The VP will speak on May 1 as Florida's ban after the sixth week of pregnancy takes effect.

The Vice President is returning to Northeast Florida yet again, in the Joe Biden administration’s latest attempt to focus on the fight for reproductive rights in a state that restricts them.

Per an advisory from the White House, Kamala Harris will be in Jacksonville on May 1.

“The event will take place on the day the state is set to implement an abortion ban even more extreme than the one currently in effect. The Vice President will discuss the harms inflicted by state abortion bans and continue to make the case that ‘Donald Trump did this.'”

The reference is to the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which restricts termination of pregnancy after the sixth week except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother. That replaces the ban on the procedure after the 15th week of pregnancy.

Contrary to the White House claim, though, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature ratified those laws, albeit in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving the states latitude to craft restrictions as they saw fit.

The VP will speak on May 1 as Florida's ban after the sixth week of pregnancy takes effect.

The Vice President is returning to Northeast Florida yet again, in the Joe Biden administration’s latest attempt to focus on the fight for reproductive rights in a state that restricts them.

Per an advisory from the White House, Kamala Harris will be in Jacksonville on May 1.

“The event will take place on the day the state is set to implement an abortion ban even more extreme than the one currently in effect. The Vice President will discuss the harms inflicted by state abortion bans and continue to make the case that ‘Donald Trump did this.'”

The reference is to the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which restricts termination of pregnancy after the sixth week except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother. That replaces the ban on the procedure after the 15th week of pregnancy.

Contrary to the White House claim, though, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature ratified those laws, albeit in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving the states latitude to craft restrictions as they saw fit.

This is a story about Clarence Thomas

For forty years Clarence Thomas has been an albatross for Black people, an arbiter of “do as I say, not as I do” politics, a mime whose silence on the bench has been deafening. And, he’s been all the things he claims to hate about Black people: He’s a welfare queen, a duplicitous double agent, a diversity hire, a beneficiary of reparations and a minstrel show.

And Anita Hill tried to warn us.

She tried to tell us that Thomas was inappropriate at best and vile at worst. She tried to tell us that Thomas was not the man he presented himself as. He was not an upstanding man of good moral character.

A Black woman once again tried to save America from itself, but America doesn’t care about Black women.

Having followed the infallible Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court, Thomas had all the intangibles needed to become a freedom fighter. He grew up dirt-poor in South Carolina and initially wanted to become a priest, until he realized the Catholic church was full of racism.

But something happened as Thomas began his climb to the highest court in the land. Instead of making the road easier for Black folks who would come behind him, he resented them for not having to work as hard as he did. He became the uncle who walked uphill forty-six miles both ways in the snow just to get to school, and he hated that we didn’t. Instead of breaking down walls of racism, the same racism that’d held him back, he ensured that hurdle stayed on the track.

One month after a federal court upheld Gov. Ron DeSantis’ erasure of a Black-held congressional district in North Florida, voting-rights groups have asked the court to reconsider in light of the discriminatory intent the judges suggested the governor might hold.

A three-judge panel sitting in the federal Northern District of Florida ruled on March 28 that evidence suggested DeSantis might have set out to quash Black voting power in the area to boost Republican strength, but that that didn’t matter because it found no evidence of bias within the Legislature, which actually passed the map.

Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now, the Florida State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Branches, and 10 individual voters argued in a brief filed this week that the distinction is meaningless under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

“The court’s opinion seems to suggest that, when multiple state actors jointly bring about the challenged state action, all of them must share an illicit racial motive for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be triggered. That is not correct,” the brief reads.

“[A] plaintiff need only show ‘that a discriminatory purpose has been a motivating factor’ behind the challenged state action — not ‘that the challenged action rested solely on racially discriminatory purposes,’” it adds.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history.

I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself.

So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some.

If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election.

And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants.

Thursday’s argument in Trump v. United States was a disaster for Special Counsel Jack Smith, and for anyone who believes that the president of the United States should be subject to prosecution if they commit a crime.

At least five of the Court’s Republicans seemed eager to, at the very least, permit Trump to delay his federal criminal trial for attempting to steal the 2020 election until after this November’s election. And the one GOP appointee who seemed to hedge the most, Chief Justice John Roberts, also seemed to think that Trump enjoys at least some immunity from criminal prosecution.

Much of the Court’s Republican majority, moreover, seemed eager not simply to delay Trump’s trial until after the election, but to give him extraordinarily broad immunity from criminal prosecution should he be elected once again. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, argued that when a president exercises his official powers, he cannot be charged under any federal criminal statute at all, unless that statute contains explicit language saying that it applies to the president.

As Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Smith’s prosecution team, told the Court, only two federal laws meet this standard. So Kavanaugh’s rule would amount to near complete immunity for anything a president did while exercising their executive authority.

Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, played his traditional role as the Court’s most dyspeptic advocate for whatever position the Republican Party prefers. At one point, Alito even argued that permitting Trump to be prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election would “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes ... our democracy,” because future presidents who lose elections would mimic Trump’s criminal behavior in order to remain in office and avoid being prosecuted by their successor.

With just days until Florida’s six-week abortion ban takes effect on Wednesday, providers are rushing to perform as many abortions as possible while planning contingencies for a future where they will need to turn thousands of women away.

Clinics have expanded hours, prioritized ultrasounds and added appointments in these final weeks. They’ve fortified their patient navigation efforts and strengthened relationships with abortion fund groups like the Florida Access Network that provide financial and logistical support to people seeking to terminate pregnancies.

