Louisiana Republican Breaks Ranks to Kill Anti-Trans Bill, Says He Doesn’t Care What Other People Say

A Louisiana Republican state senator broke ranks to kill an anti-trans bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. And he doesn’t care about the online right-wing outrage over it.

Fred Mills cast the deciding vote Wednesday to block a bill that would have banned hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-affirming surgery for transgender minors. The bill had passed the House and was up before the Senate Health and Welfare Committee. Mills joined all four Democrats in voting to defer the bill, effectively killing it for the year. Louisiana is now the only state along the Gulf Coast that still allows gender-affirming care for minors.

“Always in my heart of hearts have I believed that a decision should be made by a patient and a physician. I believe in the physicians in Louisiana,” Mills, a pharmacist, said at the time. “I believe in the scope of practice. I believe in the standard of care.”

Mills explained that part of his decision was based on testimony from medical professionals. Health professionals widely acknowledge that gender-affirming care decreases levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts in LGBTQ minors. Doctors generally don’t recommend surgery for people under age 19, and a Louisiana Health Department report found that no Medicaid recipients had received gender reassignment surgery in the state between 2017 and 2021.

A child and adolescent psychiatrist testified in the committee about the standard procedures already in place for gender-affirming care. He pointed out that many medications used for trans care are proven safe and used to treat other, unrelated issues.

Many far-right activists immediately sought to discredit Mills after the news of his vote broke. Greg Price, who works with the right-wing State Freedom Caucus Network, said Mills had received “massive contributions from Big Pharma.” Noted transphobe Matt Walsh said Mills had “sided with the butchers and groomers” and predicted it would end the senator’s career.

But Mills, frankly, doesn’t care. “Why should I?” he told the Louisiana Illuminator. “They don’t live in District 22. They don’t have a 337 area code.”

“I didn’t run for office to serve those people.”

Mills said he heard no evidence of children being harmed by gender-affirming treatment, so he voted based on the data that was presented. Since then, he said many colleagues have thanked him for his decision, including other Republican senators who are not on the committee.

In a time when we see the consequences of corporations decimating the beauty, the harmony, and the value of our natural landscape, we ought to be doing everything we can to fight back and protect the earth. The conservative-led Supreme Court, however, believes otherwise.

On Thursday, the court ruled 5–4 to weaken the already whittled-down Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate water pollution.

The question at hand involved defining “waters of the United States” that qualify for protection by the Clean Water Act. And the court held that the 51-year-old CWA does not enable the EPA to regulate discharges into some wetlands near other bodies of water.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion that decided the agency has jurisdiction over wetlands only if they have “a continuing surface connection” to larger bodies of water.

Almost 20 years ago, the court ruled that wetlands are covered by the CWA if they have a ”significant nexus” to regulated bodies of water. Various groups, including property and business organizations and fossil fuel interests, have since rallied to weaken that definition—and on Thursday, they ultimately succeeded.

The court decision follows twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former President Donald Trump rolling back updates to the CWA made under President Obama. Trump limited federal protection to cover only “permanent” bodies of water and not other smaller but still significant waterways, like streams of water that flow only part of the year. Trump’s rule gave states greater authority to determine what should be regulated under the CWA, which meant less protection for our climate.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the CWA’s jurisdiction is now all the weaker. Any seasonal streams of ebbing and flowing waterways can be more readily polluted at will by some of the most callously destructive interests in American society.

What is at stake? Look no further than East Palestine, Ohio, where a disastrous Norfolk Southern train derailment months ago has to this day left residents confused, sick, and disenchanted by the government. The derailment implicated and polluted numerous waterways—some that interlink with adjacent smaller streams and wetlands. While residents even now fear corporate-driven cover-ups of more environmental damage than meets the eye, the conservative-led Supreme Court has made it even easier for communities across America to be upended, just as East Palestine was.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed a bill Thursday banning abortion after six weeks, wiping out access to the procedure for the entire Southeast.

A similar ban had 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 McMaster called the lawmakers back for a special session to consider multiple measures, including a new abortion ban, which passed the legislature on Tuesday. He signed the bill behind closed doors, with no fanfare or warning to doctors who could be about to perform a newly illegal procedure.

“What we are doing today is not going to do away with illegal abortions. It is going to cause illegal abortions,” warned Republican Senator Sandy Senn during the final debate.

