Lindsey’s proposed federal abortion ban could split G.O.P., galvanize Dems

[jserraglio]

Comment: Graham’s desperation Hail-Mary pass in the wake of the Dobbs debacle may enhance his candidacy — for Prevagen therapy.

What the hell was he thinking? The last thing the G.O.P. wants to be talking about between now and November is abortion. Lindsey has just moved it to the front burner.

WAPO

Graham introduces bill to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy nationwide, the most prominent effort by Republicans to restrict the procedure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
“I think we should have a law at the federal level that would say, after 15 weeks, no abortion on demand except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother,” Graham said at a news conference. “And that should be where America is at.”
Graham’s measure, which stands almost no chance of advancing while Democrats hold the majority in Congress, comes just weeks after he and most Republicans had defended the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe by arguing that allowing states to decide on abortion rights would be the most “constitutionally sound” way of handling the issue.
On Tuesday, Graham vowed that, if Republicans took back the House and Senate in the midterm elections, there would be a vote on his 15-week abortion bill.
“Abortion is a contentious issue,” Graham said. “Abortion is not banned in America. It is left up to elected officials in America to define the issue … States have the ability to do [so] at the state level and we have the ability in Washington to speak on this issue if we choose. I have chosen to speak.”
Graham was joined at the news conference by Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, along with other antiabortion leaders. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) introduced a version of the bill in the House on Tuesday as well. Senior GOP aides in the House have indicated the bill would be a top priority for them if Republicans take back the majority.
The name of the bill — which includes the nonmedical phrase “late-term abortions” — drew sharp criticism from abortion rights activists. Used almost exclusively by antiabortion activists, the phrase is generally understood to refer to abortions between or after 21 and 24 weeks of pregnancy.
“15 weeks is not ‘late term,’ particularly given the significant challenges to access around the country,” Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at Emily’s List, wrote in a tweet.
While most people undergo abortions earlier in pregnancy, 15-week and 20-week abortion bans disproportionately affect patients with fetal anomalies, which are often detected at a 20-week anatomy scan, along with those who take longer to realize they are pregnant. These kinds of bans will also affect more people in a post-Roe America as abortion clinics struggle to accommodate a swell of patients from states where abortion is now banned.
The White House criticized the bill, saying it is “wildly out of step with what Americans believe.”
“President Biden and congressional Democrats are committed to restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade in the face of continued radical steps by elected Republicans to put personal health care decisions in the hands of politicians instead of women and their doctors, threatening women’s health and lives,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement.
Other Democrats swiftly responded to reports of Graham’s efforts with anger, and vowed that the measure would go nowhere. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the bill the “latest, clearest signal of extreme MAGA Republicans’ intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care.”
“Republicans are coming after your rights,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Tuesday. “We have already seen the devastation, the health-care crises, that these extreme abortion bans have caused: patients who are unable to get a prescription filled, doctors who are unsure if they can do their jobs — forced to wait until patients get sicker, until their lives are in danger, before they can take action. That’s what we’re seeing in Republican states right now. And it is a nightmare they now want to impose on every single corner of our country.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who is locked in a tough reelection bid, said she would block any efforts in the Senate to advance a nationwide abortion ban.
“We don’t need any more male politicians telling women what we can and can’t do with our own bodies,” she tweeted.
The timing of Graham’s announcement is curious — two months before the midterm elections, after abortion has already shown to be a galvanizing issue for some Democratic voters. While Republicans generally have praised the ruling overturning Roe, many have preferred not to focus on the issue ahead of the midterms.
“There’s a narrative forming in America that the Republican Party and the pro-life movement is on a run. No, no, no, no, no, no,” Graham, who in the past favored a 20-week ban, told reporters. “We welcome the debate. We welcome the vote in the United States Senate as to what America should look like in 2022.”
Graham said he had not spoken to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about the bill. Asked after the news conference if his bill had exceptions for late-term pregnancies where fetal abnormalities appear or if a child is stillborn, Graham said he did not know.
Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said Tuesday that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of votes on something like Graham’s bill but that he didn’t think anybody had “given a lot of thought to it yet.”
“Right now, I think the individual states are coming up with their own political consensus around that issue,” Thune said.
Last month, Kansas voters soundly rejected a referendum that would have allowed state lawmakers to regulate abortion, the first time state voters decided on such an amendment since Roe was overturned. Last week, South Carolina Republicans fell short in their bid for a near-total abortion ban in the state. Planned Parenthood announced last month that it plans to spend a record $50 million in an effort to elect abortion rights supporters across the country this November, banking on the belief that abortion will help turn out Democratic voters.
Moreover, several red states already have stricter bans in place. Abortion is now banned or mostly banned in 15 states, while laws in several others are in various legal limbos. Last month, Indiana passed a near-total abortion ban, the first to do so after Roe was struck down.
Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, many Republican lawmakers and advocates had been pushing for a strict nationwide “heartbeat” ban on abortions, which would have outlawed the procedure after cardiac activity is detected, at around six weeks of pregnancy. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) had been planning behind-the-scenes to introduce the legislation.
But months after the landmark abortion ruling, those plans have quietly fizzled. While that bill has been drafted, there is no timeline for Ernst or any other senator to introduce it, according to several antiabortion advocates close to the situation.
Instead, some leading antiabortion advocates are hoping that Republicans will rally around a 15-week ban, long denounced by many in the antiabortion movement because it would allow the vast majority of abortions to continue.
Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said she expects that Graham’s bill will be “universally accepted,” offering a path forward that a variety of Republican senators can support.
“I think the place to begin is where Graham is beginning,” said Dannenfelser in an interview before Graham’s bill was released. “Graham is the momentum and it will increase when he introduces [his bill].”
Some Republicans are not so sure. Since the Supreme Court decision, many have said publicly that they think abortion should be left to the states.
Even before an antiabortion amendment was resoundingly defeated in his home state, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told The Washington Post that he doubted that there was a future for any kind of national abortion ban.
“I just don’t see the momentum at the federal level,” Marshall said in a July 25 interview. “I think the legislative priority should be at the states.”
A nationwide ban would be extremely difficult to pass, requiring 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. The measure would encounter resistance from nearly all Democrats in addition to a handful of Republicans who support abortion rights. Neither party is likely to gain in the midterm elections the number of seats necessary for a filibuster-proof majority.
Republicans have been forced to reckon with a growing trove of data suggesting that abortion could be a decisive issue in the midterms, motivating Democratic and independent voters far more than was widely expected. Candidates who support abortion rights have overperformed in recent special elections, while key battleground states have seen a spike in Democratic and independent women registering to vote.
Some Republicans have grown increasingly hesitant to discuss the subject of a national abortion ban on the campaign trail. In Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters removed any mention of his support for a “federal personhood law” from his website, legislation that probably would have banned abortion nationwide after conception. Masters’s website now says he would support a ban on abortions in the third trimester, at around 27 weeks of pregnancy, a far more popular position.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America applauded the change in a news release, saying that Masters “rightfully centered his position on what is achievable at the federal level.”
Abortion rights groups have seized on the looming threat of a national abortion ban, hoping to mobilize voters around the issue all over the country, including those in states where abortion rights are protected.
“For anyone who is in a state where abortion is not yet restricted or banned, we especially want to tell those voters, ‘This is everybody’s issue. It could come to your state too if they’re voting against efforts to protect abortion,' ” said Jacqueline Ayers, senior vice president at Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

[maestrob]

Once an idiot, always an idiot.

[jserraglio]

Once an idiot, always an idiot.

He is desperate. He hates being in the minority. No limos, no perks, no chairs. It truly sucks.

If I were Schumer, I might just bring Lindsey’s bill to the floor for a vote without amendment and force the GOP to either vote down his national abortion ban or vote for making the vast majority of abortions legal in states like Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio.

Thank you, Lindsey! I might just send you money to show my appreciation for your bonehead play.

And, Sam and Clarence, you should know, Yours was the tone-deaf gift that keeps on giving.

[barney]

If I were Schumer, I might just bring Lindsey’s bill to the floor for a vote without amendment and force the GOP to either vote down his national abortion ban or vote for making the vast majority of abortions legal in states like Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio.

Inspired suggestion. What a politician the Dems lost in you.

[Rach3]

But:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey- ... s-politics

[jserraglio]

So MAGA Republicans are going to vote for a national bill that will piss off fetal heartbeat fetishists by legitimizing abortions in states like NY, IL and CA during the first 15 weeks (when most of them occur), and further tick off Independent women and G.O.P. women voters in the Philly suburbs in the wake of Dobbs by making them illegal after 15 weeks?

I doubt it. Unless of course they have given up on democracy altogether and are relying now on either their Secretaries of State, their legislatures or the U.S. House of Representatives to appoint the next President of the US in 2025 after they lose the popular and Electoral College votes.

[maestrob]

...they have given up on democracy altogether and are relying now on either their Secretaries of State, their legislatures or the U.S. House of Representatives to appoint the next President of the US in 2025 after they lose the popular and Electoral College votes.

I suspect that this is now the case, Joe.

[jserraglio]

...they have given up on democracy altogether and are relying now on either their Secretaries of State, their legislatures or the U.S. House of Representatives to appoint the next President of the US in 2025 after they lose the popular and Electoral College votes.

I suspect that this is now the case, Joe.

And to think, I read the National Review and watched Firing Line weekly, voted for Barry Goldwater, and even attended John Birch Society meetings! Misguided? No. Insane? Yes.

[maestrob]

...they have given up on democracy altogether and are relying now on either their Secretaries of State, their legislatures or the U.S. House of Representatives to appoint the next President of the US in 2025 after they lose the popular and Electoral College votes.

I suspect that this is now the case, Joe.

And to think, I read the National Review and watched Firing Line weekly, voted for Barry Goldwater, and even attended John Birch Society meetings! Was I mad?

That election divided the Union League Club in Philadelphia where my uncle was President for the first time since its founding in 1848 or thereabouts. IIRC, Goldwater carried only his home state, Arizona, as Johnson swept the country. Four years later, he was gone, amidst all the detritus of the Vietnam war.

As of now, I suspect that the Republican Party is headed for the compost heap. I've never seen anything so self-destructive in American politics as these guys.

Open mouth, insert foot.

[jserraglio]

Open mouth, insert foot.

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

I heard my hero say it and knew at that instant he was fated to lose.

[maestrob]

Open mouth, insert foot.

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

I heard my hero say it and knew at that instant he was fated to lose.

I would feel calmer if today's primary voters were so sensible.

[maestrob]

Lindsey Graham’s Unbelievably Cruel Abortion Ban

Sept. 14, 2022
By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

At the end of Senator Lindsey Graham’s news conference on Tuesday proposing a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a woman named Ashbey Beasley stood up and asked him a question inspired by her own excruciating loss.

“What would you say to somebody like me who found out that their son had an anomaly that was incompatible with life at 16 weeks?” she began. Beasley chose not to have an abortion, delivering her son at 28 weeks. “When he was born, he lived for eight days,” she said. “He bled from every orifice of his body, but we were allowed to make that choice for him. You would be robbing that choice from those women. What would you say to someone like me?”

Graham had no real answer. His bill contains narrow exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening pregnancies, but not for severe fetal anomalies or pregnancies that are otherwise nonviable. So, faced with someone insisting that he consider the consequences of his proposal, he defaulted to a duplicitous anti-abortion talking point about global abortion laws.

“The world pretty much has spoken on this issue,” said Graham. “The developed world has said at this stage into the pregnancy the child feels pain, and we’re saying we’re going to join the rest of the world and not be like Iran.”

Graham was making an argument, common in anti-abortion circles, that American abortion laws are unusually permissive, and that banning abortion at 12 or 15 weeks would bring us in line with Europe. France and Spain, for example, both permit abortion for any reason through 14 weeks, and Germany through 12 weeks post-conception. “If we adopted my bill, our bill, we would be in the mainstream of most everybody else in the world,” said Graham. “I think there are 47 of the 50 European countries have a ban on abortion from 12 to 15 weeks.”

This is, at best, a highly selective reading of European abortion laws. It ignores the fact that, on most of the continent, abortion is state-subsidized and easily accessible early in pregnancy, so women aren’t pushed into later terminations as they struggle to raise money. More significantly, the restrictions on later abortions have broad exceptions.

Take German abortion laws, which are, for Europe, quite stringent. Until this summer, a Nazi-era ban on advertising abortion was still in effect, and abortion is still technically illegal, though it’s been decriminalized during the first trimester. After that, abortion is allowed to protect a woman’s physical or mental health, taking into account her “present and future circumstances.” For low-income women, abortion is publicly funded.

A woman in Ashbey Beasley’s devastating situation would be able to end her pregnancy almost anywhere in Europe. Indeed, what Graham is proposing has little analogue in the developed world. Even Iran — where abortion is, despite Graham’s nonsensical reference to the country, mostly illegal — allows women to petition a panel to get an abortion in cases of severe fetal disability.

Why did Graham leave such an exception, which the vast majority of Americans would almost certainly support, out of his proposed abortion ban? There are two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive. Either he was pandering to the anti-abortion activists who, on Monday, sent a letter to Congress demanding federal action against states with liberal abortion laws, or he simply hasn’t thought very much about what pregnancy entails.

Most people who have gone through a pregnancy, or watched someone close to them go through one, know that there are certain white-knuckle benchmarks. At 10 weeks, you can get a blood test that checks for some prenatal genetic disorders, but it can tell you only your risk level. “Most of the time we make diagnoses around things like fetal abnormalities, genetic abnormalities, at around 15 to 20 weeks, when we can do an amniocentesis,” said Dr. Kristyn Brandi, an abortion provider in New Jersey and board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

Then, at 20 weeks, pregnant patients are typically offered an anatomy scan, which checks, among other things, for problems like anencephaly, in which a fetus’s brain and skull fail to develop.

Graham would condemn every single woman who gets disastrous news from her amnio or her anatomy scan to carry a doomed pregnancy to term, unless she could prove that it was going to kill her. Whether thoughtless or deliberate, the cruelty of this is almost unfathomable.

Politically, Graham’s bill is a boon to Democrats. He seems to have been trying to shift the focus of the abortion debate to later abortions, where Republicans think they can paint their opponents as extremists. Instead, he has underlined Republican callousness toward the abortion patients likely to elicit the most public sympathy.

But Democrats shouldn’t be gleeful. Republicans have shown themselves willing to impose such draconian prohibitions in places where they have complete power. Recently, Kailee Lingo DeSpain, who said that in the past she was “your quintessential pro-life Texan,” told CNN about having to leave the state for an abortion after finding out that her fetus had heart, lung, brain, kidney and genetic defects and “would either be stillborn or die within minutes of birth.” How, asked DeSpain, “could you be so cruel as to pass a law that you know will hurt women and that you know will cause babies to be born in pain?”

At the moment, Republicans don’t have the ability to impose such a regime on the entire country. Nor are many of them interested in talking about national bans; some Republicans were furious at Graham for thrusting the issue into the spotlight. But Graham was probably right when he said, “If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” So far, Republicans have tried their best to give the anti-abortion movement what it wants. When Graham tells us what they intend to do to us, we should listen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opin ... n-ban.html

[Rach3]

And to think, I read the National Review and watched Firing Line weekly, voted for Barry Goldwater, and even attended John Birch Society meetings! Misguided? No. Insane? Yes.

Similar here, I became more liberal in my old age, the opposite of the expected, my path made easier,though,by America’s “evolution”,insane Right and cowardly GOP.I read NR, watched Firing Line, attend an in person Buckley lecture at Ripon College in 1970 ( was too young , 16, to vote for Goldwater but would have). No JB Society for me, but I was a member of my college Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter.Even threatened to sue for a tuition refund when my college officially shut down for a couple days to protest the US invasion of Cambodia ( 1971 ?).But then, as now, youth is often wasted on the young. I recall George Wallace running for President, former SAC General Curtis LeMay his running mate.If I recall correctly, LeMay advocated use of nuclear weapons in Viet Nam, leading some to suggest his campaign slogan should be , “ Bombs Away with Curtis LeMay”; and then along comes John Bolton advocating a nuclear first strike on North Korea, and Darth Vader clone Stephen Miller and Bolton suggesting same with Iran, and all the election deniers and Jan.6 crazies. Goldwater’s famous and infamous quote sounds now like a MAGA chant.