South Carolina Passes Extreme Abortion Ban, Wiping Out Access Across the South

The South Carolina Senate passed a bill Tuesday banning abortion at six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant, and wiping out abortion access in the final southeastern state.

A similar ban died in the legislature in late April after all of the female senators, who span the political spectrum, banded together to filibuster the measure. But Republican Governor Henry McMaster called the lawmakers back for a special session to consider multiple measures, including a new abortion ban. The bill passed by a vote of 27–19.

“We are not God. We need to let people make decisions for themselves,” said Senator Katrina Shealy, a Republican.

Republican Sandy Senn pointed out that the Senate had heard “no medical testimony” about the bill and that if the ban becomes law, it will likely cause illegal abortions to increase.

She asked South Carolinians to remember in the future that when their children “are dying” from having to get illegal abortions, “it is our fault!”

House Democrats had filed 1,000 amendments to try to block the measure from reaching a final vote, but it wasn’t enough. The self-named “sister senators” tried to filibuster the measure, but they too were defeated. All three Republican men who voted against the initial ban switched sides and voted for the six-week ban.

Abortion is currently legal in South Carolina until 22 weeks, although the state had multiple restrictions, such as a mandatory 24-hour waiting period and biased counseling, aimed at running out the clock. If McMaster signs the new bill into law, then abortion access will be essentially wiped out for the entire southeastern United States.

After Florida and North Carolina codified new abortion restrictions in quick succession, South Carolina was one of the last states in the South to hold the line on access to the procedure. Now that it has fallen, it will be next to impossible for anyone in the region to get an abortion.

There is a slim chance the new law may not stick, though: After Roe v. Wade was overturned, South Carolina enacted a six-week trigger ban, which the state Supreme Court blocked in January. The new bill is an attempt to circumvent the ruling. If the new measure is challenged in court, it’s possible the state’s high court will block it once more.

Representative Lauren Boebert admitted Tuesday that she only had her third son because birth control was too expensive.

But instead of using this life experience to work to make access to contraception easier or more affordable, the Colorado Republican has actively worked to make birth control harder to get.

During a hearing on prescription drug prices Tuesday, Boebert asked a pharmacy owner if he often sees people leave without their prescriptions because they can’t afford the medication.

“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control,” Boebert said, explaining that the price was so high she thought the medicine was for three or even six months. But it turns out she was only getting one month’s worth of birth control.

“I said, ‘It’s cheaper to have a kid.’ And I left it there, and now I have my third son,” Boebert said.

Boebert then said that not being able to afford her medication “turned out to be a really great thing” because it resulted in her son. But instead of making birth control easier to access for people, Boebert has decided to force everyone into the same predicament she was in.

Boebert has repeatedly moved to make contraception harder to get. Last summer, she voted against the Right to Contraception Act, which would have codified the right to access birth control. In January, she introduced the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, which would have prohibited federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood.

While Boebert said it was because of Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, the organization actually provides a wide range of sexual health care, from birth control to screenings for sexually transmitted infections. Cutting federal funding, which makes up a little less than half of Planned Parenthood’s budget, would have crippled its services. Boebert has also supported the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which requires that insurance policies cover birth control.

Boebert took the wrong lesson away from not being able to afford her birth control, and now everyone else is having to suffer for it.

Representative Matt Gaetz is being transparent: These debt limit talks are really just about holding the government (and America) “hostage.”

On Tuesday, Gaetz told Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig that his “conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.”

Bear in mind that “Limit, Save, Grow” involves instating work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps, reducing newly introduced funding for the IRS that has already led to massively faster call times for Americans, repealing green energy programs, and blocking Biden from relieving 43 million Americans from crippling student debt.

According to Gaetz, the Republicans are still steadfast in their position that they will only agree to raise the debt ceiling—something they did three times under twice-impeached criminally indicted and liable-for-sexual-abuse former President Donald Trump—if Democrats agree to cut all these programs that millions of Americans benefit from.

Republicans also want to offer even more favors to fossil fuel companies than they already receive. In other words, Republicans want to make America worse off on the global energy stage, and worse off as a leader in fighting the inordinately costly (financially and existentially) ongoing threat of climate disaster already ravaging the country.

