response to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade that June.

That is the thing the voter asked James to repeal, and the thing James answered by promising the most conservative bill he could get through the legislature.

Michiganders didn't hand this to a legislature. They voted on it themselves, at the ballot box, and put it in the constitution specifically so a future governor couldn't undo it with a bill.

This is the position he held before he softened it

The 2024 "it's settled" version was the new one. James's actual record on abortion is long, consistent, and entirely on the public file:

He declared himself "100% Pro-Life" with the "exclusive endorsement of Right to Life."
At a 2018 campaign event he compared abortion to "genocide" — "standing by and letting this genocide continue."
He said in 2018 he was "against Roe v. Wade" and that "life begins at conception".
His campaign attacked a primary opponent for being open to confirming "pro-choice judges".
He praised Trump for "pulling funding for Planned Parenthood".
On the day Roe was overturned, he thanked Michigan Right to Life for its support.

And once he got to Congress, he voted like it. In 2023 he voted for an agriculture and FDA funding bill whose Section 761 would have nullified the FDA's January 2023 decision loosening restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone — the drug used in 63% of U.S. abortions, including by mail. The bill failed on the floor.

That's not a man who thinks the question is closed. That's a man who said it was closed in the middle of a general-election campaign because saying so was useful.

The two-audience problem

There's a name for what the tape captures, and it isn't a gaffe. It's a candidate running two messages at once.

To the general public, on television: Prop 3 passed, abortion is in the constitution, the left is fearmongering. That version is aimed at the majority of Michigan voters who put Prop 3 in the constitution in the first place — including a lot of people who don't want a governor relitigating it.

To primary voters at a rally: I never said it was settled, and I'll pass the most conservative bill I can. That version is aimed at the people who noticed him going quiet and wanted to know if he'd gone soft.

The only reason we know about the second version is that somebody hit record.

This is not the first time James has said something to a friendly crowd that doesn't hold up. He also told a Trump rally the president had won Michigan "three times" — Trump lost Michigan in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.

What's actually at stake in November

James is an Army veteran serving his second term representing Michigan's 10th District. He won the Aug. 4 primary with just over 50% of the vote, beating businessman Perry Johnson and two others, with Trump's endorsement.

He faces Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who won the Democratic primary with roughly 83%. Benson has said a miscarriage she experienced deepened her focus on reproductive care access — she told the Associated Press in May 2025 it "opened my eyes to the need to not just protect reproductive freedom and rights, but actually make sure they're real."

So Michigan voters have a clear choice, and now they have James on tape describing his own half of it.

His campaign did not respond to the Michigan Independent's request for comment on his abortion position or on whether he'd pursue anti-abortion legislation as governor.

If James believes what he told the TV roundtable — that Michigan settled this and there's nothing to be done — he can say so again now, in public, on the record, with the tape out. If he believes what he told the rally, Michigan voters deserve to hear that version in a general election, not just in a room where he thought only supporters were listening.

Source

John James to pursue anti-abortion legislation if elected, Daily Beast audio reveals — Alyssa Burr, The Michigan Independent, August 10, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya.

Kat Cammack Says Her Doctors Delayed Her Care Because They Feared Prison. Her New Bill Would Put Doctors in Prison for Two Years.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:25:25 +0000

In May 2024, Kat Cammack was five weeks pregnant when doctors found the pregnancy was ectopic and her life was at risk. The emergency room decided she needed surgery or a shot of methotrexate.

Then it waited.

By her own account, the doctors hesitated because they "were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail." She looked up Florida's statute on her phone. She called Gov. Ron DeSantis's office. Hours later she got the drug.

She blamed abortion-rights activists. "It was absolute fearmongering at its worst," she said.

Remember that phrase — worried about losing their licenses or going to jail — because on April 30, 2026, Cammack introduced a bill designed to make exactly that fear a federal reality.

What the bill does

The Dismemberment Abortion Ban Act of 2026, H.R. 8603, is Cammack's bill. She is the lead sponsor, joined by 17 cosponsors — the first of them Pro-Life Caucus co-chair Bob Onder — with a Senate companion from Mike Rounds and Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Her own press release states the target plainly. The bill establishes a federal prohibition on "dismemberment abortions, including dilation and evacuation procedures."

Dilation and evacuation — D&E — is not an exotic procedure. It is the standard method of second-trimester abortion in the United States. Sen. Rounds, arguing for the bill in that same press release, put the share at "around 80% of second trimester abortions."

The penalty, from the bill text itself: any physician who knowingly performs one "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both."

The exceptions that aren't there

Read the exceptions carefully, because this is where a bill's real content lives.

The ban does not apply to a procedure "necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself."

That is a life exception. It is not a health exception. A patient facing organ damage, loss of fertility, or a serious non-fatal complication is not covered. Neither is a mental-health crisis — the word "physical" is in that one sentence four times to make sure of it.

On rape and incest, the bill contains this rule of construction:

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit abortions performed for any reason, including when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if performed by a method other than dismemberment abortion."

That sentence is written to sound like an exception. It isn't one. It says a rape survivor may still have an abortion — just not by the method that 80% of second-trimester abortions use. For a 14-year-old who did not realize she was pregnant until the second trimester, "you may use a different method" is the answer, and the bill does not say what that method is.

And it hands a lawsuit to the parent

Section (c) creates civil remedies. The patient can sue. So can "a parent of a minor upon whom an abortion has been performed."

Sit with that. A 17-year-old in a state where abortion is legal obtains a second-trimester abortion. Under this bill, her parent gets a federal cause of action against the doctor, with "objectively verifiable money damages," statutory damages of three times the cost of the abortion, punitive damages, and attorney's fees. The one parent the bill shuts out is the one whose own criminal conduct caused the pregnancy; every other parent she was hiding it from can sue.

The doctor faces prison from the government and a lawsuit from the family, and if the family wins, the doctor pays their lawyer too.

Which brings us back to Cammack's own emergency room

Cammack's position on her ectopic pregnancy has been consistent: the law was fine, the doctors were confused, and the confusion was manufactured by her political opponents. Florida's law, as reported at the time, "does not ban the treatment of ectopic pregnancies and considers them an emergency and not an abortion." Florida issued formal guidance to providers about ectopic pregnancies anyway that September — to correct what the state called "misinformation" about the law.

So Cammack has firsthand knowledge of a specific mechanism: when a state writes criminal penalties around obstetric care, doctors slow down. Not because they are confused about politics — because they are calculating the risk of a felony against the risk of a delay. She was the patient lying there while they calculated.

Her response to learning that is a bill that adds a federal criminal penalty on top of the state ones. Two years. For the procedure used in most second-trimester abortions. With a life exception that requires a physical condition and no health exception at all.

Doctors would have two governments to be afraid of instead of one.

Her framing for it: "Under our current system, abortion procedures exist in a legal gray area with no federal standards and no accountability. Providers can perform inhumane extraction methods and face zero consequences. That ends now." She adds that the bill "ensures women are protected, not prosecuted."

Women are not prosecuted under it. That is true, and it is beside the point. The people who provide the care are, and the care disappears when the providers do.

This is not her first federal ban

Cammack is a co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus. She was one of the original cosponsors of a bill making it a federal crime to perform an abortion at 15 weeks or later — a nationwide ban that would have overridden any state where voters chose broader protections.

The through-line matters. Whatever her district decides, whatever Florida decides, whatever any state decides, Cammack's project is a federal floor beneath which no state may go. We've written about the broader plan to make Dobbs "permanent in every single state" — Cammack's bill is a working piece of it, not a symbolic gesture.

Source

Rep. Cammack Leads Bill to Ban Barbaric Abortion Procedures — cammack.house.gov, April 30, 2026, and the text of H.R. 8603. Photo: AP via WLRN.

Ron Estes Is Leading the Push to Bring Back a Rule That Cut the Family Planning Program in Half

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:52:06 +0000

On June 1, 2026, Ron Estes announced that he had led a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., asking him to bring back the 2019 Title X rule known as the "Protect Life Rule."

He wasn't one of 159 signatures. He was the person who organized it, alongside Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rep. Virginia Foxx. His office notes he also led the same push back in 2018.

Here's what he said:

"Leading this letter is about restoring basic program integrity... By reissuing the Protect Life Rule, the Trump Administration will once again draw a bright, undeniable line of physical and financial separation between actual family planning services and elective abortion activities."

"Basic program integrity" sounds like paperwork. It isn't. We already know exactly what this rule does, because it was law for about two years, and somebody counted.

What Title X is

Title X is the federal family planning program. It's been around since 1970. It pays for birth control, cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted infections, and basic reproductive health care for people who are low-income or uninsured — the person who doesn't have a regular doctor and shows up at a clinic.

Before 2019, the program ran through about 4,000 clinics and served roughly 4 million patients a year, according to KFF.

The 2019 rule Estes wants restored did two things. It banned clinics in the program from referring a patient for an abortion — including a patient who asks. And it required "physical and financial separation," meaning a clinic that also provided abortion care with its own non-federal money had to build separate facilities or leave.

Lots of them left.

The number nobody in that letter mentions

The Guttmacher Institute counted the damage in February 2020. Its findings:

An estimated 981 clinics left the Title X network in 2019 — about one-quarter of every site in the program.
The network's capacity to provide women with contraceptive services fell by at least 46% — roughly 1.6 million patients worth.
Six states ended up with no Title X provider at all: Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.
In Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and New York, capacity dropped 90% or more.

The patient count tells the same story. KFF found the number served fell from about 4 million to 1.54 million in 2020 — losses KFF says were compounded by the pandemic. And it never came back. As of 2023, Title X was serving 2.8 million people — a million fewer than before the rule took effect.

That is not "program integrity." That is a program cut roughly in half, and it stayed cut.

Estes's own press release actually concedes the mechanism, in a single sentence: "During the first Trump Administration, the organization withdrew from the program to avoid complying with the rule." He means Planned Parenthood. What he leaves out is that hundreds of clinics that were not Planned Parenthood walked out too — state health departments, university clinics, community health centers — because they could not afford to build a second building or would not agree to withhold information from a patient who asked for it.

The "gag" part

The 2019 rule is called the domestic gag rule for a reason. Under it, a clinician whose patient asked where she could get an abortion was barred from telling her.

Not barred from performing one. Not barred from paying for one — federal law has barred Title X money from being used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning since the program was created. Barred from answering the question.

That is the policy Estes led a letter to bring back, and it's the piece he described as drawing a "bright, undeniable line."

