Mike Johnson Heralds a “New Era” for Anti-Abortion Extremists

The anti-abortion movement is “entering a new era,” according to Republican leadership.

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson pointed to a flurry of actions by Donald Trump in the last week that have aided the right’s anti-abortion efforts. They included the pardoning of 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020.

And an executive order signed by Trump earlier this week also elevated fetal personhood to the national stage while simultaneously cementing language at the executive level to delegitimize transgender identities.

Meanwhile, progress against abortion rights also churned in Congress. On Thursday, House Republicans passed a “born alive” abortion bill, insisting that the effort was more akin to an anti-infanticide effort than another attempt to restrict abortions. The bill would require health care professionals to administer the “same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence” for a premature child that lives through an abortion as for a child that is carried to term. Democrats in the Senate blocked a twin bill from advancing in the upper chamber.

The effort was, of course, redundant due to a 2002 statute, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which already prevents the “intentional killing of a child born alive”—otherwise known as murder.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley also made a personal appeal to Trump on Thursday, asking the newly minted forty-seventh president to restore reproductive policies he had implemented during his first term. That would include requiring women to pick up their abortion medication in person, a move that could significantly impact people’s ability to acquire the abortion pill via mail in states where the procedure is currently banned.

Hawley also suggested to Trump that, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the rearview, states would prove to be “the most important theaters” for the fight to rid America of the procedure, according to The New York Times.

“House and Senate Republicans are committed to protecting innocent life,” Johnson told the crowd on Friday, championing his caucus’s efforts over the last five days.

Trump and JD Vance also gave remarks at the march. Speaking at the National Mall, Vance pledged to protect Christians and anti-abortion activists from federal prosecution.

“This administration stands by you, we stand with you, and most importantly we stand with the most vulnerable,” Vance said. “America is fundamentally a pro-baby, a pro-family and a pro-life country.”

Oklahoma’s state superintendent is inviting ICE to raid public schools. 

“In Oklahoma, we’re gonna work with law enforcement, we are gonna work with the Trump administration,” Ryan Walters told Oklahoma journalist Brenna Rose. “However President Trump decides to carry out the actions around his immigration policy, we’re gonna absolutely work with him on that. We’re gonna make sure that he has what he needs from us to carry those things out.”

“So you’re not completely ruling out a raid on an Oklahoma school?” Rose asked pointedly.

“No, if that’s what President Trump sees fit, as there’s [an] illegal immigrant population there that needs to have enforcement to remove them from the schools, absolutely. We will work with him to make sure that he’s able to carry that out.”  

Walters has served as Oklahoma public schools superintendent since 2020, and has been a staunch MAGA advocate in that tenure. Last year, he made the Bible required reading in public schools, saying that “without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation.” When the state opened bids for companies seeking to supply the Bible, the requirements were so narrow the Trump Bible was one of the only ones to fit the bill. (Walters is currently being sued over the entire mandate.) He has also referred to teachers as “radical leftists” who are “turning our schools into Epstein Island.” And just last month, he proposed a rule that would let the Oklahoma State Department of Education gather data on undocumented children in public schools. 

Ushering ICE agents into public schools is yet another mask-off moment for the Trump administration and all its allies.

The Trump administration this week began a plan to send email alerts to every single federal government employee from a single email address, confusing and worrying many workers about what’s coming next.

CBS News reports that the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, is testing a new capability that would allow the alerts to be sent to every single employee, about roughly 2.3 million people. Workers at multiple federal agencies initially didn’t recognize the sender, an hr-at-opm-.gov email address, and reported the email as spam.

OPM sent the messages overnight between Thursday and Friday, two officials told CBS.

“This is a new effort under this administration,” one official told CBS.

The effort is so new that even some I.T. offices in federal agencies flagged the email as spam. One anonymous federal employee sent a screenshot to CBS and said their co-workers weren’t sure if the email was legitimate.

“Everyone thought it was spam,” said the employee. “There was a flurry of messages, ‘Is this spam?’”

At a time when the new administration is closing various federal offices and proposing massive cuts to the government under Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, the new system’s potential worries federal employees.

“They had to send this this week, of all weeks? Really?” said CBS’s source. Only agency and department heads had advance notice of the email plan on Thursday, according to OPM officials. Some rank-and-file employees didn’t hear about the new plan until they received the first email, leading to Friday’s confusion.

White House officials didn’t respond to CBS’s questions about what the system will be used for. But looking at past comments from Trump and others close to his administration, the potential is vast and disturbing, with the possibility of upending some of our most critical federal agencies.

While it seems likely that the lion’s share of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are going to sail through their confirmation hearings, the fortunes of three of his picks—Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence prospect Tulsi Gabbard, and would-be Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—remain somewhat cloudy. Hegseth, of late, has emerged as the likeliest of the three to get over the line.

But according to a fresh report from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, another may be edging closer: Kennedy Jr. And the reason RFK’s chances have slightly improved have nothing to do with the nominee sanding down his fringe ideas about vaccines and modern medicine, and everything to do with the fact that Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, while not “confirmed as voting for Kennedy” nevertheless “appears to be actively considering it.”

Naturally, the reasons why, given the high stakes, are both indescribably stupid and yet very typical of the way Washington works. As Marshall reports:

I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.

Why would it matter if Whitehouse bucks common sense and votes to install RFK in Trump’s Cabinet? As Marshall points out, support for Kennedy among Republican senators is fluid for all the reasons you might expect (not everyone wants to see long-conquered childhood diseases make a comeback in this, the twenty-first century). But Whitehouse’s support may go a long way toward providing some of the fence-sitters some political cover to back Trump’s man.

During his visit to North Carolina Friday, Donald Trump floated the idea of making changes to how the federal government responds to natural disasters—including getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

“We’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA. I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac in Asheville, citing the effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton on the southwestern U.S. last year.

Trump also said that disaster aid for North Carolina and California,  both of which happen to be states with Democratic governors, would go directly through his administration rather than FEMA. Later, meeting with local officials during his visit, Trump said he’d be signing an executive order to begin reforming or even getting rid of the agency.

“I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,” Trump said. “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster…. I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

Eliminating the agency altogether would require congressional approval, and would result in more than 20,000 federal employees losing their jobs. Trump also discussed getting rid of FEMA on Wednesday in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, saying that he’d “rather see the states take care of their own problems.” 

But between 2015 and 2024, Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas, and Louisiana received the majority of federal disaster aid. Any cuts to FEMA would end up affecting states that voted for him in the last three presidential elections. Perhaps Trump sees this as an acceptable price for the power to restrict aid to other places whenever he pleases.