The Texas Supreme Court Tells Women They Can Go Die

The Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s abortion laws Friday, overturning a lower court’s decision that would have allowed women within Texas to actually access abortions granted within the confines of the state’s ban.

The case, Zurawski v. Texas, began with five women and eventually grew to represent 20 women and two doctors. It became the strongest challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s myriad abortion restrictions implemented since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the suit last year, argued that while the state’s laws technically left room for abortions in urgent circumstances, they were also so vague that they practically restricted all medical practitioners from actually considering the procedure as an option. Specifically, people could undergo abortions during complicated pregnancies so long as their doctor made a “good faith judgment” that it was medically necessary.

But opponents to the laws have argued that “good faith” is too subjective for language determining medical access—and could potentially open doctors up to lawsuits brought by anyone who didn’t believe the procedure was required. The court, however, did not see that complication.

“A physician who tells a patient, ‘Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,’ and in the same breath states ‘but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances’ is simply wrong in that legal assessment,” wrote Justice Jane Bland in the court’s opinion.

The ruling effectively leaves people in need of abortions within the state just two options: either leave, or risk death.

“Sadly, what we know is that there are anti-abortion advocates who will always question [a doctor’s] decision,” Molly Duane, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told The Texas Tribune. “I don’t know how all of this will actually function in practice … the fact that true exceptions do not exist in practice will continue to be the norm.”

The brief opinion made no mention of the 20-plus women who were represented by the lawsuit and who individually suffered under Texas’s nearly airtight abortion restrictions. Lauren Miller, a Dallas mother who was forced out of state after learning that one of her twin fetuses had a complication that threatened her health as well as the health of her other child, told the Tribune that the decision felt like a “gut punch.”

“I read the ruling. I felt like I had missed something. And so I immediately reread it, and I realized what was missing in those pages was us. We weren’t there. We didn’t exist,” Miller told the publication.

One member of the court, Justice Brett Busby, left enough wiggle room in his concurring opinion for a broader challenge to the law. But legal challenges are time-consuming, and in the meantime, more patients could be forced to wait until their symptoms are life-threatening before doctors can offer them abortions.

Texas has recently turned up the heat on its anti-abortion policies, forcing the issue into the center of the Lone Star State’s politics. Over the weekend, a policy agenda proposed by the GOP convention in San Antonio included calls for legislation that would transform the fetal personhood ideology into law, a move that would effectively categorize any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.

House Speaker and fascist elf Mike Johnson called in to Fox and Friends on Friday to express his desire for the Supreme Court to “step in” and overturn the criminal convictions handed down by a Manhattan jury against Trump on Thursday.

During the segment, which Johnson published to his official YouTube channel, Johnson intimated that he’s spoken with Supreme Court justices who are “deeply concerned” about the criminal justice system functioning properly for once. “I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Johnson, either from wishful thinking or showing his hand, shifted from what he thinks and hopes the Supreme Court will do to essentially speaking on behalf of the court’s conservative bloc, promising viewers, “This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it; it’s just going to take some time to do it.”

At a press conference Friday, Donald Trump ranted and raved about his displeasure at being found guilty of 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial.

Standing in front of a line of flags at Trump Tower in New York, Trump took aim at Michael Cohen, Judge Juan Merchan, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Democrats, and just about anyone who he thinks wronged him, violating his gag order in the process. But his biggest target might have been the English language.

At times, his words were hard to follow, as the first convicted felon former president went off on tangents with sentences with no clear end.

In one bizarre sentence, he demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the word “literally” by claiming witnesses “for our side” were “literally crucified by this man who looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil,” referring to Merchan.

This could very well be another sign of cognitive decline from the Republican presidential nominee, exacerbated by possibly the worst news he’s ever received. Last week, at a Bronx rally, he bragged about being able to put on his pants, and two weeks ago, he seemed to freeze while speaking at the NRA’s annual convention. His rant on Friday included an attack on immigrants who speak incomprehensible languages, a nod to similar bizarre remarks he made at the southern U.S. border in February.