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Estes has been on this specific issue for eight years. When the rule was first proposed in 2018, he led the congressional letter supporting it — his office says so — and on May 21, 2018 he went to the House floor to praise it.

It fits a longer record. He ran for Congress in 2017 promising voters that "one of my top priorities will be to defund Planned Parenthood." He signed a discharge petition trying to force a floor vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. He voted for the 2025 budget bill that blocked Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates nationwide. He voted against the Women's Health Protection Act, which would have protected abortion access nationwide, and against the Right to Contraception Act. Reproductive Freedom for All scores him 0% for 2025.

The letter is the same project, aimed at the last piece of the program still standing.

What it means in Kansas

Kansas is a state where voters already answered this question. In August 2022, Kansans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution — 59% to 41%, an 18-point margin, on a primary ballot, with turnout nobody predicted.

Estes represents the Wichita area. His constituents were part of that vote. Then he went to Washington and organized a letter asking a cabinet secretary to reimpose the rule that emptied out a quarter of the nation's family planning clinics.

The people who lose here are not activists on either side. They are the woman who uses a Title X clinic because it's the only place that will see her without insurance — for her birth control, her Pap smear, her STI test. When 981 clinics walked out last time, those appointments didn't move somewhere else. They just stopped.

Estes is asking for that again, and he's the one holding the pen.

Source

Rep. Estes's own announcement: Rep. Estes Leads Letter to Reissue the Protect Life Rule, June 1, 2026.

Ann Wagner's Bill Would Put Doctors in Prison for Five Years — and Force Colleagues to Turn Them In

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:20:08 +0000

H.R. 21 is Ann Wagner's bill, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. She filed it on January 3, 2025 — the opening day of the 119th Congress, on the lowest bill number House leadership had not reserved for itself — with 163 cosponsors. Three weeks later, on January 23, the House passed it 217–204: every voting Republican in favor, all but one Democrat against. It went to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it has sat ever since.

Getting a bill from introduction to the House floor in twenty days takes leadership behind it. This one had it.

She has filed some version of it for years. "I have championed this issue for decades and I have been blessed and honored to lead this legislation since 2019," she said when an earlier version passed in 2023. After the 2025 vote she called it "my vital legislation."

It's worth reading what it actually says.

What's already illegal

The bill's own findings section states the law as it already exists:

"If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws."

That's not new. It's the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, codified at 1 U.S.C. § 8, which Wagner's bill cites by name. FactCheck.org laid this out in 2019: federal law already defines a "person" as "every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development," and every state's homicide laws already apply. As one legal expert put it there: "States can and do punish people for killing children who are born alive."

So the protection Wagner says she is creating has existed for more than two decades. What her bill adds is the enforcement machinery.

What the bill actually adds

Read the text the House passed. Three things:

1. A mandatory hospital transfer, whatever the family wants. A practitioner must exercise the same care as for any child born at the same gestational age, and then "ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital." Not "if medically indicated." Not "unless the parents choose comfort care." Immediately, in every case.

2. Mandatory reporting — by everyone in the room. Any practitioner "or any employee of a hospital, a physician's office, or an abortion clinic" who knows of a failure to comply "shall immediately report the failure to an appropriate State or Federal law enforcement agency." A nurse who watched a family hold a dying infant instead of sending it to a NICU is required by federal law to call the police on the doctor.

3. Five years in prison. "Whoever violates subsection (a) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both." A separate provision punishes intentional killing as murder — which, again, was already the case.

There's also a private right of action letting the woman sue for damages "equal to 3 times the cost of the abortion," plus punitive damages and attorney's fees.

What doctors say this does to families

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the professional body for the physicians this bill would prosecute, has condemned it in unusually direct language. Here is ACOG President Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, after the House passed the 2023 version of Wagner's bill:

"The offensively named 'born-alive' legislation is another cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision making between patients and their physicians. This bill is not based in science or medicine. It is meant to incite emotions, rather than reflect the reality of evidence-based clinical care."

And on the specific harm:

"This reckless bill would impede families from making significant quality-of-life decisions, such as being able to provide comfort or spiritual care in tragic and painful situations. Abortions later in pregnancy are the result of complex decisions, and patients make these health care decisions thoughtfully, carefully, and painstakingly."

"Instead, this bill takes decision making out of the hands of families in crisis and limits the freedom of our patients to make the decisions that are right for them."

Think about the situation the mandatory-transfer clause actually governs. An infant delivered at the edge of viability, with a condition incompatible with life, whose parents have decided — with their doctor — to hold their baby rather than subject it to intubation and transport in its final minutes. Wagner's bill makes that a federal crime punishable by up to five years, and makes every nurse in the room a witness legally obligated to report it.

How often this actually happens

Rarely, and almost never in the way the bill's title implies.

FactCheck.org compiled the available data: the CDC documented 143 deaths involving induced terminations across the twelve years from 2003 to 2014. State reports tell the same story — Florida logged 6 such cases out of 70,083 abortions in 2018; Minnesota, 3 out of 10,177 in 2017. In the CDC data FactCheck cited, from 2015, 65% of abortions occurred within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.

The rare cases that do occur are the ones ACOG describes: "Abortions later in pregnancy are the result of complex decisions, and patients make these health care decisions thoughtfully, carefully, and painstakingly." Those are exactly the families the bill takes the decision away from.

Where this sits in her record

Wagner earned a 0% score for 2025 from Reproductive Freedom For All. H.R. 21 isn't an outlier in her record; it's the flagship of it.

It also fits a pattern we've now documented twice in her legislating: a bill with a title nobody can vote against, aimed at conduct that's already illegal, that produces criminal exposure for the wrong people. Her signature anti-trafficking law, FOSTA, was used in exactly one federal prosecution and, according to the GAO, was one of two April 2018 events that pushed the market overseas, where investigators found it harder to reach.

Legislating that is "meant to incite emotions, rather than reflect the reality," in ACOG's phrase, is a description of a governing style, not a single bill.

She won't discuss it at home

In April 2025, more than 1,000 people turned out for a town hall-style event in Chesterfield, inside her own district. Wagner didn't attend and dismissed it as "just another political stunt from the Democrats." In October 2025, constituents stood outside her Manchester office asking her simply to communicate. "She is our direct line to Washington and she is refusing to be accountable," said Ammie Minton of Sunset Hills.

Wagner is on the November ballot against Democrat Fred Wellman. She has refiled this bill in every Congress since 2019. There is no reason to think the next one will be different.

Source

H.R. 21 — Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, 119th Congress, sponsored by Rep. Ann Wagner, passed the House 217–204 on January 23, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Warren Davidson Was Asked About a Pregnant 12-Year-Old Rape Victim: 'You Don't Know You Were Raped for Two Months?' Four Days Later, a 10-Year-Old Ohioan Had to Leave the State.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:22:00 +0000

Two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, CNN's Pamela Brown asked Warren Davidson a direct question about the law that had just taken effect in his state.

Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill" banned abortion at about six weeks — often before a woman knows she's pregnant — with no exception for rape or incest. Brown asked what that means in practice:

"So my question to you is, what happens when a 12-year-old girl falls pregnant after being raped? Are you OK with her being forced to carry that fetus to term?"

Here is what Davidson said, from CNN's transcript of the June 26, 2022 broadcast:

"So let's say someone who is raped, you don't know you were raped for two months?"

Brown pressed him again. He answered again:

"I fully support Ohio's law... I think it's a great law and it is a compromise. And like I say, rape is raised as an objection but the Heartbeat Bill already deals with that. I mean, anyone -- it's hard to conceive of somebody who doesn't know they were raped for two months."

You can watch the exchange.

The Ohio law he called great

Davidson's answer rested on a claim about the law: that it "already deals with" rape.

It doesn't. PolitiFact went through the statute and found the exceptions cover exactly one thing — a medical emergency. Abortion is permitted to "prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." As PolitiFact put it flatly: "The law does not provide an exception for rape or incest."

His fallback wasn't a legal exception at all. It was an assumption about victims: that after six weeks, anyone who had been raped would know she was pregnant and would have acted.

Four days later

On June 30, 2022 — four days after that interview — a 10-year-old girl from Columbus traveled to Indianapolis to end a pregnancy caused by rape. TIME reported that she was "nearly six-and-a-half weeks pregnant." The case had been reported to Columbus police on June 22.

She was past Ohio's line. Not by weeks. By days.

When the story surfaced, Ohio's attorney general, Dave Yost, said there wasn't a "whisper anywhere" of such a case, and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page cast doubt that the girl existed at all. Then Columbus police arrested a 27-year-old man who confessed to raping her at least twice.

Legal experts who looked at whether she could have gotten the abortion in Ohio told PolitiFact the answer was murky at best. One said plainly: "It is not clear by any means that a 10-year-old rape victim would be permitted to have an abortion if the child became pregnant and six weeks elapsed." Another pointed out that a doctor facing felony charges is not going to gamble on ambiguous statutory language — "legal plausibility is a dangerous zone to practice medicine when you're staring down the serious consequences of the law."

A 10-year-old child. Six-and-a-half weeks. The rest of her life, decided by a sentence Davidson called "a great law."

The other thing he said in that interview

Brown moved on to Ohio's infant and maternal mortality rankings, and asked what he'd do to protect the women and babies the ban would affect.

Davidson's answer identified the problem correctly:

"Ohio unfortunately we have over half of the live births in Ohio are on Medicaid. So we have a really disproportionate amount of our families that are growing are low-income families and I think that overwhelmingly accounts for, you know, the loss of life in labor and delivery."

He named Medicaid as the thing holding up maternal and infant health in Ohio. Then he offered his own office's casework as the safety net — and added: "We haven't had any."

Three years later, he voted to cut it.

On May 22, 2025, Davidson voted no on Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 215–214. He said he was worried about the deficit. On July 3, 2025, when the same bill came back from the Senate, he voted yes and it passed 218–214.

That bill takes an estimated $33 billion in federal Medicaid funds out of Ohio over the next decade, and an estimated 356,000 Ohioans are projected to lose health coverage. In a state where more than half of births are covered by Medicaid — his number, not ours — that is money coming out of labor and delivery.

Force the pregnancy, then cut the program that pays for it. We've laid out what the rest of that bill costs Ohio.

Ohio answered him

Sixteen months after that interview, Ohioans got to vote on it directly.

On November 7, 2023, they passed Issue 1, a constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion, 56.6% to 43.4%. It bars the state from banning abortion before viability. The six-week law Davidson called "a great law" — the one with no rape exception, the one a 10-year-old fell outside of by four days — is unconstitutional in Ohio now because Ohio voters said so.

