The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki scorched Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday over Manchin's complete reversal on backing Biden's Build Back Better bill, and now we're getting details that indicate Manchin was never going to be on board with the bill's provisions.

After months of haggling with President Joe Biden and other Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed his party’s hopes on Sunday by announcing he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation.

Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.

Continuing the child tax credit for another year is a core part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass by the end of the year. The policy has already cut child poverty by nearly 30%.

Manchin’s private comments shocked several senators, who saw it as an unfair assault on his own constituents and those struggling to raise children in poverty.

Manchin has also told colleagues he believes that Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips, a source familiar with his comments told HuffPost.

Manchin’s office declined to comment for this story.

In a statement on Sunday, he said he opposed the Build Back Better agenda largely because of its cost.

 

West Virginia is in nearly every category the poorest state in the nation, and Manchin apparently thinks that the massive number of impoverished in the state are all drug addicts for not being as rich as he is in a country of "endless opportunity" like America. 

Manchin's pretty terrible, but the Republican who will eventually replace him will be far worse. There are several bad Democrats, but there are no good Republicans. Keep that in mind.

So where do Dems go from here? For his part, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Dems will be taking several "early 2022" votes on the Biden agenda.

The U.S. Senate will vote early next year on President Joe Biden's sweeping $1.75 trillion policy bill as well as on voting rights, the chamber's top Democrat said on Monday, despite conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's opposition.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled plans for both votes on Monday, the day after Manchin -- who has stood as a roadblock to many Biden policies in the evenly divided chamber -- said in a television interview that he would not vote for the "Build Back Better" bill, dealing it a potentially fatal blow.

"The Senate will, in fact, consider the Build Back Better Act, very early in the new year so that every Member of this body has the opportunity to make their position known on the Senate floor, not just on television," Schumer wrote in a letter to colleagues.

Democrats need all of their members on board to pass legislation in the Senate. Biden and party leaders negotiated with Manchin for months to satisfy his concerns, but the West Virginia senator said on Monday that those talks were doomed to fail.

 

Schumer isn't playing here. That Dear Colleague letter named Manchin specifically.  But the fact remains as long as Manchin is a no, and that there remains unified resistance from the Senate GOP, nothing gets passed at all.

Something has to change or the vote fails. The question is what, if anything, will change at all.

The Airing Of The Grievances

House Republicans aren't just counting their 2022 midterm chickens before they hatch, they're loudly and openly telling anyone in earshot exactly how they will spend 100% of their time in 2023 and 2024 with constant petty vengeance investigations, televised circus hearings, government shutdown hostage taking, and putting as many Biden administration officials in jail with House contempt votes as they can get away with should they win the House back.

 

House Republicans have begun mapping aggressive probes of the Biden administration if they win back the majority — including inquiries into the origins of COVID, a leak of IRS data about billionaires, and accusations the NSA spied on Tucker Carlson.

Why it matters: The plans, obtained exclusively by Axios, show House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy would make muscular use of majority powers for the last two years of President Biden's term if, as expected, the GOP wins the majority in next year's midterms.
McCarthy plans to send a spate of "preservation notices" to departments throughout Biden's Cabinet, ordering them to retain documents that might be needed for future GOP oversight hearings.

Between the lines: Republicans want to deflect attention from the 1/6 commission, a real-time probe of real violence, death and looting in the Capitol. 

As a prelude, House Republicans in August sent Biden a request to "preserve all records related to your Administration’s withdrawal ... from Afghanistan."

Investigations planned by House Republicans — in parallel with their legislative agenda — show they hope to use congressional power to stoke culture wars for 2024.

 

They are vowing to investigate Biden over everything Democrats hit Trump on: COVID, foreign policy, immigration, the IRS, and everything from Tucker Carlson's email to Critical Race Theory.

 

And we're not even counting the inevitable impeachment investigations. 

If you're considering stayng home and not voting in November because Biden or Manchin or whoever disappointed you, wait until Republicans get power back and take vengeance upon all of us.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans say they will block any Biden Supreme Court pick for two years if they regain control of the Senate in the 2022 elections.
• The Catholic Church is facing a major investigation into sexual misconduct of priests in Spain, with possible abuse cases dating as far back as 80 years ago.
• Chilean leftist Gabriel Boric is claiming victory in Sunday's presidential elections less than two years after nationwide protests against the Pinochet-defending party of rival Juan Antonio Kast.
• Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker both say they have tested positive for COVID Omicron and will be taking measures to control its spread among staffers and Senate personnel.
• ESPN and other Disney-owned channels are returning to YouTubeTV after Google and Disney reached a deal over the weekend for carriage of Disney channels on Google's service.
  

Last Call For School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

Let's be perfectly clear about what Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is doing to Texas abortion clinics: shutting them down permanently by criminalizing what they do on a daily basis, putting cash bounties on everyone's heads, and having them sued out of existence in civil courts by wingnut assholes.

Now let's recall that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently wants to do the same to Florida public schools.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing a new bill that would allow parents to sue school districts if their children are taught critical race theory in classrooms, which mirrors how Texas' abortion ban is enforced.

DeSantis announced the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" in Wildwood, Florida on Wednesday, alongside state Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez and Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran. "Our legislation will defend any money for K-12 going to CRT consultants," the governor said. "No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or hate each other."

Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, also spoke at the event with DeSantis. In a tweet earlier this year, Rufo promised to make the concept of critical race theory "toxic" in the public imagination.

Under the proposed measure, parents would be granted a "private right of action" to enforce the state's ban on critical race theory in schools. The bill also takes aim at such training in companies, allowing individuals the right to sue businesses if they are forced to learn critical race theory.