Though the ban has limited exceptions, Planned Parenthood will stop offering any abortions past six weeks at all, instead helping navigate those people to other states or referring them to other providers, said Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida’s interim CEO Barbara Zdravecky.

“Planned Parenthood’s motto has always been ‘care no matter what.’ And we don’t turn patients away. So this is a very devastating and tragic situation for our staff, who have to say, ‘we can’t take care of you, we have to send you someplace else,’” Zdravecky said.

Patient panic

As medical providers race against the clock, many patients are unaware their time is running out, said Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and an abortion provider in South Florida. When she tells patients about the imminent ban, she’s mostly met with shock.

With just days until Florida’s six-week abortion ban takes effect on Wednesday, providers are rushing to perform as many abortions as possible while planning contingencies for a future where they will need to turn thousands of women away.

Clinics have expanded hours, prioritized ultrasounds and added appointments in these final weeks. They’ve fortified their patient navigation efforts and strengthened relationships with abortion fund groups like the Florida Access Network that provide financial and logistical support to people seeking to terminate pregnancies.

Though the ban has limited exceptions, Planned Parenthood will stop offering any abortions past six weeks at all, instead helping navigate those people to other states or referring them to other providers, said Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida’s interim CEO Barbara Zdravecky.

“Planned Parenthood’s motto has always been ‘care no matter what.’ And we don’t turn patients away. So this is a very devastating and tragic situation for our staff, who have to say, ‘we can’t take care of you, we have to send you someplace else,’” Zdravecky said.

Patient panic

As medical providers race against the clock, many patients are unaware their time is running out, said Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and an abortion provider in South Florida. When she tells patients about the imminent ban, she’s mostly met with shock.

For the fourth time since she became the federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is arguing an abortion-related case.

The dispute before the high court on Wednesday, about whether federal mandates for hospitals override strict state abortion bans in medical emergencies, shows how legal fights over abortion rights did not cease when the conservative majority ended a constitutional right to an abortion in 2022.

In the first two abortion-related cases Prelogar argued as the Justice Department’s fourth-ranking official, both heard during the Supreme Court’s 2021 term, the conservative majority rejected her calls that abortion rights be protected. But Prelogar has eked out wins on other issues where the Biden administration was seemingly at odds with the court’s conservative proclivities, including in tussles over immigration policy and voting rights.

The administration’s supporters hope that in the two abortion cases before the Supreme Court this year, Prelogar can bring at least some of the conservative justices to the federal government’s side.

Lawyers with experience arguing before the high court cite Prelogar’s skills in oral arguments, as well as her strategy of putting forward legal points that will attract the support of justices who are otherwise hostile to abortion as an issue – and doing so without undermining the larger arguments in favor of access to abortion.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett famously provided the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. So if you are arguing in favor of an abortion ban, you probably don’t want to alienate Barrett—by, say, condescendingly dismissing her concerns when she points out that your legal theory doesn’t make any sense. Yet that is what Joshua Turner did on Wednesday while defending Idaho’s draconian abortion restrictions, and much to Barrett’s evident irritation. Turner—who represented the Idaho solicitor general’s office in the second major abortion case to come before the high court after it promised us in its Dobbs opinion that the court was out of the abortion business in 2022—might just have lost his case by repeatedly mansplaining his self-contradictory position to Barrett and the other three women justices. In his toneless, dispassionate telling, his entirely incomprehensible position was just too complex for them to understand. And so he just kept repeating it, over and over. These justices, including Barrett, sounded increasingly fed up with his chin-stroking dissembling on an issue that’s literally life-or-death for pregnant women in red states. If the court’s male members noticed Turner’s dismissive attitude toward their colleagues, they didn’t care. The gender divide on the court has never been so revealing.

Perhaps because Dobbs was a threat to unknown future women, whereas real women are now being left to hemorrhage, lose the functioning of their reproductive organs, or be popped onto helicopters to receive out-of-state stabilizing care, none of the life-and-death harms being experienced in red states around the country feel very theoretical to anyone who has thought about pregnancy in a serious way. Yet, for male justices more worried about harms to the spending clause, nothing about potentially lethal pregnancies warranted even a moment’s pause.

Wednesday’s case, Moyle v. United States, revolves around a clash between Idaho law and a 1986 federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (or EMTALA). Idaho’s abortion ban has no exception for the health of the patient; rather, it criminalizes abortion unless it’s “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” EMTALA, meanwhile, requires virtually all hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment for any condition that “could reasonably be expected” to put the patient’s health “in serious jeopardy,” as well as any condition that could seriously impair bodily functions or organs.

The Biden administration argues there’s a conflict between Idaho law and EMTALA: Where Idaho allows termination only when the patient is at the brink of death, EMTALA mandates intervention earlier, to stabilize the patient before she is literally dying, including situations in which she is facing organ damage, infertility, or other serious harms. So the administration sued the state, and a federal judge issued an injunction compelling Idaho to allow emergency abortions to preserve a patient’s “health.” Now SCOTUS must decide whether the federal statute limits the ability of states like Idaho to criminalize abortions that are health-sparing but not necessarily lifesaving. And that means slipping into their white coats and stethoscopes and explaining to America’s emergency physicians how to do their jobs without risking two to five years in prison and a loss of licensure for making poor guesses about what stabilizing care involves.