A 13-point margin, in a state that has otherwise gone hard the other way. On this one, Ohio was not with him.

What this was really about

There is a version of the anti-abortion argument that at least reckons with the hard cases. Davidson didn't take it. Asked about a raped 12-year-old, he questioned the premise — you don't know you were raped for two months? — and then called the law that would trap her great.

Four days later, the case arrived. It was a 10-year-old, and Ohio couldn't help her.

We deserve better.

Source

Rep. Warren Davidson interviewed by Pamela Brown, CNN Newsroom, June 26, 2022 (CNN rush transcript; video clip here). Photo: CNN.

An Anti-Abortion Group Said Stephanie Bice's Mailer Used Its Logo Without Permission — It Had Endorsed Nobody in That Race

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:13:43 +0000

Two weeks before the 2020 Republican primary in Oklahoma's 5th District, the head of the state's biggest anti-abortion group did something groups like his almost never do. He publicly called out a Republican candidate.

Tony Lauinger of Oklahomans for Life told The Oklahoman that mail landing in voters' mailboxes was making claims about Stephanie Bice that were not true.

"Oklahomans For Life has not endorsed anyone in the 5th Congressional District Republican Primary. Any claim to the contrary is false. The most recent mail piece says Stephanie Bice has been 'Endorsed & Rated 100% Pro-Life by Oklahomans For Life, Inc.' Neither half of that assertion is correct."

Neither half. Not the endorsement. Not the rating.

What the mail actually said

There were two mail pieces, and it matters which was which.

The one claiming Bice had been endorsed and rated 100% pro-life was paid for by an outside group — a super PAC called American Jobs and Growth PAC. Bice's campaign didn't send it.

But the other one did come from her campaign. That piece said Bice is pro-life, and it carried the Oklahomans for Life logo. Lauinger said the group's name and logo were used without its knowledge or consent.

That's the part that belongs to her. A candidate's campaign put an organization's logo on its own mail, and the organization found out the way everybody else did.

Lauinger also filled in the number the outside mailer got wrong. Over Bice's six years in the state Legislature, he said, she voted for 12 of the 14 bills his group pushed. Twelve out of fourteen is a real record. It just isn't 100%, and it isn't an endorsement, and the group had deliberately stayed out of the race — Lauinger pointed out there were "several strongly pro-life candidates" running.

Bice's answer was not an apology

Here's what she said when The Oklahoman asked:

"I understand Oklahomans for Life wasn't endorsing in this race and wanted to make clear that I am pro-life and have stood with Oklahomans for Life."

Read that again. She says she understood the group wasn't endorsing anyone. So the logo went on her campaign's mail anyway. There's no "we made a mistake," no "we'll pull it," no apology to the group whose name got borrowed. Just a restatement of the message the mailer was pushing in the first place.

Nobody could tell you who paid for the other one

The mailer that flatly invented the endorsement came from American Jobs and Growth PAC — a super PAC, meaning it can raise and spend unlimited money as long as it doesn't coordinate with the campaign.

Federal Election Commission records show the group reported more than $90,000 in spending to support Bice during that 2020 race, on direct mail and digital ads in June — the same weeks the mail was going out.

Where did that money come from? Of the nine itemized contributions the PAC reported for the entire 2019–2020 cycle, only two arrived before it started spending on Bice: $453,854 from a committee called Eagle Eye PAC on April 3, 2020, and $3,500 from something called the Jobs and Progress Fund six days later. So the trail from the false claim in your mailbox leads to a PAC, which leads to another PAC. An Oklahoma voter holding that postcard had no realistic way to find out who was actually talking to them.

It worked

Bice finished second in the June 30 primary, behind Terry Neese, 36.5% to 25.4%. She won the August runoff 52.9% to 47.1%, then beat Democratic incumbent Kendra Horn in November, 52.1% to 47.9%.

She's been in Congress ever since. And the habit the 2020 mail showed — say the thing that helps, sort out the accuracy later, never take it back — didn't stay in 2020.

The same move, five years later

On July 15, 2025, Bice voted yes on a procedural motion that killed a bipartisan push to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. It passed by one vote, 211–210. Her name is on it as a Yea.

Two weeks later, on a telephone town hall, a constituent asked her about the Epstein files. Bice called Epstein disgusting, said the victims' privacy was paramount, and, as Oklahoma Watch reported, "clarified that she had not voted to block the release of the files."

She had. The roll call is public.

That same call produced another moment worth keeping. A caller told her they'd only gotten through by pretending to ask about something else, and said the phone events "are a joke, and are screened, carefully screened," then asked why she wouldn't face constituents in person. Her answer:

"I am never going to get that kind of engagement if I'm doing in-person town halls. I am lucky to get a couple hundred, and that's on a great day," Bice said. "I do not dodge my constituents."

It was her 30th telephone town hall. A month later she finally scheduled an in-person "Coffee with a Congresswoman" — and her Democratic opponent, Jena Nelson, pointed out the venue wasn't in the district. The event was canceled for "scheduling conflicts."

And on the paperwork Congress requires of itself, Raw Story found Bice among at least 62 members who broke the STOCK Act, the law meant to stop insider trading by members of Congress. She reported two Treasury bill purchases held in a joint trust — each valued between $15,001 and $50,000 — between nine months and a year late. Her office didn't respond to Raw Story's request for comment. She's not the only Republican who's done it, which is its own indictment of how seriously the law is taken.

Why an old mailer still matters

Because it's the earliest documented example of a pattern Oklahomans are still living with. A logo used without permission. A rating that was invented. A vote she says she didn't cast. A town hall in the wrong district.

Bice isn't unusual in this. Ashley Hinson's campaign in Iowa put out an attack ad within an hour of her opponent winning his primary, making claims he had never supported. It's a style of campaigning that treats what's true as a detail to be handled after the votes are counted.

Meanwhile, the actual work of the office goes somewhere else. In July 2025 she introduced a resolution declaring that "The Star-Spangled Banner" must be performed in English — a measure with no force of law that still hasn't gotten a vote. In the same stretch, Trump's budget bill she voted for put an estimated 131,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing food benefits, and the Oklahoma Hospital Association warned the Medicaid cuts in it could eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs and cut federal reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over a decade.

The group whose logo she borrowed said it best in 2020: any claim to the contrary is false.

We deserve better.

Source

Chris Casteel, "Anti-abortion group claims mail pieces misleading in 5th District primary," The Oklahoman, June 18, 2020.

Two Republicans Crossed Over to Protect IVF in Nevada. Joe Lombardo Vetoed It Anyway.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:15:00 +0000

On February 16, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are "unborn children" under an 1872 state law — a decision the justices said "applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location." Several of Alabama's IVF clinics paused services within days. Families in the middle of treatment — people who had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to have a baby — found out their cycles were on hold.

Nevada's legislature responded the way you'd hope a legislature would. It wrote a bill.

Senate Bill 217 would have established a statutory right to IVF in Nevada law, added protections for fertility providers, and required insurers to cover the diagnosis and treatment of infertility. It cleared the state Senate 15-5, with Republicans Lori Rogich and John Steinbeck joining every Democrat.

On June 13, 2025, Joe Lombardo vetoed it.

The reason he gave

Lombardo's veto message did not argue that IVF is wrong. It argued that the state can't afford the insurance piece:

"Without dedicated and sustainable funding this mandate is fiscally impossible considering the current posture of the state's budget, specifically in terms of Medicaid resources."

He said he supports making IVF more accessible, and encouraged agencies to find approaches that are financially sustainable.

Two problems with that.

First, the bill wasn't only a coverage mandate. It also would have written the right to IVF into Nevada statute and shielded the doctors who provide it. That part costs the state nothing. He could have signed a bill with the statutory right and asked the legislature to rework the insurance section. He vetoed the whole thing.

Second, look at what he said about Medicaid budgets three weeks later. On the day the House gave final passage to Trump's budget bill, Lombardo brushed the fight aside as "beltway talking heads" bickering and told Nevadans they should be "excited" about it. That law is projected to strip health coverage from as many as 114,000 Nevadans, and roughly 147,000 Nevadans will have to document 80 hours of work a month to keep Medicaid starting in January 2027.

He knew what it would do. Months before it passed, he had written to Congress warning that rolling back expanded Medicaid and capping federal payments would be "most detrimental for Nevada."

So the state's Medicaid budget was too tight for fertility coverage in June, and a bill blowing a hole in that same budget was something to be excited about in July.

Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, who sponsored SB 217, put it this way: "Even Donald Trump has backed efforts to expand IVF, but Lombardo is picking out-of-state extremists over protecting Nevada doctors and patients."

The record underneath the veto

Lombardo describes himself as pro-life and has generally avoided the subject as governor, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that Nevadans have already settled it at the ballot box. But his stated positions have not moved with that argument.

He still says he would personally support a 15-week cutoff on abortion — nine weeks earlier than Nevada's current 24-week law.
Running in 2022, he said he would support sending voters a 13-week ban as a ballot initiative. His spokeswoman explained the standard: "If the voters and the Nevada Legislature sent a bill to the governor's office, Joe has always said that he would view it through a pro-life lens."
At a primary debate, asked whether he'd support restrictions on morning-after pills and waiting periods, he answered: "Yes, absolutely." His campaign later said he had no plans to restrict Plan B, but wouldn't say which measures he would support.
At the October 2022 gubernatorial debate he said he'd approve mandatory waiting periods and parental notification for minors. Asked why he'd backed off the 13-week ban, his full explanation was: "I thought about it more and evaluated. Not my political position or my campaign. I just thought about it more."

Political scientist David Damore described the approach to The Nevada Independent: Lombardo "hasn't been particularly assertive on the issue, knowing that there's nothing he can do in the legislative process, and they can read the polling just as well as anybody else. He's stepped very, very cautiously around the issue."

Then a bill landed on his desk that he could do something about. He did.

Who this actually hits

IVF is not an abstraction. It is the treatment people use when they want a child and their bodies won't cooperate. It is expensive, it is not usually covered, and the families who need it are mostly ordinary people going into debt over it.

Nevada Republicans in the state Senate looked at what happened in Alabama and decided their state should not be one court ruling away from the same phone calls. Two of them voted with the Democrats to make sure of it.

The governor of their own party said no.

Nevada now has no statutory right to IVF — just the assumption that nothing will go wrong. That assumption is exactly what Alabama had. We deserve better.