There's scant evidence that critical race theory — an academic area of study that examines the modern-day impact of systemic racism in law and society — is actually being taught in Florida public schools or in any other public school system, but it has become a conservative flashpoint. CRT, as it's sometimes known, is often used as a catch-all phrase encompassing diversity trainings and other anti-racist efforts criticized by conservatives.

DeSantis' new plan comes after he directed the Florida Department of Education to ban critical race theory in schools in June.

The Florida State Board of Education unanimously voted to ban teaching ideas related to critical race theory, making it one of the largest public school systems to fall in line with conservative efforts across the country to regulate certain classroom instruction of American history.

As an example of critical race theory being pushed by educators, DeSantis cited an “Equity Toolkit” posted online by the Arizona Department of Education, which he said claimed that “babies show the first sign of racism by three months old.”

The graphic posted by the Arizona government actually cites studies, conducted by researchers in the U.S., the United Kingdom and China, which found that three month olds of all ethnicities prefer to look at the face of someone from their own ethnic group.

The governor called "woke ideology" an attempt to erase the country's history, referencing the removal of statues in recent years. The bill would also let parents collect attorneys fees if they are successful with their lawsuits, DeSantis said.

 

Consider the overly broad definition of "Critical Race Theory" that DeSantis himself has cited.  The entire point of this exercise is to frighten teachers -- and corporations -- into leaving. DeSantis can simply call any company or teacher who leaves a racist, and he wins.

I suspect the courts will have a field day with this law on First Amendment grounds, but the damage would be done as soon as the law would be passed. How many teachers will quit knowing that angry parents will sue them for teaching basically anything in American history or culture? How many businesses will just leave the state?

The more fights DeSantis can pick on this front, the more popular he gets among the Trump CHUD crowd, and he knows it.

There's no downside for him if this passes, unless Florida voters are going to exact a toll, and frankly, the majority of them will support this.

Pretty soon, I suspect we'll see calls for public schools to be eliminated completely in states, and that day is coming sooner rather than later in places like Florida and Texas.

President Manchin Finally Kills The Bill

Merry Christmas to Joe Biden, as President Manchin went on FOX News this morning to announce he will now vote against the Build Back Better plan, effectively killing the legislation.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he will not be voting for President Biden's Build Back Better Act on Sunday, citing his continued concerns on inflation.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Manchin said his concerns surrounding the massive social spending and climate bill have not been assuaged.

"I've always said this Brett, if I can't go home and explain to the people of West Virginia I can't vote for and I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there," Manchin told host Bret Baier.

"This is a no."

 

This is not only Manchin saying he's a no right now, this is Manchin giving up on getting to yes.

 

He's prepared to be the bad guy here, along with all 50 Republican senators.

 

So what happens now?  There certainly won't be a vote on the bill with Manchin a hard no now, and if you noticed, I called this months ago. Once the Senate infrastructure bill was passed and signed into law, Manchin was going to kill the BBB bill. He went on FOX News Sunday specifically to drive the knife in Biden's back.

Biden won't give up completely, but at this point any more cuts in the legislation destroys its chances completely in the House, which is the point. Ideally for Manchin, the chopped bill ends up failing on the House floor, and the game ends where House Progressives are the bad guys for making the good the enemy of the perfect.

 

Again, the real bad guys are the GOP, but Manchin benefits personally from joining them here.  His nuclear option of switching parties remains in play, too. He was always holding the high hand, and he played it to perfection. Dems need to operate under the assumption that they need 52 Senate seats in 2022, minimum. The only way to remove Manchin's (and Sinema's)  power is to make his vote symbolic and irrelevant to passing actual legislation.

It's still possible that Manchin does cut some sort of deal with one or two "priorities" but of course those will be fashioned the way President Manchin wants. Again, the most likely outcome is "nothing." Manchin's position is untenable with 48 other Democrats. He got 100% of what he wanted in the Senate bill he helped create five months ago. Everything else has been kabuki.

But the Biden administration is making it very clear that there's not going to be a deal soon, if ever.

Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances. Weeks ago, Senator Manchin committed to the President, at his home in Wilmington, to support the Build Back Better framework that the President then subsequently announced. Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”

 

On Tuesday of this week, Senator Manchin came to the White House and submitted—to the President, in person, directly—a written outline for a Build Back Better bill that was the same size and scope as the President’s framework, and covered many of the same priorities. While that framework was missing key priorities, we believed it could lead to a compromise acceptable to all. Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.

 

Senator Manchin claims that this change of position is related to inflation, but the think tank he often cites on Build Back Better—the Penn Wharton Budget Institute—issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures. Many leading economists with whom Senator Manchin frequently consults also support Build Back Better.

Build Back Better lowers costs that families pay. It will reduce what families pay for child care. It will reduce what they pay for prescription drugs. It will lower health care premiums. And it puts a tax cut in the pockets of families with kids. If someone is concerned about the impact that higher prices are having on families, this bill gives them a break. Senator Manchin cited deficit concerns in his statement. But the plan is fully paid for, is the most fiscally responsible major bill that Congress has considered in years, and reduces the deficit in the long run. 

The Congressional Budget Office report that the Senator cites analyzed an unfunded extension of Build Back Better. That’s not what the President has proposed, not the bill the Senate would vote on, and not what the President would support. Senator Manchin knows that: The President has told him that repeatedly, including this week, face to face. Likewise, Senator Manchin’s statement about the climate provisions in Build Back Better are wrong. Build Back Better will produce a job-creating clean energy future for this country—including West Virginia.

Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.

In the meantime, Senator Manchin will have to explain to those families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why they need to keep paying that, instead of $35 for that vital medicine. He will have to explain to the nearly two million women who would get the affordable day care they need to return to work why he opposes a plan to get them the help they need. Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone—we cannot.

 

I was right all along, folks. The bill as it is now is dead. If the BBB passes at all, it will be much smaller.

Anyone surprised at coal in everyone's stocking from the coal state senator was never paying attention.

Nobody say that you weren't warned.

Sunday Long Read: The Journey And The Destination

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from Slate Magazine's Henry Grabar, who takes a look at that most American of obsessions, speeding. We're always in a hurry, even in the COVID era, and an entire cottage industry, not to mention billions of dollars in tickets, fines, police funding, speed traps, red light cameras, and more have sprung up as a direct result of us wanting to shave a few minutes off the trip.

Not to mention the injuries and deaths.

One Tuesday morning this fall, I strapped on a Kevlar vest and slid into the passenger seat of a gray Ford Interceptor sedan, the souped-up Taurus that replaced the Crown Vic as America’s default police car a decade ago.* (And has since been replaced itself: Ford no longer produces police cars, only SUVs and pickups.) This model has several features that are not available for civilian use, including a siren on the roof and a V6 Mustang engine under the hood.

That came in handy when Kevin Roberts, a talkative, thoughtful third-year cop, steered us onto Connecticut’s Interstate 84 for the day shift. We were heading toward Waterbury, whose interlocking expressways are his to patrol. Roberts was in the left lane going 80, and I had the uncanny experience of surveying the highway from his point of view. How many times have I been on the other side—overtaking some slowpoke, 12 over the limit, only to see a rack of siren lights in the rearview mirror and ask myself: How slowly can I complete this pass?

Roberts and I were waiting for that moment of panicked recognition. He knows people resent that the police are always speeding, but he says it’s the only way to do the job. You can’t drive the speed limit or below, because no one wants to pass a cop. The highway’s self-organizing system would disintegrate and traffic would slow to molasses. “Everyone’s at 10 and 2,” he said as we made our way past another stone-faced commuter. It’s the morning rush, and drivers are on their best behavior. “You’ve got to wait for people to spread their wings.”

Roberts is not out to ticket every last speeder, because that would be impossible. “We know not everyone is going to go 55, 65, we’re realistic,” he said. “Not everyone is going to go the speed limit.” When he’s not responding to an accident or a crime, he sees his role as corrective. Sometimes that means loop after loop on the city’s highway landmarks, the Mountain (a steep slope to the east) and the Mixmaster (a decked highway near the city), without stopping to set a trap at all.

But sometimes that means making good on the threat that’s implicit in all that driving. Roberts rolled into the grass alongside an on-ramp, hidden from oncoming traffic by a sign and a bend in the road. He pulled out a TruSpeed S, a top-of-the-line radar gun that permits him to gauge the speed of passing cars from any angle. We sat there for about 30 seconds before he clocked a blue Buick doing 90, and then we were off, racing down the highway until we were right behind the car in question.

Speeding is a national health problem and a big reason why this country is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety in the developed world. More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the United States involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year, in addition to an unknowable number of injuries. Thousands of car crash victims are on foot, and speed is an even more crucial determinant of whether they live or die: The odds of a pedestrian being killed in a collision rise from 10 percent at 23 mph to 75 percent at 50 mph. And we’re now in a moment of particular urgency. Last year, when the pandemic shutdowns lowered total miles traveled by 13 percent, the per-mile death rate rose by 24 percent—the greatest increase in a century, thanks to drivers hitting high velocities on empty roads. “COVID,” Roberts said, “was midnight on the day shift.”

In the first six months of 2021, projected traffic fatalities in the U.S. rose by 18 percent, the largest increase since the U.S. Department of Transportation started counting and double the rate of the previous year’s surge. “We cannot and should not accept these fatalities as simply a part of everyday life in America,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a press release.

But we do. Such carnage has not prompted a societal response akin to the movement elicited by drunk driving in the 1980s. Part of the reason is that Americans love driving fast and have confidence in their own abilities. About half admit to going more than 15 over the limit in the past month. Meanwhile, drivers do generally regard their peers’ speeding as a threat to their own safety, and so we have wound up with the worst of both worlds: Thousands of speed-related deaths on the one hand, and on the other, a system of enforcement that is both ineffective and inescapable.

 

For my part, Weebledad taught me to keep it at 5 over, and I admit to doing, say, 80 in a 70 zone once in a while on the interstate, but I work from home these days and it amazes me just how much of my time I used to spend in my car. I don't miss it, and I see why people would rather speed and save time, even a few minutes. I used to be that way myself.

 

These days, not so much. Especially when cops and civil forfeiture are involved.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

With the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstating the Biden Administration's vaccine mandate, OSHA now says it will begin enforcing the new vaccine mandate rules for companies with more than 100 employees for not having vaccinated employees or weekly testing starting January 10.

 

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration said Saturday that it would not issue citations tied to its coronavirus vaccination mandate before Jan. 10, so that companies have time to adjust to and implement the requirements.

The federal agency separately said there would be no citations of companies regarding its testing requirements before Feb. 9.

The announcement came after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District in Cincinnati decided on Friday that the mandate for large employers could go forward, reversing a previous court decision made after 27 Republican-led states, conservative groups, business associations and some individual companies challenged the mandate.

OSHA said in a statement that it would not issue citations before the listed dates “so long as an employer is exercising reasonable, good faith efforts to come into compliance with the standard.”