If Trump hadn’t also explained why he didn’t testify at this trial, anyone watching his remarks would have realized why themselves.

Donald Trump claims he wanted to testify in his hush-money trial—but he was afraid he’d be found guilty of more crimes. Trump’s statements came during a meandering, often incoherent tirade in front of the press at Trump Tower on Friday, the day after he was convicted of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury.

“I would have testified. I wanted to testify,” he said one day after his first criminal trial came to a close.

“The judge allowed them to go into everything I was ever involved in–not this case–everything I was ever involved in, which is a first. In other words, you could go into every single thing that I ever did [and ask], ‘Was he a bad boy here? Was he a bad boy there?’” he continued, seeming to imply that if the prosecution really dug into his past they would have found more crimes.

“But you would have been, you would have said something out of whack, like, ‘It was a beautiful sunny day,’ and it was actually raining out,” Trump continued, providing a false example of perjury, before seemingly word-associating to talk about the pro-Trump gathering outside Manhattan Criminal Court.

Trump opened his presser with claims that witnesses for Trump’s defense were “literally crucified” by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who Trump described as looking “so nice and soft” and that he “looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil” before moving on to his boilerplate racist rant about migrants.

During the trial, Trump falsely claimed he was prohibited from testifying as a result of a gag order restricting his public statements after he incited harassment against judge Juan Merchan and Merchan’s daughter. Trump allies opposed him testifying, voicing concerns about his tendency to ramble.

The day after Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony, he rushed to Trump Tower to hold a press conference proclaiming his innocence. But in doing so, he also immediately violated his gag order.

In a 30-minute speech on Friday, Trump slammed his former fixer Michael Cohen as slimy and untrustworthy.

“Again, if I wrote down and paid a lawyer—and by the way, this was a highly qualified lawyer. Now, I’m not allowed to use his name because of the gag order,” Trump said. “But, you know, he’s a sleazebag.”

“Everybody knows that,” he continued. “Took me a while to find out, but he was effective. He did work.”

Trump’s gag order—which has not yet been lifted—bars him from publicly attacking the court staff, witnesses, or jurors involved in the case. And he’s already been hit with repercussions for previous transgressions. Earlier this month, Judge Juan Merchan ruled that Trump would have to pay $10,000—the maximum penalty of $1,000 per violation—for continually breaking the order.

But that ruling came with an added threat that is still on the table. Since the court could not craft an “appropriate” financial penalty for a deep-pocketed defendant like Trump, Merchan wrote that, in order to “protect the dignity of the judicial system and to compel respect for its mandates,” the court “must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”

Trump is due to be sentenced on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention. And his words could come back to haunt him in that hearing: In criminal cases, judges often consider a defendant’s level of remorse (or lack thereof) when deciding a sentence.

Meanwhile, Cohen responded Friday in real time, posting on X that “Trump’s press conference was nothing shy of a batshit crazy avalanche of broken brain word manure,” while tagging his nickname for his former boss: “#VonShitzInPantz.”

Senator Joe Manchin is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

Politico reports that the West Virginia politician and thorn in the side of liberal priorities has made the decision to leave, citing sources close to Manchin. Shortly after, on Friday morning, Manchin confirmed the move.

Manchin had previously announced that he would not run for reelection for his Senate seat. His change in party affiliation now means he can run as an independent for the Senate, or even for governor of West Virginia, where he’d take on Republican rival Jim Justice. He has not announced plans to do either yet. Right now, the move makes him the fourth independent in the Democratic Caucus.

It’s the latest move from Manchin in a long career of taking shots at the Democratic Party. At one time, he was a critical part of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which he used to his advantage. He regularly sided with Republicans on critical issues such as student loan relief and climate change. He worked to keep the Senate filibuster, despite Democratic objections, with the help of fellow Democratic (and also now independent) Senator Kyrsten Sinema. He refused to back President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, resulting in the watered-down Inflation Reduction Act. He even killed the expanded Child Tax Credit.