Source

"'This mandate is fiscally impossible': Nevada governor vetoes IVF protections bill," Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 13, 2025. Photo: Getty Images via the Review-Journal.

Darren Bailey Said the Holocaust 'Doesn't Even Compare' to Abortion. When Jewish Groups Objected, He Said Jewish Leaders Told Him He Was Right. They Said That Wasn't True.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:58:00 +0000

In 2017, while running for the Illinois House, Darren Bailey recorded a Facebook video about abortion. In it he said:

"The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn't even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion since its legalization."

The video resurfaced on August 1, 2022, while he was the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois.

Who objected

The condemnation was not confined to one party.

The Anti-Defamation League's Midwest chapter objected. So did the Illinois Legislative Jewish Caucus, Planned Parenthood of Illinois, and Gov. JB Pritzker's campaign.

And so did the leader of Bailey's own party in the Illinois House. Republican Leader Jim Durkin said the Holocaust "was one of the worst atrocities in the history of humankind and any comments that minimize it have no place in our political discourse."

Bailey did not apologize.

The claim that fell apart

Instead, he doubled down, saying that "the Jewish community themselves have told me that I'm right."

That is a specific factual claim, and it was checkable. Bailey pointed to Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois.

Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois disputed his account directly:

"We don't know who he met with, and his comments do not reflect our position."

This is the part that separates the episode from an ordinary gaffe. The original remark was a comparison people can argue about — offensive to many, sincerely held by him. The follow-up was different. Confronted with criticism, Bailey asserted that a Jewish organization had endorsed his view, and the organization said publicly that it had not.

Why we're writing it down now

Bailey is on the ballot again, running a campaign built on affordability that keeps its older positions in the room but off the platform.

This week his running mate, Aaron Del Mar, told a Springfield rally hosted by an anti-abortion lobbying group that Pritzker is "willing to murder millions of babies" and that people come to Illinois to "sin against God" — three weeks after telling WBEZ that claims they'd restrict abortion access were "a flat-out lie."

The Holocaust remark came from the same place: the belief that abortion is a mass atrocity on a historical scale. Bailey has never withdrawn the comparison. In May of this year he told a Christian conference in Decatur, "Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

He is entitled to that conviction. Voters are entitled to know he holds it while his campaign literature doesn't mention abortion at all.

What a governor does with this

A governor speaks for the state after antisemitic incidents, sets the tone on Holocaust education in schools, and represents every Illinoisan — including the Jewish Illinoisans whose legislative caucus told him this was wrong — in moments that call for moral seriousness.

The test isn't whether a candidate has ever said something wrong. It's what he does when he's told he has. Bailey was told — by the ADL, by a Jewish legislative caucus, by his own party's House leader. His response was to claim an endorsement that the named organization denied.

Illinoisans deserve a governor who can be corrected. We deserve better.

Source

"GOP candidate for governor Darren Bailey denounced for saying Holocaust 'doesn't even compare' to abortion deaths" — CBS Chicago, August 2022. Follow-up reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times and NBC Chicago. Photo via CBS Chicago.

Darren Bailey Took Abortion Off His Platform. This Week He Stood at an Anti-Abortion Rally While His Running Mate Called It a 'Sin Against God.'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:53:00 +0000

Darren Bailey has dialed back his position on abortion. He took it off his policy platform entirely. His campaign says the focus this time is affordability.

This week he and his running mate spoke at a "Save America" rally in Springfield. The event was sponsored by Illinois Family Action — the political arm of the Illinois Family Institute, a group that regularly lobbies against bills expanding abortion access.

His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, spoke for six minutes. He said Gov. JB Pritzker is "willing to murder millions of babies." Then he said this, to applause:

"Nobody wants to make Illinois a Mecca for abortions from everyone around the country to come here and sin against God."

Three weeks earlier

In July, Del Mar sat for an interview with WBEZ as part of a media tour promoting the ticket's economic policies. He was asked about abortion. His answer:

"No matter how many times JB Pritzker and the Democrat majority try to say that Darren and Aaron are going to try to take away women's access to reproductive care, that is a flat-out lie."

He went further about what the campaign is and isn't about:

"We're talking about core services. We're not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."

Same man. Same ticket. Roughly a month apart. To a statewide public radio audience, the charge that they'd restrict abortion access is "a flat-out lie." To a room full of anti-abortion activists, Illinois is a "Mecca for abortions" and the governor is willing to "murder millions of babies."

Both of those cannot be the campaign's actual position. One of them is what they believe and the other is what they say when the wrong people are listening.

Bailey and Del Mar's campaign did not return requests for comment.

Bailey said the quiet part himself in May

This isn't only about the running mate. In May, Bailey spoke at a Christian conference in Decatur, where he said:

"Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

That is not a man who has changed his mind. It is a man who has changed his audience.

The 2022 version of Bailey didn't bother with the two-track approach. He ran openly on restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, and he called Chicago a "hellhole." He lost handily to Pritzker, badly underperforming in Cook County and the collar counties.

Del Mar explained the new approach plainly: Bailey has changed the "public-facing campaign" after "learning from his mistakes from four years ago."

Read that carefully. The thing that was a mistake was not the position. It was letting voters see it.

It is the same maneuver he ran on Chicago itself. He spent years calling the city a "hellhole" — then, once he needed the city's votes, apologized for it earlier this year. The pattern is not a change of heart. It's a change of venue.

The group in the room

There's a detail in this story that makes the rally worth more than a passing mention.

Illinois Family Action withheld its endorsement of Bailey in the March primary, even though it had donated to his 2022 campaign. It backed conservative think tank president Ted Dabrowski instead. Dabrowski lost to Bailey by 24 points.

And yet in August, IFA is the group hosting Bailey and Del Mar on a Springfield stage, alongside Republican U.S. Senate candidate Don Tracy.

A campaign genuinely pivoting away from abortion politics does not spend a week in August at a rally thrown by an anti-abortion lobbying outfit that didn't even endorse it. That is a campaign doing outreach to a base it needs and hoping the rest of Illinois isn't paying attention.

Pritzker's campaign spokesperson said Bailey and Del Mar are focused on "spreading the extreme MAGA agenda by attacking women's right to choose, supporting Trump's failing economic agenda, and spreading far-right conspiracy theories."

Why it matters in Illinois

Illinois is one of the places people travel to when their own state has banned abortion. That is the actual meaning of the word Del Mar used on that stage — "Mecca" is a complaint about patients arriving from states where the procedure is now illegal.

A governor of Illinois has real power over that: over what the state protects, what it funds, and whether the people who come here for care are treated as patients or as a problem to be solved.

Bailey is asking for that power while declining to say what he'd do with it. His platform is silent. His running mate says one thing on public radio and the opposite at a rally. Bailey himself, in May, told a friendly crowd there's no one more pro-life than he is.

Voters are entitled to know which of these is the campaign.

Illinoisans deserve a candidate who tells every audience the same thing. We deserve better.

Source

Mawa Iqbal, "Darren Bailey's running mate maintains abortion is 'sin against God'" — Chicago Sun-Times / WBEZ, August 7, 2026. Photos by Pat Nabong and Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times.

Jim Pillen Called Nebraskans Who Criticize Him 'Libtards' Three Times in One Hour. Then His Staff Blocked Reporters From Asking About It.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:41:00 +0000

On the evening of Tuesday, January 20, 2026, Jim Pillen held a telephone town hall. He promoted it on his campaign accounts. Callers from across Nebraska submitted questions, and for an hour the governor answered them.

Three separate times during that hour, he referred to Nebraskans who criticize him as "libtards."

The first came early:

"Nebraskans are about faith, family and hard work. We're about the American dream. I will tell you that if you sit and listen to the 10 keyboard warriors that are the libtards, if you listen to that, you would think the sky is falling down."

The second came while he was describing what an "incredible privilege" it is to serve as governor:

"I love the people in Nebraska, and you know, I don't really give a damn what those libtards and these people want to criticize."

The third was about people who had shown up to protest at one of his events that day:

"We had some demonstrators in one of our places today that wear the red things – whatever. The libtards have lost their brains."

The word, and why families objected

The slur is built out of a word used to demean people with intellectual disabilities. That is why the backlash came from disability advocates and families rather than from the political opponents Pillen was aiming at.

The nonprofit Disability Rights Nebraska said it found "the repeated use of this term to be highly unprofessional and lacking in integrity."

State Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha put the objection directly: "The governor is missing the point. Ableist slurs are harmful because they equate disability with something contemptible." She added that "Disabled Nebraskans deserve leadership that takes their dignity seriously."

When reporters tried to ask Pillen about it, they didn't get an answer. They tried three times, and a spokesperson stepped in before the governor could respond each time.

A written statement came a week later. Pillen's communications director, Laura Strimple, said he has always supported "Nebraska's developmentally disabled community," pointed to his clearing of the long-stalled developmental disability waitlist and increased special education funding, and called him "a fierce advocate for the inherent dignity and value of all people."

Strimple said the comment was never aimed at people with disabilities or their families, "nor did the thought ever cross his mind." It was meant, she said, for "the group of liberals who continually dress in Handmaid's Tale outfits as a form of political protest and disrupt official events, as well as other left-wing radicals."

That explanation answers a question nobody asked. The objection was never that Pillen meant to insult disabled Nebraskans. It was that the word does that regardless of who he was aiming at — which is exactly what Hunt said, and what the governor's statement never engages with.

Even inside his own party the response was cool. Rep. Don Bacon, asked about it at a press conference, said he had thoughts and then said, "I think I'll just keep it to myself." Charles Herbster, the agribusinessman weighing a primary challenge, said Pillen "deserves to be challenged on the words he uses" because it's "part of the job," and added: "he acts as if he has all the answers, and if you question him, you're either a liar or a 'libtard,' in his words."

What else he said on that call

The slur got the headlines. The rest of the hour deserves more attention than it got.

He told Nebraskans the budget hole isn't real. The state faces an estimated $471.5 million shortfall after the economic forecasting board lowered revenue projections. State senators have called closing it their top priority. Pillen's response:

"We got to get everybody to understand that – even though the press tries to say that we're broke and we have a $400-some million hole – quite honestly, we have a budget prepared that fills it."

And then:

"Quite simply, we've got bushel baskets and bushel baskets of money. And when these people try to make it like we're broke, it's just crazy. It's unacceptable."

