Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
‘I Underestimated the Depth of Outrage’: A Year in Post-Roe America
Among the surprises is that voters didn’t necessarily respond in the way some might have predicted, including in the reddest of states where anti-abortion measures failed. Meanwhile, the legal battle over abortion, far from taking a pause as some expected, quickly returned to the courts. And in a reminder of just how divisive the issue is, some of our contributors even disagreed on the very impact of Dobbs: a transformative event or “business as usual.”
Ultimately, even in a time of political paralysis, this past year proved that our politics is never predictable, even on our most polarizing issues. And that the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will likely reverberate for years to come.
One year after Roe v. Wade's reversal, warnings about abortion become reality
Over the last 12 months, 13 states have enacted near-total bans on abortion, while at least a dozen more have approved new laws curtailing access. In one state, Wisconsin, abortion services are suspended due to uncertainty about the status of an abortion ban from 1849 that remained on the books after the Roe decision. Wisconsin's top officials are challenging the pre-Roe ban in court, arguing it should be unenforceable.
"What this year has made clear and the legislative session has made clear is that a state's abortion laws extend well beyond that state," said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization. "States are legislating their own abortion laws, but they need to see they're impacting more people than just their own constituents."
Republicans struggle with abortion one year after Dobbs
The political consequences have also been staggering.
Democrats credit abortion with helping them keep control of the Senate and protecting against steep losses in the House in last year’s midterm elections. And they plan to make it a major campaign issue in 2024.
And Republicans still have no consistent message on abortion one year after securing conservatives’ long-sought victory at the Supreme Court.
Why the Supreme Court Really Killed Roe v. Wade
First, there is the grassroots anti-abortion movement, which has long been in the trenches and seeks the elimination of elective abortions and recognition of fetal personhood. Second, there’s the elite legal conservative movement, which is motivated to restore what it describes as the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Since at least the 1980s, when conservative legal icon Robert Bork denounced Roe as an egregious example of judicial policymaking, these legal elites have also called for the undoing of abortion rights.
These two movements have occasionally clashed, but as we argue at greater length in a forthcoming law review article, Dobbs also shows what happens when they work together, and when their foot soldiers and close allies — including what we call “movement judges” — take actions that facilitate movement goals.
Trump touts Dobbs decision to cheers at Faith & Freedom
This year’s conference highlights the challenge the 2024 Republican field faces a year after the overturning of Roe, a decision that galvanized the Democratic Party just months before a midterm election. Democrats have seized on GOP talks of a national ban, while some Republicans have cautioned against its potential to turn away general election voters.
Documents reveal justices’ long-running tensions over ethics
Newly released and previously unreported court documents that belonged to Justice John Paul Stevens, who led the marble palace’s liberal wing, show just how aware the justices were of charges that the appearance of impropriety could shake the public’s faith in the institution. They also show just how quick they were to push back against these concerns.
Democrats warn party: The threat of Trump winning in 2024 is 'very real'
Despite an air of confidence from Biden and his team, some Democrats say they believe Trump has a very serious shot at winning back the Oval Office.
“If you think otherwise, you have literally had your head buried in the sand,” said former Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, who fell short in his bid to woo Trump-friendly voters to his side in a 2022 Senate race against JD Vance. “You’re living in a world of delusion. And it’s dangerous.”
‘It’s just stupid’: DeSantis stumbles in New Hampshire
Longtime allies of his chief opponent, Donald Trump, were shopping around for alternatives. Multiple efforts sprang up to draft DeSantis into the race. The Florida governor topped Trump in one New Hampshire poll in January, and he sold out the state GOP’s biggest annual fundraising dinner in April, helping the party bring in a record haul.
But in the month since DeSantis formally entered the presidential race, he’s stumbled in the first-in-the-nation primary state.
Exclusive: CNN obtains the tape of Trump’s 2021 conversation about classified documents
In the two-minute audio recording, Trump and his aides also joke about Hillary Clinton’s emails after the former president says that the document was “secret information.”
“Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails,” Trump’s staffer said.
“No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner,” Trump responded, referring to the former Democratic congressman, prompting laughter in the room.
Trump’s statements on the audio recording, saying “these are the papers” and referring to something he calls “highly confidential” and seems to be showing others in the room, could undercut the former president’s claims in an interview last week with Fox News’ Bret Baier that he did not have any documents with him.
In Pitch to Evangelicals, Trump Casts Himself as Christian Crusader Who Helped End Roe v. Wade
Appearing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gala in Washington on Saturday night, he cited his appointment of three of the six justices who voted to strike down the law as a capstone of his presidency. And he cast himself as an unflinching crusader for the Christian right in a meandering speech that lasted nearly 90 minutes.
“No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”
Supreme Court rejects controversial Trump-backed election law theory
The case had captured the nation’s attention because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina were asking the justices to adopt a long-dormant legal theory and hold that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.