The mandate was previously slated to take effect Jan. 4.

The Biden administration’s vaccine requirement applies to companies with 100 or more employees and covers about 84 million U.S. workers. Employees who are not fully vaccinated have to wear face masks and be subject to weekly COVID-19 tests. There are exceptions, including for those who work outdoors or only at home.

Administration officials estimate that the mandate will save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over six months.

 

Expect a looooooot of new employee policies in January.

 

Get vaxxed, or get fired.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Time and time again, in state after state, white Republicans are gerrymandering Black Democrats out of existence, and 2022 is going to be the worst yet.

More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.

The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.

Until this year.

Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.

“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”

“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.

“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”

Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.

Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.

But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.

The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.

A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.

In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.

Across the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.

But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.

“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”

Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.

Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”

 

Black representation of Black constituents is racism you see, and Black Americans should be happy with what the white Republicans drawing the maps to specifically keep Black America without power, without representation, and without a voice in politics deem proper for us.

 

They're never going to stop trying to destroy us.

 

We should be grateful we have the right to vote at all, you see.

 

And soon, we won't even have that.  The new Jim Crow will be even worse than the old days, because it will be legal, and we'll never have a legal recourse to change it. Districts gerrymandered within the granularity of a city street to maximize Republican wins even in cities and counties with Black Democratic majorities, as we'll be divided up among several districts with no chance of winning.

They know exactly what they are doing, and the courts will let them.

And then that's it. They know that if they can break the Black backbone of the Democratic party, they can win supermajorities in state after state and control the House and the Senate for decades, and eliminate the civil rights era completely.

They've almost won. 2024 will be too late.

We have to win 2022.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

A lot of stuff to cover today on the January 6th investigation front. First up:

 

Will Bunch discusses how close we came to a Trump autocracy, and why the Trump coup failed. In addition to Mike Pence's cowardice as I have pointed out several times, Bunch cites the January 3rd letter from (then) all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, and the warning from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser for people to stay away from the Trump rally on January 6th so as not to become the justification for military action against the people by the DC National Guard.

Three days ahead of the pro-Trump rally, all 10 then-living ex-secretaries of defense — including Donald Rumsfeld, who died in 2021, and Dick Cheney — published an extraordinary letter in the Washington Post, warning the White House not to engage the military in its election challenge. They wrote: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”

Americans might well wonder what prompted such a stern warning. One of the signers, in fact, was Mark Esper, whom Trump had shockingly fired as Pentagon chief just days after the Nov. 3 election. The supposed lame duck president had not only replaced Esper but — with just nine or so weeks before leaving office — had installed an entire slate of new loyalists at the Pentagon as well as intelligence agencies. Asked the New York Times in a headline: “To what end?”

To what end, indeed?

Although there was understandable speculation about what the moves meant for U.S. troops then in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the then-president had been increasingly focused since the spring of 2020 — and the at-times destructive protests over the police murder of George Floyd — on what he claimed was a domestic threat posed by “antifa.” In June, Trump promised in a tweet that “the United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization” — even though experts agree such extreme leftist elements are small and lack any umbrella organization.

Although it didn’t receive a ton of attention at the time, violence between pro-Trump groups like the Proud Boys and leftist counterprotesters may have peaked on December 12, 2020, at rallies which in hindsight look like trial runs for January 6. A man was shot in Olympia, Washington, while several dozen people on both sides were arrested or hurt in the D.C. fighting that lasted well into the night. In another bit of foreshadowing, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio posted mysterious pictures from the White House portico. Trump previewed the “wild” January 6 rally one week later.

But then something happened that arguably altered the course of history. People on the left who’d spent four years actively resisting Trump in the streets shared a surprising new message in those two weeks ahead of the insurrection: Stay home on January 6. This was reinforced by a number of Democratic officials who pushed out the same message to both traditional leftists and Black Lives Matter activists.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was typical: “I am asking Washingtonians and those who live in the region to stay out of the downtown area on Tuesday and Wednesday and not to engage with demonstrators who come to our city seeking confrontation.” But more important, arguably, were rank-and-file anti-Trump liberals sharing that message on social media sites. There was even a hashtag making the rounds, #DontTakeTheBait.

The anti-Trumpers didn’t take the bait. We’ll never know what would have happened if there had been street battles between the two factions on January 6, but there’s a chilling hint in the coup-planning PowerPoint presentation from Trump ally and former Army psy-ops specialist Phil Waldron that circulated both among Meadows and others in the White House as well as their allies in Congress. It called for Trump to declare a “National Security Emergency” — a move that might have aligned with his “antifa” memo of the day before.

Meanwhile, if National Guard troops were — as Meadows stated in his email — indeed on standby to support pro-Trump protesters, military leaders seemed to freeze that Wednesday afternoon when they were asked to do the exact opposite and confront the insurrectionists. D.C. officials who dispatched metro police officers to quell the insurrection pleaded with the Pentagon — which had operational control over the D.C. National Guard — to send in added forces, only to face three long hours of stunning inaction.

More recently, a former high-ranking official in the D.C. National Guard has called two top Army generals “absolute and unmitigated liars” in their efforts to explain the delay in deploying Guard troops positioned at a nearby armory until nearly 5:30 p.m., or when the worst fighting that injured scores of police officers was already over. This discrepancy needs to be answered — but so does the question of whether Guard troops would have been more hastily deployed in the event of leftist protesters, and whether that action would have impeded Biden’s certification. (Also, the question of why one of those two generals in that line of command was Gen. Charles Flynn, brother of Trump ally Michael Flynn who was leading efforts to overturn the election.)

