Republicans Have a Terrifying Plan for Abortion Clinics

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised that the anti-abortion movement would be “entering a new era” under Donald Trump’s leadership. The newest benchmark for the conservative party under that banner is, apparently, allowing people to attack and shutter health care clinics providing abortion services.

Republican lawmakers held a private meeting with anti-abortion activists, pledging to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act, reproductive rights columnist Jessica Valenti reported Tuesday. The FACE Act prohibits the use of physical force, threat, or intimidation to prevent people from obtaining an abortion, and prohibits damaging or destroying the clinics that provide them.

“God demands justice,” said Representative Andy Biggs, according to Valenti.

The meeting followed an effort by Representative Chip Roy last week, in which the Texas Republican introduced a bill in the House to formally repeal the act.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system,” Roy said in a statement at the time. “The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse—being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life.”

Regardless of the FACE Act’s future, the Department of Justice announced it won’t enforce the protective statute, anyway. In a memo issued Friday, the acting attorney general’s chief of staff directed the agency’s Civil Rights Division to dismiss several FACE Act cases against anti-abortion protesters, claiming that the act embodied the “weaponization of the federal government.” The department also ceased future prosecutions under the statute, except under “extraordinary circumstances,” such as death, “serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”

In the same week, Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020. They included Lauren Handy, who was arrested in 2022 for retaining five fetuses at her house.

Meanwhile, conservatives are also attacking abortion access through the judicial system: Anti-abortion activists have asked the Supreme Court to overrule Hill v. Colorado, which established a buffer zone around abortion clinics that prevents activists from speaking to patients or distributing anti-abortion materials to them within 100 feet of a facility.

The intention, for Republicans, is clear.

Speaking at the National Mall last week, Vice President JD Vance pledged to protect Christians and anti-abortion activists from federal prosecution.

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

The first foreign leader to visit President Donald Trump at the White House in his second term will be wanted for war crimes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday that Trump will host him at the White House on February 4. Trump had earlier hinted at the announcement on Monday by saying he’ll be “speaking with Bibi Netanyahu in the not too distant future.”

Less than two weeks ago, a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza went into effect. Netanyahu deliberately delayed the ceasefire to be implemented the day before Trump’s inauguration, agreeing to terms with Hamas that were nearly identical to previous ceasefire proposals months before.

Now Trump and Netanyahu will gloat before media cameras and will probably discuss how Trump plans to thank the Israeli leader—perhaps more military aid, a green light for annexing the occupied West Bank, or a revival of the idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump already lifted the Biden administration’s superficial ban on exporting 2,000-pound bombs to the country last week.

Netanyahu is facing allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust back in Israel, along with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The U.S. under the Biden administration rejected the warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similarly defended Israel’s actions during its brutal war against Gaza and condemned the ICC.

Senate Republicans attempted to give Netanyahu a gift on Tuesday by trying to advance a bill sanctioning the ICC, but Senate Democrats (minus John Fetterman) blocked the bill. Regardless, Netanyahu will be able to travel to the White House next week and meet with his corrupt American counterpart worry-free.

Trump fired two prominent officials of the National Labor Relations Board while everyone was rightly worried about the federal funding freeze.

The president fired the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was a Biden appointee, as well as Democratic member and former Chair Gwynne Wilcox Monday evening. Their departures leave the board two members short of what it requires to actually function as the country’s top labor watchdog.

The NLRB protects nonfederal employees from unfair labor practices and preserves their right to unionize—and during the Biden administration went further than ever before in doing so. Trump’s firings come as the NLRB is already facing lawsuits from SpaceX and Amazon for apparently doing too much to protect workers.

The NLRB allows the president to remove board members only in exceptional circumstances, like negligence of duty or malfeasance.

“These moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler wrote.

Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the labor board, believes her firing was illegal.

“I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” she said.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze—which appears to have kneecapped Medicaid access nationwide—a constitutional crisis. So is anyone going to do anything about it?

A memo from the Office of Management and Budget announced that starting Tuesday at 5 p.m., there would be a freeze on all federal grants and loans, affecting nearly 2,600 agencies and programs, including nonprofit organizations that provide school meals for low-income students, safety from domestic violence, and reintegration for homeless veterans, among other services.

To resecure funding, these organizations would have to report to OMB whether they promote ideas such as environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They would also have to say whether they provide services to undocumented immigrants.

A second memo published by OMB Tuesday claimed that certain programs, including Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and Pell Grants, would be unaffected—but multiple states reported having issues accessing these programs.

Florida Representative Maxwell Frost said that his state Medicaid portal had been shut down. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed during her first press conference that there had been a “portal outage,” but she did not confirm whether it was connected to the OMB’s memo.

At the same time, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Head Start’s reimbursement system was no longer working. “Don’t believe these people,” Murphy warned in a post on X, referring to the second OMB memo.

The decision to issue a blanket funding freeze has created widespread chaos and confusion Tuesday as essential government services were left in limbo.

Ocasio-Cortez slammed the administrative clusterfuck as nothing short of a constitutional crisis.

“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X Tuesday. “We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”

So what are House Democrats doing to stop the hostile takeover? They’re meeting virtually on Wednesday, according to Punchbowl News.

The city of Chicago may be too smart for Tom Homan.

Donald Trump’s border czar appeared on CNN Tuesday complaining that Chicagoans were too knowledgeable of their basic rights.

“Sanctuary citizens are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well-educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you’; ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’”

Homan is referring to the city’s Know Your Rights campaign, launched by Mayor Brandon Johnson. The program seeks to “ensure residents of Chicago know their rights in the event of being stopped and detained by federal immigration agents.” The information is posted on video screens throughout the city’s public transit system.

The immigration czar is spearheading efforts to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans, which have hit major cities like Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, and New York.