Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Republican candidates downplay past anti-abortion stances ahead of 2024 election
On social media, in public comments and in talking points on their websites, candidates are shying away from past hard-line positions and softening their stances. In some cases, the changes have been overt, with candidates reversing course on supporting outright bans on abortion or even denying they ever opposed it.
But in others, the shift has been more subtle and nuanced, with candidates altering or deleting previous statements, or de-emphasizing stances that had been more central to their platform just a few years ago.
Speaker Mike Johnson said noncitizen voting is a 'threat.' The facts say otherwise
Standing alongside former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Johnson provided no evidence for past fraud by undocumented immigrants, instead saying, "We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur."
Experts who spoke to USA TODAY said allegations of noncitizens altering elections are myths and at worst xenophobic lies that erode trust in the electoral process.
“It makes people think that hordes of unknown, unnamed people who look different from other people are voting and casting ballots, and that’s just not true,” said Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a nonpartisan good-government group. “It’s a scare tactic.”
Chris Sununu now says Trump shouldn't drop out if convicted but stands by his past criticism
In an interview on ABC News' "This Week," Sununu, a Republican who endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley over Trump in the GOP primary, was repeatedly pressed by anchor George Stephanopoulos about his previous statements attacking the former president.
Sununu said he stood by a 2021 denunciation of Trump over Jan. 6 but said he no longer believes that Trump should leave the race if he is convicted in one of his four criminal cases. Trump denies all wrongdoing.
Right-Wing Broadcaster Asks Trump Fans In NYC To Do Something Very Illegal
The former president’s hush money trial got underway on Monday, and right-wing broadcaster Clay Travis tweeted on X to implore Trump fans in the Big Apple to commit a felony to help their fearless leader.
Travis suggested that any Trump supporter “who is a part of the jury pool, do everything you can to get seated on the jury and then refuse to convict as a matter of principle, dooming the case via hung jury.”
I Was a Skeptic of the Stormy Daniels Prosecution. I Was Wrong.
Over the past year, though, I have realized that my initial doubts about Bragg’s indictment were misplaced. It now seems clear that Trump’s New York trial, slated to begin this week, will be the former president’s only criminal trial before the November election. The other three strong indictments against him in other jurisdictions have unfortunately been delayed by a corrupt judge, a foot-dragging Supreme Court, and a district attorney’s questionable conduct in an already complex case. This, combined with Bragg’s excellent pretrial briefing, has substantially strengthened the case for this prosecution. It is important to American democracy that Trump be forced to defend at least some of his alleged criminal conduct before a jury of his peers in advance of Election Day.
The Final Cass Review and the NHS England Response
For England, the Cass Report marks the end of the era of a highly medicalized approach to the treatment of young people with gender-related distress, which has come to be known as “gender-affirming care.” While the treatment protocol for youth comprising of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery, known as the “Dutch Protocol,” was invented in the Netherlands in the 1990’s, the report points out the concept of “gender-affirming care” – the notion that the doctors must accept children’s declarations of identity at face value and must assist them in gender change as early as possible– actually originated in the United States, and only then spread internationally.
January 6 insurrectionists had a great day in the Supreme Court today
It appears, after Tuesday’s arguments, that a majority of the justices will side with the insurrectionists — though it is far from clear how those justices will justify such an outcome.
The case, known as Fischer v. United States, involved a federal law which provides that anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a very serious federal felony and can be imprisoned for up to 20 years — although, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out during Tuesday’s argument, actual sentences against January 6 defendants convicted under this statute have been much shorter, normally ranging from a little less than one year to slightly over two years.
Hundreds of Jan. 6 Prosecutions—Including Donald Trump’s—Are Suddenly in Peril at the Supreme Court
Tuesday’s oral arguments in Fischer v. United States were rough sledding for the government, as the conservative justices lined up to thwap Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for allegedly overreaching in its pursuit of Jan. 6 convictions. Six members of the court took turns wringing their hands over the application of a criminal obstruction law to the rioters, fretting that they faced overly harsh penalties for participating in the violent attack. Unmentioned but lurking in the background was Trump himself, who can wriggle out of two major charges against him with a favorable decision in this case.
Supreme Court Justice Does Whatever He Felt Like Doing
From the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts shared only that Thomas would “participate fully” in deliberations based on the briefs and transcript of oral argument. Thomas returned to work on Tuesday without explanation, and resumed business as usual.
Many observers are wondering what prompted Thomas’s absence. (Perhaps yesterday’s argument in Snyder v. United States, a case about porous barriers to government corruption, hit too close to home; perhaps he was busy asking his accountants if he still has to file taxes when Harlan Crow claims him as a dependent.) I’m also wondering why we, the hundreds of millions of people whose lives are controlled by Thomas’s decisions, have to wonder this much about his absence at all.
Several attorneys general made ‘abusive legal demands’ to get trans patients’ medical records, senators allege
The report, titled “How State Attorneys General Target Transgender Youth and Adults by Weaponizing the Medicaid Program and their Health Oversight Authority,” investigates how attorneys general in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana and Texas have opened investigations into hospitals for alleged Medicaid fraud or violations of consumer protection laws. They opened the investigations, the report argues, “in order to further ideological and political goals,” and there has been “significant variation in hospitals’ responses to such requests and their approaches to safeguarding the privacy of one of their most vulnerable patient populations—LGBTQIA+ people.”
Cass Review excluded 98% of gender-affirming hormone studies to reach its conclusion
Specifically, the report led by paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass, which includes references to boys playing with trucks and girls playing with dolls, excluded 98% of studies submitted to it that showed gender-affirming care and hormones helped transgender people - Alejandra Caraballo
The Cass Review said it applied robust methodological concepts to this process by insisting all studies were double-blinded—a clinical concept you may understand as testing drugs alongside placebos.
However, the issue with doing this with gender-affirming care studies is it would have required young people to be forced not to transition despite that being their wish.
States Fights
Supreme Court allows Idaho to enforce ban on gender-affirming care for nearly all transgender minors for now
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to allow Idaho officials enforce a ban on gender-affirming medical care for nearly all transgender minors statewide, granting a request from state officials to narrow the scope of a lower court's order that blocked the law from taking effect.
The court's conservative majority granted the state's request for a stay over the objections of the three liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The stay does not apply to the two transgender teenage plaintiffs in the case and the care they are seeking, but blocks the more expansive portions of the lower court's decision.
DeSantis signs law limiting Florida book challenges
Florida residents who don’t have children attending school will have significantly fewer chances to challenge books in local K-12 libraries under a new law signed Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Meant to curb what lawmakers described as a “logistical nightmare” facing school districts flooded with requests to remove books, the policy marks an admission from Republican leaders that last year’s expansions to book challenge laws may have gone too far after national backlash from free speech groups and even some conservatives.
The Supreme Court Has Ruled to Let Louisiana Keep Hunting DeRay McKesson
If you want to see somebody who is being persecuted, I suggest you look no further than DeRay McKesson. McKesson is an activist dedicated to ending police brutality. He’s been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement for nearly a decade, and for those efforts, he’s been relentlessly harassed by whites in the state of Louisiana and on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Court. Now, the Supreme Court has given the harassment its blessing.
In 2016, McKesson helped to organize a Black Lives Matter protest near the police headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after the cops there murdered Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man whom they shot six times, despite having pinned him to the ground and utterly immobilized him. During that protest, somebody threw a rock. That rock struck a police officer, severely injuring him.
New ways of viewing happenings in our country, linking White Christian Nationalism to activities of national terrorism and prejudice.