28 Comments

Thanks Jessica. Running a bit behind on newsletters. My biggest takeaway is why did Biden sign the "Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act” (H.R. 9495)"?!!! He could have vetoed and sent it back to congress and then you need 2/3 vote in house and senate. Duh! Can't blame this on TRump.

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No compromise, hell no. In fact, I’m more pissed off than ever. I don’t know how I’ll get through these next four years. A lot of people have been discussing ‘toning back’ the abortion issue lately… I need to remember your talking points.

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How are media outlets still conflating 'technically legal' with 'access'?! The whole problem with Roe is it didn't guarantee access, and yet I see NYT articles talking about how referendums = access. I woke up at 5am spiraling about this.

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Regarding Wyoming arguing that abortion care isn’t healthcare because pregnancy is an illness.

ICD Codes are a specific set of codes used by healthcare providers when (among other things) giving a diagnosis and providing tests and procedures. These standardized codes are used for billing medical insurance for care. Both pregnancy and abortion have specific ICD codes which indicates that these issues are directly treated through medical means. Pregnancy is a medical condition and abortion is a medical procedure.

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I made a typo in the first sentence above, which should read-

Regarding Wyoming arguing that abortion care isn’t healthcare because pregnancy isn’t an illness.

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Folks, I saw this comment on some other site and am passing it on. Please do the same. One way we could help ourselves and our equal right to healthcare is to pressure Biden (only one person!!!) to publish the Equal Rights Amendment:

“URGE BIDEN TO MAKE THE ERA THE 28TH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION. This is something significant and meaningful we could work on in Biden's last 70 days in office. Many of you probably know that the ERA has been around a long time and is in limbo. Right now, because the required 38 states have ratified the amendment AND several law suits as well as the American Bar Association have deemed time limits for constitutional amendments to be unconstitutional, all this is left to make this the 28th amendment to the Constitution is to urge Biden to have the national archivist sign it and publish it in the Federal Register. We are asking everyone to send a letter or postcard to Biden ON DECEMBER 15th urging him to publish the ERA. The address is: President Biden, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW; Washington, DC 20500. And, call the White House and leave a message at 202-456-1111. If hundreds of thousands of us (or even millions) urge Biden to do this, he may actually ACT. “

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I want ERA but most all Constitutional Amendments have time limits. And since then some states have rescinded their approval. I think it is magical thinking that an archivist can sign it and we are good to go. That's how I see it.

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You can also message the president on whitehouse.gov - a very easy form to fill out. I’ve already sent messages on getting judges confirmed, etc.

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Thank you for all the work you do. No, we cannot compromise. This is trench warfare. Every inch matters.

Just a quick history lesson. RICO derives from early twentieth century efforts to close down red-light districts. Anti-vice activists knew that madams viewed criminal charges as a kind of licensing fee. Get raided once every few months, pay the fine, keep going. It didn’t close brothels, and the municipal government liked the income. To work around this arrangement, anti- vice activists turned to the civil courts and crafted “injunction and abatement” laws to prevent future misuse of property. They would padlock properties for a year and sell off all the furnishings. This was devastating for madams and completely changed the way people engaged in prostitution. (And like the anti-abortion activists now, the vice reformers had model laws that they tested out in different states and tweaked after the inevitable court challenges).

When Prohibition came, the antis applied their anti-prostitution tactics to the alcohol trade, including civil forfeiture, which SCOTUS said was constitutional along with other policing tactics including wire tapping.

Governments like civil forfeiture because enforcement pays for itself (or contributes) keeping budgets more balanced. Confiscating cars, real estate, and funds to “prevent future misuse” will economically supplement every attack on abortion.

Similarly, like the Comstock Law, I worry about the Mann Act. We already see anti-abortion activists looking into how they can apply anti-trafficking laws. The Mann Act was initially passed to limit “commercialised prostitution”, but the phrase “for any other immoral purpose” shifted it to include non commercial sex. In 1985, Congress amended the law to limit the “immoral purposes” to sexual abuse; however, some tweaking and anti-abortionists can bring back crossing state lines for “immoral purposes” as a way to justify federal intervention.

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Can we apply RICO to the Catholic Church? They crossed state lines moving pedophile priests around the country from parish to parish. Can we have a RICO case against these Catholic pregnancy centers which are popping up in states? I would gladly contribute to support cases like this or any class action cases on the side of women. I’m frustrated that all I see are a handful of cases being brought for individuals (these are important, for sure, but don’t have the impact we need to slow down or stop this assault). We seem to still be reacting. I feel we need to be proactive at this point.

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Well, actually, no, because ever since Bush I faith-based organizations basically get a hall pass.

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Ethic not ethnic 😩

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If political actions were required to be logical and fair, that might be a good strategy, but I'm afraid that non-Christian faiths are not going to get a lot of leeway. In fact pretty soon we're going to be replaying the Reformation and Counter-Reformation because the alliance between nutjob Catholic extremists and nutjob Evangelical extremists isn't going to hold.

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This is very disheartening. Still, it might be worth a try if only to show that we don’t give up and we’ll make them work for every step.