So what’s the reason behind this move now? Manchin already toyed with a third-party run for president before backing out. Is Manchin going to stay in politics after all, staying in the Senate or looking at the governorship? Either way, it will be, in his mind, the best decision for himself.

Donald Trump and his fans are losing big on the crypto marketplace following his guilty verdict, despite his bragging just days earlier that he was confident in cryptocurrency.

As news of the verdict broke Thursday, the TRUMP token fell 35 percent, while a memecoin for President Joe Biden called “Jeo Boden” grew 20 percent.

Trump may have personally lost money last night too. According to blockchain data tracked by Arkham Intelligence, the former president reportedly holds assets worth approximately $10 million, with sizable amounts of MAGA tokens, ethereum (ETH), and MAGA VP tokens.

Alongside these memetokens, Trump has launched three NFT collections since December 2022, including the “Mugshot Edition NFTs.” But as the hush-money trial began in late April, the first edition of the Trump Digital Trading Card’s trading volumes fell 99 percent in 30 days.

Trump has bet heavily on a cryptocurrency payoff. Earlier this month, he spent one of his few days off the trial courting NFT buyers at a dinner in Mar-a-lago. Shortly after, he vowed to “build a crypto army.” And on Thursday, just hours before the verdict, Bloomberg reported that Trump was discussing crypto policy with Elon Musk.

While Musk denied specifically talking about crypto, it does appear that the Trump campaign is looking for an advisory role for Elon if he wins a second term.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are losing on standard markets too, with Truth Social stocks plummeting as much as 15 percent on Thursday.

Despite Trump’s myriad monetary failures, crypto traders at Polymarket, the blockchain-powered betting site, are still banking on Trump defeating Biden—putting his odds of winning at 54 percent—even after the conviction. Traders are also placing $900,000 wagers on whether Trump will see the inside of a jail cell by November, with some saying he has a 17 percent chance of imprisonment.

Ultimately, let’s hope the only blocks and chains Trump is involved with in the next year are in a cell block.

Representative Lauren Boebert’s attempts to highlight her congressional track record may have unintentionally damaged her reelection campaign.

Fending off criticism Thursday night during a Republican debate for Colorado District 4 representative hopefuls, Boebert attempted to draw attention to her work in the House—but ended up having to admit to her minimal accomplishments.

“For Ms. Boebert, how many bills did you prime-sponsor … in the U.S. Congress that actually were signed by the president of the United States?” asked state Representative Richard Holtorf, noting that “anybody can put their name on a bill after it passes” and become a co-sponsor.

Boebert immediately attempted to dodge the question, hitting the local conservative and primary competitor for having a “failing Liberty score,” a measure of a conservative’s policy stances.

“Would you like to answer the question, or would you like to talk about Liberty scores?” pressed Holtorf. “You can answer the question, ma’am, it’s OK. I asked a very specific question, please answer it.”

“I certainly will. One of my favorite pieces of legislation that has been signed into law is my Pueblo Jobs Act that creates at least 1,000 jobs in Pueblo, Colorado,” Boebert said, not revealing that that is actually the only bill she’s prime-sponsored that has become law.

“But there are also many other pieces of legislation that I’ve passed through the House—” she continued, before getting cut off by Holtorf, who clarified that “it doesn’t matter if it’s passed through the House. If the president doesn’t sign it, ma’am, then it doesn’t get passed.”

But the debate moderators gave Boebert one more chance to elucidate her congressional scorecard after her speaking time ran out.

“So my Pueblo Jobs Act—” she started, before the moderator insisted on a number.

“That is one,” Boebert finished weakly.

Boebert’s time in Congress, instead of being spent working on legislation for her constituents, has been sprinkled and seasoned with scandal. In September, the gun-toting Republican was caught vaping, recording, loudly singing along, and fondling her date during a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver, causing her and her date to get kicked out of the theater for “causing a disturbance.” And in February, the Colorado representative’s son was arrested in the city of Rifle over a string of thefts.

