RIGHT WING EXTREMISM
‘Mastermind’ Behind Abbott’s Draconian Texas Abortion Ban Is a Longtime Anti-LGBTQ Conspiracy Theorist
Americans woke up last Wednesday morning to a new reality: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark legislation granting a woman a right to an abortion, was violently under attack through the passage of a new “heartbeat bill” in Texas.
That law—which bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, makes no exception for rape or incest, and allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids a woman in getting an abortion—is the first so-called heartbeat bill to have become law and actually be enforced. The Supreme Court did not swoop in and prevent the law’s enforcement as some had hoped: That evening, the top court allowed the law to stand in a 5-4 decision, with the five right-wing lawmakers firmly in camp against Roe simply claiming it was a procedural issue that abortion providers had not addressed, voting in effect for Texan women to lose the right to abortion provided under Roe.
For Janet Porter, the Texas law was a dream come true. The longtime religious-right activist took to Rumble, a posterboard of her book, “A Heartbeat Away,” propped up in the background as she announced the news. “That makes Texas the first state in the nation to actually enforce their heartbeat law of the 14 states who have passed them,” she told the camera.
“Grasp this for a moment,” she said, ecstatic, a smile spread across her face, her hands gesturing in excitement. “There is a place in the United States where nearly every child facing abortion is now legally protected. It is historic.”
“Today in Texas, if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected,” she said. “Soon, the nation will follow.”
Porter is often seen as the mastermind behind so-called heartbeat legislation, which bans women from having abortions after a “heartbeat” is detected—as early as six weeks in some cases and, for many women, before they’re aware that they are pregnant. Medical experts say the term “fetal heartbeat” is scientifically inaccurate, noting that at six weeks, the embryo—which is not yet a fetus—will have not yet developed a heart. But the term “fetal heartbeat” pulls at heartstrings, and its marketability, for a lack of better term, has Porter to thank.
While Porter has made restricting access abortion her main priority, the longtime religious-right activist’s extremism has been well documented on these pages. As Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Porter took to her radio program to spread the racist birther conspiracy theory championed by Donald Trump. Once Obama was elected, the conspiracies didn’t stop: As Right Wing Watch reported, she falsely claimed “Obama would orchestrate food shortages to starve conservatives to death, use a swine flu outbreak as an excuse to lock them up in concentration camps, and use Obamacare to deny them healthcare and eliminate them.” On the pages of World Net Daily, a far-right conspiracy website, she frequently penned columns—her last, published Dec. 11, 2020, refused to accept Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
When she wasn’t spreading noxious conspiracy theories, the activist was attempting to beat back the advance of gay rights, claiming Christians would be labeled criminals, rounded up, and tossed in jail if gay people had rights. She also trumpeted “conversion therapy,” a range of dangerous and discredited practices meant to change one’s sexual orientation, and was labeled the “The Architect of the ‘Conversion Therapy’ Campagin” by the New York Times. The activist, purportedly so concerned about the lives of children, even served as a spokeswoman for Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who unsuccessfully ran for Senate, defending him after he was accused of child molestation and attacking the woman who accused him.
At the heart of Porter’s activism is an effort to spread a fundamentalist version of Christianity. In 2010, her views became so extreme that VCY, the Christian radio station broadcasting her show, canceled it, citing “the drift of the program toward ‘dominion’ theology”—that is, the idea that Christians are called to take complete control over every aspect of human life in order to bring about the return of Christ. Among those aspects of human life: abortion and women’s bodies.
And so in 2011, Porter, working as the head of anti-choice group Faith2Action, found an Ohio state legislator, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, to champion legislation she had drafted to restrict access to abortion. The Ohio bill was the first “heartbeat bill” of its kind and so extreme—limiting abortion at the detection of a “heartbeat,” making no exceptions for incest or rape—that other anti-choice groups and legislators balked at it. Questioning the constitutionality of such a measure, they wondered whether the legislation would do more harm than good for their cause. Supporters of the bill said incremental steps weren’t working and were eager to directly challenge Roe. Porter herself was explicit about her goal, stating in 2017, that her “heartbeat bill” was “the foot in the door” to totally outlawing abortion.
“It was not my original idea, but I’ve been a pro-life leader here in Columbus for 26 years, and I’m committed to pushing the courts as far as we can go to protect human life, and that’s clearly what this bill is all about,” Wachtmann stated in February 2011 shortly before he introduced the bill.
At that point, Faith2Action already had a full-throttle pressure campaign underway to get the legislation passed. Under Porter’s leadership, the group urged its supporters to send heart-shaped red balloons to the Ohio governor and state representatives ahead of Valentine’s Day, “encouraging their support of the Heartbeat Bill” and to “Have a Heart!”—a message Porter repeated in a column for the far-right WND site. The bill passed in the state House later that year.
When the legislation stalled in the state Senate in 2012, Faith2Action took out a full-page ad in the Columbus Dispatch and made thousands of robocalls asking its supporters to contact state senators. That ad featured Dr. John Willke, founder of the National Right to Life and another sponsor of the bill. Revered in anti-abortion rights circles, Willke had perpetuated the false myth that a woman’s body can resist conception in rape, which may be among the reasons why the bill did not provide exceptions for abortion in case of rape. Another is that Porter doesn’t think women should be allowed to have any abortion, stating in 2017, “We’re not for killing any child, especially an innocent child for the crime of his father.”
