Texas Republicans Propose Horrific Punishment for Abortion Patients

Having some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws isn’t enough for the Texas GOP. Instead, Republicans in the Lone Star State are actually considering the death penalty as punishment for people who undergo the medical procedure.

A new platform proposed at the state’s GOP convention on Saturday included calls for legislation that would transform the fetal personhood ideology into law, which would effectively categorize any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.

The 50-page document claims that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and calls for lawmakers to extend “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”

Not everyone in attendance was in support of the endeavor, however. Harris County Precinct 178 Chair Gilda Bayegan volunteered to speak at the event, calling on her party to drop its anti-abortion platforms on the basis that the state’s draconian restrictions to the medical procedure were alienating its base.

“I’m up here begging you not to make it one of our priorities,” Bayegan said.

Her party clearly did not listen. The GOP wish list is a revealing glimpse into which direction they are headed, but it wasn’t the first clue. In January, Hood County Republican Party officials were spotted attending an Abolish Abortion Texas function in which the death penalty was discussed as a possible repercussion for women and minors who seek out not just abortion but also in vitro fertilization treatments.

“There’s no difference in the value of born people and preborn people,” Paul Brown, the group’s director, said in leaked video footage, revealing the philosophy behind the extreme measures. “In short, abortion is murder. And that’s starting at the moment of fertilization even prior to implantation. So that Plan B pill, or what’s known as the morning-after pill, which is used to terminate or kill a baby prior to implantation, that is an abortion.”

(Plan B does not “kill” an embryo, as Brown claims. Instead, it prevents fertilization from occurring in the first place.)

Texas isn’t the only state to consider classifying the lifesaving medical procedure as homicide or even sentencing people to death for seeking the treatment. Republican lawmakers in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina introduced similar legislation last year. All of those bills were defeated, with even some state Republicans deeming them too extreme.

As if any more proof was needed, a former producer for The Apprentice just revealed the depths of Donald Trump’s racism.

Recently freed from a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, Bill Pruitt, who worked on the television show that christened Trump as America’s Boss and arguably shaped the savvy businessman persona that he rode to the presidency in 2016, told the story of The Apprentice’s early days for the first time for Slate. Most notably, he recounted a 2004 incident in which Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season. His reason, according to Pruitt?

“I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Trump reportedly told the show’s producers.

The comment was reportedly caught on tape, though Pruitt said he’s sure the evidence will never be found.

It’s the most incendiary, if not exactly surprising, moment in a story full of characteristic details of the former president’s deceptive and crooked behavior: requiring NBC to rent out Trump Tower space for the set at a premium because his actual office was “cramped” and with “chipped or peeling” wood furniture; stiffing the architect of Trump National Golf Club, who realized legal fees to sue Trump would exceed the financial reward; and rambling incoherence retouched into slick boardroom operating in NBC’s editing room.

It also comes in the wake of Trump’s rally in the South Bronx last week, held in an effort to “woo” Black and Latino voters.

That Trump is an anti-Black racist is hardly revelatory: a lifetime of discriminatory housing practices, advocacy for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five, attacks on kneeling NFL players, and many refusals to condemn white supremacists indicate as much.

Still, the remark, stripped of the gloss of plausible deniability his public dog whistles often possess, is alarming.

As his hush-money trial wraps up, Donald Trump thinks key witnesses were not called in his defense.

“A lot of key witnesses were not called. Look at your list. Look at the players, and you know who I’m talking about. You can take five or six of them. Why didn’t they call those witnesses? They didn’t call them because they would have been on our side, and it’s a shame,” Trump told reporters outside of court after the trial wrapped up for the day Wednesday.

“And in particular, one witness, who’s now suffering greatly because of what’s happened, because of the viciousness of these thugs. They’re vicious people, what they’ve done to that person, and you know who I’m talking about,” Trump added.