“State courts retain the authority to apply state constitutional restraints when legislatures act under the power conferred upon them by the Elections Clause,” Roberts wrote.
Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights
But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say.
Since it was formed in 1994, Alliance Defending Freedom has been at the center of a nationwide effort to limit the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, all in the name of Christianity. The Southern Poverty Law Center has termed it an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” that has extended its tentacles into nearly every area of the culture wars.
There’s a Time Bomb in Progressives’ Big Supreme Court Voting Case Win
But Moore is not all good news. In the last part of his majority opinion for the court, the chief justice got the liberal justices to sign on to a version of judicial review that is going to give the federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court itself, the last word in election disputes. The court held that “state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
‘Their plan is to literally kill people’: Senate Democrats reveal new details about intel warnings ahead of January 6 attack
A new report released by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee paints a freshly damning portrait of various intelligence failures by the FBI and DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, agencies tasked with preventing domestic terrorism.
Internal communications from both agencies, obtained by Democrats on the panel, reveal new details about how top officials either ignored or dismissed clear indicators of potential violence by pro-Trump actors ahead of the US Capitol attack – leaving law enforcement unprepared for what ultimately unfolded that day.
Sean Hannity’s desperate attempt to spin the new Trump tape
Fundamentally, though, the constituent elements of the rant didn’t matter, as they never do. Hannity isn’t conveying the news to his audience. He’s conveying a framework for perceiving politics — and, particularly, how to perceive Trump in the best possible light. Hannity was arguing that the Justice Department was corrupt in the same way that high-schoolers complain about a teacher they dislike, offering up a pastiche of coded or vague claims that should be treated with skepticism.
DeSantis pitches bizarre plan to eliminate four key agencies
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that if he is elected president he would seek to close four federal agencies as part of an effort to reduce the size of government. “We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we’d do Energy, and we would do IRS,” DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when he was asked whether he favored closing any agencies.
American Baptist board reaffirms women in ministry
“Clergywomen have been and remain essential to our churches and the fulfillment of our mission to spread the gospel,” the ABHMS statement explains. “Out of the 51 leadership team, missional staff and board members of ABHMS, 23, or 45%, are ordained women and either presently or have served in pastoral ministry. Other members of our board have either hired or actively support women in pastoral roles. “
Affirmative action ruling puts target on corporate diversity programs
Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the use of race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities, conservative groups and legal experts say the private sector should get ready for more challenges to their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives.
Though the ruling is not expected to have direct legal implications on private-sector employment practices, it “will put the wind in the sails of groups like ours, who want to get the woke, racially based hiring and promotion schemes out of corporate America,” said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, a right-wing advocacy group that has taken aim at the use of environmental and social considerations in the finance sector.
The Supreme Court Just Bulldozed Affirmative Action—With Two Bizarre Loopholes
It is a sprawling 237-page decision, including multiple concurrences and dissents, and lower courts will spend years fighting over its proper interpretation. At the outset, though, one thing is clear: Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court carves two loopholes—the strength of which are to be determined—into its otherwise emphatic holding. First, he wrote that schools can still consider how “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life” in an essay, so long as they are still “treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.” Second, Roberts exempted military academies from his holding altogether, for now.
Samuel Alito's Justification for Taking GOP-Billionaire-Led Trip: The Seat “Would Have Otherwise Been Vacant”
In an unusual move, just hours before ProPublica’s latest report went live, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito in which the influential justice—who penned the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year—attempted to undermine the reporting on his ethics violations as “misleading.” He argued that had “no obligation” to recuse himself and did not need to disclose the trip under the rules as written. He also claimed to have stayed in a “modest room” at the fishing lodge, ate “homestyle fare,” and only accepted the trip in Singer’s private jet because the “seat…would have otherwise been vacant.”
States Fights
DeSantis challenges Biden on another legal front — college accreditation
Florida’s suit is challenging federal rules governing accreditation boards that Gov. Ron DeSantis contends wield too much power over schools and are circumventing policies and decisions from state leaders. The lawsuit marks the latest legal battle between DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, and the Biden administration as the sides continue to clash over an unrelated high-profile immigration dispute.
Billionaire-funded group driving effort to erode democracy in key US states
The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based group affiliated with the alliance of conservative thinktanks called the State Policy Network, has played a key role in recent efforts to raise the threshold for passing citizen ballot initiatives from a simple majority to a supermajority, and to make it harder to place measures on the ballot in the first place.
College Librarians in Florida Are Hoping for the Best, but Preparing for the Worst
Academic librarians in the state were alarmed to learn that the series of abrupt firings that ensued this past spring after DeSantis appointed six conservative board members to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees included the termination of Helene Gold. Gold, who was an associate dean at the New College’s Jane Bancroft Cook Library, was fired during what most college students would consider “crunch time.”