Here is what fills that hole. The budget plan Pillen introduced the week before puts much of the reduction on the Department of Health and Human Services — a $22 million cut in the current fiscal year and $130.4 million in the next, if senators approve it.

That is roughly $152 million out of the agency that runs Medicaid, child welfare, and services for people with disabilities. A governor with bushel baskets of money does not need to take it from there.

He promised a six-week abortion ban. Nebraska law currently bars abortion after 12 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. On the call, Pillen said the state needs to pass a so-called "heartbeat" bill — which restricts abortion as early as six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. He made it a loyalty test:

"When I'm talking to people running for election – if you aren't pro-life, if you don't want to go after a heartbeat [bill], I'm not supporting you. That's where we have to go."

He celebrated being first in line for federal cuts. Pillen pointed to Nebraska being the first state to implement Medicaid work requirements, announced alongside Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz in December, and the first to start the school scholarship tax credit created in Trump's budget bill.

He wants to extend the coal plants. On energy, Pillen said Nebraska has to "win the power game," calling for extending coal plants and adding nuclear — while pointing to data centers and aviation fuel plants as the growing demand. Nebraska's electric bills have already been climbing as power use rises.

The part he keeps promising

Pillen also returned to the promise he has been making since 2024: property tax relief. His answer on the call was that he needs more time.

"We have to get that fixed. A really, really critical piece for tax policy [is a] broad-based sales tax, so that we can fund education to drop our property taxes to 40%. It's a really, really important piece. We'll get a small piece of it this year, but we need more time."

"Broad-based sales tax" is the same idea Nebraskans already rejected. His 2024 plan would have applied new sales taxes to more than 120 everyday goods and services, and a Republican on his own task force said it helped large property owners at the expense of middle- and lower-income renters. The bill died on the last day of the session. The special session he called went nowhere.

And the thing he promised to cut has gone up. Property taxes assessed in 2025 rose another $285 million — the third-largest increase in state history. His one win was a $6 million statewide decrease in 2024, against a statewide total of $5.3 billion.

His pitch on the call was: "That's why re-election is so critical."

The bottom line

In one hour on the phone with Nebraskans, Jim Pillen used an ableist slur three times, told voters the state's half-billion-dollar shortfall was something the press made up, defended a budget that takes $152 million out of health and human services, and said he won't support candidates who won't back a six-week abortion ban.

Then his office made sure reporters couldn't ask him about the easiest part of that to answer.

Nebraskans deserve a governor who can take a question. We deserve better.

Source

Jackie Ourada, "Nebraska governor takes jabs at 'libtards,' champions conservative wins in campaign call" — Nebraska Public Media, January 21, 2026. Reaction reported by Juan Salinas II, "Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen responds to backlash over saying 'libtards'" — Nebraska Examiner, January 28, 2026. Photo by Fred Knapp / Nebraska Public Media.

Todd Blanche Told a Private Prayer Call He'd Make Abortion Bans 'Permanent in Every Single State.' Ashley Moody Voted to Advance Him to Attorney General.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:15:00 +0000

For four years, Republicans have told us the same thing about abortion: it's up to the states now. That's what the Supreme Court said in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade. Every state gets to decide for itself. No national ban. Just let the people vote.

That was never the plan.

On a private call hosted by the White House Faith Office, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the religious group Intercessors for America that the Justice Department is "working hand-in-hand" with federal health agencies, the White House and President Trump's team "to get permanent solutions so the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state."

Every single state. Not just the ones with bans. All of them.

Blanche admitted the work is "taking longer than we want." But he promised it's coming.

"We don't have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent."

The group posted the recording on YouTube. Politico found it. The Hill confirmed it on August 4, 2026 — the same day Senate Republicans voted to make Blanche the permanent attorney general of the United States.

What "permanent in every single state" actually means

Since Roe fell, abortion hasn't gone away. It's gone in the mail.

Most abortions in America now use pills, not a clinic — 63% of them by 2023, up from 53% in 2020. In 2023, the Biden administration ended the rule that made women pick up mifepristone in person. Blue states passed "shield laws" that protect doctors from being prosecuted for prescribing to patients in states with bans. Put those two things together and a woman in a banned state can still get care.

That's what Blanche says he's going to stop.

"If states have said, 'We are going to protect the unborn and we're going to protect every life from the moment of conception,' we're putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can't attack that. They can't do things like they're doing with mailing in mail-order drugs."

Read that again. The "other states" he wants to stop aren't breaking any law. They passed their own laws, in their own legislatures, to protect their own doctors. Blanche is saying the federal government will override them.

The tool for that is a law from 1873. The Comstock Act was an anti-obscenity law written before women could vote, and it bans mailing "every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion." In 2022, the Justice Department concluded it doesn't apply to mailing abortion pills unless the sender knows they'll be used illegally. A different Justice Department can simply write a different opinion — and then start prosecuting. It would hit every state, including the ones where abortion is legal.

Blanche wouldn't say whether that's his plan. But he didn't say it wasn't.

What he said under oath vs. what he said in private

At his confirmation hearing on July 15, Blanche was careful. He told senators he'd make mifepristone a priority but wouldn't give specifics. He said the administration opposed the Biden-era mail-order rule and that the DOJ "could review it." He said the FDA was taking "a real look" at whether the pills are safe.

"We are not in any way defending what Biden and what his administration did," he said.

That's hedging. On the prayer call, there was no hedging at all — just a promise of total, permanent victory in all 50 states.

When The Hill asked about it, the Justice Department said the comments "have been mischaracterized and need to be understood in their full context, which was with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states."

But blocking one state from mailing pills into another state is federal control over states. That's the whole idea.

Ashley Moody voted to hand him the job

Ashley Moody sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. On August 4, that committee voted 12–10, straight down party lines, to send Blanche's nomination to the Senate floor. Every Republican on the panel voted yes. Moody is one of the twelve Republicans on that committee.

She didn't just vote for him. She campaigned for him. Moody publicly endorsed Blanche, calling him "an excellent attorney, a former federal prosecutor, and a dedicated public servant" and saying she looked forward to "our continued work together." The anti-abortion group Americans United for Life backed him too.

None of this is out of character. Before DeSantis appointed her to the Senate, Moody spent six years as Florida's attorney general, and she used that job to try to keep Floridians from ever voting on abortion at all. In 2023 she filed a 39-page brief asking the Florida Supreme Court to strip the abortion-rights amendment off the 2024 ballot, calling it an attempt to "hoodwink" voters.

The court let it on the ballot anyway. And then something remarkable happened: 57.17% of Floridians voted yes. A clear majority. It still failed, because Florida requires 60% to amend the constitution.

So Florida is still enforcing a six-week ban. Nearly six in ten Floridians voted to change that. Moody fought to keep them from getting the chance, and now she's voted to confirm the man who says he'll make that ban permanent.

Susan Collins says no — four years too late

Hours after the committee vote, Susan Collins announced she'd oppose Blanche on the floor. Her reason wasn't abortion. "While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political," she said. "Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department's independence."

Collins is the Senate's most famous self-described pro-choice Republican. She also put the fifth vote to overturn Roe on the Supreme Court.

In 2018, she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, who was seated 50–48. She told Mainers he had assured her privately that Roe was "settled law" and an important precedent. Four years later Kavanaugh wrote that Roe was "wrongly decided" and "should be overruled." Collins called the ruling a "sudden and radical jolt to the country."

She has never taken it back. This June, asked on Fox News whether the Kavanaugh vote is a problem for her reelection, she claimed it didn't matter: "Whether Justice Kavanaugh were confirmed or not, Roe v. Wade would have been overturned, given the 6-3 vote."

That's not what happened. The 6-3 part of Dobbs upheld Mississippi's 15-week ban. The part that threw out Roe entirely was 5-4 — and Kavanaugh was in that five. Her own spokesperson later acknowledged she misspoke.

Here's why it lands so hard right now. Maine has a shield law, in effect since August 2024, that protects Maine doctors who provide reproductive care from out-of-state investigations. Maine providers are exactly the "other states and other organizations" Blanche says he's building policies to stop. The protections Collins points to when she calls herself pro-choice are the next target.

A "no" vote this week doesn't undo a "yes" vote in 2018.

What happens next

Blanche's nomination is on the Senate floor. Republicans hold 53 seats. With Mitch McConnell still absent and Collins a no, Blanche can lose exactly one more Republican and still be confirmed. He is expected to get there.

If he does, the man who privately promised to make the Dobbs decision "permanent in every single state" will run the Justice Department, control the Comstock Act, and decide who gets prosecuted for putting a pill in the mail.

They told us it would be left to the states. It was a talking point with an expiration date.

We deserve better.

Source

FactPost on X, reporting on Blanche pledges to make Dobbs decision 'permanent' in every state by Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill, August 4, 2026. Photo: The Hill.

Susan Collins Says She'd Vote for Brett Kavanaugh Again. In 2022 She Said He Misled Her.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:30:00 +0000

In October 2018, Susan Collins stood on the Senate floor and cast the vote that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. She was the swing vote. Without her, he doesn't get confirmed.

She explained her reasoning at length. She said Kavanaugh had assured her — under oath and privately — that Roe v. Wade was "settled law." She said he called it "precedent on precedent," because Planned Parenthood v. Casey had reaffirmed it. She said he told her it "should be extremely rare that it be overturned."

And she was explicit about her own red line. On 60 Minutes Overtime, she put it this way:

"I could not vote for a judge who had demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because it would indicate a lack of respect for precedent."

Four years later, Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and overturned Roe.

When the draft opinion leaked in May 2022, Collins said it would be "completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings." In plain English: she said she had been misled.

Now she says she'd do it again

Collins is up for reelection this year — her first Senate race since Roe fell — and the question keeps following her around Maine.

In June, in Portland, she told reporters: "I do not regret that vote."

Then, after an event at a fire station in Randolph, Maine, she went further. Asked whether she would confirm Kavanaugh again, she said:

"I would vote for him again, yes, if that's what you're asking."

The remark was captured on audio by an operative for the Democratic super PAC American Bridge and reported by Lisa Lerer and Beth Reinhard in the New York Times on August 1, 2026.

Both things cannot be true

Line the three statements up:

2018: I could not vote for a judge hostile to Roe. He told me it was settled law.
2022: What he did is completely inconsistent with what he told me.
2026: I would vote for him again.

If the 2022 statement was sincere — if she genuinely believed a nominee had given her private assurances and then broken them — there is no version of "I'd do it again" that follows. You don't rehire the person you say deceived you.

Which leaves two possibilities, and neither is good.

