Idaho Republicans Want to Charge People With “Human Trafficking” for Helping Minors to Get an Abortion

Republican lawmakers in Idaho want to expand the definition of “human trafficking” to include helping a minor get an abortion.

The bill, which was introduced Tuesday, would prohibit “recruiting, harboring, or transporting” a person under the age of 18 to get an abortion or abortion medication, either in Idaho or out of state. It would also give the state attorney general the power to prosecute someone for violating the proposed law, should the prosecuting attorney in the relevant county refuse to do so.

Anyone who helps a minor get an abortion without their parents’ knowledge could be charged with human trafficking. But the bill says that if the minor’s parents or guardians consented to the abortion, then that would count as a legal defense. Anyone found guilty of human trafficking under the new, expanded definition would face between two to five years in prison.

Abortion in Idaho is illegal, with exceptions for rape, incest, or risk to the life of the pregnant person. But the bill introduced Tuesday does not include similar exceptions. It is also short on details about exceptions for minors who are being sexually abused at home, or whether both parents or guardians need to consent to the procedure or only one is acceptable.

Idaho is not the first state to try to restrict the ability to help someone get an abortion. Missouri lawmakers introduced a bill in March that would allow people to sue anyone who helped a state resident get an abortion, including transporting them across state lines. State House lawmakers blocked the bill a few weeks later.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republicans across the country have gone full-speed ahead on restricting abortion rights, for instance in Kansas, where lawmakers are trying to overturn the will of the people. Democrats have tried to combat their efforts, including at the federal level, where House Democrats introduced a bill protecting the right to cross state lines to get the procedure.

That bill is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled chamber. President Joe Biden has promised repeatedly to veto any federal abortion ban bills, but during the State of the Union address Tuesday he only said the word “abortion” once, infuriating reproductive rights activists.

“I know everyone thinks Republicans aren’t funny. But if you get a bunch of us together, we can be a real riot.”

On Wednesday night, Republican Representative Nancy Mace charmed the Washington press corps with a stand-up routine filled with enough self-awareness that it showed how much of a game Washington politics really can be.

Going from hit to hit, Mace dropped genuinely solid quips about everything from George Santos’s serial lying to efforts to overturn the 2020 election to inquiries into whether Matt Gaetz had sex with a minor.

“Come on George, you’ve given Republicans a bad name, and that’s Lauren Boebert’s job,” Mace quipped. “Just kidding Lauren, don’t shoot.”

“There hasn’t been a Republican that’s gotten this much buzz since Lauren Boebert went through a metal detector,” she added.

The chummy event followed a chaotic GOP-led House Oversight Committee hearing with former Twitter employees, in which an array of incendiary right-wingers outright threatened the employees and exposed their own claims of collusion between Democrats and the social media company as completely baseless.

During said hearing, it was not just the typical suspects Boebert and Jim Jordan who were throwing everything at the wall and seeing what would stick.

Mace joined in, appealing to elite credentialism to question why Twitter’s employees felt they could apply their content moderation policies to Harvard and Stanford-educated doctors when they did not hold medical degrees. The doctor in question was Jay Bhattacharya, who co-published a petition condemning Covid-19 responses like lockdowns, contact tracing, and isolation and argued that “those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Bhattacharya (who now serves on Ron DeSantis’s public health “integrity” committee) and company published the petition on October 5, 2020, at which point more than 200,000 people had died of Covid in the United States alone. Another more than 900,000 have died since then—even with America’s hodge-podge but still not immediately returning-to-normal response. Mace went to bat for a man whose ideas, if validated further, could have led to thousands more deaths.

Mace further peddled doubts about the vaccine, saying she had “great regrets about getting the shot,” proclaiming she has not only had long-term effects from Covid but now from the vaccine too. If she does indeed have such effects, that’s surely concerning. But this does seem to be the first time she has said so, and it doesn’t seem to preclude the possibility that her long-term effects are, in fact, just from long Covid itself—which one would think might make someone less eager to defend a doctor who disparaged Covid mitigation strategies.

And for the cherry on top, Mace proudly declared, “Thank God for Matt Taibbi. Thank God for Elon Musk,” for the Twitter Files, which helped prompt a hearing so comical, you’d think it would have made it into Mace’s stand-up routine.

Mace’s oscillation between her pally “I’m-not-like-other-Republicans” shtick and essentially being exactly like her other far-right colleagues is part of an ongoing trend.

After Mace initially expressed hesitation to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she fell in line on her caucus’s shameless smear campaign against one of the only independent voices on foreign policy in Congress.

As Mace continues to criticize her party’s staunch anti-choice stance, touting her own supposedly more moderate views, she has continued to vote “yes” on anti-abortion bills.

And maybe Mace is doing it all just because she can. She’ll maintain good standing with her ever-rightward party, while still currying favor with the press, as she delivers wink-wink jokes, assuring the press corps that she’s different from the rest of her colleagues. It’s fine to chuckle at the humor and absurdity of it all. But let’s not fall for the whole act.

Republicans’ fateful “Twitter Files” hearing on Wednesday was supposed to reveal how the social media company and the left colluded to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Instead, witness testimony revealed more ways the social media company accommodated right-wing speech and was even supplicated directly by Republican elected officials—including the White House.

Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin introduced a line of questioning to former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli, who explained that the company actually allowed “a loud roar” of violence-inciting hate speech from thousands of posts. Navaroli said management did not allow employees to remove the posts that were violating incitement to violence policies.