While an alarming timeline about the possible role of troops and a national security emergency on January 6 is taking shape, there are, of course, many holes that still need to be filled in by an aggressive House investigation. First and foremost is learning what communications took place between Meadows and other White House staffers with the Pentagon to believe that soldiers were “on standby” to support their cause. Investigators should also ask about Trump’s focus on “antifa,” right up to the middle of the afternoon on January 6. Increasingly, the question is less whether there were plans for a coup on January 6 — clearly, there were — but who needs to be held accountable for the greatest assault on U.S. democracy since 1861.

Keep in mind something else rather shocking that we learned this week — that even knowing that the violent Capitol Hill insurrection was the work of Trump supporters, and horribly wrong, key Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity went on national TV that night continuing to suggest antifa might somehow be to blame. Because once the script for a coup has been written, apparently it’s hard to break character.

 

Again, we know what the plan was: The Justice Department would put the election "under investigation" for fraud in the five battleground states Biden won, Mike Pence would send the electoral votes for those five states back to the legislatures (all controlled by the GOP), declare that there were not enough electoral votes to elect either Biden or Trump, and send the matter to the House where Trump would win based on House state delegations.

In addition, the plan was to justify Pence's actions and declare a national state of emergency precipitated by the destructive Trump rally, with the DC National Guard to be called in to deal with the "Antifa caused chaos" while electoral votes were being counted. If Pence balked, he would be "taken to a secure location" where in the ensuing emergency, House Republicans would declare Trump to be President.

We know that Trump's team was also considering sending US Marshals to all 50 states to secure electoral vote boxes from all 50 state legislatures. The final result would have been a Trump second term, and enough House and Senate races flipped due to "election fraud" in favor of the GOP that the Republicans would keep Congress.

It would have been the end of American democracy, with martial law declared to maintain Trump's hold on power.

It was absolutely a coup.

The question now is whether or not we send the people who engineered the attempt to prison, and whether or not we stop the inevitable next attempt when it happens in 2022 and 2024, as three retired US Army generals warn us.

With the country still as divided as ever, we must take steps to prepare for the worst.

First, everything must be done to prevent another insurrection. Not a single leader who inspired it has been held to account. Our elected officials and those who enforce the law — including the Justice Department, the House select committee and the whole of Congress — must show more urgency.

But the military cannot wait for elected officials to act. The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members — uniformed and civilian — on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department whom they answer to. No service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.

The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 — but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

These are bold actions that need to be taken. If Trump gets into power again, if the GOP is allowed to steal the election in 2024, the US military will absolutely be used. We have to find the weaknesses and shore them up.

 

Meanwhile, back on the January 6th Committee, it seems that Stop The Steal founder Ali Alexander is turning states' evidence on Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.

Ali Alexander, who founded the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and attended the rally that preceded the Capitol attack, told congressional investigators that he recalls “a few phone conversations” with Rep. Paul Gosar and a text exchange with Rep. Mo Brooks about his efforts in the run-up to Jan. 6, his lawyers confirmed in a late Friday court filing.

Alexander also told the Jan. 6 House select committee that he spoke to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in person “and never by phone, to the best of his recollection,” his lawyers say.

The description of the testimony comes in a lawsuit Alexander filed to block the committee from obtaining his phone records from Verizon. Alexander says in the suit that the records include contacts with people protected by privileges: religious advisers, people he counsels spiritually and his lawyers. He also indicated that he already shared more than 1,500 text messages with investigators, in addition to sitting for an eight-hour deposition. The Brooks text, he indicated, is among the texts he turned over.

Alexander’s testimony underscores the degree to which the select committee continues to probe the roles of their Republican colleagues in efforts to promote former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud — and their potential support for fringe figures who helped gather people in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was required to certify the 2020 election results.

The panel hasn’t formally requested testimony from any of the GOP lawmakers yet but has continued to ask witnesses about Gosar, Biggs, Brooks and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped push a strategy to use the Department of Justice to promote the fraud claims.

 

The GOP lawmakers like Jim Jordan and Paul Gosar really, really, really do not want those phone records used as evidence, almost as if it would empirically prove a case of seditious conspiracy.

We'll see where all this goes.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

From the "I Coulda Told You This" Department comes proof that Donald Trump's regime deliberately made COVID worse in the US because he didn't want to be held responsible for it. Luckily, voters did that anyway.

Trump administration officials made "deliberate efforts to undermine the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes," the House Select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis led by Democrats said in a report released Friday.  

The committee, which spent months working to interview former Trump officials, said the administration worked to undermine the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic by blocking officials from speaking publicly, watering down testing guidance and attempting to interfere with other public health guidance. 

Many pieces of the report were a summation of documents and interviews they've released throughout the year, but the report also outlined new examples where health guidance was adapted despite officials' concerns about the potential harmful effects of the changes. 

In one instance, Dr. Jay Butler, the deputy director for infectious diseases at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the committee he was upset and concerned about guidance he was directed to update in May 2020 for faith communities. He said he feared that some of the altered guidance about masking and other church practices could potentially put lives at risk. 

He wrote in an email about the change that he was "very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do." 

"I was doing a lot of soul searching about whether or not I should have agreed to even make the change in the document," Butler told the committee when asked about his words. "Clearly, it was a directive, but that was a real struggle as I felt like what had been done was not good public health practice." 

Butler told the committee that while he wasn't aware of any examples where the guidance had adversely impacted the health of Americans, "that concern will haunt me for some time." 

The report also chronicled deep frustration from then-White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who at one point was so upset about a meeting that included doctors whom she called part of a "fringe group" that she told colleagues she would not attend. 

