Ohio’s Republican Governor Vetoes Bill Blocking Care for Trans Minors

Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine shocked everyone Friday when he vetoed a bill that would have banned gender-affirming care for minors, a major win for LGBTQ residents of the Buckeye State.

House Bill 68 would have banned gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers. The measure would have applied to treatments including puberty blockers, hormones, and medical procedures; it also included prohibitions on trans high school and college students participating on sports teams that match their gender identity.

“Were I to sign House Bill 68, or were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state—that the government—knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most: the parents,” DeWine said at a press conference.

“I cannot sign this bill as it is currently written. Just a few minutes ago, I vetoed this bill.”

More than 500 people testified against the bill in early December, including representatives for most major medical institutions in the state and the country. DeWine cited the medical support for gender-affirming care as a factor in his decision, as well as conversations he had with trans teens and their parents.

“Parents have looked me in the eye and told me that but for this treatment, their child would be dead,” he said. “And youth who are transgender have told me they are thriving today because of their transition.”

DeWine’s decision is a rare bright spot in the current onslaught of measures restricting access to gender-affirming care. GOP-led states have passed hundreds of bills banning health care for trans teens and adults. The few victories are often the result of a Republican breaking ranks, such as in Louisiana, where Republican state Senator Fred Mills cast the deciding vote in May to kill a gender-affirming care ban in committee. Unfortunately, the Louisiana Republicans resurrected the bill and successfully passed it through a different committee. That ban will go into effect on January 1.

Maine has disqualified Donald Trump from its 2024 primary ballot, the second time this month that a state has made the historic move regarding the former president.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled Thursday that Trump had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack, rendering himself ineligible for elected office under the text of Article Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Trump’s team had desperately tried to stop her from handing down this decision, arguing that Bellows should have recused herself from the case because of past comments she had made about the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Bellows determined that the January 6 attack was “violent enough, potent enough, and long enough to constitute an insurrection.” Trump, she stated in her decision, “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.”

“The events of January 6, 2021 were unprecedented and tragic,” Bellows wrote. “The evidence here demonstrates that they occurred at the behest of, and with the knowledge and support of, the outgoing President. The U.S. Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government, and [Maine law] requires me to act in response.”

Bellows’s decision comes a little more than a week after the Colorado Supreme Court also determined that Trump had engaged in insurrection and barred him from the state’s primary ballot. Neither decision will go into effect immediately so Trump has time to appeal.

Multiple other states are currently weighing cases regarding Trump’s ballot eligibility. The secretaries of state in Michigan, Minnesota, and California have all determined that Trump will remain on their presidential ballots. The next decision will likely come out of Oregon.

While it’s possible that other states might come to the same conclusion reached by election officials in Maine and Colorado, the question of whether Trump will ultimately appear on these states’ ballots will likely be determined by the Supreme Court. Trump’s campaign has already said it will appeal the Maine and Colorado decisions. The Colorado Republican Party on Wednesday asked the nation’s high court to review the state Supreme Court decision.

While the Supreme Court is not required to take the case, there is a sense of momentum that this dispute is headed its way, as  legal scholars have called on the justices to resolve the issue. Their decision will provide a single rule for all states—instead of having a messy mix of some state ballots with Trump’s name and some without—and will likely shape how the Fourteenth Amendment’s language will be interpreted going forward.

It turns out that pulling off a scheme to use fake electors to overturn a presidential election isn’t as easy as you might think. What if, for example, the fake elector documents you ginned up to further the plot somehow gets stuck in the mail? Well, then you have to go to elaborate lengths to make sure that your counterfeit credentials make it to Washington in time to stop the actual electoral votes from being counted—an “all hands on deck” moment for President Donald Trump’s crackerjack gang of coup plotters.

That’s one of the primary takeaways from a new report from CNN, adding fresh details to the way Trump’s inner circle plotted to get Vice President Mike Pence to throw a spanner in the works in the days before Trump’s desperate effort to hold onto power in the days before the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. The news comes at a time when secretaries of state around the country are mulling whether Trump’s efforts to topple the electoral process should get him booted from the presidential ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Late Thursday afternoon, CNN reported that it had obtained “emails and recordings” that shine a light on “the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office”—specifically that the plotters’ “fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.” Per CNN:

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

A conservative parental rights activist and former candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant governor has been charged for providing alcohol to minors at a party in September and then punching one of the attendees.