Boebert has also used her national platform to call Representative Ilhan Omar a “terrorist,” joined fellow conspiracy theorist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in heckling President Joe Biden during his 2022 State of the Union address, and faced calls for her resignation after she tweeted out the location of Nancy Pelosi as the former speaker of the House escaped charging rioters on January 6.

Supporters of the newly convicted Donald Trump are already disseminating extensive calls for violence. According to Reuters, which reviewed numerous posts across multiple conservative platforms, users have expressed desires to attack jurors and to kill Judge Juan Merchan, as well as to kill everyone in Washington, D.C., and Democrats overall.

“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one user on Patriots.Win, a far-right forum that was created after its genesis, r/The_Donald, was suspended by Reddit for hate speech.

“Time to start capping some leftys,” wrote one user on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit. “This cannot be fixed by voting.”

“1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” said another.

Fanning the flames himself, Trump posted on Truth Social shortly before the verdict, calling Merchan “highly conflicted” and sowing doubt about the integrity of the jury vote process that led to his conviction. In response, Reuters reports, a user posted a photo of a noose on a hangman’s platform with the caption “Treasonous mobster of the justices system.”

Trump also published a campaign video on Truth Social after his guilty verdicts, promising to “liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“This is the final battle,” Trump warns in the chilling video. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxist, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

Calls for violence from Trump supporters aren’t a new phenomenon—after all, these are the same people who carried out a violent riot at the Capitol in rejection of Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden. And Trump has been goading them on throughout his hush-money trial.

As Reuters notes, many of the threats and calls for violence circulating online don’t rise to the threshold of an actionable threat. But the intensity of hate spewing out from the MAGA cesspool following Trump’s conviction is sizable and has prompted far-right figures to urge people away from giving in to their desire to post things that will get them a visit from the FBI.

It’s every man for themselves in the Wild West of the Republican Party, with convicted felon Donald Trump warning other party members to stay far away from his fundraising efforts.

The presumptive GOP presidential candidate’s campaign wasted no time Thursday leveraging his hush-money conviction for its fundraising efforts, raising $34.8 million in a small-dollar haul in the hours after Trump became the first former president turned convicted felon in U.S. history. In emails to his supporters, a free-walking Trump described himself as a “political prisoner” and questioned if the verdict would be the “end of America.”

But Trump has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want any down-ballot Republicans to join his crusade—for fear that they could line their own pockets with donations that might instead have gone to him.

“Any Republican elected official, candidate or party committee siphoning money from President Trump’s donors are no better than Judge Merchan’s daughter,” Trump co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita told Politico. “We’re keeping a list, we’ll be checking it twice, and we aren’t in the spirit of Christmas.”

The Trump campaign had already delivered an unusual notice to GOP vendors in April requesting that other campaigning Republicans “who choose to use President Trump’s name, image, and likeness” share a minimum of 5 percent of their fundraising solicitations with the former president.

“This includes but is not limited to sending to the house file, prospecting vendors, and advertising,” LaCivita and his campaign co-manager Susie Wiles wrote in the letter.

But the ongoing money-grubbing is a stark sign for the health of the Trump campaign. Trump’s previous grifts included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and selling NFT trading cards of himself dressed in superhero costumes and astronaut suits. And, on top of maintaining some GOP megadonors post-conviction, Trump is well on his way to morphing the RNC into his personal piggy bank.

In March, he installed his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to co-run the organization alongside North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley. In an interview with Real America’s Voice, Lara Trump vaguely promised that “every single penny of every dollar donated” will go to causes that “people care about.”

But Republicans saw through that.

“There will be zero money available for any candidates down ballot. Zero,” Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, told USA Today at the time. “All of it will be funneled into the presidential, and despite what Chris LaCivita says, I’m pretty sure as much of it as can be will actually be funneled into covering Trump lawsuit costs.”