Addressing state residents directly, she said, “When … your teenagers end up dying because they went to get an illegal abortion because they didn’t know they were pregnant before six weeks, it is our fault!”

The new law bans abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant. It includes exceptions for rape and incest up to 12 weeks, but health care providers are required to tell patients that they will report the assault to law enforcement. This could discourage people from seeking abortions because they don’t want to report the attack.

The measure also prohibits mental health from being considered a medical emergency, so even if someone is diagnosed as suicidal, they still cannot get an abortion. Doctors who break the law face fines and up to two years in prison.

While the law does require child support payments be made from the moment of conception, writer Jessica Valenti points out that this is less to help the pregnant person and more to establish that personhood begins at conception.

The South Carolina arm of Planned Parenthood Votes South Atlantic has already said it intends to try to block the law in the courts. There is a slim chance it will succeed: After Roe v. Wade was overturned, South Carolina enacted a six-week trigger ban, which the state Supreme Court blocked in January. The new law is an attempt to circumvent the ruling, and if it’s challenged in court, it’s possible the state’s high court will block it once more.

But until it is blocked, abortion access will be decimated in the South. 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.

Ron DeSantis’s long-delayed presidential announcement was a disaster. And Donald Trump is cheesing from cheek to cheek.

A Twitter Space with audio glitches, jarring feedback echoes, nervous whispers wondering whether the operation was even working. The DeSantis x Elon Musk x David Sacks collab even fully crashed at one point. The whole affair didn’t even begin until 30 minutes later. The content itself was just as embarrassing; a tinny-voiced DeSantis fielded questions from an entirely sympathetic rotating cast, all while sounding like he was reading off bullet points as quickly as possible, lest the whole Twitter Space chat room crash again before he got it all off his chest.

And Trump had a field day with it all.

He was quick to remind everyone how absurd it was that DeSantis was announcing in the manner he did at all:

Someone also helped Trump figure out A.I. voice impersonations, placing DeSantis in a fictional Twitter Space with a cast including the FBI, the Devil, and Hitler (Trump was also able to scratch a far-right itch by including George Soros in the mix):

And he poked fun at a key feature of Musk: Everything he touches soon blows up:

Of course, even if DeSantis somehow had the brain cells to host a “successful” campaign launch, there’s more at stake. Everything about his résumé exhibits a destructive man corrosive to social harmony, or society working at all.

But whether it’s the decisions of him or those around him, every choice DeSantis has made so far has been downright daffy. Waiting as long as he did to announce. Announcing in the most physically out-of-touch manner—not in his home state, nor even a swing state, but on a website famously eviscerated on the back end. Doing the announcement in a setting in which people can only hear his voice that some may argue is not fit for radio. And all those decisions come while he tries to outdo the twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former president, while barely criticizing him for any of those faults.

There’s a satisfaction in watching the instantaneous collapse of someone as obscenely evil and dramatically uninterested in unity as DeSantis—even if it is prompted by his role model.

Ron DeSantis somehow managed to follow his disastrous Twitter Space with an equally cringey Fox News interview.

The Florida governor formally announced he was running for president Wednesday night in a Twitter event with Elon Musk and David Sacks. To say things had gone poorly would be an understatement, with constant glitches and bad jokes derailing any sense of pomp or celebration. But DeSantis’s subsequent interview on Fox News didn’t really improve things.

When host Trey Gowdy asked how DeSantis would address the war in Ukraine, the Florida man launched into a rant about how the military is too “woke.” “First, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized,” DeSantis said. “You talk about gender ideology, you talk about things like global warming that they’re somehow concerned, and that’s not the military that I served in.”

He did not mention what he specifically would do about Ukraine. (Recall that DeSantis has previously faced blowback from Republicans for saying Ukraine is not a vital interest.)

Gowdy then asked about the government’s role in addressing climate change (which, props to him for semi-acknowledging that it’s real). DeSantis promptly responded that the weather has been subject to “politicization.”

Insisting that hurricanes have not gotten more intense in recent years, DeSantis instead said, apropos of nothing, “I think what we should be doing in the United States is focusing on being energy independent.”

It’s interesting how quick DeSantis was to denounce things being too politicized, considering all the things he has recently decided to politicize in his home state: bathrooms, drag queens, children’s books, and Disney World, to name a few.