Gaetz also revealed the quiet part out loud to Zeballos-Roig about how Republicans have been approaching the debt limit back-and-forth in general. “I believe the one-person motion to vacate has given us the best version of Speaker McCarthy, and I think he’s doing a good job.”

McCarthy, by deferring to the furthest extreme members of his caucus while trying to become speaker, agreed to terms that have made it such that those extreme members can continue to dictate the terms and pace of whether the U.S. will avoid default and potential catastrophic recession.

A Florida school has banned the poem read at Joe Biden’s inauguration after a parent complained it contained “indirect hate messages,” part of a disturbing state-wide trend of blocking discussions about race and gender.

A parent of two students at the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes challenged Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb and four other books in March, arguing they were not age-appropriate. Bob Graham covers grades kindergarten through eight.

Daily Salinas said that The Hill We Climb, The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, and Love to Langston contained references to critical race theory, gender ideology, “indirect hate messages,” and “indoctrination,” especially of socialism. She requested they be removed from the school entirely, according to documents shared by the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

The school decided in April to restrict four of the titles, including Gorman’s, to middle school students only, the Miami Herald reported Monday. Salinas told the Herald she was not satisfied with the decision because “I don’t see how these books support the curriculum.” But she insisted that she “is not for eliminating or censoring any books.”

This is just the latest book ban in Florida since Ron DeSantis was reelected governor in November. At least 175 books have been banned as of March, according to PEN America. The nonprofit sued one Florida school district last week over the book bans.

“The government should not foster censorship by proxy, allowing one person to decide what ideas are out of bounds for all,” said Nadine Farid Johnson, counsel and managing director of PEN America Washington, in a statement regarding the lawsuit.

The Bob Graham ban has come to light after an elementary school in Pinellas County banned the movie Ruby Bridges in March. School officials in the same county also banned high school students from reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison earlier this year. And in October, the Wakulla County school district decided to remove the graphic novel Little Rock Nine from its libraries. All of these bans were enacted after just one parent complained.

Florida is increasingly restricting what can be taught in schools at all levels. DeSantis has declared war on “wokeism” and recently signed into law a measure defunding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses. He backed the Stop Woke Act, which restricts teaching about race in colleges, announced plans to mandate Western civilization courses, and supported the expansion of “Don’t Say Gay.” His administration was also in close contact with the College Board as it gutted the A.P. African American Studies course.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won big on Tuesday—and no, it wasn’t for new concessions on the debt ceiling.

It was for Kevin McCarthy’s used Chapstick.

During House Republicans’ private weekly meeting, they paused discussing the looming federal debt default to auction off McCarthy’s lip balm, Politico reported. Specifically, it was a cherry-flavored, Representative Aaron Bean campaign–branded Chapstick. Greene placed the winning bid of $100,000.

Greene beat out several other contenders, but she reportedly only began bidding after the House speaker agreed to have dinner with the auction winner and any guests of their choice (including donors). Her payment will go to the House Republicans’ campaign arm.

Democrats were rightfully livid, pointing out that Greene was throwing cash around while her party fights to cut spending for childcare, health care, food aid, and veterans’ benefits. Robert Garcia said the move was “gross but on brand” for Greene, while Summer Lee called it a “blatant slap in the face to Americans.”

Nydia Velazquez said the auction demonstrated “GOP priorities in a nutshell,” while Ilhan Omar—a frequent target of Greene’s xenophobia and Islamophobia—didn’t even bother to dress her outrage up in formal language.

The GOP is holding the country hostage as the party refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a very standard congressional procedure, even as the United States hurtles toward defaulting on its debt. Should the U.S. fail to pay its bills, there will be potentially catastrophic consequences for both the domestic and global economy.

At least Greene will be able to put the chapstick to good use. Her lips must be chapped from all the kissing up she does to McCarthy and Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Rick Scott warned socialists and Communists not to come to Florida, saying that the state is “openly hostile” toward them.

“Florida is openly hostile towards Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by Socialists and others who work in the Biden Administration,” the former governor and current Florida senator warns.