Either the assurances never actually mattered. In which case her 2018 floor speech, the long explanation of precedent and stare decisis, the careful reasoning about why this particular nominee was safe — all of it was cover for a vote she was going to cast anyway.

Or the 2022 statement was for show. A statement of disappointment issued at the exact moment Maine women were realizing what had happened, from a senator who has spent a career being the Republican who feels bad about it.

Collins has never had to pick between those two answers, because she's never been asked to. Now she's answered anyway, on tape, outside a fire station in Randolph.

What it actually cost

This is not an abstract debate about judicial philosophy.

Dobbs ended the federal constitutional right to abortion. In the years since, states across the country have banned or severely restricted it. Women have been turned away from emergency rooms while miscarrying. Doctors have left states rather than risk prosecution. People travel hundreds of miles for care that used to be a legal right everywhere in America.

Collins is one of only two Senate Republicans who describes herself as supporting abortion rights. She had the single vote that determined whether the justice who would end Roe got a seat. She used it to confirm him.

Saying she'd do it again is the most consequential thing she has said in this campaign.

The pattern Mainers already know

This fits a shape that shows up over and over in Collins's record: the carefully worded objection, followed by the vote that makes it irrelevant.

She said she opposed Trump's Medicaid cuts — after casting the procedural vote that sent that budget bill to the Senate floor. She voted against the Iran war powers resolutions for 60 days, then voted for one only after the legal deadline had passed and the outcome no longer mattered. She votes no when no is free.

She has not held a public town hall in Maine in years, preferring invitation-only meetings — which is part of why it took a super PAC staffer with a recorder outside a fire station to get a straight answer out of her on the most important vote of her career.

Maine voters get to decide in November whether "I would vote for him again" is an acceptable answer. We deserve better.

Source

Lisa Lerer and Beth Reinhard, reporting for The New York Times, August 1, 2026, surfaced by the Maine Democratic Party. Collins's 2018 and 2022 statements as compiled by Newsweek.

Steve Hilton Spent the Primary Saying He'd Hand a California Doctor to Louisiana. Now That He Needs Our Votes, He Says He Wouldn't.

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:55:00 +0000

There is a doctor in Sonoma County named Rémy Coeytaux. Louisiana wants him. Prosecutors there charged him with a felony — "criminal abortion by means of abortion inducing drugs" — for allegedly mailing abortion pills to a Louisiana woman in 2023. Then Louisiana asked California to put him on a plane.

California said no. Governor Gavin Newsom's office answered in January with one line: "California protects patients and their doctors. We will not be complicit in efforts to strip away their privacy, autonomy, or dignity."

Steve Hilton, the Republican running to replace Newsom, spent his entire primary campaign saying he'd answer differently.

On Friday, three months before the general election and 25 points down in the polls, he changed his answer.

What he said when he was talking to Republicans

Back in January, Hilton told KQED he would let Louisiana take Coeytaux. His argument was about federalism, not abortion:

"Louisiana voted one way. California voted a different way. That's the beauty of our federalist system, and I think that's exactly right. But you can't have one state imposing its will on another."

He put it even more bluntly: "Louisiana is trying to uphold what its people voted for, and California is undermining it."

He kept saying it. In a May debate, he framed it the same way — this isn't about abortion, it's about one state undermining another's laws. Pressed on it again at the final gubernatorial debate, he doubled down rather than back off.

That was not a slip. That was a position, stated repeatedly, over months, in front of the voters he needed at the time.

What he says now that he needs the rest of us

On Friday, on Southern California radio host Jennifer Horn's show "The Morning Answer," Hilton said this:

"I think that the clear decision for me would be that whatever one's personal views on abortion, you wouldn't actually extradite this doctor because the doctor hasn't broken California laws."

Same doctor. Same case. Same California shield laws — which have been on the books since 2022, along with Newsom's executive order directing the state to refuse exactly these extradition requests. Nothing about the law changed between January and July.

Hilton's explanation is that he took a closer look at California's statutes.

Ask yourself whether you believe that. A candidate for governor spent six months publicly promising to hand over a California doctor, went through a full primary and multiple debates defending it, and only got around to reading the state's shield law after the primary was safely over.

What actually changed

The polls did.

In early July, the Public Policy Institute of California found Democrat Xavier Becerra leading Hilton 61% to 36% among likely voters. That is not a race you win with the Republican base. California's Republican base isn't big enough to win anything statewide.

So the position that helped him in a Republican primary became the position that was going to sink him in a general election. And it went away.

That is worth naming plainly: this wasn't a change of heart about whether California doctors should be dragged to Louisiana. It was a change of audience.

He didn't actually defend abortion rights — read the sentence again

Look closely at what Hilton said, because it isn't what it sounds like.

He did not say Louisiana is wrong to prosecute doctors. He did not say Coeytaux did nothing wrong. He said the doctor "hasn't broken California laws" — a jurisdictional technicality.

That's a very different thing from believing a woman in Louisiana should have been able to get that prescription in the first place. And Hilton has been clear about what he thinks of that. He called abortion an "awful, awful outcome" and said he'd encourage adoption instead.

His new line — "if there was someone sitting in front of me making these choices, I would not be telling a woman what to do" — is about how he'd behave personally. It's not a commitment to protect the shield laws, or to veto anything, or to fight the next state that comes after a California provider. It's a mood.

And there will be a next state. UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler, who studies abortion law, warned that even a win here "shouldn't create a false sense of security that shield laws will always hold up." Louisiana's attorney general has said plainly: "We are going to continue to fight the illegal sending of abortion pills into Louisiana."

The question for a California governor isn't what he'd say to one woman in his office. It's what he'd do when the next warrant lands on his desk — and whoever is governor will be the one who signs or refuses.

The pattern

If this feels familiar, it should. CalMatters ran a whole profile on how Hilton has rebranded himself multiple times — adviser to a British prime minister, then Silicon Valley futurist, then Fox News populist, now candidate for California governor.

He was also a leading champion of Brexit — and then moved here rather than live with it.

This is a man who is very good at telling a particular room what that room wants to hear. The rooms keep changing. So does he.

Why this one matters

California built its shield laws in 2022 for exactly this moment — so that a doctor here doesn't have to wonder whether a prosecutor in a banned-abortion state can reach across the country and take them. Coeytaux's case may be the first real test of whether they hold.

That protection only works if the governor honors it — every time, not when it's convenient.

Hilton has now given us two answers to the same question in the same election year. One of them was given when he was courting Republican primary voters. The other was given after a poll showed him losing by 25 points.

Whichever one he actually means, we're being asked to guess. And the person who'd pay for a wrong guess isn't Steve Hilton. It's a doctor in Healdsburg, and every provider in California watching to see what happens to him.

We deserve better.

Source

Ben Paviour, In reversal, Hilton says he would not extradite California abortion doctor, The Sacramento Bee, July 31, 2026. Photo: Hector Amezcua / The Sacramento Bee.

Tom Tiffany Backed a National Abortion Ban. Now That He's Running for Governor, He's Erased It From His Website.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:09:30 +0000

There's a version of Tom Tiffany that spent years in Congress voting to restrict abortion nationwide. And there's the version currently running for Governor of Wisconsin, whose campaign website doesn't want to talk about it.

They're the same guy. Only one of them is on the ballot.

What he actually did in Congress

Start with the record, because the record is not ambiguous.

On January 9, 2023, Tiffany signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 175, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2023 — a bill that would make it a federal crime for a doctor to perform an abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That's roughly six weeks into a pregnancy, often before a person knows they're pregnant.

You can see his name on the official cosponsor list at Congress.gov. He was one of 81 cosponsors, and he joined the day the bill was introduced.

The bill carries an exception for the life of the mother. It carries no exception for rape or incest — a point Tiffany has been asked about directly and declined to address.

That's not his only vote. Tiffany also voted against the Women's Health Protection Act, the bill that would have protected abortion access nationwide after Roe fell. And he signaled support for a 20-week federal abortion ban.

Before Congress, in the state Senate, he voted for Wisconsin's 2015 law banning abortion after 20 weeks — which is still Wisconsin law today. Of that bill, he has said plainly: "I stand by that bill."

The personhood problem

Tiffany belongs to the Republican Study Committee, the largest bloc of conservatives in the House.

In June 2023, the RSC published its budget blueprint for fiscal year 2024 — the document that lays out what the caucus wants to see enacted. Buried in its list of endorsed legislation, the budget backs a series of abortion bills. Two of them matter here.

The first is the Heartbeat Protection Act — the same six-week ban Tiffany personally cosponsored. The budget notes that "the RSC's Steering Committee officially endorsed the Heartbeat Protection Act."

The second goes considerably further. The budget endorses:

"Rep. Alex Mooney's (R-WV) Life at Conception Act, which would provide 14th Amendment protections at all stages of life."

Read that slowly. "14th Amendment protections at all stages of life" is the legal language of fetal personhood — the idea that a fertilized egg is a person with full constitutional rights from the moment of conception.

If that became law, abortion wouldn't just be banned. It could be treated as homicide. And it reaches past abortion entirely: personhood laws threaten in vitro fertilization, because IVF routinely involves creating embryos that don't get implanted — a collision the New York Times flagged as soon as Roe was overturned.

This isn't a fringe document Tiffany happened to be near. It's the budget of the caucus he belongs to, and it endorses a bill he personally cosponsored alongside one that would end abortion nationwide by redefining who counts as a person.

Then he ran for governor and the website changed

Here's where it gets interesting.

In October 2025, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Daniel Bice noticed something about Tiffany's personal website. His report was headlined: "Rep. Tom Tiffany erases abortion, gun rights and other issues from personal website."

Bice opened with the obvious point:

"When you've been in state and federal office for as long as U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, it's impossible to erase your political past. But you can certainly try."

The positions didn't change. The page describing them just stopped existing.

And when reporters have asked him the direct question — do you still support the six-week ban you cosponsored? — Tiffany has declined to say.

That's the whole strategy. Not a reversal. Not an explanation. Just quietly removing the evidence and refusing to answer.

Why he's hiding it

There's no mystery about the motive.

A June 2025 survey found that a majority of Wisconsinites support Planned Parenthood and abortion access. And since Roe was overturned in 2022, voters in 14 states have approved ballot measures protecting or expanding abortion rights.

Tiffany can count. He knows a six-week ban with no rape exception is not a winning platform in Wisconsin. So he's betting that voters will forget the votes if the website doesn't mention them.

The job he's applying for

This matters more than usual because of the specific office.