Who Trump is talking about is unknown. If it’s Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, he’s serving a prison sentence for lying under oath during Trump’s fraud trial, and thus wouldn’t be a credible witness for either side.

What is known is that Trump’s defense team had every opportunity to call any of their own witnesses in his hush-money trial, and they only called two: a paralegal who entered phone records into evidence, and Robert Costello, an attorney who spoke to Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen in 2018 after the FBI raided his home and office. Trump can hardly expect the prosecution to call witnesses to aid in his defense, unless he has a profound misunderstanding about how a trial proceeding works. If the Republican presidential nominee has complaints, he should be making them to his own lawyers. (Or maybe he could have testified himself.)

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election with Cohen’s help, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday. He faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime.

A bankrupt Rudy Giuliani is so deep in the red that his creditors have described his lavish lifestyle as “gross mismanagement.”

Court documents filed Tuesday by unsecured creditors for the disbarred attorney indicate that Giuliani was blowing off other financial responsibilities—such as paying back his lawyers, accountants, or ex-wife—while racking up more debt, even after filing for bankruptcy last year.

“More than five months ago, the Debtor commenced his bankruptcy case,” reads the legal notice. “One might ask what he has accomplished during that time. An objective review leads to one conclusion: he has accomplished almost nothing.”

According to the notice, Giuliani has continued his “exorbitant spending” to fuel his “extravagant lifestyle.” That included dishing out more than $26,000 for “60 Amazon transactions,” as well as“charges for entertainment such as Netflix, Prime Video, Kindle, Audible, Paramount+ and Apple services and products and numerous Uber rides.”

The creditors slammed Giuliani’s “egregious spending habits,” noting that while making practically zero progress in the debt-induced legal process, he has repeatedly filed inaccurate financial disclosures, even after being told to correct the wrong information, and has delayed the sale of his multimillion-dollar properties around the country.

After “months of empty promises,” Giuliani filed an application to retain a broker on his New York City apartment, for which he paid $21,000 in fees during April alone. Still, he has made no movement on listing his Palm Beach condominium, “despite such property not being an exempt asset,” the notice reads.

“That is how the Debtor spent the last five months in his bankruptcy case: filing false and misleading financial reports, delaying the inevitable monetization of his assets, ignoring this Court’s orders, trying to retain professionals and attempting to relitigate the Freeman Judgment,” the notice continued, referring to the $148 million that Giuliani was ordered to cough up for defaming a pair of Georgia election workers during the “Stop the Steal” initiative.

The telling filing is just the latest in a long series of legal woes Giuliani has suffered since he risked it all to allegedly help Trump steal the 2020 presidential election. In September, Giuliani faced a suit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses—after Giuliani claimed he himself was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

That resulted in an embarrassing show in which Giuliani had no other option than to beg Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees, to which the stingy developer refused but offered to throw a couple of fundraisers for him instead.

Giuliani is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.

The jury is still out, but Donald Trump’s campaign has already suggested that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will seek revenge against whoever was involved in his myriad legal trials.

Speaking to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt warned that people need to be “held accountable” for their “crimes” committed against Trump—that is, all the people who have attempted to prosecute Trump and give the former president the same legal treatment as they would any other private citizen.

“Let’s say he does win reelection this November, will there be any revenge directed at the people that put this hoax case together?” asked Watters.

“Well, certainly people need to be held accountable for the crimes that have been committed over the last several years. We’ve seen them lie, we’ve seen them abuse our justice system, we’ve seen Joe Biden target innocent Americans across this country such as the protesters on January 6, who they’ve thrown in the gulag in Washington, D.C.,” Leavitt said, referring to the Soviet Union–era work camps for criminals and political prisoners.

“President Trump said he will pardon those protesters on day one of his presidency. Yes, justice needs to be served for the good-hearted Americans across this country who want to see an equal application of the law,” Leavitt said, seemingly insinuating that Trump’s followers do not expect to be held to the law if they commit a crime.  “And this trial proves we don’t have that in America right now.”