Read as written, Scott is not only expressing open hostility to millions of Americans sympathetic to socialist and Communist ideals and nations. He also explicitly notes he “devalues” the “challenges faced by Socialists and others who work in the Biden administration.” Would those challenges include the looming debt ceiling crisis? Or climate change, which threatens to drown Florida? Or that millions in this country lack good and affordable health care (perhaps something that could be solved by—*gasp*—the government)? Funnily enough, the answer as to whether Scott and Republicans devalue and dismiss those challenges would be a resounding “yes.”

Scott’s useless and juvenile “advisory” comes in the wake of the NAACP issuing an earnest travel advisory for people of color and LGBTQ people visiting Florida. The organization’s advisory was in direct response to a state that, under Ron DeSantis’s reign, has relentlessly targeted immigrants, LGBTQ people, women, those afraid of being killed in a mass shooting, people exercising their right to vote, teachers, students, and libraries.

Meanwhile, Scott’s advisory against socialists mimics the House wasting our time and money to pass a bill in February “denouncing the horrors of socialism.” That time, though, 109 Democrats joined the farcical exercise in proving that they too are drunk on capitalist Kool-Aid.

It’s bad enough that Scott is making a mockery of the NAACP—an organization his colleague Ted Cruz has also criticized for apparently not honoring its original mission of advancing civil rights. It’s another thing that apparently both Scott and Cruz can’t understand, or more likely are excited about, how Florida is actively demolishing people’s civil rights. All the more comical, given that Cruz based much of his complaint on the notion that Democrats are the real racists because of people like George Wallace—whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from Scott’s in his new advisory against socialism.

And it’s the cherry on top that, as TNR has written previously, in “a country ailed by the callousness of capitalism—as people are subject to a continual stream of mass shootings, ruthless police brutality, and having to resort to GoFundMe in order to pay for rent and hospital bills—members of Congress spent their workday instead denouncing socialism.”

It’s amazing that the most powerful people in the United States get to also be remarkably lazy and incredibly dull. And Ted Cruz is the cream of the crooked crop.

Over the weekend, the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, stating that the state is “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” The advisory came, according to the historic organization, in response to Ron DeSantis’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”

Senator Cruz, ever the galled-fellow, called the move “utterly dishonest.”

American historian Kevin Kruse responded, pointing out that despite Cruz’s (and other Republicans’) insistent invocation of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader’s political legacy simply doesn’t align with conservatives’ views on race in America.

Cruz retorted by repeating what Kruse had already said, that George Wallace was a Democrat, as if that was some exculpatory evidence that conservatives are the real torchbearers of King’s legacy, and the left, actually, are the real racists.

Of course, Cruz either still somehow doesn’t know or, more likely, willfully ignores basic history to whip up outrage among any impressionable followers. Wallace was among the slate of twentieth-century Democrats who deployed the “Southern strategy”: increasing support among white voters by whipping up racist sentiment against African Americans.

Sounds familiar to exactly what Cruz is doing by attacking the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for its bold act of expressing concern for Black people, huh?

After all, Wallace’s speeches, which railed against “hippies,” civil rights “agitators,” “lazy” welfare recipients, atheists, “pointy-headed intellectuals,” “anarchists and Communists,” antiwar “radicals and rabble-rousers,” and beatniks are something you might readily hear on any number of programs hosted by Cruz’s media circle, from Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles, to Cruz’s own armchair-and-cigars podcast (one he hosts almost daily, when he instead could be serving the people who elected him).

But the idea that political party names (Republican, Democrat) don’t correspond to the ideologies beneath them and can change throughout time is simply too complicated for Cruz’s mental capacity, or, more likely, too historically true for his offensive pursuit to proselytize a made-up view of America. It seems impossible for Cruz—who has pathetically bowed down to a serial criminal and sexual abuser who has insulted Cruz’s own wife—to imagine that members of a political party could actually criticize and separate themselves from detestable figures who claim to be part of the same party.

For what it’s worth, note that the NAACP’s advisory was certainly not a dismissal of Florida. “The NAACP proudly fights against the malicious attacks in Florida, against Black Americans. I encourage my fellow Floridians to join in this fight to protect ourselves and our democracy,” said Leon Russell, chair of the NAACP Board of Directors.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her boyfriend are back at it again with the bald-faced hypocrisy, this time attacking strippers.