And in a farcical hearing where Republicans were supposedly concerned with government officials attempting to influence the social media company’s content moderation policies, Representative Gerry Connolly pointed out that former President Trump tried on numerous occasions to directly influence Twitter’s content moderation policies, including publicly in a rant on Twitter.

In answering a question from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Navaroli revealed that Twitter had in fact changed its own content moderation policy after Trump violated it, in order to accommodate his tweet.

“So much for bias against [the] right-wing on Twitter,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

Members including Representative Jim Jordan attempted to propagate a notion that the FBI “played” the employees in order to suppress the Hunter Biden story. For this, as for many of the allegations being hurled at individual Twitter employees, Trump was president at this time, and the FBI director was Trump’s own pick, Christopher Wray.

Meanwhile, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert spent much of their time complaining about their own accounts being held accountable for content moderation violations, and still attempting to peddle an anti-Trump conspiracy between Twitter and the government—a plot supposedly happening while Trump was still the leader of the government.

While firebrand Republicans sought to carry out a hearing that exposed a nefarious connection between Democrats and Twitter, instead they revealed the tenuousness of some of their claims.

“I believe that what’s happening here is my Republican colleagues know that the premise of this whole hearing is misleading. There is no evidence that the Biden campaign had anything to do with the Hunter Biden New York Post story,” Representative Becca Balint said. “And the evidence we do have simply shows what the Trump campaign and millions of Twitter users do routinely: flag content and ask Twitter to conduct its own review to determine whether it violates Twitter’s own rules and policies.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped reveal Wednesday that Twitter changed its rules to allow Donald Trump to tweet essentially whatever he wanted.

Anika Collier Navaroli worked on Twitter’s content moderation policy. She was also the whistleblower who told the House January 6 investigative committee that the social network let Trump bend rules and tweet disinformation for years because executives enjoyed how powerful it made them.

Navaroli testified Wednesday in front of the House alongside three other former Twitter executives. Republicans had called the hearing to ask about Hunter Biden’s laptop, but Ocasio-Cortez decided it was time to “talk about something real.”

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted a Trump tweet from 2019 demanding why she and several of her colleagues (members of the Squad and, at the time, all women of color) don’t “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

In response to a series of questions, Navaroli explained that she and her team had recommended finding Trump in violation of Twitter policy for that tweet, particularly because phrases such as “go back to where you come from” were specifically forbidden in Twitter’s content moderation guidelines.

When she made the recommendation to one of her superiors, Navaroli’s decision was overridden. A few days later, Twitter changed its content moderation policy to remove that phrase as an example of abusive language.

“So Twitter changed their own policy after the president violated it in order to potentially accommodate his tweet?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

When Navaroli said yes, the congresswoman replied, “So much for bias against [the] right-wing on Twitter.”

Republicans and Trump in particular have long claimed that social media is biased against them. But Navaroli’s testimony reveals that Twitter, at least, was willing to bend the rules to give world leaders much more wiggle room.

In 2019, Twitter created its public interest exemptions, which stated that even if a politician’s tweets violated content policy, the posts could be left up if they were found to be in the public interest.

Trump was only penalized when he tweeted something really egregious, such as election misinformation or comments that helped spark the January 6 riot. But by then, it was too late.

Thanks to Representative Maxwell Frost, “pussy ass bitch” is now in the congressional record.

As he questioned former Twitter safety employee Anika Collier Navaroli in a House hearing on Wednesday, Frost asked Navaroli to read out loud the expletive quote from a Chrissy Teigen tweet about Donald Trump. Navaroli then testified that the Trump administration reached out directly to Twitter, jockeying for the company to remove the post.

“Free speech,” Frost remarked about Teigen’s tweet.

The exchange was part of a House hearing, inspired by the so-called “Twitter Files,” on whether Democrats worked with Twitter to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Frost’s line of questioning complicated Republicans’ narrative that Twitter colluded with the government to baselessly silence right-wing views.

Frost, the 25-year-old congressional freshman from Florida, further challenged the hearing’s supposed concern for free speech, asking whether his colleagues would host hearings on government officials suppressing free speech, rather than only private businesses making editorial decisions. Frost cited how his state’s own Governor Ron DeSantis is attacking free speech by targeting businesses that support drag shows and teachers who are teaching curriculum that DeSantis has sought to ban.

Much of the right-wing outrage driving the hearing revolved around trumped-up claims of cancel culture and of social media companies suppressing “free speech” (whether that be slurs, calls for violence, or even incitements of riots). Frost addressed this quite acutely, noting that “there’s a difference between a culture war, and how culture naturally changes,” as he suggested some of his colleagues are resistant to natural culture change. “Just yesterday, we heard a member equate immigration negatively to ‘changing our culture.’”

“The reality is that culture changes and adopts and welcomes more people. It becomes more understanding, and it also decides to reassess what’s acceptable behavior and rhetoric,” Frost said. “In this supposed culture war, they often conflate the right to free speech with the nonexistent right to not be criticized or held accountable for what you say on the internet or even real life.”

Questions surrounding free speech, online and offline, are indeed important, as are inquiries into policies on platforms where millions of people communicate. Frost’s lines of questioning, however, helped provide a reality check on how many of the concerns from the hearings’ most vocal proponents were about free speech versus about the right to say a slur, spread election or Covid conspiracies, or incite more riots on the Capitol.