Texas’s Attorney General Has a Ghoulish New Abortion Stance

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened doctors who perform abortions with felony charges, even if a court says they can conduct the procedure.

A Travis County district judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Texas’s strict abortion laws to allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The woman, Dallas resident Kate Cox, and her husband had wanted to have a child, but doctors warned the fetus had a lethal abnormality and would not survive past birth.

Within hours, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a warning of his own. “The Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) granted by the Travis County district judge purporting to allow an abortion to proceed will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws,” he said in a statement.

“This includes first degree felony prosecutions.”

Paxton acknowledged that Cox’s ob-gyn, Dr. Damla Karsan, was shielded by the order; the TRO “does not enjoin actions brought by private citizens”—a blatant threat to people who seek or provide abortions.

Cox was 20 weeks’ pregnant when she found out her fetus had trisomy 18, a condition caused by having an extra chromosome. This abnormality is almost always fatal, either before birth or soon after.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortions were banned in Texas except to save the life of the pregnant person. Since trisomy 18 is only fatal to the fetus, not the patient, Cox’s situation did not qualify for a medically necessary abortion.

She filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to let her terminate her pregnancy. Thursday’s ruling was the first time in at least 50 years that a judge has intervened to allow an adult to get an abortion.

Paxton’s office can appeal the ruling and ask a higher court to prevent Cox from getting an abortion, but he has not yet done so.

This is not the first time that Texas’s cruel and restrictive laws have caused legal backlash. Over the summer, a group of 15 women sued the state after they were denied abortions. All of the women had wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but needed abortions because their fetuses had fatal anomalies.

One defendant, Samantha Casiano, vomited in court while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her child die four hours after being born.

Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses and said that becoming House speaker was part of God’s plan.

Johnson was the keynote speaker at Tuesday evening’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ annual gala. The NACL is a Christian nationalist organization that says its goal is to codify a “biblical worldview” into law. Both its founder and Johnson are big fans of the “Appeal to Heaven” Christian nationalist flag.

During his speech, Johnson said that a few weeks before Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership, God told him to “prepare and be ready.”

“We’re coming to a Red Sea moment. What does that mean, Lord?” Johnson said, referring to when God parted the Red Sea so Moses could lead the enslaved Jews out of Egypt.

“When the speaker’s race happened and Kevin McCarthy, who’s a dear friend of mine, was deposed and vacated from the chair, oh wow! Well, this is what the Lord may have been preparing us for.”

“At the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses, and thank you Lord, you’re going to allow me to be Aaron,” Johnson continued, referring to Moses’s brother.

But as the votes dragged on, Johnson said, God told him, “Now, step forward.”

While Aaron did help Moses, he also nearly caused the destruction of the Israelites. When Moses went up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the people grew tired of waiting. They convinced Aaron to make a statue of a golden calf, and Aaron was going to become the new leader. So really, Johnson said he was prepared to lead a rebel group that worships a false idol.

Johnson repeatedly eschews the separation of church and state, instead flaunting his extremist Christian beliefs. And yet he is still allowed to stay in power, despite the risk his ideology poses to the country.

Americans seem to have no interest in the Republican primary debates, even with two more of the mud-slinging spectacles freshly lined up by CNN for January.

Over the last several months, viewership of the debates has tanked. The first crowded debate in August hit a high of 14.2 million viewers, though those numbers have since plummeted, with just 3.2 million people tuning in to Wednesday’s debate between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Koch-backed former Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

The 90-minute punch-packed bully specials haven’t done much for any of the GOP contenders in the polls, according to aggregated data from FiveThirtyEight. As of Thursday, DeSantis’s and Haley’s numbers have barely budged; they continued to poll at a measly 12.7 and 10.6 percent, respectively.

At this point, it’s a scramble to gain an inkling of the attention so easily pulled by the GOP’s greatest showman, Donald Trump, whose strategy of outright avoiding public debates has proved effective among Republican voters—he leads the primary with around 60 percent of the vote, per aggregate polling.

To that point—Fox News’s sleepy town hall between Sean Hannity and a sluggish Trump was the most watched program on Tuesday, pulling just as many viewers as a full and formal debate stage, according to ratings released by the network.

If Americans are voting with their remotes, they’ve made it abundantly clear that none of the candidates on the GOP debate stage are of any interest to them.