A member of Congress is one vote out of 435 on a bill that may never get a floor vote. A governor signs or vetoes what the Legislature sends. Wisconsin Public Broadcasting laid out where abortion law actually stands and what the 2026 candidates for governor would do about it — it is one of the sharpest dividing lines in the race.

A governor who "stands by" a 20-week ban and cosponsored a six-week ban would not be vetoing those bills. He'd be signing them.

Tiffany is asking Wisconsin voters for the one job where his abortion position converts directly into law — while declining to tell them what that position currently is.

If he's proud of the record, he can put it back on the website. If he's changed his mind, he can say so.

He's done neither. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by American Journal News (July 31, 2026), with primary documents from Congress.gov, the RSC FY2024 budget, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Teen Births Fell 72%. The Trump Administration Just Gutted the Program That Helped.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:18:00 +0000

Over the past 16 years, the teen birth rate in America fell by about 72%. That's according to CDC data — and it's one of the biggest public health wins of our lifetimes. Experts credit better sex education and better access to contraception.

The federal program that funded a lot of that work is the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Congress created it in 2010, and Republicans and Democrats have funded it together ever since — including in the 2026 budget bill, even after the White House tried to zero it out.

This summer, the Trump administration rewrote it. The new version steers the money toward abstinence, marriage promotion, and "fertility tracking."

What changed

The original law was simple: fund programs that are "medically accurate and age-appropriate" and that actually reduce teen pregnancy, then keep funding the ones proven to work in rigorous studies.

The new grant terms, reported by States Newsroom, point somewhere else:

Applicants must teach "body literacy" — two separate modules, one for girls, one for boys.
The girls' module must treat ovulation as the "central event and primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility," and must cover the disadvantages of "ovarian suppression" versus approaches that address "root causes." As a nurse practitioner quoted in the story notes, "ovarian suppression" is how most hormonal birth control works.
The boys' module must cover the physiology of arousal and how "repeated or artificially stimulated arousal may affect neural development and behavior over time."
Programs must provide "reproductive goals counseling" and "should affirm marriage and parenthood as meaningful and value components of adult life."
One of the program's stated pillars tells grantees to "incorporate sexual risk avoidance education" — the federal term for abstinence-only.

That last one matters. There is already a separate federal grant program for abstinence-only education. What just happened is that a different program — one with a much higher bar for scientific evidence — got turned into more of the same.

There's also a new gatekeeping step: applications must pass an "alignment review" with agency priorities, conducted by political appointees.

The research is not ambiguous

This isn't a case where reasonable people weigh two equally supported approaches.

Academic studies have repeatedly found that abstinence-only approaches produce higher rates of teen pregnancy and teen births — even after adjusting for other socioeconomic factors.

Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns that the "restorative reproductive medicine" framework behind the new rules can be "ineffective and redundant" and can delay patients from getting real medical treatment when it's presented as the best or only option.

So the government took a program built specifically to fund what works, and rebuilt it around what doesn't.

53 grants killed overnight

The rewrite came with cancellations. Fifty-three grantees got letters telling them their funding was terminated without notice. Most were told their programs were misaligned with agency priorities and "normalized sexual activity for minors." Three of them, along with the sex-ed group SIECUS, sued over it on July 14.

What that looks like on the ground:

Children's Aid, New York City. The 170-year-old organization had a $936,700 grant, eligible for funding through 2028. In mid-May, after a meeting with HHS, staff expected renewal — they'd gotten nothing but positive feedback. At the end of June, the cancellation letter arrived, effective immediately.

"It was an overnight shutdown with no transition period for staff, or for young people that were relying on these resources." — Rhonda Braxton, VP of health and wellness, Children's Aid

Nine people are expected to lose their jobs. 1,200 young people a year in the South Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights lose the program. A group of high-school-age peer educators lost the summer job they'd already lined up.

Healthy Futures of Texas. CEO Ginger Mullaney's group had a nearly $2 million grant funding 11 programs — including ones serving youth in foster care and runaway and unhoused teenagers. It was canceled too, which stunned her: the organization had already rewritten all of its materials to comply with the administration's executive orders, and the new curriculum had been approved. "We felt like we had already made all the necessary changes to comply," she said.

She also pointed out a practical problem with the replacement. The government used to publish a list of more than two dozen programs certified as effective through academic evaluation. That list is gone — but applicants are still told they must use an "evidence-based program."

"We don't know what (programs are) considered evidence based." — Ginger Mullaney

Who's positioned to get the money instead

The new funding notice awards extra points to applicants who have never received the funding before.

Alison Macklin of SIECUS says that, based on what she's seeing locally, the new terms are paving the way for crisis pregnancy centers to apply for and win these federal dollars. Those are anti-abortion organizations that typically offer free ultrasounds and pregnancy tests with a religious mission, and mostly don't provide or refer for contraception.

States Newsroom reported earlier this year that such centers have already taken in nearly $500 million in state and federal taxpayer money since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

"They've been given an inch, so they're trying to take a mile." — Alison Macklin, SIECUS

This isn't only coming from the executive branch

The approach now baked into the grant terms has champions in Congress. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi introduced a bill in 2025 directing federal health agencies to promote restorative reproductive medicine training through Title X and the HHS Office of Population Affairs. That bill didn't advance — but the administration has now written much of the same philosophy into how the money moves.

It also fits a broader pattern at HHS. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly pointed to falling sperm counts in men, including teenage boys, as an explanation for lower birth rates — despite no scientific evidence supporting that claim for young men. As experts note, the national birth rate is lower largely because teen births have dropped so sharply. Which is to say: the thing they're treating as a crisis is the public health success this program helped produce.

The bottom line

A bipartisan program that helped cut teen births by nearly three-quarters has been rewritten around a method the research says makes teen pregnancy more common, gatekept by political appointees, with 53 organizations cut off overnight and thousands of teenagers left without the programs they were counting on.

The people who lose here are teenagers — disproportionately kids in foster care, kids without stable housing, kids in the neighborhoods with the least access to a doctor. They didn't get a vote on this.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Kelcie Moseley-Morris for States Newsroom, published by Talking Points Memo. Photo via Getty Images.

Michael Cloud Says He's Defending the Constitution. He Joined the First Caucus CAIR Has Ever Called an Anti-Muslim Hate Group.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:15:01 +0000

Michael Cloud has represented Texas's 27th District — Victoria, part of Corpus Christi, and the Coastal Bend — since 2018. Eight years in, he sits on the Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, and on the Oversight Committee's DOGE subcommittee. Here are three things his constituents should know.

1. He joined a caucus that a civil rights group calls an anti-Muslim hate group

In January 2026, Cloud signed on to the "Sharia Free America Caucus," founded by his fellow Texans Keith Self and Chip Roy. In the caucus's own press release, Cloud said the rise of Sharia law is "an assault on our Constitution, our freedoms, and the Christian foundations of our nation."

This is not a debating society. Fox News reported that the caucus is pushing a ban on foreign nationals who "adhere to Sharia" from entering the U.S., along with a bill designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Muslim civil rights group, designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the organization's 32-year history it has applied that label to a congressional caucus. CAIR's analysis found the bills the caucus backs would, if enacted, "effectively render the practice of Islam illegal in the United States."

Texas is home to people of every faith and no faith. The Constitution Cloud says he's defending is the same document that says the government does not get to pick which religions are allowed here.

2. He's on the DOGE subcommittee — and wants to make DOGE permanent

Cloud didn't just go along with DOGE. He helped run it.

On January 22, 2025 he was appointed to the House Oversight DOGE subcommittee chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene. On June 4, 2025 he signed on as an original cosponsor of the "Make DOGE Permanent Act." And when the bill arrived to lock in $9 billion of those cuts, he voted for it in June and again in July.

Even after Elon Musk walked away, Cloud told The Daily Signal that Musk had built "a process that will outlast him."

Here's what that process did to Texas:

Texas has more than 249,000 federal employees — 8% of the entire federal workforce — which made Texans unusually exposed to the layoffs.
The EPA terminated just over $118 million in environmental grants already awarded to Texas organizations, in the administration's first three and a half months.
Across the state, DOGE claimed $1.8 billion in cuts to Texas grants and leases.

And the savings? DOGE promised $2 trillion a year. Analysts who went through the books found it disrupted an enormous amount while saving very little, and that federal spending actually went up. Cloud is one of the few members who could have stopped it from the inside. He tried to make it permanent instead.

3. He signed on to a bill that would ban abortion nationwide

On January 24, 2025, Cloud became an original cosponsor of the "Life at Conception Act" — a bill extending full legal personhood and 14th Amendment protection to every "preborn" human being from the moment of fertilization. Read the text: there is no exception in it for rape, for incest, or for the life of the mother. The only carve-out written into the bill says a woman herself can't be prosecuted.

He is pushing that in a state that already shows what happens next. ProPublica found that after Texas's near-total ban took effect, the rate of sepsis in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalizations jumped more than 50%, and identified at least 120 in-hospital deaths of pregnant and postpartum women in 2022 and 2023. The danger was undeniable enough that Texas's own Republican-led legislature passed a bill clarifying the ban's medical exceptions.

Meanwhile about two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. Cloud's answer is to take the Texas policy national.

What kind of representative is this?

A caucus organized around one religion, a permanent version of the agency that cut $1.8 billion out of his own state, and a federal abortion ban modeled on a law Texas doctors say is killing patients. Three different issues, one instinct — the more government power there is to point at people, the more he wants it pointed.

Eight years is long enough to call that a record rather than a phase. The Coastal Bend votes on it in 2026.

More Than 300 of Keith Self's Constituents Heckled Him at His Own Town Hall. He Called It 'a Great Opportunity to Connect.'

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:10:01 +0000

Keith Self has represented Texas's 3rd District — Collin County and the northern Dallas suburbs — since 2023. He chairs a subcommittee on Foreign Affairs, so he has real power in Washington. Here are three things his neighbors in Plano, McKinney and Wylie should know about how he uses it.

1. He did hold a town hall — and 300 of his own constituents told him what they thought

Give him this much: unlike a lot of his colleagues, Self actually stood in a room with the people he represents.

It did not go well. At his March 1, 2025 "Koffee with Keith" event at the Collin College Conference Center in Wylie, more than 300 constituents repeatedly heckled him, chanting "vote you out!" and giving him thumbs-down as he defended DOGE cuts and the House budget. Protesters outside held signs reading "Dump Musk." Inside, he took 19 questions on DOGE, Ukraine and Medicaid.