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I wonder if Wicca, or some other recognized non-Christian religion, might offer some kind of path. Could we have refuges and “religious” CPC’s that follow a different ethnic with regard to choice and have those as sanctuaries?

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Whenever Democrats lose, the knee jerk reaction seems to be to move right and “compromise” on our values by throwing women, people of color or the LGBTQ+ community under the bus. The very conservative David French just wrote in the NYT: “But let’s be very clear about the course of this election. One candidate leaned away from the extremism of her base, and she lost. The other candidate leaned into the worst excesses of his movement, and he won.” Moving right and abandoning our values is not the answer.

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Yes, I remember Bernie saying back in 2015 we shouldn't be worried about "Identity politics" voters (meaning women and POC shouldn't count).

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I reject the characterization of our (your average AEd reader) policy positions as "extremist". Universal Health care, paid parental leave, free or heavily subsidized higher education , the human right to make decisions about your own body, gun safety laws, etc are standard public policy in the rest of the "developed" world. These are not extremist positions. The mainstream media continuously makes the false analogy of the left as "extremist" compared to the (truly radical) right extremists.

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Of course the policies you mention aren't extremist and they're also not what French was talking about because she didn't distance herself from any of that. Biden and Harris were repeatedly characterized by republicans as advocating for things such as "abolishing the police" or "allowing abortion up to the minute of delivery and even after" or "letting children have surgery to change their sex without their parents' permission at school" or "persecuting people for their Christian faith" or "having a completely open border to get more voters." These positions aren't real, but many conservatives and low information voters are absolutely convinced they are actual progressive positions. I quoted French to show that even conservatives who believe that there is an extreme left equal to the extreme right can see that Harris did not cater to that or support any extreme positions. That is, he looked at what she ran on and saw a moderate, normal Democratic platform, not an "extremist left wing" one even though he believes the extremist left wing exists. I feel like it's important to make this point, right now because so much of the postmortem is going with the narrative that the campaign was just too progressive or focused too much on "identity politics" and the party needs to move right to get the votes. I think this is the wrong lesson and we need to push back on it.

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Nov 22Edited

Agreed - so many Americans don’t bother themselves with actual policies or positions at all. It’s all dumbed down, Idiocracy. Reactionary, emotional. Immigrant rapists and schools teaching kids to be trans... I also don’t think enough is being said about how the Right got the ‘bro’ vote . Especially the incels, or the average Joes buying the lies being fed to them. Or clicking the ads for betting sites. These men could literally place a bet on Trump (favored to win! Big $$!) and then go VOTE for Trump. How is that legal? I hate to say that Democrats need to learn some of those tricks… but maybe they do?? It’s all so gross. How do we make these men see women as people - worthy of respect, with the right to control their own bodies and futures? Where is the empathy? How do we chip away at their mindset and make inroads?

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Jessica, I absolutely agree that the best approach for Dems is to continue embracing abortion rights.

1. It is true that pushing abortion rights was not enough to save Harris. So what? It certainly did not hurt. Harris lost for various reasons, but pushing abortion rights was not one of them. Abortion rights is not going to be the thing that guarantees Democratic victories in the future, but it should be part of the platform that we proudly stand on. Mostly we need to focus on formulating and communicating an economic message, and showing that we will take care of people and not hurt people. Guaranteeing abortion access can be part of that.

2. While abortion rights are very popular, it is not 100%. Even though we got close to 60% in Florida, that means over 40% voted against abortion rights. This is a lot of people. Standing for abortion rights does lose us those voters, but by and large they are lost to Dems anyway. What we need to work on is whittling down that number.

3. What we should continue to do -- with your leadership -- is educating people about abortion policy. It will take a while but -- just as with marriage equality (first, interracial marriage, and then same-sex marriage)-- the more people think about the horrible consequences of real-life abortion bans, the more popular abortion rights will become. The percentage of people who want to ban abortion will gradually decline. Even just 2-3 percentage points can make the difference in swing states. Society changes, but it changes slowly. I am friends with a couple who were married in the 1980s and got a lot of flack from their families (or maybe it was just one side of the family). Why? One is of European descent, the other is of African descent. Nowadays, people don't bat an eyelid, but 40 years ago it was a big deal.

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Agreed,Victor.I’m in Fl and trying to educate voters about our draconian ban.It is frustrating when the right continually parrots that we have “exceptions”. Also, just started wearing a repro rights t so I can initiate many convos in the months,years ahead…

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No and hell no. No compromise.

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No compromises

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I read about a case in Texas that Jonathan Mitchell was representing suing a woman and her friends who helped her get a abortion out of state. The case was dropped because the man hacked his partners' phone to get the imformation.

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Fuck them.....full stem ahead. Do not give an inch. No compromises.

The Republican party = the party of sex predators and offenders. All covering for each other, so fuckin corrupt.

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No compromises. To me, like you, the only real question is, who makes decisions about your body, you with the aid of your doctor , or the government? No nuance.

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I don't think the doctor has any role outside of discussing medical options and the risks and benefits of each. The doctor's religious and moral convictions are completely irrelevant to the pregnant person's decision to have an abortion or not have one. (I was going to say, to continue the pregnancy but pregnancies do end for many reasons other than induced abortion.)

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