"I can't be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity," Birx wrote in an email released by the committee. That approach has been widely decried by public health experts, who note that a previous infection doesn't guarantee immunity and who say such an approach would most certainly have led to even more hospitalizations and deaths. "These are people who believe that all the curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant -- they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience. I am happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover," she wrote. 

The report also laid out how one briefing so angered former President Donald Trump that CDC officials were blocked by the Trump administration for more than three months from conducting public briefings. 

One official, then-CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Dr. Nancy Messonnier, told the committee Trump was "angered" after she gave a briefing on February 25, 2020, that warned about the danger of Covid-19. She told the select subcommittee she felt "upset" after she received calls from then-CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield and then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar about it. 

CNN has reached out to Redfield and Azar for comment.

 

Yet another example of why Trump can never be allowed the levers of power again, but the honest truth is he'll remain a threat because he's not going to prison, and he's nt going to prison because there's a 99% chance that would start, at the very least, a series of devastating white supremacist military terrorist attacks across the country that would kill thousands, and possibly far worse. 

 

There is good news, however. Last night the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals here in Cincy reinstated President Biden's vaccine mandates, allowing the OSHA rules to go forward. Republican attorneys general are almost certainly going to make an emergency appeal to SCOTUS in the weeks ahead.

A federal appeals court has reinstated the Biden administration’s vaccine and testing requirement for private businesses that covers about 80 million American workers.

The ruling by the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati lifted a November injunction that had blocked the rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which applies to businesses with at least 100 workers.

In the decision Friday, the 6th Circuit noted that OSHA has historical precedent for using wide discretion to ensure worker safety and “demonstrated the pervasive danger that COVID-19 poses to workers—unvaccinated workers in particular—in their workplaces.”

The Justice Department argued last week that blocking the requirements would result in “enormous” harm to the public, as hospitals brace for an increase in Covid cases this winter and the highly mutated omicron variant takes root in more states.

“COVID-19 is spreading in workplaces, and workers are being hospitalized and dying,” the Justice Department argued in a court filing on Friday. “As COVID-19 case numbers continue to rise and a new variant has emerged, the threat to workers is ongoing and overwhelming.”

The policy required businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers were fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. Unvaccinated employees were required to start wearing masks indoors starting Dec. 5.

Republican attorneys general, private companies and industry groups such as the National Retail Federation, the American Trucking Associations, and the National Federation of Independent Business sued to have the policy overturned. They argued that the requirements are unnecessary, burden businesses with compliance costs, and exceed the authority of the federal government.

“These assertions ignore the economic analysis OSHA conducted that demonstrates the feasibility of implementing the ETS [Emergency Temporary Standard],” the 6th Circuit said Friday, labeling concerns by the petitioning groups “speculative.”

The Biden administration last month stopped implementation and enforcement of the requirements to comply with an order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. Judge Kurt D. Englehardt, in an opinion for a three-judge panel, said the requirements were “staggeringly overbroad” and raised “serious constitutional concerns.”

 

Republicans went judge-shopping and got Englehardt, a Trump-appointed goofball who raged against the mandate as unconstitutional. The Sixth Circuit not only overturned that, but found that the Biden administration absolutely proved that with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from COVID, that there may be an actual point to using OSHA's emergency powers. 

Sadly, as I've pointed out before, if the corrupt Roberts Court wants to blow a hole in federal executive agencies and cripple them for decades, this is exactly the case to use to do it.

We'll see.

Last Call For Counseling The Counselors

America's mental health care professionals are drowning in patients as we enter Pandemic Year 3. Just as the nation's hospitals are overrun with COVID patients, social workers, counselors, clinical psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists are overloaded to the point of turning people who truly need help away.

 

As Americans head into a third year of pandemic living, therapists around the country are finding themselves on the front lines of a mental health crisis. Social workers, psychologists and counselors from every state say they can’t keep up with an unrelenting demand for their services, and many must turn away patients — including children — who are desperate for support.

“All the therapists I know have experienced a demand for therapy that is like nothing they have experienced before,” said Tom Lachiusa, a licensed clinical social worker in Longmeadow, Mass. “Every available time slot I can offer is filled.”

The New York Times asked 1,320 mental health professionals to tell us how their patients were coping as pandemic restrictions eased. General anxiety and depression are the most common reasons patients seek support, but family and relationship issues also dominate therapy conversations. One in four providers said suicidal thoughts were among the top reasons clients were seeking therapy.

“I regularly wished aloud for a mental health version of Dr. Fauci to give daily briefings,” said Lakeasha Sullivan, a clinical psychologist in Atlanta. “I tried to normalize the wide range of intense emotions people felt; some thought they were truly going crazy.”

The responses to our survey, sent by Psychology Today to its professional members, offer insights into what frontline mental health workers around the country are hearing from their clients. We heard from mental health providers in all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. (You can learn more about how we conducted our survey at the end of this article.)

While there were moments of optimism about telemedicine and reduced stigma around therapy, the responses painted a mostly grim picture of a growing crisis, which several therapists described as a “second pandemic” of mental health problems.

“There is so much grief and loss,” said Anne Compagna-Doll, a clinical psychologist in Burbank, Calif. “One of my clients, who is usually patient, is experiencing road rage. Another client, who is a mom of two teens, is fearful and doesn’t want them to leave the house. My highly work-motivated client is considering leaving her career. There is an overwhelming sense of malaise and fatigue.”

 

The mental health effects of a multi-year pandemic are just starting to be understood, and it's going to take years, if not decades, to treat the country's serious emotional issues.

