Last Call For The Road To Gilead Goes Through South Carolina

After Republicans replaced the only woman on South Carolina's state Supreme Court who blocked the state's "fetal heartbeat" abortion ban earlier this year, a 4-1 decision from the now all-male panel has stripped the right of bodily autonomy from the state's women.

 

South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Court reversed course on abortion on Wednesday, upholding a ban on most such procedures after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The 4-1 ruling departs from the court’s own decision earlier this year to strike down a similar law.

The continued erosion of legal abortion access across the U.S. South comes after Republican state lawmakers replaced the lone female on the court, Justice Kaye Hearn.

Writing for the new majority, Justice John Kittredge acknowledged that the 2023 law infringes on “a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” but said the state legislature reasonably determined this time around that those interests don’t outweigh “the interest of the unborn child to live.”

“As a Court, unless we can say that the balance struck by the legislature was unreasonable as a matter of law, we must uphold the Act,” Kittredge wrote.

It was Hearn who wrote the majority’s lead opinion in January striking down the ban. The court ruled then that the law violated the state constitution’s right to privacy.

Hearn then reached the court’s mandatory retirement age, enabling the Republican-dominated legislature to put Gary Hill on what is now the nation’s only state Supreme Court with an entirely male bench.

 

And yet plenty of women will continue to vote for Republicans in SC and plenty of other red states, and just accept that all women need to be second-class citizen to the axolotl tank imperative in order to keep all the crabs in the bucket, and none can escape.

Increasingly, your rights depend on where you live in America, and solely so in some cases. That's not justice or fairness, it's tyranny.

 

Orange Meltdown: A Rudy Awakening Edition

Rudy Giuliani faces the music in Georgia today for his role in Trump's election-theft conspiracy to defraud the state.

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer who championed the former president’s bogus election fraud claims, said he will turn himself in to authorities in Georgia on Wednesday to face racketeering charges alleging he meddled in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

"I’m going to Fulton County to comply with the law, which I always do," he told reporters before leaving for Georgia. "I don’t know if I plea today but if I do I plead not guilty."


Giuliani and Trump both face 13 counts, more than the other 17 defendants in the case.

The former New York City mayor has maintained his innocence, and claimed the only thing he’s guilty of was zealously advocating for his client.

“I never thought I’d ever get indicted for being a lawyer,” Giuliani said on his radio show last week.

Trump has said he will surrender at the Atlanta jail Thursday.

Giuliani is being represented by New York-based attorney John Esposito, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney.

After their arrival, they will go to his local counsel’s office, where Giuliani will remain as the attorneys go to District Attorney Fani Willis’s office to negotiate a bail amount and sign documents.

Once a judge approves those documents, Giuliani will head to the Fulton County Jail, where he will be fingerprinted and photographed. His arraignment is expected in the next week or two and may take place virtually.

"I get photographed, isn’t that nice? A mugshot for the mayor who probably put the worst criminal of the 20th century in jail," Giuliani complained to reporters when he left his apartment.

The indictment in Fulton County alleges that Giuliani was a key part of a criminal conspiracy, pressing election officials in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to act on voting fraud claims that he was repeatedly told were false. Giuliani was also charged with promoting false claims that voting machines were rigged, and making false claims in sworn legal filings.

Additionally, the indictment singles out false claims Giuliani made about Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, who was targeted with death threats and harassed as a result of the phony allegations.

The main charge against Giuliani — racketeering — is similar to a federal law he used with great success when he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Giuliani predicted Wednesday that he will be vindicated. “This will be proven to be like all the rest, a complete hoax and a lie,” he said.

 

I predict Rudy Giuliani will spend the rest of his life behind bars, completing his fall from grace as NYC's Hizzoner to Georgia inmate. Of course, during that meeting with Fani Willis today, he could always cut a deal.

 

We'll see.

Supreme Crooks, Cads, And Creeps, Con't

The conservative network of super-rich donors that have given more than $1 billion to corrupt right-wing Supreme Court justices are now facing investigation by Washington DC's Attorney General.

 

Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is investigating judicial activist Leonard Leo and his network of nonprofit groups, according to a person with direct knowledge of the probe.

The scope of the investigation is unclear. But it comes after POLITICO reported in March that one of Leo’s nonprofits — registered as a charity — paid his for-profit company tens of millions of dollars in the two years since he joined the company. A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS requesting a probe into what services were provided and whether Leo was in violation of laws against using charities for personal enrichment.

David B. Rivkin Jr., an attorney for the parties in the investigation, said in a statement that the complaint “is sloppy, deceptive and legally flawed and we are addressing this fully with the DC Attorney General’s office.”

The news of the investigation comes as the nonprofit that was a subject of the complaint quietly relocated in recent weeks from the capital area to Texas, according to paperwork filed in Virginia and Texas. For nearly 20 years the nonprofit, now known as The 85 Fund, had been incorporated in Virginia.

Gabe Shoglow-Rubenstein, Schwalb’s communications director, declined to confirm or deny the existence of the probe, including whether the attorney general took any action in response to the complaint.

Schwalb, who took office in January, has a background in tax law and served as a trial attorney in the tax division of the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton.

Best known as Donald Trump’s White House “court whisperer,” Leo played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president’s Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits. Trump chose his three Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, from a list drawn up by Leo. More recently, Leo was the beneficiary of a $1.6 billion contribution, believed to be the biggest political donation in U.S. history.

He is also the co-chair of the Federalist Society, the academic arm of the conservative legal movement, for which he worked in various capacities for decades while building his donor base.

While Leo grants few interviews, in mid-July he was featured in a two-part podcast with the Maine Wire, a conservative news organization. Asked why he’s become a “lightening rod for criticism,” Leo cited his commitment to “defend the Constitution” and spoke about the “long history” of dark money in U.S. politics.

“It’s not to hide in the shadows,” he said. “It’s because we want ideas judged by their own moral and intellectual force.”

He did not address any allegations of potential misuse of nonprofit tax law.

Real estate and other public records illustrate that the lifestyle of Leo and a handful of his allies took a lavish turn in the course of the making of the current ultraconservative court, beginning in 2016, the year he was tapped as an unpaid adviser to Trump. Citing the report, a progressive watchdog group called on the IRS and D.C. Attorney General a few weeks later to investigate whether the groups may be violating their tax-exempt status by “siphoning” assets or income for personal use.

Anthony Burke, a public affairs specialist with the IRS, declined to comment. “Under the federal tax law, federal employees cannot disclose tax return information,” he said.

The Leo-aligned nonprofit The 85 Fund — which is registered as a tax-exempt charity — paid tens of millions of dollars to a public relations firm in Virginia which he co-chairs in the two years since he joined the firm, known as CRC Advisors.

The watchdog complaint alleges the total amount of money that flowed from Leo-aligned nonprofits to his for-profit firms was $73 million over six years beginning in 2016.

“There are questions as to whether Leo-affiliated nonprofits have diverted substantial portions of their income and assets, directly or indirectly, to the personal benefit of Leonard Leo,” read the Campaign for Accountability’s complaint.

 

This is something long overdue, and while I'm not crazy enough to believe a reckoning is coming, putting this cast of crooks, cads, and creeps in the spotlight may be what starts a real reckoning down the line.