Even DeSantis’s one-off, completely unrelated matchup against California Governor Gavin Newsom held more public interest than the most recent debate. Fox’s “Great Red vs. Blue State” publicity stunt, which saw the Florida governor thoroughly scorched and humiliated amid his own references to poop and science denialism, garnered 4.7 million viewers.

Still, faltering public interest might not be the only reason why Wednesday’s debate fell flat on its face. Droves of potential viewers complained online that they weren’t able to find it—perhaps unsurprising given that the debate was aired on The CW, the network most famous for airing Gossip Girl and the final (and worst) season of Gilmore Girls.

Taylor Swift was named the 2023 Time “Person of the Year” on Wednesday, and of course conservatives have been quick to claim that there is a vast liberal conspiracy to blame.

Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted to X, formerly Twitter, early on Wednesday morning, writing that Swift’s “girlboss psyop has been fully activated,” and claimed that Swift is gearing up to be part of a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Psobiec posted again, linking a video of Taylor Swift crying while talking about her frustrations with former Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn’s conservative voting record.

“I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee, I am Christian, that’s not what we stand for,” Swift said in the video. Swift broke her career-long political silence in 2018 to post on Instagram urging her followers to vote against Marsha Blackburn during the 2018 midterm elections when Blackburn ran for Senate.

Posobiec captioned the video of Swift, “The day the op was born.”

Former Trump adviser and resident internet twerp Stephen Miller also took to X on Wednesday night to air a similar grievance:

Conservatives’ claims that the billionaire superstar is secretly a political operative come after a remarkably apolitical year from Swift.

In 2022, she tweeted her disappointment with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but she hasn’t done all that much since. In October, Swift posted on Instagram encouraging young people to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day. As a result, over 35,000 people did so, contributing to a 23 percent increase in overall registrations. Swift’s call to action was distinctly nonpartisan.

So why all of the fuss? Do conservative men just hate to see a girlboss winning? Maybe a post by one of Donald Trump’s dear Fulton County co-defendants, Attorney Jeff Clark, can give us some idea of what’s going on.

Clark quote-tweeted Posobiec’s first post, and added, “This is what happens when we cede culture to the Left. Brainless youth raising themselves on Taylor Swift’s saccharine bland music and that washing over into the serious world of politics.”

Clark seems to hate Taylor Swift because he deems her representative of the so-called “brainless youth,” but to some degree, Swift is a uniquely apolitical pick for Time’s Person of the Year, with the possible exception of 2006’s “You” (seriously, what was that about?). But now it seems like conservatives are confused. Is Swift a major political player, or is she just a piece of leftist cultural flotsam washing up onto a more “serious” shore?

The answer is neither. Swift is a billionaire singer-songwriter and movie star who has kept everyone’s attention for the last 365 days. And ultimately, Swift was granted one of the biggest platforms in the world—the only women’s rights mentioned in the article anointing her as “Person of the Year” were Swift’s rights to her own master tapes.

Republican politicians are making morbid warnings about the future of the party’s narrow majority in the House in the wake of a mass exodus of their elected officials.

The dwindling GOP caucus is thanks in part to several major retirement announcements, including those of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, and Representative Bill Johnson, as well as the expulsion of serial fabulist George Santos last week. Those vacancies set the House balance at 219–213 for the time being, meaning that Republicans need a practically united caucus—a rarity—to pass their conservative agenda.

“I can assure you Republican voters didn’t give us the majority to crash the ship,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on X, blaming the Freedom Caucus for inducing the legislative nightmare that ousted McCarthy and stoking division.

“Hopefully no one dies,” she added.

So far, 30 members of the House and seven senators have announced they will not be seeking reelection in 2024, though some seem to be expediting their exit. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday, McCarthy revealed he wouldn’t even wait until the end of his term to ditch Capitol Hill, opting instead to vacate his seat by the end of the month.

But the retreat might be about more than just a legislative migraine. In recent years, Republican officials have become increasingly incensed by a lack of action by their party on Capitol Hill, voicing anxieties about returning to the campaign trail empty-handed.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” lamented Texas Representative Chip Roy during a speech on the House floor last month, coming down hard on former President Donald Trump for failing to act on border security while wielding a Republican majority in the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides well, ‘I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats,’” Roy added.