We're burned out, folks. We need help.

Help is in short supply.  Take some time out of your day to be nice to yourself and to others. We all need to pitch in.

Ukraine On The Membrane, Con't

The situation in Ukraine just got exponentially worse on Friday. With thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and vehicles on the Ukraine border, Russian President Vladimir Putin is making public his list of demands from NATO and President Biden.

Russia outlined on Friday its demands for a sweeping new security arrangement with the West in Eastern Europe, with the most far-reaching request a written guarantee that NATO will not expand farther east toward Russia and will end all military activity in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The Russians also said they wanted NATO to remove all military infrastructure installed in Eastern Europe after 1997 — demands that analysts said seemed unacceptable to the West.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey A. Ryabkov, offered the details about the proposal in public for the first time on Friday, in a video news conference in Moscow, amid a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine’s border.

The demands went far beyond the current conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. And most were directed not at Ukraine, which is threatened by the troop buildup, but at the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies.

They included a request for a NATO commitment that it would not offer membership to Ukraine specifically. But NATO countries are unlikely to formally rule out future membership for Eastern European countries.

The proposal highlighted starkly differing views in the United States and Russia on the military tensions over Ukraine. Russia has insisted that the West has been fomenting the crisis by instilling anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, and by providing weapons. Mr. Ryabkov cast the confrontation in Ukraine as a critical threat to Russia’s security.

The United States and European allies, in contrast, say Russia provoked the security crisis by recently deploying tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s border.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia voiced some of the demands more broadly in recent weeks. But this formal Russian offer on Friday for defusing the tensions on Ukraine’s border followed a video call between President Biden and Mr. Putin on Dec. 7. After the call, Mr. Biden said he was willing to hear the Russians out.

Russian officials said diplomats conveyed the proposal to a senior American diplomat, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on Wednesday during meetings in Moscow. Afterward, Ms. Donfried said in a video statement that she would relay the ideas to Washington as well as to NATO allies during a stop this week in Brussels.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had said in a statement last week that Moscow was seeking a document with “legal and obligatory character” prohibiting any further expansion of NATO eastward in Europe. The Russian proposal took the form of a draft statement from NATO.

“Member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization accept the obligation to exclude farther expansion of NATO to Ukraine and other states,” the text suggested as an acceptable guarantee for Russia.

 

As I've been saying for some time now, Putin wants a new Soviet Empire, and he wants it at the direct expense of America and the West.  These are hostage demands, straight up: you can let me take Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe without firing a shot, or we can do this the hard way.

It's up to Joe Biden to make the call here. Biden's talking economic sanctions, Putin's talking rolling tanks into Kyiv. It's the Cold War days all over again, the ones that supposedly died when I was in high school and college, but a shooting war in Ukraine is going to kill thousands.

It's important to note that if Trump were still in charge, he'd be on the first plane to Moscow to agree to Putin's hostage deal, and he would use this as his argument that the US needed to drop out of NATO immediately. Ukraine would be on their own.

Biden's way forward -- hitting Putin in the wallet along with the rest of the Western World -- may not work however if China continues to play ball with him.

We'll see.

Climate Of Disaster, Kentucky Edition, Con't

Here in Kentucky, it takes a tornado destroying your home and begging for FEMA assistance to admit that the guy in the Oval Office is your president, and the Democrat in the Governor's mansion in Frankfort actually does care about setting things right.

Cliff Giambrone most certainly didn’t vote for President Biden and, in fact, was outside the U.S. Capitol protesting the election results on Jan. 6. On the trailer hitch on the back of his van, he usually uses two 10-foot poles to fly a flag with a derogatory message aimed at Biden: “Let’s Go Brandon.”

But when the 67-year-old retired construction worker drove from his home in Hamburg, Pa., to help the recovery effort here, he made a conscious decision to leave that flag at home, bringing an American flag instead. “Believe me, part of me wants to wave that flag and smile when he looks at it,” he said. “But I don’t want to be that guy.”

Pausing in his search for a lost photo album in the rubble of a home, Giambrone added, “I am political, but there are times you have to set that aside. This is one of those moments. I hope it’s not temporary. I didn’t vote for him, but he’s still my president. I want to support him.”

As Biden arrived in Mayfield on Wednesday, he came to perhaps the most conservative place he has visited as president, the one where open hostility would be most apparent. He set foot in a county that voted for Donald Trump by nearly a 4-to-1 margin. Many here protested his election, and some still do not accept that he is the rightful president.

But the storms that have transformed parts of western Kentucky suggest that a natural disaster remains one of the few spaces left in American life where, however briefly, many attempt to put their politics aside. Biden’s response to the tornadoes has won praise from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who rarely has warm words for the president. Most here say they welcome Biden’s visit, even if they question how effectively he may be able to help them.

“I didn’t vote for the president, and I’m not a fan of his policies,” said Clayton Howe, a 57-year-old lifelong resident who was assessing damage to his downtown building that Biden would walk past an hour later. “But I appreciate him being here. He’s still the president of the United States.”

Biden carried just two of Kentucky’s 120 counties. Thirteen months after the presidential election, signs of the region’s deep support for Trump remain vivid, even amid the rubble.

In Dawson Springs, a town of 2,500 where an estimated 75 percent of the houses were destroyed, tattered Trump flags still hang outside damaged homes. And even as they picked through the debris, emergency personnel were spotted over the weekend wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.

At least one “Let’s go, Brandon” shout was heard as Biden toured the area, but that reaction was relatively muted. More conspicuous were people like Gary Killian, a 55-year-old who stood in a red Trump 2020 cap but nonetheless said he wanted to hear from Biden.