Afterward, Self posted that it was "a great opportunity to connect with my constituents in TX-03."

That's the tell. Three hundred people told him to his face that he was on the wrong side, and his takeaway was that it went great. The county Republican Party's explanation was that the crowd was just Democrats who showed up to cause disruptions. But this is Collin County — a district Republicans have held for decades. The people in that room were his neighbors.

Showing up matters. Listening is the other half of the job.

2. He's the lead sponsor of a federal abortion bill — in a state where the ban is already deadly

Texas has a near-total abortion ban, and we now know what it has cost. ProPublica found that after the ban took effect, the rate of sepsis in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalizations jumped more than 50%, and identified at least 120 in-hospital deaths of pregnant and postpartum women in 2022 and 2023. The danger is so undeniable that Texas's own Republican-led legislature passed a bill to clarify the ban's medical exceptions after those reports came out.

Self's response to all of that was to push for more, at the federal level. On January 31, 2025 he introduced the Ensuring Justice for Victims of Partial-Birth Abortion Act as its lead sponsor — a bill to ramp up enforcement of the federal partial-birth abortion ban. Not fixing the exceptions doctors say are killing women. Enforcement.

About two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. Self has decided that the government knows better than you and your doctor what happens to your body.

3. His lifetime environmental score is 1%

That's not a typo. The League of Conservation Voters scores every member of Congress on how they vote on clean air, clean water and climate. Keith Self's score is 3% for 2025, and 1% for his career.

A 1% lifetime score means that on virtually every chance he's had to protect the air his district breathes and the water it drinks, he voted the other way. And his district needs that protection. The American Lung Association's 2026 report ranks Dallas-Fort Worth the 9th worst metro area in the country for ozone pollution — smog that got worse, not better, over the past year.

Those votes back an agenda with a body count attached. The EPA has moved to stop counting the lives saved when it writes air pollution rules, and analysts warn the rollbacks will increase cancer-causing pollution. Trump's budget bill slashed through the country's clean energy programs.

Somebody benefits from all that. Look at who funds him — Chevron is on the list. Kids with asthma aren't.

Whose side is Keith Self on?

Three hundred neighbors in a room said one thing; he heard applause. Texas women are dying under a ban his own party is scrambling to soften; he wrote a bill to enforce more of it. His district breathes some of the dirtiest air in the country; he votes with the polluters 99% of the time.

Pick any one of the three and the answer lands in the same place — the people of Collin County are not who he's checking with before he votes. They get their turn in 2026.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Abortion

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:12:00 +0000

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 41 states have abortion bans in effect with only limited exceptions, and 13 states ban abortion entirely. That is not what the country asked for. Sixty percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases — a number that has barely moved in decades.

We already know what the bans do to people. In Texas, ProPublica bought and analyzed seven years of hospital records and found that after the state's ban took effect, the rate of sepsis rose more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost a pregnancy in the second trimester. Doctors delayed care because treating a miscarriage can look like performing an abortion. Women got sicker. Some died.

The politicians below didn't just go along for the ride. They wrote the laws, filed the briefs, picked the judges, and are now working to make it national — reaching into states where voters have said no.

Michael Guest helped build the case that killed Roe

Mississippi's 15-week ban was the law at the center of Dobbs — the case that ended the constitutional right to abortion for everyone in America. In July 2021, Michael Guest was one of the members who led 228 members of Congress in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Guest had told Mississippians that abortion should be "a state's rights issue" and that "the federal government should allow each state to be able to set their laws." Four days after Dobbs came down, he signed on as a cosponsor of the Heartbeat Protection Act — a national six-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. So much for states' rights.

He's still going. Guest is an original cosponsor of this Congress's Life at Conception Act, which declares that constitutional personhood begins "at the moment of fertilization." The bill contains no exception for rape, for incest, or for the health of the pregnant woman.

Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked a bill to protect IVF

Cindy Hyde-Smith signed that same Dobbs brief, and she now chairs the Senate Pro-Life Caucus. She is the person Senate Republicans put in charge of this issue.

In February 2024, after Alabama's Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children and clinics started shutting down, the Senate tried to pass the Access to Family Building Act to protect IVF nationwide. It needed unanimous consent. Hyde-Smith stood up and said, "Therefore, I object" — killing it on the spot while claiming she supports "total access to IVF."

This January she reintroduced the SAVE Moms and Babies Act, which would end mail-order and telehealth prescriptions for mifepristone and force every patient to appear in person. Abortion pills account for roughly 63% of abortions in this country. That's the point.

Eli Crane voted to pull the abortion pill off the shelf

Eli Crane cosponsored the Life at Conception Act in June 2023 — the same fertilization-onward personhood bill, the one with no exceptions at all.

Then he voted for it in a spending bill. In September 2023, Crane voted yes on the Agriculture-FDA appropriations bill that carried a provision reversing the FDA's decision to let pharmacies dispense mifepristone. The bill failed on the House floor — because more than two dozen Republicans wouldn't go as far as Crane did.

Tom Tiffany wants to run the state whose limits he voted for

Tom Tiffany is running for governor of Wisconsin. In March 2026, asked whether he'd like to see any changes to Wisconsin's abortion laws, he answered plainly: "No. So, I voted for the current law, which, 10 years ago when I was in the state Legislature, which is you can have an abortion up to five months. I voted for that law, and as governor I will uphold it."

What he didn't mention: in June 2022, he cosponsored the federal Heartbeat Protection Act — the six-week national ban, no rape or incest exceptions. Five months for Wisconsin, six weeks for everyone. And as he geared up to run statewide, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Tiffany erased abortion, gun rights and other issues from his website. A record you have to hide is a record you know we don't want.

Mike Flood wrote the first 20-week ban in the country

Before he came to Congress, Mike Flood was speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, where he introduced the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. When it was signed in April 2010, Nebraska became the first state in the nation to ban abortion at 20 weeks — a model that spread to statehouse after statehouse and helped build the legal road to Dobbs.

Sixteen years later he hasn't moved an inch. Flood is a cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act in the current Congress.

Juan Ciscomani helped pick the judges who revived an 1864 ban

Some of this work doesn't happen in public. From 2015 to 2022, Juan Ciscomani was one of four staffers in Governor Doug Ducey's office who vetted judicial applicants — "I have the privilege of being part of the Governor's team who interviews judicial candidates," as he put it. All four Arizona Supreme Court justices who voted to reinstate the state's 1864 near-total abortion ban were appointed during his tenure in that role.

When the ruling landed and Arizonans were furious, Ciscomani called the 160-year-old ban "archaic" and "a disaster for women." He helped build the court that resurrected it.

Pat Harrigan changed his answer when his district changed

Pat Harrigan ran in one North Carolina district in 2022 and a different, more conservative one in 2024. His position on a federal abortion ban changed right along with the map. Spectrum News reported: "In 2022, when Harrigan was running in the 14th District, he told us he did not support a federal ban on abortion. He now said, given the makeup of this different district, he would support one."

Your rights shouldn't depend on which precincts a politician needs to win.

This is the party's position, not seven bad apples

Look at what connects these seven. A congressman in Mississippi and a congressman in Arizona cosponsoring the same personhood bill. A senator objecting to IVF protections. A House candidate trading his position for a friendlier district. A governor candidate deleting the issue from his website. None of them stops at their own state line — the personhood bills, the pill restrictions, and the six-week bans are all written to apply everywhere, including the states where voters have already said no.

They can only do that if we keep sending them back. In 2026, we don't have to.

Mississippi's Last Abortion Clinic Has Closed. Michael Guest Wants a Six-Week Ban With No Rape Exception for the Whole Country.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:45:00 +0000

Michael Guest has represented Mississippi's 3rd District since 2019 — seven years in Congress. In that time he's climbed into a chairmanship on the Homeland Security Committee, which means his votes don't just count, they set the agenda. Here are three things Mississippians should know about how he's used that job.

1. He wants the government to control your body

Mississippi is the state that ended Roe. The Dobbs case came from here, and today Mississippi enforces a near-total abortion ban — the state's last abortion clinic has closed, so women have to leave Mississippi to get care.

Guest didn't just cheer that on. He wants to take it national. He's pushing a federal six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape — six weeks is before many women even know they're pregnant. He spoke at a rally on the Supreme Court steps the day the justices heard the case to overturn Roe, and he's spent his career attacking Planned Parenthood and voting to defund it.

Almost two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. Guest thinks he knows better than you what you should be allowed to do with your own body.

2. He's the guy who wrote ICE a $46 billion check

Guest chairs the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement. So when Trump's budget bill handed ICE and Customs and Border Protection the biggest enforcement budget in American history, Guest wasn't a bystander — he went to Newsweek to take credit for it: more than $46 billion for border wall construction, 3,000 new Border Patrol agents and 5,000 new CBP officers. He also went on camera to confirm $800 million set aside just for ICE agent bonuses.

Here's what that money bought. Masked agents operating in near-total anonymity, which ProPublica calls an "unfettered and unaccountable" federal police force. People grabbed outside their own immigration court hearings — the ones who showed up trying to do the right thing. And in January 2026, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed an American citizen, a mother of three, in the face as she tried to drive away.

It's not just happening somewhere else. Local and state agencies are helping ICE run its crackdown here in Mississippi. Guest's response to all of it? He posted that he "fully supports" what DHS is doing.

3. He voted to take health care away from Mississippi

Almost a quarter of this state — 714,600 people, 24.3% of the population — was on Medicaid in 2024. Guest voted for the same bill he brags about above, and it cut more than $1 trillion from health care and food assistance.

For Mississippi, that means:

An estimated $2–$4 billion in lost federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals.
About 115,000 Mississippians projected to lose coverage entirely.
ACA tax credits allowed to expire, which spikes premiums for everyone still buying insurance.

Faith leaders across the state begged the delegation to stop, warning about the harm to Mississippi's most vulnerable. Guest voted yes anyway, then went on to talk up the shutdown fight and the expiring ACA subsidies like it was a win.

So who does Michael Guest work for?

Not the woman in Jackson who now has to drive to another state for medical care. Not the family whose neighbor got picked up by masked agents. Not the 115,000 Mississippians projected to lose their insurance in one of the four states with the lowest median household income in the country.

He works for the agenda that gets him a chairmanship and a Newsweek byline. Pick any one of these three and the answer comes out the same — the people of Mississippi's 3rd District are never the ones he's serving. In 2026, they get to say whether that arrangement continues.