Clarice Schillinger was charged in late October over the incident at her home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half’s drive north of Philadelphia. The charges were reported on Thursday. The 36-year-old faces charges of assault, harassment, and furnishing minors with alcohol. Her lawyer has denied the charges.

Schillinger has earned some notoriety in her home state for launching a political action committee in 2021 aimed at preventing schools from implementing lockdowns due to Covid-19. She also made a wildly unsuccessful bid for Pennsylvania lieutenant governor last year.

The October charges stem from a 17th birthday party Schillinger hosted for her daughter the month prior. According to the police report, Schillinger stocked a drinks table with vodka and rum, poured alcohol for the teenage guests, asked them to take shots with her, and played beer pong with them.

Things took a turn for the worse when Schillinger began to fight with her then-boyfriend, Shan Wilson. When a teenager tried to intervene, Wilson grabbed the teen by the neck. Schillinger’s mother allegedly punched the teen in the eye and chased him around the kitchen.

Wilson later hit another teen during an argument, after which some of the adolescent partygoers began to leave to get away from the adults. But things continued to escalate as Schillinger told them to stay and then grabbed one partygoer who was trying to depart. That teen told police that Schillinger hit him three times with a closed fist but didn’t injure him.

One of the partygoer’s parents called the police early the next morning, on September 30, to report the assault and the underage drinking. As it turned out, this was not the first time police had been called to Schillinger’s home for an out-of-control party. One week before, police responded to a noise complaint at Schillinger’s house. Officers saw beer cans thrown all around the front yard and street, and saw about 20 teenagers run into the house when the authorities approached.

Schillinger made a name for herself in 2021 when she launched a PAC to back candidates that opposed closing schools down as a Covid-19 safety measure. She has described her PAC and organization as bipartisan and single-issue, but they only back Republican candidates.

That first year, her organization took credit for flipping six school districts. But they fell victim to the pushback against parental rights activists, which delivered major wins for Democrats nationwide this past fall. Schillinger also ran as a Republican for lieutenant governor in 2022. She finished fourth, with a little more than 148,000 votes out of the 1.2 million cast in total.

Schillinger is the latest case of a conservative activist falling ironically short of the moral standards to which she holds other people. Most recently, the national organization Moms for Liberty has been rocked by a rape allegation. A woman revealed she had engaged in threesomes with Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her husband, Christian Ziegler. The woman accused Christian Ziegler of sexually assaulting her.

To gain traction in the Republican presidential primary, Chris Christie has gone all out by going all in—specifically, with a massive ad campaign in New Hampshire that he hopes might fan the dying flames of his presidential run. But seeing as he’s mired in the low single-digits of RealClearPolitics’s rolling average of the last three weeks of polling, it’s far more likely that he will just crash and burn.

Christie’s campaign unveiled a seven-figure ad buy in New Hampshire that launched Thursday. In the first ad, Christie addresses calls for him to drop out of the race and tries to bring the focus back to stopping Donald Trump.

“Some people say I should drop out of this race. Really? I’m the only one saying Donald Trump is a liar,” Christie says of the man whose presidential transition team he briefly led.

Trump will “burn America to the ground to help himself,” Christie warns in the ad. “Every Republican leader says that in private. I’m the only one saying it in public.”

The next ad, which launches Friday, will include a “call for unity and moving past our differences,” a Christie aide told Politico, speaking anonymously. The ads will run on both broadcast and digital media platforms throughout New Hampshire.

Christie has hung his hopes on a successful breakthrough in the Granite State. After flaming out spectacularly in the state’s primary during his 2016 run, Christie has been laser-focused on charming the state’s Republicans and formally launched his current campaign in New Hampshire.

But the new ad buy is one of the biggest expenses of Christie’s campaign thus far, and unfortunately, it looks unlikely to pay the dividends he’ll need if he wants to climb up in the race. Christie has an average of just 3.3 percent support in national polls, far behind Trump’s average of 62.5 percent. In New Hampshire, Christie is faring comparatively better, but that’s not saying much: RealClearPolitics has him third in the race with 10.5 in the state’s rolling average. That puts him more than 14 points behind Nikki Haley and a daunting 36 points behind Trump.

Christie has spent his entire campaign hammering the same message that his new ad buy is themed around: painting Trump, as well as a few other Republican candidates, as too extreme. But it’s not clear that casting himself as a more moderate option holds much appeal for Republican voters. The rather terrifying reality is that it looks as if many Trump voters actually want a candidate willing to break the laws. It could be that the money Christie plans to spend highlighting the fact that Trump wants to “burn America to the ground” will end up being an in-kind donation to the former president.