“You can’t help but have compassion for our town,” Killian said. “I just want to see into his eyes. I want to hear what he has to say. And I can’t say I don’t want to hear him just because I’m from the other side of the aisle.”

Many Mayfield residents appeared to be wrestling this week with their emotions toward Biden, combining a deep-seated disdain and even contempt with a respect for the presidency and a sense that Biden deserved credit for coming. And there was a recognition, grudging for some, that they desperately needed help, or at least money, from the federal government.

Tami Trevarthen, a 58-year-old who works at a deli market and sat outside her brother’s destroyed home, said she approved of Biden’s visit. “He should see what’s going on here. People need help, federal help,” she said.

“He needs to come,” she said, before adding, “But is he coherent?” She recalled that Biden referred to the tornado that swept the area as a hurricane, and she blames him for rising gas prices and the persistence of covid.

Her brother, George Long, agreed for the most part with her assessment of Biden, but the Army veteran added that he is still the commander in chief. “I’d be diligent and courteous” if he met Biden, he said. “I’d even call him president. Everything is too political.”

Trevarthen demurred. “I’d be cordial to him,” she allowed. “Let’s see what he can do for people.”

 

It literally took an unprecedented natural disaster that destroyed 75% of the homes in town for these folks to admit that Joe Biden might not be the monster he has been portrayed as all these long months, and that he might actually be a good person who wants the federal government to work for everyone. 

 

Irving Kristol infamously said that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged by reality. I posit a conservative is just a greedy, self-centered asshole who will remain so until a climate change fueled disaster levels his home and suddenly he needs government assistance and demands it.

That's the only way conservatives ever even have a chance of learning human empathy for those unlike them.

 

StupidiNews!

• The workers at a candle factory hit by tornadoes on Saturday have filed a class-action lawsuit, claims of management telling workers they would be fired if they sought shelter from the storm.
• Project Veritas is under investigation for allegedly trying to blackmail President Biden with threats to publish claims in what they say are his daughter's diary unless he agreed to a live interview.
• A federal judge has thrown out a $4.5 billion settlement that would have shielded the wealthy Sackler family from legal repercussions from owning Purdue Pharma maker OxyContin.
• President Joe Biden is warning the unvaccinated that they face a winter of "severe illness and death" due to COVID Omicron, and once again asked all eligible Americans to get vaccinated.
• Washington University researchers have determined that fossil fuel emissions kill up to one million people per year globally, most deaths coming from coal particulate pollution known as PM2.5.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

This will change the moment we get a GOP president again, but the FDA is approving abortion pills on a permanent basis for use up to ten weeks of pregnancy for women. The larger issue: the second we get a GOP Congress and a GOP president, this goes away in a post-Roe world, and abortion medicine has already been criminalized in 19 states.

 

The federal government on Thursday permanently lifted a major restriction on access to abortion pills. It will allow patients to receive the medication by mail instead of requiring them to obtain the pills in person from specially certified health providers.

The decision, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes as the Supreme Court is considering whether to roll back abortion rights or even overturn its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal nationwide.

The F.D.A.’s action means that medication abortion, an increasingly common method authorized in the United States for pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation, will become more available to women who find it difficult to travel to an abortion provider or prefer to terminate a pregnancy in the privacy of their homes. It allows patients to have a telemedicine appointment with a provider who can prescribe abortion pills and send them to the patient by mail.

Earlier this year, for the duration of the pandemic, the F.D.A. temporarily lifted the in-person requirement on mifepristone, the first of two drugs used to end a pregnancy. The decision to make this change permanent is likely to deepen the already polarizing divisions between conservative and liberal states on abortion. In 19 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest, telemedicine visits for medication abortion are banned, and these and other conservative states can be expected to pass other laws to further curtail access to abortion pills.

Yet other states, like California and New York, which have taken steps in recent years to further solidify abortion rights, are expected to increase the availability of the method and provide opportunities for women in states with restrictions to obtain abortion pills by traveling to a state that allows them.

“It’s really significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University. “Telehealth abortions are much easier for both providers and patients, and even in states that want to do it, there have been limits on how available it is.”

So far this year, presumably in anticipation of such a decision, six states banned the mailing of pills, seven states passed laws requiring pills to be obtained in person from a provider, and four states passed laws to set the limit on medication abortion at earlier than 10 weeks’ gestation, said Elizabeth Nash, the interim associate director of state issues for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

The current practice is that women who live in states that don’t allow telemedicine for abortion must travel to a state that does — although they don’t have to visit a clinic. They may be in any location within that state for their telehealth visit, even a car, and may receive the pills at any address in the state.

But legal experts said they expected supporters of abortion rights to try to find ways to make the pills available without requiring a patient to travel, including possibly filing legal challenges to state laws banning telemedicine for abortion.

In data released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of all abortions — and 54 percent of abortions before 10 weeks — occurred with medication in 2019, the most recent year for which C.D.C. data is available. (The report represents most of the country, but does not include data from California, Maryland and New Hampshire.)

In 2020, some states, including Indiana, Kansas and Minnesota, the method accounts for a majority of abortions, according to state health department reports.

 

This will be criminalized in as many states as possible in the months ahead. Remember, the point is to drive women into second-class citizenship again, and making them dependent on neckbearded incels for anything approaching rights.

This is a good thing the FDA did here, unalloyed, but it will be regulated or criminalized out of existence, along with a lot of other things we're currently taking for granted as "rights".

You only have rights as far as five Supreme Court justices say you do, and that has been the case all your life.