Supreme Court Is About to Take Another Big Swing at Abortion Rights

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that would decide the fate of the “abortion pill.”

It will be the biggest reproductive rights case that the court’s conservative supermajority has seen since it overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

At stake is access to a drug called mifepristone, which, along with misoprostol, comprises one-half of a two-pill prescription jointly referred to as “the abortion pill.” Together, they account for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute.

In April, a Trump-appointed judge in a lower court halted access to the drug. Four months later, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs, the right-wing Christian organization Alliance Defending Freedom, ruling that while the pill was safe for market, the Food and Drug Administration had overstepped its role by taking several steps that expanded access to the drug in 2016. That included allowing women to access it 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven, lowering the standard dosage, and allowing the prescription to be accessed via telemedicine.

Until now, none of those changes have been felt thanks to a Supreme Court stay on the case. But now that the nation’s highest court has decided to review it, that could change.

And the Christian legal group leading the charge against mifepristone would like to see more than just a few nicks to its access—instead, it’s aiming for a complete ban that questions the FDA’s initial approval of the drug in 2000, according to court filings.

A decision in the case is expected by summer.

The chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, is apparently afraid to go up against even the mildest of criticism as he pushes the GOP forward with a symbolic impeachment vote of Joe Biden, telling Newsmax host Eric Bolling that he won’t even dare to go on Fox.

On Monday, Fox anchor Steve Doocy suggested on Fox & Friends that the probe, which hasn’t produced one fact witness who could say Joe Biden did anything illegal and has tried and failed to tie the president into the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden, was meritless.

“They’ve connected the dots, the Department of Justice did, on Hunter, but they have not shown where Joe Biden, you know, did anything illegally,” Doocy said on the network before being harangued by his colleagues.

Thanks to that tiny hole in the conservative safety net that is Fox News, Comer jumped ship to Newsmax on Wednesday, claiming that Doocy’s dissenting opinion is too threatening.

“He’s had that position from the very beginning,” Comer told Bolling. “I’ve quit going on Fox & Friends because of Doocy, you know? I mean, he’s the one guy on Fox that’s been very critical of the investigation. I have my theory why, and we’ll talk about that at a later point, but at the end of the day, he’s entitled to his opinion, but I don’t think the average viewer of Fox News agrees with Doocy one bit.”

But if Comer is too afraid to face down Fox News for even the mildest bout of criticism, what does that mean for the actual impeachment proceedings, which Republicans seemingly want to keep in the dark?

Last week, the caucus threatened to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress if he refused to appear for a closed door deposition, despite the president’s son’s previously voiced preference for a public hearing, fearing that information from those interviews would be selectively leaked and used to “manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public.”

The House is expected to cast a floor vote sometime on Wednesday to formalize the impeachment proceedings into Joe Biden.

House Speaker Mike Johnson once warned about the exact impeachment strategy his party is now pursuing against Joe Biden.

In a video from 2019 recently resurfaced by MSNBC, Johnson raises concerns about Democrats opening an impeachment inquiry against Trump along party lines, as well as an impeachment happening within a year of a presidential election.

Johnson also warned that the Founding Fathers would have been against Trump’s impeachment because they believed a “single-party impeachment” would divide Americans.

“The Founding Fathers warned us,” Johnson said in 2019.

The House plans on authorizing Biden’s impeachment inquiry on Wednesday.

Republicans are doubling down on their removal of the phrase “open and transparent” from a proposed resolution to impeach President Joe Biden, continuing to defend a move that by all means looks like an effort to keep the American people in the dark and out of a legal challenge to the nation’s highest elected official.

Republicans on the House Rules Committee on Tuesday voted against adding the clause back into their impeachment rules.

A senior House Republican aide identified with House Speaker Mike Johnson previously said that the term was excluded from the resolution on the basis that it was “too wordy,” according to USA Today.

But Democrats got feisty about that, pointing toward their 2019 impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, which didn’t just include the phrase in its text but utilized it as a header to front a section explaining the proceedings.

“My point is that at the impeachment inquiry phase, when we took that vote, from then on, everything was public, which is why the resolution was structured as such,” said Colorado Representative Joe Neguse. “In this instance, Republicans have removed it, and it’s clear that they don’t intend to have a public process.”

Neguse also highlighted that Republicans’ impeachment rules, as currently written, don’t require a single public hearing.

The blatant dismissal of the phrase seems more akin to shirking responsibility for a transparent proceeding, despite aggressive Republican signaling otherwise.

On Tuesday, Republican Representative Guy Reschenthaler claimed the inquiry was inherently transparent because “you can’t turn on a news program” without seeing Representatives Jim Jordan or House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer discussing the investigation.

It’s not the only aspect of the inquiry in which Republicans are insisting on discretion. Last week, the caucus threatened to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress if he refused to appear for a closed-door deposition, despite the president’s son’s previously voiced preference for a public hearing, fearing that information from those interviews would be selectively leaked and used to “manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public.”

Congressional interns are calling their bosses out, accusing the rank and file of Capitol Hill of downplaying constituent calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, claiming that hundreds of thousands of messages from U.S. citizens and staff have gone “unnoticed and unheard.”

In an open letter signed by 140 interns and fellows working for Democratic and Republican offices, the collective noted that congressional phone lines and inboxes have been more than overwhelmed with messages calling for an immediate cease-fire. In just 71 of 535 congressional offices, constituents placed more than 693,170 calls, letters, and voice messages demanding a cease-fire, according to the group.

“We believe Israel, like any nation, has the right to defend itself and its people. However, there is no justification for the wanton killing of innocent civilians. There is no justification for intentionally bombing hospitals, shelters, water supplies, religious sites, or schools. This is no longer an act of defense. It is genocide,” the letter read.

“While we refrain from telling our bosses how to do their jobs, as congressional interns and fellows, we owe it to the American people to expose the patent malpractice of Congress. We can no longer stand by while the voices of constituents are suppressed and ignored by their elected officials,” they added, avoiding naming themselves for fear of career retaliation.

The interns also noted that some members of Congress have not been “adequately briefed” about the volume or contents of the messages and that despite congressional inaction, they would do “everything in our power to ensure a permanent ceasefire is achieved.”

“To diminish the intelligence of people who support a ceasefire, to blatantly spread misinformation within the office about the conflict, and to actively make other staff feel uncomfortable is appalling,” read one testimonial included in the letter. “There is a clear disconnect between what the American public wants and what their representatives are doing.”

This isn’t the first report that members of Congress are ignoring constituent calls for a ceasefire. Last month, a HuffPost report found that several Democratic lawmakers explicitly told their staff to let the ringing go to voicemail. At the time, one staffer said the calls don’t “stop ringing at any point in the day.”

Sixty-one percent of all likely voters support a cease-fire and calls for the deescalation of violence in Gaza, according to a December 5 Data for Progress poll. That same poll found that the majority of respondents (63 percent), including Republicans, felt that Israel should only receive more aid under the condition that it meets a U.S. standard for human rights.

Meanwhile, only 11 percent of Congress feels the same, with just 61 lawmakers having issued statements calling for a cease-fire.

At least 18,412 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began, and 1.7 million people (or 81 percent of the total population) have been displaced, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations.