I cannot get enough of the Democratic National Convention vasectomy van: Imagine, in an election where, thus far, one party has positioned itself as pro-family—to the point where "childless cat ladies" have become a focal point, brought to the fore by vice-presidential contender J.D. Vance's catty, mean-spirited cable news comments—the other party is parking vasectomy and abortion vans outside of the convention. Technically, it's Planned Parentho
I cannot get enough of the Democratic National Convention vasectomy van: Imagine, in an election where, thus far, one party has positioned itself as pro-family—to the point where "childless cat ladies" have become a focal point, brought to the fore by vice-presidential contender J.D. Vance's catty, mean-spirited cable news comments—the other party is parking vasectomy and abortion vans outside of the convention.
Technically, it's Planned Parenthood Great Rivers doing it, making reproductive rights—and the Republican Party's attack on them—a focal point of this convention. But Democrats are, more broadly, all over the place this first night of the DNC, as if they can't quite figure out what they're all about or where they want to go, whether they're the party of joyor a party that just dealt with a succession crisis, or a party that's riven by the Israel-Hamas conflict or a party that stands in defiance of purported Republican attacks on essential freedoms.
Consider the new ad, unveiled by Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign:
But such an ad assumes Americans have short memories. Ones that forget all the regulations Democrats have imposed that have driven up housing costs. Ones that forget how people were not enjoying freedom when they were shut inside their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, or forced to stay home from school and church, by blue-staters. Ones that forget the last decade of (Democrat-enforced) culture war language policing and hypersensitivity to all manner of grievance. Democrats aren't really the party of freedom, they're the party of dictating, in ways big and small, how you live, either for your own good or the greater good, as they define it.
What exactly are they for? The first night of the DNC was a good reminder of the party's schizophrenia. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D–N.Y.) speech was excellent, proving that they have at least one promising young talent waiting in the wings. Formerly an outsider given a paltry 90-second speaking slot, Ocasio-Cortez has earned her spot as a Democratic Party mainstay, a primetime speaker whose name is chanted by an adoring arena. (This undeniable charisma is bad for the rest of us, mind you, as Ocasio-Cortez is economically illiterate and embraces Bernie Sanders-style socialism.)
At times, they veered away from light-touch diversity—a raft of speakers from all different backgrounds—and toward more explicit identity politics. Hillary Clinton's speech was all about shattering the glass ceiling. Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison emphasized that a "black convention chair and a black D.N.C. chair lead us in nominating a black and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] woman to be the next president," saying that "this election is about every little boy inspired by a party chair who looks like them, and every little girl who will finally see a president who looks like her." (I highly doubt young children are paying attention to the party chair.)
This emphasis—on being a candidate of firsts, on the "I'm with her" mentality—is especially interesting because it's one Harris has steered away from, ostensibly learning from the mistakes of Clinton's failed 2016 run. Ocasio-Cortez directly inverted this emphasis in her speech, shifting from voters being with the candidate to the candidate being with the voters. "If you are a working parent trying to afford rent and childcare, Kamala is for you," said Ocasio-Cortez. "If you are a senior who has to go back to work because your retirement didn't stretch far enough, Kamala is for you. If you're an immigrant family just starting your American story, Kamala is for you."
Everyone who covered 2016 will overthink that race forever, but AOC's "Kamala is for you" sounds like the inversion of "I'm with her."
Oh, and President Joe Biden also spoke. He didn't really say much of note. It was fine. But the fanfare was…aggressive, thanking Biden constantly for his service, for his leadership, for everything. Also, implicitly, for stepping aside and putting the presidency back in play.
The shenanigans also turned destructive: Outside of the security perimeter, protesters—a smaller turnout than was expected—succeeded at tearing down gates and fencing.
Last vid of the day. Two funny things: the protesters saying to the cops, "Don't hurt her!" and, once I wriggled out of the fencing (with the help of two dudes pulling me), who is standing there cool as a cucumber saying, "Hello Nancy" but @mcmoynihan. Hello from Chicago! pic.twitter.com/vjhFdnREj9
Group of protesters with their backs turned to Biden and hands over their mouths. They're quiet. So far unmolested by officials or security. pic.twitter.com/VuKcwc1Kzc
It remains to be seen how much trouble the protesters will cause, and how the situation in Gaza will be discussed on the main stage, but the protests outside were a decidedly inauspicious start.
Scenes from New York: Why does 3.5 grams of weed, purchased legally, cost $60 in New York, while unlicensed bodegas are selling for $40? Some of it also has to do with the federal, state, and local taxes (including 13 percent sales tax upon purchase) that must be forked over by dispensaries, as well as the security systems they must put in place to keep their wares safe. They're also trying to recoup the costs of legal fees and securing expensive licenses to operate legally.
Basically, everywhere a legit entrepreneur turns, the state has made it quite expensive for them to simply open up a cannabis business. And a big chunk of that cost gets passed down to the consumer.
QUICK HITS
"Democrats begin their four-day national convention Monday in the city that perhaps best exemplifies the chasm between their party's dreamy policy rhetoric and grim real-world results," writesReason's Matt Welch. "As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago's tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century."
"US job growth in the year through March was likely far less robust than initially estimated, which risks fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve is falling further behind the curve to lower interest rates," reportsBloomberg.
Protests are still happening in Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro has wrongly declared himself victorious in the latest presidential election (and refused to release results corroborating the outcome).
On Friday, The San Francisco Standard published a piece titled "How ex-liberal billionaires Ben and Felicia Horowitz made a MAGA U-turn," which essentially spends a lot of words grappling with the idea that Felicia, a black woman, could not possibly authentically support former President Donald Trump, and that there must be some kind of mental derangement at play:
A Michigan couple sued when their local township passed an ordinance to prevent them from opening a cemetery. This week, in a victory for property rights, a judge ruled in the couple's favor and threw out the ordinance entirely. As Reason reported in January, Peter and Annica Quakenbush wanted to open a "green" cemetery, allowing people to bury their loved ones in a natural and environmentally friendly manner, free of chemicals like formaldehyde
A Michigan couple sued when their local township passed an ordinance to prevent them from opening a cemetery. This week, in a victory for property rights, a judge ruled in the couple's favor and threw out the ordinance entirely.
As Reasonreported in January, Peter and Annica Quakenbush wanted to open a "green" cemetery, allowing people to bury their loved ones in a natural and environmentally friendly manner, free of chemicals like formaldehyde and coffins containing metal. They specifically intended to establish a conservation burial ground, in which decedents would be buried in biodegradable coverings like cotton shrouds or wooden caskets and the burial sites would be marked by natural landmarks like rocks or native trees. The site would otherwise remain an undisturbed forest.
The Quakenbushes bought a 20-acre plot near Brooks Township and started putting together the necessary paperwork. But local officials had other plans in mind, and in June 2023, the Brooks Township Board passed an ordinance prohibiting the establishment of all new cemeteries.
"In the past, cemeteries elsewhere have taken up large amounts of sometimes otherwise productive land," the ordinance declared. "Cemetery landscaping, grass cutting, monument repair and upkeep costs have increased dramatically over time. The problems associated with abandoned or 'orphan' cemeteries have increased throughout Michigan, and citizens look to the local municipal government…to take over abandoned or orphan cemeteries."
According to the Quakenbushes' lawsuit, after they first inquired about establishing their cemetery in February 2022, a zoning official emailed the township's legal counsel. "It is our general recommendation that new private cemeteries not be allowed within the Township except under certain very limited circumstances," the attorney replied. "Almost certainly, at some time in the future (whether in a few decades or the distance [sic] future), the family members of the deceased individuals will no longer own the parcel involved. What happens to the burials then? In all likelihood, it would devalue the property and make it unmarketable or difficult to sell."
"My response to that is, what does it matter? It's not your property," Renée Flaherty, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who represented the Quakenbushes, told Reason in January.
Besides, there were numerous mechanisms in place to prevent that outcome: Establishing a conservation burial ground in accordance with the Green Burial Council's criteria, as is the Quakenbushes' intent, requires obtaining a conservation easement—preventing the land from being used for other purposes—and partnering with a land conservancy that can maintain the property in perpetuity.
Michigan state law also requires all private cemeteries to establish an "endowment and perpetual care trust fund," with $50,000 to start and monthly deposits of "not less than 15% of all proceeds received."
"Nearly 250 people had reserved a burial plot even while the ban was in place," a local FOX affiliate reported.
The Quakenbushes sued to overturn the ordinance as a violation of due process. The township filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. This week, after hearing oral arguments, Newaygo County Circuit Court Judge David Glancy not only dismissed the township's motion but found the ordinance unconstitutional.
A written order was not available at press time; a representative of the Newaygo County Circuit Court tells Reason that the court directed the plaintiffs' attorneys to prepare a ruling, which the judge will review in a later hearing.
"We're excited and feel vindicated by this ruling," the Quakenbushes said in a statement released by the Institute for Justice. "We are delighted that the judge understood that Brooks Township's ordinance violated our right to use our property and operate our cemetery."
"The Green Burial Council (GBC) is pleased to learn that Newaygo County, Michigan Circuit Judge David Glancy rejected Brooks Township's attempt to throw out a lawsuit against the 'cemetery ban' ordinance," the GBC said in a statement to Reason. "The Green Burial Council has stated before, that we believe Brooks Township's ordinance stood on a weak foundation of misinformation about green burial's negative impact on soil and water, and other similar fears. Though individuals may experience genuine trepidation about a naturally interred body's impact on their environment, local governments can easily find scientific evidence proving no such impact when burial practices are performed according to industry standards."*
UPDATE: This piece has been updated to include a statement from the Green Burial Council.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade set off a wave of new attacks on abortion, causing a catastrophic public health crisis and rapidly eroding our civil liberties and reproductive freedom. So far, 14 states have banned abortion completely, and others have severely limited access to abortion by criminalizing it after the earliest weeks of pregnancy.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic party’s nominee, has already indicated her support for abortion access and other forms
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade set off a wave of new attacks on abortion, causing a catastrophic public health crisis and rapidly eroding our civil liberties and reproductive freedom. So far, 14 states have banned abortion completely, and others have severely limited access to abortion by criminalizing it after the earliest weeks of pregnancy.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic party’s nominee, has already indicated her support for abortion access and other forms of reproductive health care. At one of her first campaign events, she stated that if Congress “passes a law to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”
The ACLU promises to hold Harris accountable for keeping this campaign promise if she is elected in November. Learn more in our breakdown:
Harris on Abortion Rights
The Facts: The Biden-Harris administration made abortion rights and reproductive health a priority during their four years in office. But anti-abortion politicians have had control of at least one body of Congress ever since Roe was overturned, preventing meaningful congressional action on abortion. Enacting federal legislation to protect the right to abortion throughout the country is a crucial and desperately needed step to rectify the harms of overturning Roe.
To be clear, abortion care was not accessible for far too many even before the end of Roe. If elected, Harris must carry out her promise to restore reproductive freedom by taking bold action to ensure that everyone can get an abortion if they need one, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have. She must not only demand legislation that codifies abortion rights and invalidates state bans and restrictions, but that also ends discriminatory barriers to abortion care, such as insurance coverage bans like the Hyde Amendment.
Why It Matters: Right now, millions of people of reproductive age live hundreds of miles from the closest abortion provider. In 2023 alone, more than 171,000 people were forced to travel outside of their home state to secure abortion access. As a result of abortion bans and other restrictions, countless people are being forced to continue their pregnancies against their will. Some states have gone so far as to criminalize the provision of abortion care in medical emergencies where the inability to get an abortion puts the pregnant person’s health, life, and future fertility in danger.
In the two years since Roe was overturned, however, there has been a groundswell of public support for abortion rights and rising opposition against bans and restrictions on abortion care. People in states across the country — including Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — have repeatedly demonstrated their support for reproductive health care access since Roe was overturned.
How We Got Here: Making good on his campaign promise to end Roe, President Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who were part of the majority opinion that overturned the 50-year-old decision and took away the constitutional right to abortion. Since then, extreme politicians have increased their attacks on our reproductive freedom, enforcing bans that push care out of reach entirely in 14 states and attempting to use junk science to take an abortion pill off the shelves nationwide. These politicians even threatened to put doctors in prison for providing emergency abortion care to pregnant patients facing complications.
Our Roadmap: As a presidential candidate in 2020, Harris committed to working with Congress to pass a federal bill to codify abortion rights. She also promised to end the Hyde Amendment, which places restrictions on Medicaid coverage for abortion and has forced one in four low-income women seeking an abortions to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. The Biden-Harris administration took steps to remove this harmful restriction and, if Harris is elected, the ACLU will urge her administration to build on past progress to fulfill her campaign commitments.
In addition to ending the Hyde Amendment and protecting abortion access, the threat of misusing the Comstock Act as a national abortion ban must be eliminated. The Comstock Act is an 1873 anti-obscenity law that regulates the use of the mail and common carriers to send or receive anything that is “indecent, filthy, or vile” or “intended for producing abortion.” Trump’s advisors are threatening to misapply this law, claiming incorrectly that the Comstock Act functions as a national abortion ban. To ensure that no future anti-abortion president can weaponize this antiquated law, Harris must urge Congress to repeal it. The ACLU has already asked lawmakers to introduce the Stop Comstock Act, and we will demand that any legislation codifying abortion rights also repeals the Act.
Additionally, we urge a potential Harris administration to robustly defend pregnant people’s rights and ensure all hospitals satisfy their obligations under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals that receive Medicare funds to provide emergency stabilizing treatment, including abortion, to any patient who needs it. The ACLU will continue to work in the courts and with coalition partners to defend emergency abortion care, including urging Congress to swiftly respond in the event of a Supreme Court decision that eliminates these protections.
Lastly, while the Biden-Harris administration made steps toward expanding reproductive health care and contraception access, it must go further. If Harris is elected, the ACLU will work with her administration to urge Congress to make needed investments in Title X, a federally-funded family planning program that helps low-income people obtain critical health care services for free or at a reduced cost.
What Our Experts Say: “If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election this year, it will be because she prioritized reproductive freedom as a central tenet of her campaign, but that promise must be met with bold and urgent action. Harris has the opportunity to ensure that Congress enacts federal protections for abortion that reflect the American public's overwhelming support for reproductive freedom. That means demanding Congress send her a bill to sign that ensures everyone who needs abortion care can access it.” — Madison Roberts, ACLU senior policy counsel for reproductive freedom.
Today, the Supreme Court declined to issue a ruling in Idaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States. Instead, it sent the case back down to the lower courts where anti-abortion extremists will continue to fight to strip pregnant people of the basic right to emergency care, including when their life is at risk.
While the court’s decision temporarily restores the ability of doctors in Idaho to provide emergency abortions required under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act —EMTALA— by
Today, the Supreme Court declined to issue a ruling in Idaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States. Instead, it sent the case back down to the lower courts where anti-abortion extremists will continue to fight to strip pregnant people of the basic right to emergency care, including when their life is at risk.
While the court’s decision temporarily restores the ability of doctors in Idaho to provide emergency abortions required under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act —EMTALA— by dismissing the case without affirming once and for all that pregnant people have a right to the emergency abortion care they need to protect their health and lives, the court continues to put pregnant patients at unnecessary risk.
Below, we break down why the case matters, and what happens next.
What Is the Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act?
EMTALA requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment to patients in emergency situations. Since it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the federal government–across Democratic and Republican administrations–has consistently recognized that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care to any patient who needs it. For nearly 40 years, EMTALA has been a crucial tool in guaranteeing the right to emergency care for pregnant patients in need.
Although the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, extremist politicians still tried to prevent people experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms. In this case, Idaho, which has a near total abortion ban, went all the way to the Supreme Court for the power to criminalize emergency abortions required under EMTALA.
The ACLU and the Cooley Law Firm filed a friend-of-the-court brief in defense of EMTALA. We explained that the law clearly requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care, regardless of state abortion bans like Idaho’s and others, and that pregnant people cannot be excluded from EMTALA’s protections. The court’s concurring opinion authored by Justice Elena Kagan, and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in part, echoes the arguments we laid out in our brief.
Who Will Be Most Impacted by the Court’s Decision?
The Supreme Court had the opportunity to affirm that every pregnant person in this country is entitled to the emergency care they need to protect their health and lives, and it failed to do so. The court’s refusal to safeguard the right to emergency abortion care–and put an unequivocal end to extremist attacks by anti-abortion politicians on this essential health care –puts pregnant patients at risk and devalues equality under the law.
Two Years Post-Roe: Life in the Aftermath
Two Years Post-Roe: Life in the Aftermath
On this episode, we’re going back into our archives to share an episode that unfortunately still has deep resonance today. Last year, we asked you what a year without Roe has been like in your lives and you responded in droves. Today, with abortio...
On this episode, we’re going back into our archives to share an episode that unfortunately still has deep resonance today. Last year, we asked you what a year without Roe has been like in your lives and you responded in droves. Today, with abortio...
Importantly, the court’s order does nothing to stop the chaos and confusion unleashed by abortion bans across the country, which still prevent providers from giving appropriate medical care to patients when they need it most. While the court’s order does provide a temporary reprieve for pregnant patients in Idaho facing medical emergencies, it also allows extremist politicians in the case to continue to fight to put doctors in jail simply for providing essential care. And, alarmingly, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, wrote a dissenting opinion that provides a roadmap for just how they would strip pregnant people of the right to emergency abortion care should this case return to the Supreme Court.
The dissenting opinion also indicates a willingness to endorse an extreme strategy to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses that will override the rights of the pregnant person, and could lead not only to a national abortion ban, but bans on other forms of reproductive health care like fertility treatment and birth control.
How Can We Fight Back?
This case proves that this battle is far from over. Extremist politicians are coming for our reproductive freedom and will not stop until abortion, including emergency abortion, is banned in all 50 states. They already went all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to put doctors in jail for providing life-and health-saving emergency abortion care, and they will do it again if we let them.
At the ACLU, we’ll continue to use every tool at our disposal to fight attacks on our bodily autonomy. We urge Congress to act now and pass federal protections for abortion rights that will end extreme bans in states and protect access to care nationwide.
Seven out of 10 college students say that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence, according to a new survey from the Knight Foundation, a journalism and free speech nonprofit. The survey, which polled more than 1,600 college students, also found that since 2016, college students' faith in the security of free speech rights has declined. "2024 marks a crisis for free speech on college campuses as international conflicts, like the war
Seven out of 10 college students say that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence, according to a new survey from the Knight Foundation, a journalism and free speech nonprofit. The survey, which polled more than 1,600 college students, also found that since 2016, college students' faith in the security of free speech rights has declined.
"2024 marks a crisis for free speech on college campuses as international conflicts, like the war in Gaza, and domestic strife come to a head, bringing urgent political and personal issues to center stage," the report states. "With campuses cracking down on protests, political leaders casting a questioning eye on the decisions of university administrators, and emerging technology making disinformation easier and faster to produce, the position of higher education as a forum for open discussion has never been more crucial or imperiled."
The Knight Foundation's survey asked students a wide range of questions on campus free speech and the First Amendment in general. The survey also asked students to identify their race, household income, and political affiliation.
Sixty percent of students agreed with the statement "the climate at my school or on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive." The figure is up from 54 percent in 2016, but down from a high of 65 percent in 2021. Additionally, more than 1 in 4 agreed that it was more important for schools to "protect students by prohibiting speech they may find offensive or biased," rather than prioritizing allowing students to hear a wide range of viewpoints, including possibly offensive ones. Students were sharply divided by political opinion on this question, with 70 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Independents, and 45 percent of Democrats supporting allowing offensive speech.
Why do so many students support censorship? It's not exactly clear, but the rest of the survey offers some clues. For example, 70 percent of students, including 82 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans, agreed that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence. Forty-four percent reported feeling uncomfortable in college because of "something someone said in reference to your race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation—whether or not it was directed at you," up from 25 percent in 2016. It's not clear, however, whether this increase is due to an uptick in genuinely offensive statements or increasing student intolerance towards mild political disagreements.
On the bright side, increasing numbers of students opposed instituting policies like restrictive speech codes or providing safe spaces. Since 2017, support for speech codes has declined 23 percentage points, and support for safe spaces declined 15 percentage points. Support for disinviting potentially offensive speakers stayed roughly the same since 2017, declining by just three percentage points, to 25 percent after a brief jump to 42 percent in 2019.
"American society continues to be at a crossroads over how to apply First Amendment rights in the 21st century, particularly on college campuses," the report reads. "That is why it is essential that thought leaders, administrators, professors, and the public listen to the voices of college students as they grapple with issues of free speech in America and on campus."
New legislation would repeal parts of the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that's being revived to attack abortion pills. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act was a big deal in earlier eras, sending people to prison for publishing information about birth control, critiques of marriage, and more. The law is vague and broad, banning the mailing of any "article, matter, thing, device, or substance" that the government deems "obscene, lewd, lascivious,
New legislation would repeal parts of the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that's being revived to attack abortion pills.
Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act was a big deal in earlier eras, sending people to prison for publishing information about birth control, critiques of marriage, and more.
The law is vague and broad, banning the mailing of any "article, matter, thing, device, or substance" that the government deems "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile," along with anything "designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use." Essentially, the Comstock Act weaponizes the U.S. Postal Service to give the federal government an in against things that otherwise wouldn't be its business.
"Anthony Comstock, the law's namesake and an anti-smut crusader, lobbied for and personally enforced the law as a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service," noted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) lawyer Robert Corn-Revere in a recent piece for Reason about efforts to posthumously pardon publisher D.M. Bennett. "Under the law's broad mandate, everything that Comstock considered immoral was by definition obscene and, therefore, illegal. Comstock's concept of immorality included blasphemy, sensational novels and news stories, art, and even scientific and medical texts." (You can read more about Comstock, "the prodigal censor," here.)
The Comstock Act lay dormant for a while, rendered toothless in part by court interpretations of the First Amendment that were more vigorously protective of free speech. But these days, activists and politicians opposed to abortion are trying to revive the law, seeing its potential usefulness in going after mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-pill regimen approved to end first-trimester pregnancies.
The resurgence of interest in the Comstock Act underscores the need to repeal bad laws, not simply assume them defanged by decades of latency.
The Biden administration certainly isn't going to start prosecuting people under the Comstock Act, but a more conservative future administration could. "[Donald] Trumps' [sic] advisors are…arguing that the Comstock Act is a de facto national abortion ban already on the books," says Madison Roberts, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "They are wrong. The Department of Justice has made clear and federal appeals courts have uniformly held for almost a century that the Comstock Act does not apply to legal abortion care. But anti-abortion extremists have manipulated the law to ban abortion before, and there's no reason to think they won't try it again."
Moreover, the law was cited in a legal challenge to abortion pills and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's decision to let them be sent via mail. The district judge who first heard the case (and sided with the plaintiffs) wrote that "dispensing of chemical abortion drugs through mail violates unambiguous federal criminal law." That case was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court last week on procedural grounds, but it certainly won't be the last attempt to stop the prescription and mailing of abortion pills. Nor is it likely to be the last time Comstock is invoked for this purpose—unless the act is revised or repealed.
"It is too dangerous to leave this law on the books," Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) said in a statement.
The Stop Comstock Act, which Smith is slated to introduce soon (no draft has been released yet, however), would repeal the parts of the law "that could be used by an anti-abortion administration to ban the mailing of mifepristone and other drugs used in medication abortions, instruments and equipment used in abortions, and educational material related to sexual health," per Smith's press release. A companion bill will be introduced in the House by Rep. Becca Balint (D–Vt.).
This is good, but not far enough, if it only partially repeals the law.
Why stop with repealing the parts that could be used to target abortion? The Comstock Act's reach is much more broad than that, and every bit could do some damage in the wrong hands.
Every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and
Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and
Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and
Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and
Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing.
It's time to repeal the whole thing.
Today, it's only the abortion part of the law that people are trying to revive. But a few years ago, most of us weren't expecting a Comstock revival at all. Who's to say that a few years from now, people won't try to use it against all sorts of information, art, etc. that they don't like?
If we want to stop the Comstock Act from ever again being used to suppress speech, restrict access to contraceptives, punish people for homosexuality, and more, then we need to stop the Comstock Act entirely.
This month, the Supreme Court refused to consider a request by anti-abortion groups to impose nationwide restrictions on mifepristone, a safe medication used in most U.S. abortions and for miscarriage care. Without addressing whether mifepristone should be further restricted, the court found that these anti-abortion plaintiffs lack “legal standing” – meaning they do not have a sufficient connection to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of mifepristone to be able to challenge the
This month, the Supreme Court refused to consider a request by anti-abortion groups to impose nationwide restrictions on mifepristone, a safe medication used in most U.S. abortions and for miscarriage care. Without addressing whether mifepristone should be further restricted, the court found that these anti-abortion plaintiffs lack “legal standing” – meaning they do not have a sufficient connection to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of mifepristone to be able to challenge the agency’s decisions in court.
The court’s decision is a relief, but we should not be dazzled by the fact that the justices did the right thing based purely on a legal technicality. While the Supreme Court refused to allow these particular anti-abortion groups to bring this case, extremist politicians have vowed to continue to use the courts and the law to strip away access to medication abortion nationwide. Below, we break down why this case matters, and what happens next.
COURT REFUSES TO CONSIDER ANTI-ABORTION DOCTORS’ CHALLENGE TO MIFEPRISTONE
The plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA are organizations and doctors who want to see all abortion banned nationwide. To further their agenda, they used junk science to target access to mifepristone, a medication used in most U.S. abortions. They filed this lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, where they could guarantee it would be heard by a Trump-appointed district court judge with a record of hostility to abortion. That district judge rubber-stamped all of their requests, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely did the same – overriding the consensus of the FDA and every leading national medical authority in order to impose medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone.
In its decision, the Supreme Court did not address the plaintiffs’ arguments that mifepristone should be severely restricted. The court found that the lawsuit suffered from a critical defect: the anti-abortion groups and doctors who brought the case lack legal standing. As the court explained, these anti-abortion plaintiffs don’t prescribe mifepristone and have no actual connection to the FDA’s regulation of the drug. Instead, “the plaintiffs want [the] FDA to make mifepristone more difficult for other doctors to prescribe and for pregnant women to obtain.” But under the Constitution, “a plaintiff ’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue.”
For now, the court’s decision preserves the state-level patchwork access to medication abortion that has existed since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in 2022. That means that, for the time being, people across the United States can continue to fill their mifepristone prescriptions through mail-order and retail pharmacies, just as they would for any other similarly safe medication – without having to travel, sometimes hundreds of miles, just to pick up a pill. Health care professionals with specialized training, like nurse-practitioners, will also maintain the ability to prescribe mifepristone where state law allows. Furthermore, in the U.S. nearly 1 in 5 abortions relies on telemedicine. For many people – including low-income patients, people of color, folks in rural areas, and women in abusive households – retaining accessibility options, such as telemedicine, is essential – especially when it may be impossible to arrange and afford lengthy transportation and childcare, to secure time off work, or to escape the surveillance of an abuser in order to access time-sensitive care.
The court’s order also forestalls the dire consequences the American Cancer Society and many other patient advocacy groups warned of should the court override the FDA’s actions and undermine drug development and impede access to critical medications well beyond reproductive health care.
MEDICATION ABORTION REMAINS SAFE AND EFFECTIVE
There is no credible dispute about mifepristone’s safety. The nation’s leading medical associations describe the science confirming its safety as “overwhelming.” While all drugs carry risks, medical experts have explained that mifepristone is among the safest medications used in medical practice today – safer than Viagra or penicillin – with serious complications experienced by fewer than 1 percent of patients.
By contrast, the plaintiffs’ evidence rested on testimony and research from a few anti-abortion doctors who travel the country peddling junk science about abortion safety. As the ACLU explained in a friend-of-the-court brief, when other courts have heard these folks testify, time and again, they have discredited them. For instance, Dr. Ingrid Skop – cited 17 times in the appellate court’s ruling– had her testimony on abortion thrown out by a Florida court two years ago for being “inaccurate.” Dr. Skop admitted under oath in 2020 that she is “not a really good researcher,” so it’s no surprise that her research on mifepristone was published by a fringe advocacy group known for promoting blatantly false conspiracy theories, such as that President Barack Obama hypnotized listeners with his speeches. Several of the studies relied on by these plaintiffs have been retracted because they are so profoundly flawed. Another study is based on 98 anonymous blogs.
Maintaining access to mifepristone has never been more crucial. Since it was approved in 2000, nearly 6 million people in the United States, and millions more globally, have used this medication. Today, medication abortion comprises almost two-thirds of all abortions in this country.
The Supreme Court refused to allow these particular anti-abortion groups to bring this case, but extremist politicians are waiting in the wings to continue this campaign to strip away access to medication abortion nationwide. Indeed, the same Trump-appointed district judge in Texas has already permitted Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri to intervene in the district court proceedings on the same side as the anti-abortion groups. And these extremist politicians have said that they will try to continue this case in Texas – even though the Supreme Court just found that the original plaintiffs lack standing – or else bring copycat lawsuits in other jurisdictions.
Moreover, in the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will decide another abortion case that will determine whether politicians can force doctors to withhold emergency room care from their patients suffering severe pregnancy complications. These cases show how far politicians will go to prevent people from getting the reproductive health care they need.
WE ALL MUST ADVOCATE FOR OUR RIGHT TO REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
Since Roe was overturned, every time an abortion issue has been put to the ballot, the people have voted in favor of access. Politicians are relentless in their attacks, but a majority of this country believes that people must have the power to make personal decisions during pregnancy. We’ll continue using every tool at our disposal to fight back against these cruel and deeply unpopular attacks on our health, our futures, and our bodily autonomy.
For nearly a decade, the transit authority in Washington, D.C., has faced controversy over restrictive guidelines governing advertisements in the city's subways and busses. Now, it might have to scrap some of them. The controversial rules prohibit any ad that is "issues-oriented" or "intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions." The guidelines also single out religious ads, prohibiting "adver
For nearly a decade, the transit authority in Washington, D.C., has faced controversy over restrictive guidelines governing advertisements in the city's subways and busses. Now, it might have to scrap some of them.
The controversial rules prohibit any ad that is "issues-oriented" or "intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions." The guidelines also single out religious ads, prohibiting "advertisements that promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief."
Last month, a D.C. district court ruled in favor of a Christian group seeking to challenge the rules, placing a preliminary injunction on part of the guidelines that ban ads "intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions."
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) first enacted the controversial rules after an anti-Islam activist attempted to buy an advertisement depicting Muhammad in 2015.
In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union sued WMATA over the guidelines, joined by plaintiffs ranging from vegan group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. That case is still ongoing. In 2018, however, a D.C. district court ruled against a request for a preliminary injunction against WMATA's rules.
But the ACLU has joined another lawsuit challenging the guidelines on First Amendment grounds—this time, to much better success. This latest lawsuit was filed in December 2023 by WallBuilders, an organization that aims to educate the public "concerning the Godly foundation of our country," according to legal records.
When WallBuilders attempted to purchase ads to go in WMATA busses, reading "Christian? To find out about the faith of our founders, go to wallbuilders.com." WMATA rejected the ads, citing their guidelines. When WallBuilders resubmitted the ads, omitting all text except "visit wallbuilders.com," they were still rejected.
WallBuilders sued. On May 21, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the District Court of D.C. granted WallBuilder's motion for a preliminary injunction, halting enforcement on the part of the guidelines that prohibited advertisements seeking "to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions."
"WMATA is permitted to retain considerable discretion in evaluating the intent and purpose of an ad…but this discretion must be coupled with objective, workable standards," wrote Howell. "Put simply, the utterly undefined use of the phrase '[a]dvertisements intended to influence . . . regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions,' coupled with the lack of any definitions or official guidance and WMATA's inconsistent application of [the guideline], makes clear that [it] is not a reasonable restriction on speech."
The ruling is a major victory for a whole range of controversial groups who want to buy ads on D.C. buses and subways. It also sends a clear message to WMATA: While it can place some restrictions on the content of ads, its rules have to be well-defined and narrowly tailored.
What do the National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nine U.S. Supreme Court justices from five presidential administrations all have in common? That list is likely relatively small. But at least one area of overlap was made evident Thursday when the Court published a unanimous ruling that a New York government official allegedly violated the First Amendment by pressuring insurers and banks to sever busines
What do the National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nine U.S. Supreme Court justices from five presidential administrations all have in common? That list is likely relatively small. But at least one area of overlap was made evident Thursday when the Court published a unanimous ruling that a New York government official allegedly violated the First Amendment by pressuring insurers and banks to sever business ties with the NRA, which the ACLU is representing.
The decision resuscitates the gun advocacy group's lawsuit against Maria Vullo, the former head of New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had previously ruled in her favor.
At the core of the case is Vullo's advocacy following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After that tragedy, in private meetings with insurance companies, Vullo allegedly expressed she would selectively apply enforcement action to groups that insisted on serving the NRA.
She didn't stop there. She also sent letters titled "Guidance on Risk Management Relating to the NRA and Similar Gun Promotion Organizations" to insurers and banks, in which she encouraged them to "continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks, that may arise from their dealings with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; to "review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; and to "take prompt actions to manag[e] these risks and promote public health and safety." And in a press release with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the two officials urged such companies to terminate their relationships with the gun advocacy group. Some took them up on the suggestion.
The constitutional issue at stake here is similar to the one the Court explored in Murthy v. Missouri, the case that asks if President Joe Biden's administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to convince social media companies to remove content it disliked. During those oral arguments in March, many justices appeared sympathetic to the view that government officials had not overstepped the bounds of their authority and had merely exercised their own free speech rights to persuade those companies to adopt their views, not unlike a White House press secretary promoting an ideological slant to the media.
But in NRA v. Vullo, the Court ruled unanimously that Vullo's actions as alleged by the NRA had crossed the line from persuasion into coercion. "Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The NRA, she said, "plausibly alleges that respondent Maria Vullo did just that."
The decision sends the case back to the 2nd Circuit, which could still give Vullo qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields government officials from suits like the NRA's if the misconduct alleged has not been "clearly established" in prior case law. That outcome is certainly probable, as the 2nd Circuit's original decision not only ruled that Vullo had not violated the Constitution—which the Supreme Court rejected today—but that even if she had, qualified immunity would insulate her from the NRA's claim.
It is difficult to imagine, however, a more obvious violation of the Constitution than the weaponization of government power to cripple advocacy disfavored by the state. The supposed reason for qualified immunity is that taxpayer-funded civil servants deserve fair notice that conduct is unlawful before a victim can seek recourse for those misdeeds. To argue that a government agent could not be expected to understand the contours of the First Amendment here is rather dire.
Many people may struggle to separate the constitutional question from the ideological backdrop. The NRA, after all, is one of the more polarizing lobbying organizations in the country, not least of which because its founding issue—gun rights—is not exactly a topic that elicits cool-headed responses. It has also become an advocacy group not just for firearms but for the Republican Party more broadly and the identity politics associated with it, alienating large swaths of people, to put it mildly.
There is another major group in the country that has followed a similar story arc, just on the other side of the political spectrum: the ACLU. Once a stalwart free speech group—so principled it defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis—it has, in modern times, sometimes actively advocated against civil liberties when those principles transgress progressive politics, an awkward move when considering the group's name. But no matter how much you dislike one or both of them, the NRA and the ACLU coming together here is all the more reflective of the fact that some things, like the First Amendment, really aren't partisan.
On Tuesday, Harvard officials announced that the university would adopt a formal stance of ideological neutrality on political events and other controversial issues. The decision comes after months of tumultuous campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas. Earlier this month, a faculty-led working group published a report that strongly recommended adopting a neutral stance on topics that do not directly concern the university itself. "T
On Tuesday, Harvard officials announced that the university would adopt a formal stance of ideological neutrality on political events and other controversial issues. The decision comes after months of tumultuous campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Earlier this month, a faculty-led working group published a report that strongly recommended adopting a neutral stance on topics that do not directly concern the university itself.
"The university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university's central activities. They must defend the university's autonomy and academic freedom when threatened," the report stated. "The university and its leaders should not, however, issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university's core function."
The report hinted at what is likely the prevailing reason behind Harvard's push toward neutrality—the immense pressure faced by school officials to weigh in on Hamas' October 7 attack against Israel, and the ongoing war in Gaza. The report noted how, if officials make statements about one topic unrelated to the university's core function, the school opens itself up to demands it comment on every other controversy.
"If the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day," said the report. "This is the reality of contemporary public life in an era of social media and political polarization."
Survey results released last week by TheHarvard Crimson indicate widespread faculty support for neutrality. The survey found that more than 70 percent of Arts and Sciences faculty supported a shift to formal neutrality and more than half reported feeling "somewhat negatively" or "negatively" about "the current state of academic freedom at Harvard"
The announcement was met with widespread praise from free expression advocates.
"For better or worse, what Harvard does, others follow," Angel Eduardo, senior writer and editor at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote on Tuesday. "The principles outlined in the Institutional Voice Working Group's report don't just bode well for Harvard's future on free speech and academic freedom—they may also signal a significant sea change in colleges across the country."
On Wednesday, Syracuse University also announced that it would adopt the recommendations of a similar working group and take an official neutral stance.
"We embrace the guiding principle that the remedy for speech that some may find hurtful, offensive, or even hateful is not the disruption, obstruction, or suppression of the free speech of others, but rather more speech," a statement from the university reads. "Except under the most extraordinary circumstances and with the sole purpose of protecting its mission of discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge, the University does not make institutional statements or pronouncements on current controversies."
America's most insane occupational licensing law is about to get a whole lot better. Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in
America's most insane occupational licensing law is about to get a whole lot better.
Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in an arrangement. Going forward, obtaining a florist license will require only the payment of a fee to the state.
The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle with a unanimous vote in the state House on Wednesday. Landry, a Republican who has supported other licensing reforms, is expected to sign it.
Requiring any sort of government permission slip before someone can work as a florist is obviously ridiculous, and Louisiana's florist-testing regime was a uniquely perverse and protectionist scheme. This week's passage of state Rep. Mike Bayham's (R–Chalmette) reform bill is the culmination of a two-decade battle to eliminate it.
That effort began in the early 2000s, when the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit challenging the florist licensing law. One of the plaintiffs in that case, a woman named Sandy Meadows, had been fired from her job at a Baton Rogue grocery store when state inspectors discovered she had been arranging flowers without the proper license. She tragically died, unemployed and in poverty, before the case could be heard.
Several subsequent lawsuits and legislative efforts have failed to kill the florist licensing law, although Louisiana lawmakers did adopt changes in 2012 that put an end to the practical portion of the licensing exam. Yes, before that, would-be florists were not only quizzed on their knowledge of the profession but also on their subjective skills at arranging flowers. The judges for the exam, naturally, were already-licensed florists.
Even after the exam was pared back to being only a written test, the requirements were still quite onerous, Sarah Harbison, general counsel for the Pelican Institute, a free market think tank that supported the reform bill, told Reason this week. The test would be offered only a few times a year, and would-be licensees had to travel to Baton Rouge to take it in person.
The arguments for maintaining the florist license strain credibility. During a Louisiana Senate hearing on the reform bill earlier this month, Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain fretted about the risk of "pest and disease problems" if the licensing requirement was removed. Louisiana does not require a license to sell cut flowers—which would presumably carry the same, truly terrifying risks—but does require a license if you want to arrange different types of flowers into a bouquet. And if Louisiana is protecting the public from the danger of unlicensed floristry, why isn't there mass chaos in the 49 other states where florists can work without first passing a government-issued test?
"This will lead to greater sales of flowers. This will help people get jobs. This will expand opportunities for people to sell flowers, and this will get rid of a needless regulation," Bayham said last month when the House first approved his bill.
Good riddance to Louisiana's absurd florist licensing exams. But this week's reforms do leave one dilemma: What will be America's worst licensing law now?
pThe outcome of the 2024 election will have a profound impact on access to abortion care in this country. Donald Trump’s allies have drawn up an agenda for a potential second presidential term, and they have made clear that if Trump is elected, he will dust off a 150-year-old federal statute called the Comstock Act to iban all abortions nationwide/i without any need for congressional action./p
pYou read that right: Anti-abortion groups are peddling the radical theory that abortion could be banne
pThe outcome of the 2024 election will have a profound impact on access to abortion care in this country. Donald Trump’s allies have drawn up an agenda for a potential second presidential term, and they have made clear that if Trump is elected, he will dust off a 150-year-old federal statute called the Comstock Act to iban all abortions nationwide/i without any need for congressional action./p
pYou read that right: Anti-abortion groups are peddling the radical theory that abortion could be banned in every state the moment he takes office./p
pAnd because anti-abortion politicians know that the American people a href=blankoppose/a having our reproductive rights taken away, they’re trying to keep these plans under the radar until it’s too late—advising Trump and anti-abortion groups to a href=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/us/politics/trump-allies-abortion-restrictions.htmlkeep quiet/a about their plan to impose a back-door abortion ban until after the election./p
pIt’s long past time to shine a spotlight on this outrageous scheme, and why it’s just plain wrong./p
pThe Comstock Act is an 1873 anti-obscenity law that, among other things, makes it a crime to mail anything that’s “indecent, filthy, or vile” or “intended for producing abortion.” Its namesake, Anthony Comstock, was an infamous Victorian-era anti-vice crusader who, as the Supreme Court has explained, “believed that anything remotely touching upon sex was obscene.” Comstock took credit for arresting thousands and driving at least 15 people to suicide through his anti-vice crusades./p
pTrump’s anti-abortion allies are trying to revive this zombie law, claiming that the Comstock Act is a dormant national abortion ban already on the books, just waiting to be enforced by a Trump Department of Justice. According to anti-abortion extremists, the Comstock Act makes it a crime to send or receive drugs or articles that are used in abortion care by mail or common carriers like UPS and FedEx. That interpretation of the law is wrong; it flies in the face of how courts and the Department of Justice have long interpreted the law. But if anti-abortion judges buy into this unfounded theory, it would effectively amount to a nationwide abortion ban because the medication and equipment used in abortion care are transported by mail and common carrier./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/abortion-criminal-defense-initiative
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=2800 height=1400 src=https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610.jpg 2800w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-768x384.jpg 768w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-1536x768.jpg 1536w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-2048x1024.jpg 2048w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-400x200.jpg 400w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-600x300.jpg 600w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-800x400.jpg 800w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-1000x500.jpg 1000w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-1200x600.jpg 1200w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-1400x700.jpg 1400w, https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2023/12/3dbe18c0063d3b7aed43c26f2ed07610-1600x800.jpg 1600w sizes=(max-width: 2800px) 100vw, 2800px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/abortion-criminal-defense-initiative
target=_blank
Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/abortion-criminal-defense-initiative
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tablet/p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/abortion-criminal-defense-initiative
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pThat likely means that abortion medication like mifepristone won’t even leave the factory. It means that companies that produce medical instruments, ultrasound machines, and other items used in abortion care couldn’t send them to abortion providers, and abortion providers couldn’t obtain the materials they need./p
pThe plan to enforce the Comstock Act as an abortion ban is spelled out in the Heritage Foundation’s a href=https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf180-Day Playbook/a, which details nearly 900 pages’ worth of “actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration.” The scheme is echoed by Jonathan Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer before the Supreme Court and the architect of Texas’s abortion bounty-hunter law, S.B. 8, who has a href=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/us/politics/trump-allies-abortion-restrictions.htmlmade clear/a that a Trump Department of Justice would wield the Comstock Act as a backdoor abortion ban: “We don’t need [Congress to pass] a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books.”/p
pMitchell wants Trump and anti-abortion groups to “keep their mouths shut [on Comstock] as much as possible until the election.” Once in office, they plan to shut down abortion care nationwide without any need for congressional action./p
pTo be clear, the argument that the Comstock Act is a dormant national abortion ban is legally wrong. That’s true for many reasons:/p
ul
liFirst, starting in the early twentieth century, federal appellate courts reached a consensus that the Comstock Act only criminalizes sending and receiving materials to be used for iotherwise unlawful /iabortion and contraception. The courts’ uniform conclusion was that the Act does not apply to drugs and articles sent and received for ilawful/i abortion care. Importantly, courts reached this consensus well before the Supreme Court’s recognition of the constitutional right to contraception and abortion in iGriswold v. Connecticut/i, and iRoe v. Wade/i; the interpretation in no way turned on the existence of a constitutional right./li
/ul
ul
liSecond, Congress was well aware of the court decisions that the Comstock Act doesn’t apply to lawful abortions. If Congress disagreed with the courts, it could have changed the law. Instead, Congress repeatedly reenacted the Comstock Act’s abortion provisions without modifying the language in response to the decisions. This means that Congress concurred with courts narrowing the scope of laws under the principle of congressional ratification. As the Supreme Court explained in iTexas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project/i, “[i]f a word or phrase has been #8230; given a uniform interpretation by inferior courts #8230;, a later version of that act perpetuating the wording is presumed to carry forward that interpretation.”/li
/ul
ul
liThird and relatedly, the United States Postal Service, the agency that enforces the Comstock Act’s mailing restrictions, also concurred with the courts’ settled interpretation of the Act, and in 1970 informed Congress of its position. This timeline bolsters the conclusion that Congress accepted the appellate courts’ narrowing construction of the law./li
/ul
ul
liFourth, the Department of Justice has publicly endorsed this interpretation of the Comstock Act in a December 2022 Office of Legal Counsel a href=https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/file/1560596/dl?inlineopinion/a. As the opinion explains, “[b]ased upon a longstanding judicial construction of the Comstock Act, which Congress ratified and USPS itself accepted,” the Comstock Act “does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of [abortion-inducing medications] where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully./li
/ul
pIn short, Trump’s allies’ argument that the Comstock Act can be enforced as a national abortion ban defies the settled determination by federal courts and the Justice Department that the law does not apply to lawful abortion care./p
pBut we have seen anti-abortion extremists manipulate the law to ban abortion before. iRoe/i was settled law for decades until a reconstituted Supreme Court reversed course in iDobbs /iand allowed states to ban abortion. And before iDobbs/i, Trump’s lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, managed to impose an abortion ban in Texas that ought to have been struck down as unconstitutional, but that survived because of its manipulative bounty-hunter enforcement scheme./p
pSo when Mitchell, who is on the short list to become Trump’s attorney general, endorses the dangerous Comstock scheme, the threat is deadly serious./p
pThe Supreme Court’s docket this term includes many of the complex issues American society is currently facing, including gun control, free speech online, race-based discrimination in voting, reproductive rights, presidential immunity from criminal accountability, and more./p
pThe ACLU has served as counsel or filed friend-of-the-court briefs in all of the cases addressing these hot-button issues. The court will decide all its cases by the beginning of July. Here are eight undecided cases to wat
pThe Supreme Court’s docket this term includes many of the complex issues American society is currently facing, including gun control, free speech online, race-based discrimination in voting, reproductive rights, presidential immunity from criminal accountability, and more./p
pThe ACLU has served as counsel or filed friend-of-the-court briefs in all of the cases addressing these hot-button issues. The court will decide all its cases by the beginning of July. Here are eight undecided cases to watch, and what they mean for the future of our civil liberties./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markReproductive freedom: Protections for medication abortion and access to abortion during medical emergencies /h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardFDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine/h3
/div
pbThe Facts:/b Anti-abortion doctors, who do not prescribe medication abortion, are asking the Supreme Court to force the Food amp; Drug Administration (FDA) to impose severe restrictions on mifepristone – a safe and effective medication used in this country in most abortions and for miscarriage management – in every state, even where abortion is protected by state law./p
pbOur Argument: /bThe FDA approved mifepristone more than 20 years ago, finding that it is safe, effective, and medically necessary. Since its approval, more than 5 million people in the U.S. have used this medication. Our brief argued that the two lower courts – a district court in Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – relied on junk science and discredited witnesses to override the FDA’s expert decision to eliminate medically-unnecessary restrictions on an essential medication with a stronger safety record than Tylenol. We urged the Supreme Court to protect access to medication abortion and reverse the lower courts’ rulings./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/danco-laboratories-llc-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine-u-s-fda-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/danco-laboratories-llc-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine-u-s-fda-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine
target=_blank
Danco Laboratories, LLC, v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine; U.S. FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/danco-laboratories-llc-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine-u-s-fda-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletThe American Civil Liberties Union joined over 200 reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court.../p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/danco-laboratories-llc-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine-u-s-fda-v-alliance-for-hippocratic-medicine
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters:/b Today, with abortion access already severely restricted, the ability to get medication-abortion care using mifepristone is more important than ever. If the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is allowed to stand, individuals would be blocked from filling mifepristone prescriptions through mail-order pharmacies, forcing many to travel, sometimes hundreds of miles, just to pick up a pill they can safely receive through the mail. Healthcare professionals with specialized training, like advanced practice clinicians, would also be prohibited from prescribing mifepristone, further limiting where patients can access this critical medication. The American Cancer Society and other leading patient advocacy groups are also sounding the alarm that overturning the FDA’s decision would upend drug innovation and research, with consequences well beyond reproductive health care./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“As this case shows, overturningi Roe v. Wade /iwasn’t the end goal for extremists. In addition to targeting nationwide-access to mifepristone, politicians in some states have already moved on to attack birth control and IVF. We need to take these extremists seriously when they show us they’re coming for every aspect of our reproductive lives.” – emJennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project./em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardIdaho amp; Moyle et. al v. US/h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bIdaho politicians want the power to disregard the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) that requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing treatment to patients in emergency situations, including abortion where that is the appropriate stabilizing treatment. If the state prevails, it would jail doctors for providing pregnant patients with the necessary emergency care required under this federal law./p
pbOur Argument: /bThe ACLU and its legal partners filed a friend-of-the-court brief explaining that the law requires hospitals to provide whatever emergency care is required; there is no carve-out for patients who need an abortion to stabilize an emergency condition. All three branches of government have long recognized that hospitals are required under EMTALA to provide emergency abortion care to any patient who needs it./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/idaho-and-moyle-et-al-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/359637f7872568a863b03d635c156d9a-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/idaho-and-moyle-et-al-v-united-states
target=_blank
Idaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/idaho-and-moyle-et-al-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletIdaho and Moyle, et al. v. United States was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Idaho politicians seeking to disregard a federal statute — the.../p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/idaho-and-moyle-et-al-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters:/b Because Idaho#8217;s current abortion ban prohibits providing the emergency care required under EMTALA, medical providers have found themselves having to decide between providing necessary emergency care to a pregnant patient or facing criminal prosecution from the state. Depending on how the court rules, medical providers and patients in several other states with extreme abortion bans could find themselves in a similar position./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“If these politicians succeed, doctors will be forced to withhold critical care from their patients. We’re already seeing the devastating impact of this case play out in Idaho, and we fear a ripple effect across the country.” – emAlexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markFree speech: Government authority over online and political speech /h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardNational Rifle Association v. Vullo /h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bIn 2018, Maria Vullo, New York’s former chief financial regulator, in coordination with then-Mayor Andrew Cuomo, threatened to use her regulatory power over banks and insurance companies to coerce them into denying basic financial services to the National Rifle Association (NRA) because she and Cuomo disagreed with its pro-gun rights advocacy. The NRA argued that Vullo’s alleged efforts to blacklist the NRA penalized it for its political advocacy, in violation of the First Amendment./p
pbOur Argument: /bThe ACLU, representing the NRA at the Supreme Court, argued that any government attempt to blacklist an advocacy group and deny it financial services because of its viewpoint violates the right to free speech. Our brief urges the court to apply the precedent it set in 1963 in iBantam Books v. Sullivan/i, which established that even informal, indirect efforts to censor speech violate the First Amendment./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/national-rifle-association-v-vullo
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/29cdadc17d83f5ef0a78a0e3eca67374.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/29cdadc17d83f5ef0a78a0e3eca67374.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/29cdadc17d83f5ef0a78a0e3eca67374-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/29cdadc17d83f5ef0a78a0e3eca67374-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/national-rifle-association-v-vullo
target=_blank
National Rifle Association v. Vullo /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/national-rifle-association-v-vullo
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletOn January 9th, 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union filed its opening brief on behalf of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in National.../p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/national-rifle-association-v-vullo
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters: /bWhile the ACLU stands in stark opposition to the NRA on many issues, this case is about securing basic First Amendment rights for all advocacy organizations. If New York State is allowed to blacklist the NRA, then Oklahoma could similarly penalize criminal justice reformers advocating for bail reform, and Texas could target climate change organizations advancing the view that all fossil fuel extraction must end. The ACLU itself could be targeted for its advocacy./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/why-is-the-aclu-representing-the-nra-before-the-us-supreme-court
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=1200 height=628 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec.jpg 1200w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec-768x402.jpg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec-400x209.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec-600x314.jpg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec-800x419.jpg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/7e5c30fc4a1d9a737ed614291b23e1ec-1000x523.jpg 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/why-is-the-aclu-representing-the-nra-before-the-us-supreme-court
target=_blank
Why is the ACLU Representing the NRA Before the US Supreme Court? /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/why-is-the-aclu-representing-the-nra-before-the-us-supreme-court
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletThe ACLU has always stood up for free speech – no matter the speaker./p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/why-is-the-aclu-representing-the-nra-before-the-us-supreme-court
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbThe Last Word: /b“The right to advocate views the government opposes safeguards our ability to organize for the country we want to see. It’s a principle the ACLU has defended for more than 100 years, and one we will continue to protect from government censorship of all kinds, whether we agree or disagree with the views of those being targeted.” – emDavid Cole, ACLU legal director/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardNetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice /h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bMotivated by a perception that social media platforms disproportionately silence conservative voices, Florida and Texas passed laws that give the government authority to regulate how large social media companies like Facebook and YouTube curate content posted on their sites./p
pbOur Argument: /bIn a friend-of-the-court brief, the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida and the ACLU of Texas argued that the First Amendment right to speak includes the right to choose what to publish and how to prioritize what is published. The government’s desire to have private speakers, like social media companies, distribute more conservative viewpoints–or any specific viewpoints–is not a permissible basis for state control of what content appears on privately-owned platforms./p
pbWhy it Matters:/b If these laws are allowed to stand, platforms may fear liability and decide to publish nothing at all, effectively eliminating the internet’s function as a modern public square. Or, in an attempt to comply with government regulations, social media companies may be forced to publish a lot more distracting and unwanted content. For example, under the Texas law, which requires “viewpoint neutrality,” a platform that publishes posts about suicide prevention would also have to publish posts directing readers to websites that encourage suicide. ./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“Social media companies have a First Amendment right to choose what to host, display, and publish. The Supreme Court has recognized that right for everyone from booksellers to newspapers to cable companies, and this case should make clear that the same is true for social media platforms.” — emVera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, amp; Technology Project/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markVoting rights: Racial gerrymandering and the fight for fair maps /h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardAlexander v. South Carolina NAACP/h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bIn 2022, South Carolina adopted a racially-gerrymandered congressional map. The state legislature singled out Black communities, “cracking” predominantly Black communities and neighborhoods across two districts to reduce their electoral influence in the state’s first congressional district./p
pbOur Argument: /bThe ACLU and its legal partners sued on behalf of the South Carolina NAACP and an affected voter to challenge the constitutionality of the new congressional map. We argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids the sorting of voters on the basis of their race, absent a compelling interest, which the state failed to provide./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/alexander-v-south-carolina-state-conference-of-the-naacp
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=1000 height=667 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82.jpg 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82-400x267.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82-600x400.jpg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/adacb5fd2b08ce6397602bca3ce44e82-800x534.jpg 800w sizes=(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/alexander-v-south-carolina-state-conference-of-the-naacp
target=_blank
Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (Congressional Map Challenge) /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/alexander-v-south-carolina-state-conference-of-the-naacp
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletSouth Carolina unlawfully assigned voters to congressional districts based on their race and intentionally discriminated against Black voters in.../p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/alexander-v-south-carolina-state-conference-of-the-naacp
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters: /bThis racially-gerrymandered congressional map deprives Black South Carolinians the political representation they deserve in all but one of seven districts, limiting the power and influence of more than a quarter of the state’s population just before the 2024 election./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“South Carolina’s failure to rectify its racially-gerrymandered congressional map blatantly disregards the voices and the rights of Black voters. The ACLU is determined to fight back until Black South Carolina voters have a lawful map that fairly represents them.” – emAdriel I. Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markGender justice: Denying guns to persons subject to domestic violence restraining orders/h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardUnited States v. Rahimi /h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bZackey Rahimi was convicted under a federal law that forbids individuals subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing a firearm. Mr. Rahimi challenged the law as a violation of his Second Amendment right to bear arms./p
pbOur Argument: /bThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that individuals subject to domestic violence protective orders have a constitutional right to possess guns. It invalidated the federal gun law because it found no historical analogues in the 1700s or 1800s that prohibited those subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing a firearm. The ACLU argued that the Fifth Circuit’s analysis is a misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision in iNew York State Rifle amp; Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen/i because it effectively required a “historical twin” law in order to uphold a law today. There were no identical laws at the time of the Framing because there were no domestic violence protective orders then, but that should not be a basis for invalidating the laws today. We also argued that imposing time-limited firearms restrictions based on civil restraining orders is a critical tool for protecting those who have experienced domestic violence and face a threat of further violence./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/united-states-v-rahimi
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5d4549447588adb73b5aba378f7d7f59.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5d4549447588adb73b5aba378f7d7f59.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5d4549447588adb73b5aba378f7d7f59-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5d4549447588adb73b5aba378f7d7f59-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/united-states-v-rahimi
target=_blank
United States v. Rahimi /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/united-states-v-rahimi
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletWhether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violates the.../p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/united-states-v-rahimi
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters: /bIf the Fifth Circuit’s rationale is affirmed, then governments would lose the ability to prohibit gun possession by persons subject to restraining orders — and presumably even to run pre-acquisition background checks, which have stopped more than 77,000 purchases of weapons by individuals subject to domestic violence orders in the 25 years that the federal law has been in place. This “originalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment not only hinders our ability to protect individuals against newly recognized threats, but also tethers the authority to regulate gun possession to periods when governments disregarded many forms of violence directed against women, Black people, Indigenous people, and others./p
pbThe Last Word:/b “It would be a radical mistake to allow historical wrongs to defeat efforts today to protect women and other survivors of domestic abuse. The Supreme Court should affirm that the government can enact laws aimed at preventing intimate partner violence, consistent with the Second Amendment.” –em Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markCriminal justice: Eighth-Amendment protections for unhoused persons accused of sleeping in public when they have nowhere else to go /h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardCity of Grants Pass v. Johnson /h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bGrants Pass, Oregon, enacted ordinances that make it illegal for people, including unhoused persons with no access to shelter, to sleep outside in public using a blanket, pillow, or even a cardboard sheet to lie on. Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that punishing unhoused people for sleeping in public when they have no other choice violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment./p
pbOur Argument: /bIn Oregon, and elsewhere in the United States, the population of unhoused persons often exceeds the number of shelter beds available, forcing many to sleep on the streets or in parks. The ACLU and 19 state affiliates submitted a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that it is cruel and unusual to punish unhoused people for the essential life-sustaining activity of sleeping outside when they lack access to any alternative shelter./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/city-of-grants-pass-v-johnson
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/city-of-grants-pass-v-johnson
target=_blank
City of Grants Pass v. Johnson /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/city-of-grants-pass-v-johnson
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tablet/p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/city-of-grants-pass-v-johnson
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters: /bWhen applied to people with nowhere else to go, fines and arrests for sleeping outside serve no purpose and are plainly disproportionately punitive. Arresting and fining unhoused people for sleeping in public only exacerbates cycles of homelessness and mass incarceration./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“There is no punishment that fits the ‘crime’ of being forced to sleep outside. Instead of saddling people with fines, jail time, and criminal records, cities should focus on proven solutions, like affordable housing, accessible and voluntary services, and eviction protections.” – emScout Katovich, staff attorney with the ACLU Trone Center for Justice and Equality/em/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
hr class=mark /
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-markDemocracy: Presidential immunity from prosecution for criminal acts after leaving office /h2
/div
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h3 id= class=wp-heading-h3 with-standardTrump v. United States/h3
/div
pbThe Facts: /bFormer President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to rule that he cannot be held criminally liable for any official acts as president, even after leaving office, and even where the crimes concern efforts to resist the peaceful transition of power after an election. This claim runs contrary to fundamental principles of constitutional accountability, and decades of precedent./p
pbOur Argument: /bOur friend-of-the-court brief argues that former President Trump is not immune from criminal prosecution, and that the Constitution and long-established Supreme Court precedent support the principle that in our democracy, nobody is above the law — even the president. Our brief warns that there are “few propositions more dangerous” in a democracy than the notion that an elected head of state has blanket immunity from criminal prosecution./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/trump-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ba988bc008254460d80a4ea1aa03d252-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/trump-v-united-states
target=_blank
Trump v. United States /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/trump-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tablet/p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/trump-v-united-states
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pbWhy it Matters: /bNo other president has asserted that presidents can never be prosecuted for official acts that violate criminal law. The president’s accountability to the law is an integral part of the separation of powers and the rule of law. If the President is free, as Trump’s legal counsel argued, to order the assassination of his political opponents and escape all criminal accountability even after he leaves office, both of these fundamental principles of our system would have a fatal Achilles’ heel./p
pbThe Last Word: /b“The United States does not have a king, and former presidents have no claim to being above the law. A functioning democracy depends on our ability to critically reckon with the troubling actions of government officials and hold them accountable.” – emDavid Cole, ACLU legal director /em/p
America's tax code is notoriously convoluted, but the complexity really sparkles when it comes to the federal government's approach to alcohol taxation. Wine, beer, and liquor are all subject to varying tax rates based on intricate calculations, but the so-called "bubble tax" for hard cider is the star of this regulatory circus. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the tax rate for alcoholic cider is based on, among other things, the amount of carbonat
America's tax code is notoriously convoluted, but the complexity really sparkles when it comes to the federal government's approach to alcohol taxation. Wine, beer, and liquor are all subject to varying tax rates based on intricate calculations, but the so-called "bubble tax" for hard cider is the star of this regulatory circus.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, the tax rate for alcoholic cider is based on, among other things, the amount of carbonation the drink contains. Yes, America technically already has a carbon tax and the feds have literally found a way to tax air. Craft cider makers are being flattened by an arbitrary system that is strangling the industry's long-term potential.
Under the federal code, alcoholic cider is taxed as either hard cider, still wine, or sparkling wine, and the implications of which category applies are not insignificant. Hard cider is taxed at a modest $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at a whopping $3.40 per gallon—a staggering 1,400 percent increase. For every 100 gallons of cider produced, Uncle Sam either takes $22 in taxes or $340 in taxes.
What determines how cider is categorized and taxed? A ridiculous three-part formula based on a) what type of fruit is used to make the cider, b) the alcohol content of the cider, and c) what carbonation level the cider contains.
Imagine you're a cider maker aiming for the lower tax rate to apply to your product. You need to produce a cider that is made from apples or pears (with no other fruit additions), is less than 8.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), and has less than or equal to 0.64 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per 100mL. However, if you decide to add some blackberries or grapes, it's considered a still wine and taxed at $1.07 per gallon—but only if it has less than 0.392 grams of CO2 per 100mL. If you go over that carbonation threshold, you've unlocked sparkling wine status and with that the $3.40 per gallon tax rate.
Confused? It gets worse.
If your pear or apple cider is over 0.64 grams of CO2, it gets the sparkling wine rate. But it's knocked back down to the still wine rate if it's less than 0.392 grams of CO2 and the ABV level is 8.5 percent or higher.Whether the bubbles are added via "force carbonated" or "bottle conditioned" carbonation creates another tax delineation for the sparkling wine category. A flow chart is needed just to unpack all the potential permutations and combinations:
(American Cider Association)
The implications of this tax labyrinth extend to consumers. A report from Wine Enthusiast notes that modern drinkers have grown to expect beer-like carbonation levels in their alcoholic beverages, thereby creating pressure for cider makers to add more carbonation to their products.
One cider maker from Oregon reported that he receives frequent emails from consumers complaining about flat cider, which they incorrectly blame on him rather than the government. If adding more carbonation could financially cripple a small business, it's little wonder many cider makers feel that their hands are tied.
The disparity is glaring when compared to beverages like beer, hard seltzer, and regular soda, which face no such carbonation-based tax penalties. It's a clear disconnect from market realities and consumer demands, which increasingly favor diverse flavors and more carbonation in ciders.
Craft cider makers are doing their best to diversify the carbonation levels and fruits in their ciders to respond to consumer demand, but it's clear the industry has a hard ceiling on its growth due to these tax rules. This is why many cider makers state that their ability to expand—and the ability of the industry as a whole to thrive—is being pointlessly inhibited.
The bubble tax is now getting more attention due to a recent bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, which aims to level the playing field between apple and pear ciders and those made with other fruits. While promising, the best reform would be to convert the entire system of alcohol taxation to one based simply on a drink's ABV level rather than arbitrary classifications.
Craft cider, a beverage steeped in American history, deserves better. Another Michigan cider maker made it even simpler: "It's not expressing the free market. The government needs to get out of the way."
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill banning the sale or production of lab-grown meat in the state. While a press release framed the bill as an attempt to advance Floridans' freedom by protecting them from the "World Economic Forum's goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects," all the legislation really does is stile competition for the state's meat producers. "Today, Florida is fighting back against the gl
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill banning the sale or production of lab-grown meat in the state. While a press release framed the bill as an attempt to advance Floridans' freedom by protecting them from the "World Economic Forum's goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects," all the legislation really does is stile competition for the state's meat producers.
"Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals," DeSantis said in a Wednesday press release. "Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef."
Cultivated, or "lab-grown," meat has been available in the United States on an extremely limited basis, generally limited to individual restaurants, since last year, after the Food and Drug Administration approved two different kinds of cultivated chicken for sale.
However, despite DeSantis' supposed fears about a lab-grown meat takeover, the small cultivated meat industry is struggling. The product isn't currently available anywhere in the United States, let alone in Florida.
Nonetheless, the governor signed Senate Bill 1084, which enacts a wide-ranging ban on cultivated meat, making it illegal "for any person to manufacture for sale, sell, hold or offer for sale, or distribute cultivated meat in" Florida. Violators of the law face misdemeanor penalties, and businesses caught selling the product could have their licenses suspended.
"We must protect our incredible farmers and the integrity of American agriculture," Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson said in the press release. "Lab-grown meat is a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity, and is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture."
However, it seems DeSantis is the real authoritarian in this situation. Instead of letting Floridians decide for themselves whether they want to try lab-grown meat, DeSantis is having the state step in, all in the name of protecting Floridians from an imaginary threat to their freedom.
Florida's lab-grown meat ban is a perfect marriage of protectionism and the culture war. By framing the tiny lab-grown meat industry as a left-wing threat, DeSantis can justify giving government kickbacks to the meat industry, all while protecting meat producers from a source of future competition. Wednesday's press release goes so far as to brag about a litany of recently passed legislation that "support[s] the state's agriculture and meat industry."
Unfortunately, Florida isn't the first state to ban cultivated meat. Alabama passed a ban on lab-grown meat last month, and legislation to ban the product is pending in Arizona and Tennessee. Italy banned it last year.
pThe Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in iIdaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States/i, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications. Here’s what you need to know:/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h
pThe Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in iIdaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States/i, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications. Here’s what you need to know:/p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardThis case is about politicians trying to block emergency care for pregnant patients./h2
/div
pAnti-abortion politicians brought this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to deny pregnant people access to emergency abortion care that is necessary to prevent severe and potentially life-altering health consequences, and even death. A federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act or EMTALA, has long guaranteed that, in an emergency, patients can get the care they need — including abortion care — regardless of where they live. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue: Every administration from President Reagan to President Biden has recognized that EMTALA requires emergency abortion care. The Supreme Court#8217;s decision to overturn iRoe v. Wade/i did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, which override state laws that would prohibit such care, but now, extreme politicians are doing everything in their power to prevent someone experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardThis case could have a severe impact on emergency care across the country, and these devastating effects are already playing out in Idaho. /h2
/div
pWhile it considers the case, the Supreme Court has already allowed Idaho politicians to block emergency care for pregnant people using the state’s abortion ban which has no exception for health, and the impact is already reverberating across the state. For example, St. Luke’s Health System, the largest health system in Idaho, which sees hundreds of thousands of emergency department visits each year, reports that they are now transferring pregnant patients with medical emergencies out of state to get the care they need, but even that delay can also increase the unacceptable risks patients face. Not surprisingly, doctors do not want to practice in a state where they are criminalized for providing the emergency care their patients need: Since Idaho’s extreme abortion ban took effect, more than 20 percent of obstetricians in Idaho have left the state, according to a a href=https://www.idahocsh.org/idaho-physician-wellbeing-action-collaborativereport/a published by the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare./p
pIf the Supreme Court sides with Idaho in this case, these devastating effects on patients and doctors alike could spread to other states with extreme abortion bans, such as Arizona, and would give anti-abortion politicians around the country the green light to try to prohibit this essential, even life-saving, emergency care./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardThis case is about doctors and hospitals that want to provide care, but politicians want to stop them from treating patients. /h2
/div
pThe issues in this case are about hospitals and physicians who want to fulfill their oath and provide care to patients experiencing medical emergencies, but politicians want to enforce Idaho’s abortion ban up until the moment that a pregnant person’s life is at imminent risk. “Can I continue to replace her blood loss fast enough? How many organ systems must be failing? Can a patient be hours away from death before I intervene, or does it have to be minutes?”/p
div class=wp-audio mb-8
div class=wp-audio__content
span class=wp-audio__episode-title is-hidden-tablet is-hidden-desktop is-size-5 is-size-6-mobile
In Alabama, Embryos Are People and It Won't Stop There /span
div class=wp-audio__metadata columns
div class=column
span class=wp-audio__episode-title is-hidden-mobile is-size-5 is-size-6-mobileIn Alabama, Embryos Are People and It Won't Stop There/span
p class=wp-audio__episode-description line-clamp-3 is-size-6 is-hidden-mobile
On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, meaning the embryo has rights consistent with a person living in the United States. While this marks the first time a frozen embryo has been granted ... /p
p class=wp-audio__episode-description line-clamp-5 is-size-7 is-hidden-tablet is-hidden-desktop
On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, meaning the embryo has rights consistent with a person living in the United States. While this marks the first time a frozen embryo has been granted ... /p
/div
div class=wp-audio__thumbnail-wrapper column
img
class=wp-audio__thumbnail
src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/themes/aclu-wp/img/at-liberty_500x500.jpg
alt=Cover artwork for
/
/div
/div
/div
div class=wp-audio__links is-flex is-align-items-center pl-none pl-4-tablet
div class=wp-audio__links-episode is-size-7 has-text-grey has-text-weight-bold p-4
a href=https://www.aclu.org/podcast/in-alabama-embryos-are-people-and-it-wont-stop-there class=visit-link p-none mb-none no-underline column
span class=visit-link__textVisit this episode/spanspan class=icon caret is-dark right /
/a
/div
/div
/div
pThese are some of the questions our client Dr. Caitlin Gustafson shared that some Idaho providers are now forced to consider when a patient comes in with an emergency pregnancy complication in a recent a href=https://time.com/6968774/idaho-abortion-doctors-essay/op-ed/a on the case. Politics shouldn’t matter when you’re trying to treat a patient whose condition is rapidly deteriorating before your very eyes, but that’s the exact dystopia politicians are trying to force on all of us./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardThe extremists behind this case won’t stop with abortion. /h2
/div
pOverturning iRoe v. Wade/i was just the beginning. Anti-abortion politicians are using every tool at their disposal in their campaign to ban abortion nationwide, and they won’t stop there. They are also pushing a legal strategy to give rights to embryos and fetuses that would override the rights of the pregnant person. We saw what happened in Alabama when the state supreme court granted rights to embryos, which forced IVF clinics across the state to temporarily shut down services. To be clear: There isn’t a serious argument to use EMTALA to grant legal rights to embryos, but that may not stop justices from considering whether to follow the lead of the anti-abortion movement and issue another devastating blow to people’s power to make personal medical decisions during pregnancy./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardWe have the power to fight back, and we will win!/h2
/div
pAnti-abortion politicians and the groups supporting them are trying to use the courts to further their agenda because the policies they’re pushing are deeply unpopular. Every time abortion is on the ballot, voters send a clear message that they want reproductive freedom to be protected. That’s why the anti-abortion movement has turned to the courts to carry out their agenda, and the scary thing is they might just be successful./p
pWhile there is already federal law to protect access to emergency care, the way anti-abortion politicians are trying to manipulate their state’s ban to deny people emergency care shows why we need to put an end to state bans once and for all. We need Congress to pass federal protections for abortion rights that will end extreme bans in states and protect access to care nationwide./p
There may not be a more apt visual metaphor for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' past few years than his opposition to a proposed marijuana legalization ballot initiative—which he announced Tuesday while literally standing behind a sign celebrating "Freedom Month." "I don't want this state to be reeking of marijuana," DeSantis said, defaulting to one of the laziest arguments against pot freedom, but one that DeSantis has been using for years. "We're do
There may not be a more apt visual metaphor for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' past few years than his opposition to a proposed marijuana legalization ballot initiative—which he announced Tuesday while literally standing behind a sign celebrating "Freedom Month."
"I don't want this state to be reeking of marijuana," DeSantis said, defaulting to one of the laziest arguments against pot freedom, but one that DeSantis has been using for years. "We're doing fine. We don't need to do that."
How's that for Freedom Month?
In fairness to DeSantis, the jarringly dissonant signage was celebrating the state's sales tax holiday during May. Even so, the gap between DeSantis' pro-freedom messaging and his actions as governor has become a recurring theme for the one-time presidential hopeful.
After all, this is the same guy who wrote a book titled The Courage To Be Free, but has made a name for himself in conservative politics by wielding state power against drag queens, student groups, and others who have had the courage to freely express their opinions. On the presidential campaign trail, DeSantis would talk up the importance of school choice and parental rights, then moments later promise stricter state control over school curriculums. He's championed Florida's status as a refuge for Americans fleeing poor government policies in other states, even as he's tried to boot out migrants who are voting with their feet by coming to America for the same reason.
Freedom, for DeSantis, seems to mean that you can do whatever you'd please—but only if he approves.
It's disappointing, but hardly surprising, that DeSantis is applying that same logic to marijuana legalization. Florida residents might get a chance to vote on legalizing recreational weed in November, but DeSantis promised Tuesday that he would be "getting involved in different ways" to combat that ballot initiative. It's unclear exactly what DeSantis means, but State Attorney General Ashley Moody and some anti-legalization groups have already sued in state court to block the initiative from getting on the ballot.
The ballot initiative, Florida Amendment 3, would change the state's constitution to allow adults aged 21 and older to possess up to three ounces of marijuana. Existing licensed medical marijuana distribution centers—Florida voters approved medical marijuana in 2016—would be the only places allowed to distribute recreational weed, although state lawmakers could pass new laws to allow for commercial distribution and home growing.
As Marijuana Momentnotes, economic analyses of the ballot initiative show that legalization would be a boon for Florida and could generate between $195.6 million and $431.3 million in new sales tax revenue annually.
Greater freedom for Floridians and higher tax revenue seem to matter less to DeSantis than the possibility that some of the state's residents might dislike the smell of reefer. "You want to walk down the street here and smell it," he asked, rhetorically, on Tuesday. "Do you want to not be able to take your family out to dinner because you're worried about it?"
If that's the best argument that the opponents of legalization in Florida can muster, there might be little cause for concern. Even so, having the (admittedly quite popular) governor campaigning against legalization figures to be a factor in the election.
Voters seem to be split on the legalization issue: A poll taken last month by USA Today and Ipsos showed 49 percent of Floridians support the ballot initiative—including 38 percent of registered Republicans. That's well short of the 60 percent threshold required for the amendment to pass.
What DeSantis does as Florida's governor will continue to carry national implications, not solely because he remains one of the most well-known Republican politicians in the country. He's reportedly seeking to patch up his relationship with former President Donald Trump—the two had dinner this week, according to The Washington Post—and may have a role to play in a future Trump administration, or as a Republican presidential candidate in 2028.
By then, maybe he'll have gotten over his fear of the smell of weed.
State legislation is crucially connected to our civil liberties, and can either expand our rights or chip away at them. These bills touch nearly every aspect of our lives. From Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs case that overturned the right to an abortion, to Loving v. Virginia, which struck down laws banning interracial marriage, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized marriage equality across the country — many Supreme Court cases that address all of our civil rights come from laws that were passe
State legislation is crucially connected to our civil liberties, and can either expand our rights or chip away at them. These bills touch nearly every aspect of our lives. From Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs case that overturned the right to an abortion, to Loving v. Virginia, which struck down laws banning interracial marriage, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized marriage equality across the country — many Supreme Court cases that address all of our civil rights come from laws that were passed in state legislatures.
With an increasingly conservative Supreme Court and federal court system, as well as a Congress whose members are constantly in gridlock, state legislatures offer a more accessible way to enact meaningful change. State lawmakers are easier to contact regarding policies that should be passed, and also frequently go on to run for federal office, or become governors. What’s more, state actions can lead to national impact if many similar policies are passed around the country, signaling national trends.
With many state legislative sessions currently underway, learn more about this important political process, how it affects your rights, and how to get involved.
What Are State Legislative Sessions?
Each state has its own legislative body in which lawmakers work together to pass policies — just like Congress does at the federal level. Every state except for Nebraska has a legislature composed of two chambers, or a bicameral legislature — which must work together to get a majority of favorable votes and pass bills in both chambers. While the exact names and powers of these entities depend on the specific states, once a bill is passed, it will be sent to the governor to be signed into law or may face a veto.
Most state legislatures are made up of lawmakers who meet to pass laws during legislative sessions each year. If circumstances arise that require lawmakers to address legislation outside of these regular sessions, a special session can be called. There are also several states with full-time legislatures whose lawmakers meet year-round. Lawmakers often engage in this work part time, and are often not adequately paid.
When Are State Legislative Sessions Held?
The length and timing of state legislative sessions differ from state to state. Some legislatures are in session for many months, while others only take a few. The sessions that aren’t full time usually take place in the first half of the year, traditionally beginning in January.
How Do They Impact Our Rights?
The laws that are passed during state legislative sessions run the gamut and can affect a number of constituents’ rights, including reproductive freedom, voting protections, access to gender-affirming care, and others. But this influence goes both ways. Presumably, the prospective laws should reflect the majority opinions of individuals in the state, with lawmakers acting as advocates for these interests. Many bills and policies that make it to state legislatures are promoted by advocacy organizations or interest groups who work with lawmakers to get them passed. The ACLU is among these entities, and is the only organization focusing on civil rights and civil liberties that has an office with staff in every state, working with local policymakers.
What To Watch As Sessions Are Underway
There are many decisions happening in states around the country that put our rights in the balance. Without the federal protections from Roe v. Wade, many lawmakers are attacking abortion rights at the state level. There has also been a surge of state laws introduced that block trans youth from receiving gender-affirming care, censor student free speech, and suppress people’s voting powers.
But the ACLU will never stop fighting for your rights. We have taken on countless state-level legal battles to protect people’s liberties — and have seen many victories along the way.
How Do I Engage/Get Involved in the Process?
The ACLU always encourages our community to play a hands-on role in the fight for our freedoms. Across the country, we implement strategies that empower voters around the country to stay informed about local races and elect candidates whose interests align with theirs. We’re also mapping state-level attacks on LGBTQ rights so you can keep track of your own area’s legislation — and fight back accordingly.
Supporters can get in touch with the ACLU affiliate offices in their state to learn about local issues they are taking action on. Many affiliate websites offer primers on state legislatures. Our grassroots effort People Power also allows volunteers to engage with state-level actions in their area.
To learn about your state’s legislature, identify the lawmakers who represent you and what their stances are on the issues you care about most. State lawmakers and governors will usually highlight the issues they care about, and the legislative work they’ve done, wherever they are able. With most state legislative sessions underway right now, you can also keep track of policies that are being voted on. This will let you know your legislature’s priorities and if your lawmakers are fulfilling their campaign promises to constituents. Remember, the key players involved in the legislative process are voted into office by you. You have the power in numbers to elect or replace representatives based on whether they are advocating for your interests.
Less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatment are children, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a law protecting access to IVF treatment in the state. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a controversial ruling, deciding that frozen embryos would count as children under a 19th-century Alabama wrongful death statute. Justice Tom Parker used extensive quotes from
Less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatment are children, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a law protecting access to IVF treatment in the state.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a controversial ruling, deciding that frozen embryos would count as children under a 19th-century Alabama wrongful death statute. Justice Tom Parker used extensive quotes from the Bible and Christian theology to justify his decision. "The doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment," which prohibits murder, Parker wrote. "All human beings bear the image of God," he continued, "and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."
IVF is an infertility treatment involving the fertilization of multiple eggs with the goal of inserting them afterward in a woman's uterus, where they may hopefully implant and grow into a healthy baby.As Reason's Ronald Bailey put it shortly after the ruling was released, "Since the implantation of any specific embryo is far from guaranteed, IVF often involves creating several embryos that are stored in liquid nitrogen that could be made available for later attempts at achieving pregnancy." Parents often have to choose whether to leave their remaining frozen embryos in storage (at a cost) or to have the IVF clinic discard them.
The ruling caused near-immediate chaos, with three IVF providers in the state shutting down operations, citing confusion over the legal implications of the court's decision. The ruling quickly garnered widespread outrage, even among many who are avowedly pro-life.
"We want to make it easier for people to be able to have babies, not…make it harder….And the IVF process is a way of giving life to even more babies," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott toldCNN in February. "What I think the goal is is to make sure that we can find a pathway to ensure that parents who otherwise may not have the opportunity to have a child will be able to have access to the IVF process."
Soon after the ruling was handed down, Alabama legislators moved quickly to introduce bills that would protect access to IVF treatment in the state. Senate Bill 159, which Ivey signed Wednesday, ultimately passed with a large bipartisan majority.
"No action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization," the bill states. "No criminal prosecution may be brought for the damage to or death of an embryo against the manufacturer of goods used to facilitate the in vitro fertilization process or the transport of stored embryos."
"The overwhelming support of [the bill] from the Alabama Legislature proves what we have been saying: Alabama works to foster a culture of life, and that certainly includes IVF," Ivey said in a statement on March 6. "I am confident that this legislation will provide the assurances our IVF clinics need and will lead them to resume services immediately."
After the bill's signing, two of the three closed clinics announced that they would restart IVF treatments.
Alabama's IVF protection bill will likely assuage fears that access to fertility treatments could be seriously impacted by state-level court rulings. Even in a state where abortion is banned from conception, attacks on IVF remain incredibly unpopular—and stridently pro-life legislators still recognize the importance of safeguarding fertility medicine.
A Russian defector is assassinated in Spain. The Chinese government offers bounties for dissidents who take refuge in foreign countries. The Canadian government fingers Indian officials for murdering a Sikh activist in British Columbia. What do these incidents have in common? They represent acts of "transnational repression," a form of authoritarianism that reaches across national frontiers and has becoming disturbingly common in recent years. R
A Russian defector is assassinated in Spain. The Chinese government offers bounties for dissidents who take refuge in foreign countries. The Canadian government fingers Indian officials for murdering a Sikh activist in British Columbia. What do these incidents have in common? They represent acts of "transnational repression," a form of authoritarianism that reaches across national frontiers and has becoming disturbingly common in recent years.
Repression Without Borders
"More than 20 percent of the world's national governments have reached beyond their borders since 2014 to forcibly silence exiled political activists, journalists, former regime insiders, and members of ethnic or religious minorities," finds a Freedom House report released in February. "According to the new data, 25 countries' governments were responsible for 125 incidents of physical transnational repression in 2023 alone, including assassinations, abductions, assaults, detentions, and unlawful deportations."
Last year enjoyed the dubious distinction, the report adds, of featuring the first documented cases of transnational repression by Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Yemen. Well, it's only fair that every regime gets an opportunity to terrorize a critic or political opponent in another country, instead of leaving all the fun to the year's main culprits: Russia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and China.
A Busy Year for International Thugs
Along those lines, recent weeks saw the assassination of Maksim Kuzminov, the Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in 2023 in protest of his country's invasion of that nation. Russian media reported that military intelligence issued a kill order for Kuzminov, which, it seems, was carried out.
"Kuzminov, who was reportedly living in Spain under a false identity, was found dead in the Spanish town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante, on Feb. 13. Police said attackers shot the former pilot six times before running him over with a car," reportsPolitico. "Sources in Spanish intelligence services…believe Moscow hired hitmen from outside Spain to carry out the assassination."
China's overseas efforts are broader and more overt in their efforts to target dissidents.
"Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world," FBI Director Christopher Wray charged in a 2020 speech. "Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders."
Chinese officials threaten dissidents' family members who remain in China, but also pressure those overseas through "police stations" covertly established in foreign countries and intended to convey the impression that the regime reaches everywhere. U.S. officials busted one such outpost in New York City last spring.
India's government, for its part, stands accused by Canadian officials of orchestrating the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Accused of terrorism by India in pursuit of a Sikh homeland, Nijjar had a bounty on his head and was shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia.
Just months later, U.S. officials claimed to have thwarted a similar attempt on American soil against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Last year was a busy year for international thugs and assassins, it appears. But if we go back just a bit further, we find other incidents, such as the gruesome 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian agents in Istanbul, or the botched but lethal attack the same year on Sergei Skripal in the U.K. by Russian agents using the Novichok nerve poison (one of the Putin regime's favorite calling cards). There is a frightening abundance of examples from which to choose.
"Between 2014 and 2023, Freedom House has recorded a total of 1,034 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 44 origin-country governments in 100 target countries," observes Freedom House. "The governments of China, Turkey, Tajikistan, Russia, and Egypt rank as the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression overall since 2014. China's regime on its own accounts for 25 percent of all documented incidents of transnational repression."
Bad Examples Encourage Bad Behavior
Part of the problem, unmentioned by Freedom House, is that relatively free democratic governments can compound the problem with their own misbehavior. While Canada, the U.S., and their allies aren't known for poisoning overseas dissidents (at least, not as a matter of course that they want publicized), they do sometimes bend laws to target inconvenient people in other countries. The U.S. federal government, aided by its British allies, has tormented journalist Julian Assange for years with arrest and extradition efforts over what Amnesty International describes as "politically motivated charges" under the Espionage Act. His "crimes," points out the Freedom of the Press Foundation, are "things journalists at news outlets around the country do every day."
That sets a precedent on which authoritarian government can seize.
"National security laws of other countries, including the US and the UK, also have extraterritorial effect," sniffed China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning when challenged on arrest warrants and bounties for Hong King dissidents residing in other countries. The scope of China's actions extend way beyond those of any western government in reach and severity, but she had a point.
"It's clear that governments are not being deterred from violating sovereignty and targeting dissidents living abroad," commented Freedom House's Yana Gorokhovskaia of events documented in the recent publication. "Democracies must ensure that the perpetrators of these brutal acts face real consequences. Otherwise, the use of transnational repression is likely to spread."
That's true. But if officials in relatively free countries are serious about deterring overtly authoritarian regimes from spying on, blackmailing, assaulting, kidnapping, and killing people who've taken refuge across national borders, they have to refrain from anything that even slightly resembles such behavior themselves. The end of transnational repression begins at home.
The sorry history of anti-miscegenation and forced sterilization laws in the U.S. provides ample evidence that preemptive government interference in the reproductive decisions of its citizens should be strongly rejected. In a free society, the default should be that individuals are best situated for weighing the costs and benefits, moral and material, with respect to how, when, with whom, and whether they choose to become parents. The now infamou
The sorry history of anti-miscegenation and forced sterilization laws in the U.S. provides ample evidence that preemptive government interference in the reproductive decisions of its citizens should be strongly rejected. In a free society, the default should be that individuals are best situated for weighing the costs and benefits, moral and material, with respect to how, when, with whom, and whether they choose to become parents.
The now infamous Alabama Supreme Court decision earlier this month essentially outlawing the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) by would-be parents highlights the consequences of unwarranted government meddling in reproductive decisions all too well. At its most basic, IVF is a treatment for infertility involving the fertilization of eggs in a petri dish with the goal of installing them afterward in a woman's womb where they have a chance to implant and hopefully develop into a healthy baby. Since the implantation of any specific embryo is far from guaranteed, IVF often involves creating several embryos that are stored in liquid nitrogen that could be made available for later attempts at achieving pregnancy.
Some 12 to 15 percent of couples in the U.S. experience infertility. Fortunately, since 1981 many infertile folks have been able to avail themselves of IVF and assisted reproduction techniques with the result that more than 1.2 million Americans have been born using it. Currently, about 2 percent of all babies in the U.S. are born through assisted reproduction. A 2023 Pew Research poll reported that "four-in-ten adults (42%) say they have used fertility treatments or personally know someone who has." Given the wide public acceptance and ubiquity of IVF, it is no surprise that a new Axios/Ipsos poll finds that two-thirds of Americans oppose the Alabama court ruling that frozen IVF embryos are the equivalent of born children.
The moral intuition that embryos are not people implied by these poll results reflects what research has revealed about the fraught and complex biology of uterine implantation and pregnancy. In both IVF and natural conception most embryos will not become babies. Research estimates that between 50 to 70 percent of naturally conceived embryos do not make it past the first trimester. In other words, one foreseen consequence of conception through sexual intercourse is the likely loss of numerous embryos.
In his 2012 Journal of Medical Ethics article, University of Illinois Chicago philosopher Timothy Murphy argued that the moral good of the birth of a child counterbalances the unwanted but nevertheless foreseen loss of other embryos in both natural and IVF conception. Again, polling suggests that most Americans endorse this moral reasoning.
In another 2012 article speculating on the metaphysical ramifications of endowing embryos with souls, Murphy basically recapitulates the line of reasoning in my 2004 article asking, "Is Heaven Populated Chiefly with the Souls of Embryos?" There I suggest that "perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires."
Murphy similarly concludes, "Since more human zygotes and embryos are lost than survive to birth, conferral of personhood on them would mean—for those believing in personal immortality—that these persons constitute the majority of people living immortally despite having had only the shortest of earthly lives."
Metaphysical conjectures aside, former President Donald Trump clearly knows where most Americans stand on IVF. "We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder! That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America," he posted on Truth Social. He's right.
Now, the 124 denizens of the House of Representatives (all Republicans) who cosponsored just over a month ago the Life at Conception Act are scrambling to explain that, no, they did not really mean that every frozen IVF embryo is a "human person" entitled to the equal protection of the right to life. As a butt-covering move, Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) is circulating a House resolution "expressing support for continued access to fertility care and assisted reproduction technology, such as in vitro fertilization."
More substantially, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.) is pushing for the adoption of the Right to Build Families Act that states, "No State, or official or employee of a State acting in the scope of such appointment or employment, may prohibit or unreasonably limit…any individual from accessing assisted reproductive technology."
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run. Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size,
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.
Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.
They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.
This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.
Today's sponsor:
DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should. The fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to easily donate to charities that align with your values. Whether it's promoting education freedom, protecting free speech, or just helping people live better lives, the choice is yours. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and to all other groups like it.
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?
Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage.
So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes.
But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.
Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?
Amash: Well, I resigned from it.
Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?
Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.
Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.
Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?
Amash:The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant.
When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world.
I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so/" Well, tell me why.
Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?
Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.
Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.
Amash:I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.
Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.
Amash:Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.
Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?
Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues.
I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.
But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.
Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?
Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.
It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.
Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.
All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that.
That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?
Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way.
I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together.
Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him.
Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?
Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance.
Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.
Amash:That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement.
Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?
Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.
Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.
Amash:Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot.
Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?
Amash:I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative.
Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?
Amash:One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky.
Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach.
For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least.
Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?
Amash:I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that.
For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.
I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair."
Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.
Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?
Amash:The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions.
When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.
Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?
Amash:For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok.
You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.
Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.
Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?
Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate.
If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom
Frozen embryos are "children" under Alabama law, the state's Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state. Frozen embryos are "unborn children" and "unborn children are 'children,'" Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court's main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos. The rul
Frozen embryos are "children" under Alabama law, the state's Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.
Frozen embryos are "unborn children" and "unborn children are 'children,'" Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court's main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.
The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama's Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law's text could not justify reading it to include "unborn children"—let alone frozen embryos.
It also portends a creeping Christian conservatism into court decisions, with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker citing the Bible in his legal reasoning. In a concurring opinion, Parker justifies prohibitions on murder not by invoking classical liberal principles, like natural rights, but rather on the basis of "Man's creation in God's image" and the "you shall not murder" edict of the Sixth Commandment. "Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself," Parker writes.
Embryos Destroyed
The decision stems from suits brought by former patients of the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama. These patients—couples James and Emily LePage, William and Caroline Fonde, and Felicia Burdick-Aysenne and Scott Aysenne—had used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to successfully have several children and still had some embryos stored in the Center's "cryogenic nursery." In December 2020, a patient at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center (which the Center was a part of) entered the cryogenic nursery unauthorized and proceeded to remove and then drop some of their frozen embryos, destroying them.
The couples sued the fertility clinic and the hospital, citing Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This 1872 law lets parents sue for monetary damages "when the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person."
The LePages and the Fondes brought a joint lawsuit, and a separate suit was filed by the Aysennes. Both suits alleged negligence and the Aysenne suit also alleged wantonness and breach-of-contract.
A trial court granted the Center's motion to dismiss all but the breach-of-contract claim. "The cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a 'person'" or "'child,'" the lower court held.
The three couples appealed, and their suits were consolidated for Supreme Court purposes.
No Exceptions for "Extrauterine Children"
In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos are, indeed, children, rejecting the lower court's dismissal of the couples' wrongful death claims.
In the court's main opinion, Justice Jay Mitchell referred to frozen embryos in turn as "embryonic children" and "extrauterine children."
While the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor statute doesn't explicitly include "unborn children"—let alone "extrauterine children"—in its purview, "the ordinary meaning of 'child' includes children who have not yet been born," asserted Mitchell.
Furthermore, Alabama's Supreme Court "has long held that unborn children are 'children' for purposes of Alabama's that law," he wrote. The central question in this case, said Mitchell, is "whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children—that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed."
The couples in this case raised some truly ridiculous arguments for why such an "exception" shouldn't exist. They argued that a finding that the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act doesn't apply to unborn children (including frozen embryos) would mean partial-birth abortions are legal, since the baby would no longer be in utero but would also not be fully born. They also suggested it would OK murdering hypothetical toddlers entirely gestated in artificial wombs, since such children—no matter how old they got—would not technically have been born.
Amazingly, the majority lent credence to these crazy arguments. They are "weighty concerns," wrote Mitchell, albeit ones that needn't be resolved at this time since "neither the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act nor this Court's precedents exclude extrauterine children from the Act's coverage."
Dissent, Dissent, Dissent
Not all of the justices agreed with the majority's logic, and some offered quite scathing rebukes of it.
For instance, Justice Brady E. Mendheim—who concurred with the result of the main opinion but disagreed with some of its reasoning—doesn't think that it's so clear cut that "child" includes frozen embryos. For one thing, the wrongful death statute in question was written a century before IVF was even a scientific possibility. Furthermore, other parts of Alabama law, including the 2019 Human Life Protection Act, explicitly define an unborn child as a human being in utero.
Justice Will Sellers also rejected the idea that this is an easy and obvious call. "Any sequence of linguistic gymnastics, cannot yield the conclusion that embryos developed through in vitro fertilization were intended by the legislature to be included in the definition of 'person,' much less the definition of 'minor child,'" he wrote. Rather, the inclusion of in utero children in certain statutes was there to allow for punishment of violence perpetrated against pregnant women. "To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain," Sellers added.
Meanwhile, Justice Greg Cook—who dissented in full from the main opinion—rejects the idea that the 1872 law meant to include fetuses and zygotes in its definition of children, even when they are in utero.
The main opinion suggested that the "leading dictionary of that time defined the word 'child' as 'the immediate progeny of parents' and indicated that this term encompassed children in the womb," notes Cook. But if you look at the full entry in the cited dictionary, it indicates the opposite, saying "the term is applied to infants from their birth."
Furthermore, interpreting the Wrongful Death Act to include unborn children is a recent phenomenon. "There is no doubt that the common law [in 1872] did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," wrote Cook. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our caselaw did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed."
Thus, applying the wrongful death act to the loss of frozen embryos runs counter to the philosophy of originalism (the idea, common among libertarians and conservatives, that laws should be interpreted only as they were originally intended) and closer to the progressive idea of a malleable "living Constitution," suggests Cook. And he's not a fan. "It is not our role to expand the reach of a statute and "breathe life" into it by updating or amending it," Cook writes. If the legislature thinks the law needs expanding, it can do so.
Cook and Mendheim both object to characterizing the defense's position as seeking an "exception" for frozen embryos, because to declare it an exception to the state's protection of minor children assumes that embryos are minor children—a point that's far from a given. And they both pan the tacit acceptance of the out-there hypotheticals offered by the patients.
"The main opinion ignores the fact that it is not now—or for the foreseeable future—scientifically possible to develop a child in an artificial womb so that such a scenario could somehow unfold," writes Mendheim. Should that become possible, "the answer to this futuristic hypothetical is simple," writes Cook: "the Legislature can address future technologies and can do so far better than this Court."
Bibles and Broad Reach
Pointing out that no other state has interpreted wrongful death laws this way—and a number have specifically rejected it—Cook suggests that being "the sole outlier" should "cause us to carefully reexamine our conclusions."
He concludes the decision could end IVF in Alabama, since "no rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue to maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a Wrongful Death Act claim for punitive damages."
This fear was echoed by the defendants in this case, who told the court a finding that the statute includes frozen embryos could make IVF prohibitively expensive.
Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, called the court's decision "terrifying" for people "who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families."
Chief Justice Parker's opinion suggests that their fears are not unfounded.
His opinion is chilling in the way is showcases the theocratic underpinnings on which he sees Alabama governance resting. Pointing to a 2018 amendment declaring it "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life," he notes that the term sanctity can be defined as "holiness of life and character," godliness, and "the quality or state of being holy or sacred." He goes on to cite the King James Bible, noting that in Genesis man's creation was described as being "in the image of God." Its on these foundations that the legal treatment of frozen embryos should rest, he suggests.
According to Parker, this would not mean the end of IVF in Alabama. But it could mean changes that would seriously upend the IVF process.
In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women's bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman's body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.
Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.
In Italy, "cryopreservation of embryos" is banned "except when a bona fide health risk or force majeure prevented the embryos from being transferred immediately after their creation," writes Parker. He also points approvingly to countries with other stringent regulations, such as a rule limiting the number of embryos that can be transferred at a time.
"These regulations adopted by other countries seem much more likely to comport with upholding the sanctity of life," Parker concludes, writing that "certain changes to the IVF industry's current creation and handling of embryos in Alabama will result from this decision."
Even if the ruling doesn't end IVF in Alabama, it could pave the way for changes that make fertility treatments more difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and impractical.
Přihlásit se
