Supreme Court Decides to Let Texas Women Die

A new Supreme Court decision effectively means that Texas women will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that emergency abortions violate the Lone Star State’s already draconian abortion laws, upholding a ban on the life-saving procedure even in emergency circumstances.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court ruling, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in June to punt a challenge to a similarly restrictive medical emergency abortion clause in Idaho. That decision temporarily allowed emergency abortions to continue while a lower appeals court retried the case.

The administration also pointed to federal mandate, reminding the court that hospitals must provide life-saving emergency medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The government further noted that legal precedents set by the Texas Supreme Court mean doctors within the state do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide the critical care required to save her.

Yet none of that seemed to matter to the ultra-conservative bench, who ruled in favor of heightened restrictions without detailed reasoning, reported the Associated Press.*

Texas had asked the Supreme Court to leave the order in place, arguing that their law left exceptions in place that prioritized the health of pregnant patients. But accessing Texas’s emergency abortion clause loophole isn’t cut and dry. Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Cox’s case was the first such lawsuit since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Despite her apparent eligibility—and a court decision allowing her to receive the critical care—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, promising to prosecute doctors with felony charges if they were caught performing the procedure.

Doctors argue that the medical exemptions in the state are unclear, leaving them in legal jeopardy and effectively stalling access to abortions in Texas by proxy.

* This article originally misstated the justices’ vote breakdown.

JD Vance over the weekend admitted that Donald Trump would stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told a reporter on Saturday that “we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.

“That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around; it will remain a consistent view,” Vance said to RealClearPolitics.

Vance’s remarks fly in the face of how other Republicans, including Trump, have tried to present more moderate views on abortion. Last week, Trump claimed that he would veto a national abortion ban. Republicans have experienced loss after loss as anti-abortion ballot initiatives fail at the state level in red states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana.

Planned Parenthood itself provides many vital services outside of abortion, from preventative screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer to birth control. The organization depends on government reimbursements and grants for 34 percent of its revenue, according to its 2023 annual report. These include Medicaid as well as other federal grants and programs.

Republicans have been trying to end public funding for Planned Parenthood for a long time but have only succeeded in a handful of states, most recently Missouri. It’s something they’ve been trying but failing to do at the federal level.

The former president has been all over the place on abortion rights. In the past, he’s also called for regulation of the procedure to be left to the states, said that a “six-week [ban] is too short,” and struggled to make sense when speaking about the abortion pill mifepristone. Trump’s position on abortion, though he attempts to obfuscate it, is opposing reproductive rights. He’s appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s courted the religious right, and he depends on the support of conservatives. Over the weekend, Vance finally said in clear terms what Trump intentionally tries to hide.

Not only has Elon Musk been pushing election misinformation, now his mother is getting in on the action by encouraging her followers to commit election fraud.

Maye Musk, mother of the bouncing billionaire, posted on X Saturday in response to her son’s call for people to register to vote in Georgia, to say that voters don’t actually have to register at all.

“The Democrats have given us another option. You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal,” Maye Musk wrote. “Maybe we should work the system too.”

Users on X were quick to correct Maye Musk, pointing out not only that it’s obviously illegal but that at best it was a stupid thing to say, and, at worst, she was inciting people to break the law.

“Actually, this comes from Gavin Newsom,” Maye Musk wrote in a response to one of her many, many angry replies. “What you are saying is that he should be jailed for his new law that prevents ID when voting, so illegal immigrants can vote many times. I guess you don’t understand sarcasm.”

Last month, California Governor Newsom passed a law banning local governments in California from enacting voter identification rules because there are already state laws in place that require voter identification. The new law would prevent each locality from having its own set of requirements, which could potentially disenfranchise voters.

A bad sense of humor seems to run in the family. Last month, Elon Musk found himself in hot water after “joking” that there aren’t any assassination attempts made against Kamala Harris, which unsurprisingly got him in trouble with the feds.

While executive branch figureheads float around the American South in the wake of Hurricane Helene promising relief, one Washington politico’s actions could actually make all the difference for thousands of victims—but he doesn’t seem to be doing a thing about it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will not be calling the House back early to vote on emergency hurricane relief, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

The speaker said that the damages from the storm have to be “tabulated” before Congress can pass supplemental aid to help the victims, adding that he believes the situation is weeks away from that being achieved.

Johnson will visit western North Carolina on Wednesday, a region that was devastated by Helene and its subsequent floods. More than 100 people died in the storm’s aftermath. Across the six states that the Category Four storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

More than 300,000 people remained without power in Georgia and the Carolinas by Sunday evening, with nearly half of those customers in North Carolina, reported CNN.

So far, President Joe Biden has deployed 1,500 troops to help with recovery efforts, alongside more than 6,100 National Guardsmen and 7,000 federal personnel. The Biden-Harris administration has also distributed more than $137 million in federal assistance to support the beleaguered region, the White House announced in a press release Sunday.

Meanwhile, Johnson has continued to undermine one of the federal agencies tasked with responding to the storm surge. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Johnson elevated a false claim launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration had diverted emergency relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid immigration efforts.

“The streams of funding are different, that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson told the conservative network. “But the problem is with the American people, see, and what they’re frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster. Not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border. That’s what the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, and Secretary Mayorkas have been engaged in.”

In response, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told ABC News that the charge was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took a break from spreading lies about Hurricane Helene to dip her toe into a new conspiracy theory.

“Raw Milk does a body good,” wrote the Georgia representative on X Sunday afternoon, posting a photo of a large glass of milk. “Make America Healthy Again!”

The far-right has long touted their devotion to only drinking unpasteurized milk, which skips the process of killing off harmful bacteria and does not in fact do a body good. Greene’s post was hit was a massive fact-check in the community notes section of X, clarifying that “raw milk consumption is linked to a number of foodborne illnesses (e.g., Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella) that can result in serious complications and death.” X users added a long list of links with evidence of how dangerous drinking raw milk can be.

As Melody Schreiber reported for The New Republic in July, drinking unpasteurized milk can also put the consumer at an unnecessary risk for H5N1, or the bird flu. In states where it is legal to sell raw milk, there were 3.2 times more outbreaks of illness linked to the milk over a span of 20 years.

Dairy was a hot topic this weekend for Republicans, who only seem to be getting weirder, as Trump invited a QAnon conspiracy theorist to speak at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally alongside Elon Musk on Saturday.

“We will protect your raw milk,” said Scott Presler of Gays for Trump, in attempt to court the Amish vote in the swing state.

In recent years, the deregulation of the dairy industry and shift away from pasteurization has turned into a new culture war for the right. How long until Trump tells his followers to drink it, like he told them to drink bleach?

This post has been updated.