In the latest episode of her podcast, MTG Battleground, which aired Monday night, Greene and her boyfriend, Brian Glenn, discussed how some strip clubs had drive-thru performances during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Glenn, who works for the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, said the move was “ridiculous.”

“This is one of the things that Covid should’ve shut down and kept shut down, is strip clubs,” Greene says, as they both laugh. “The very fact that Covid forced the strippers out in public … that is appalling to me.”

But in an old news video, Glenn did a segment on male strippers that definitely brought the dancers out in public. He opens the segment by saying you could consider the dancers “therapists.” It’s not clear when the segment was filmed, but the microphone that he holds during the video bears the logo for the local Dallas-Fort Worth Fox news station. Glenn worked for that station from 2013 to 2015.

During the news segment, Glenn wears a vest over a cutoff flannel shirt and chaps over jeans. Two male dancers teach him how to strip his clothes off in time to music.

Glenn seemed to think strippers were just fine in that video. But now, he and Greene are laughing about how Covid should have put an entire industry out of work.

These two clips began circulating online just a day after Greene, who has gone out of her way to viciously attack drag queens, tweeted that she was “literally lol’ing” at an old video of Glenn wearing drag on the local Dallas news.

Once again, it appears that physical actions of wearing drag or sex-related work are not the issue. The problem for Greene and other Republicans like her are the people doing them.

Donald Trump allegedly knew he was supposed to return every single classified document after he was subpoenaed for them, but he kept hundreds of papers anyway.

Federal prosecutors have about 50 pages of notes from Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran, who apparently warned the former president about complying with the subpoena, The Guardian reported Monday. These notes could be significant in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Corcoran found about 40 classified documents in the estate storage room last June and told the Department of Justice that that was all there was to be found. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago two months later and seized 101 additional classified documents.

The notes reveal that Trump and his valet Walt Nauta knew exactly where and when Corcoran was planning to search for the documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Justice Department is paying particular attention to Nauta, according to The Guardian, who had previously testified that Trump asked him to move boxes out of the storage room both before and after the subpoena was issued.

The Guardian suggested that it is possible prosecutors are investigating whether Nauta knew exactly what was in the boxes he was moving. According to Corcoran’s notes, Nauta had offered to help him look through the boxes in the storage room, which Corcoran declined. But he took breaks during the multiday search, leaving the storage room unattended multiple times.

The grand jury hearing evidence in the case was able to see the notes after a judge ruled in March that some of Trump’s attorney-client privileges could be “pierced.” Prosecutors for Smith’s team found that Trump intentionally misled his own lawyers, including Corcoran, about keeping classified materials when he left office.

U.S. Judge Beryl Howell ordered Corcoran to comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony on six different lines of inquiry. She also ordered him to hand over records of Trump’s alleged “criminal scheme,” including handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings.

In addition to Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents and role in January 6, the former president is also under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he has been indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and on Monday, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.

“Everywhere there’s globes…and that’s what they do to brainwash… For me, if it is not a conspiracy, if it is, you know, ‘real,’ why are you pushing so hard? Everywhere I go, every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere—every movie, every TV show, news media, why?”

This is what Kandiss Taylor, former Republican Georgia gubernatorial candidate, and current GOP Chair in Georgia’s 1st District, said on her program called “JESUS. GUNS. AND BABIES.”

Taylor’s comments came during a broader conversation focused on the flat-Earth conspiracy theory; the conversation featured “Flat Earth Dave,” who manages a website with the same moniker.

Last year, Taylor boosted conspiracy theories and lies describing state GOP leaders as secret communists and Democrats as satanic pedophiles. And, of course, she was a big believer in the lie that twice impeached criminally indicted and liable for sexual abuse former President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election.

She herself refused to concede her loss in the Republican primary, despite only receiving some 3 percent of the vote. She also promised to demolish the Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious granite monument of 16-foot-tall stones known as “America’s Stonehenge,” if elected. Curiously, months later, a large explosion destroyed significant parts of the granite monument.