The bill had wide support among religious-right figures both in state and out of state. An archived version of Faith2Action’s site for the bill lists E.W. Jackson, Samuel Rodriguez, Mat Staver, James Robison, Rick Joyner, Wendy Wright, Ken Blackwell, Jay Sekulow, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and Frank Pavone as supporters. It also featured a list of current and former elected officials: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Jim Jordan (then an Ohio state legislator), Rep. Louie Gohmert, former Sen. Rick Santorum, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Rep. Steve King, and former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
When the bill did reach then Gov. John Kasich, he vetoed it twice, preferring to sign another strict abortion ban at 12 weeks and citing constitutionality issues with the “heartbeat” legislation. But the bill found a champion in his Republican successor, Gov. Mike DeWine, who signed Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” into law in 2019 before Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued. A federal judge issued a temporary stay on the abortion ban and extended it again this spring.
A slew of red states followed suit, passing their own “heartbeat” abortion bans. The legislation mostly faced the same fate as the Ohio law—that is, except for Texas.
The Texas law provides a loophole those others did not: Instead of the state attorney general or other state officials enforcing the law, the law explicitly prevents state governments from enforcing it and essentially deputizes every citizen to sue anyone who performs an abortion or aids a woman in getting one. That leaves abortion clinics at a loss of who to sue. The purpose by the law’s drafters: to prevent intervention from federal courts.
So when the Supreme Court had a chance to stay the legislation, the conservative majority essentially said that the nation’s top court had its hands tied, that abortion providers in the state had not addressed the “complex and novel” procedural questions and would have to do so before the Supreme Court would take it up.
The Texas law also provides a bounty to incentivize enforcement: Any person who successfully sues would get $10,000 and their legal fees covered. Defendants who are successful are not entitled to have their legal fees covered, and anyone who aided a woman in getting an abortion could be sued multiple times. The effect is that most if not all clinics in the state have stopped providing abortions after six weeks for fear of bankruptcy.
The Texas law was sponsored by Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who asked conservative litigator Jonathan F. Mitchell how anti-abortion legislation could avoid the fate of other “heartbeat bills” that languished without enforcement after federal judges issued injunctions. Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general and active member of the Federalist Society, was already steeped in the religious-right effort to overturn Roe, representing towns sued by the ACLU over their ordinances that made abortion a crime. In 2017, while working alongside with Alliance Defending Freedom on a case about religious freedom, he trotted out a theory that he’d go on to use in Texas, claiming that no matter how unconstitutional a law was, if it did not charge a state official with the duty of enforcement, it couldn’t produce a federal lawsuit. Mitchell would become the primary architect of the Texas abortion law’s private-enforcement provision.
“We knew we had to have another way,” said Hughes, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We were going to find a way to pass a heartbeat bill that was going to be upheld.”
It’s unclear how much Porter, who was a supporter of the Texas law, had to do with this particular loophole, but the drafters of that particular bill have Porter’s popularization of the “heartbeat bill” to thank and the religious right’s decades-long campaign to overturn Roe of which she was a part.
National religious-right organizations, like ADF, have championed a state-by-state approach to chip away at the landmark legislation. This spring, the Supreme Court announced it will hear a case about a Mississippi law banning abortions at 15 weeks, a law that was based on ADF’s model legislation and a major threat to a woman’s right to an abortion. But so far, no effort has dealt as big of a blow to Roe as has Porter’s “heartbeat” legislation. Already, other states are considering a law based on Texas’ version of the “heartbeat bill.”
As she celebrated last Wednesday, Porter, too, looked forward.
“The National Association of Christian Lawmakers just adopted the Texas version of the heartbeat law as their model legislation,” she said, a smile dancing across her face between sentences. “That means we’re about to see a lot more heartbeat bills become law and actually get enforced.”
This article was originally published by Right Wing Watch and is republished here by permission .
Image: Screenshot via Right Wing Watch/Twitter
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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM
DeSantis Slammed by Former High-Level FBI Official After Declaring How He Would Treat Bureau’s Independence
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is under fresh fire after launching his presidential campaign and declaring he believes the Federal Bureau of Investigation and even the U.S. Dept. of Justice are not “independent” agencies, and they should be subject to the scrutiny of the President of the United States.
After disgraced GOP President Richard Nixon left office, a virtual wall between the White House and the U.S. Dept. of Justice, including especially the FBI, was created to prevent turning the chief law enforcement agencies of the federal government into political, partisan tools to do the bidding of the nation’s chief executive and Commander-in Chief.
Days after the November, 2016 election, the Los Angeles Times reported on the “revelation that President-elect Donald Trump does not intend to seek a new investigation into Hillary Clinton,” calling it “startling,” but “not only because it seemed to reverse a campaign pledge.”
“It also suggested that Trump thinks that that’s his decision to make, reflecting an apparent lack of regard for the cherished independence of the Justice Department, which is responsible for conducting investigations without the influence or opinion of the White House.”
“Long-standing protocol dictates that the FBI and Justice Department operate free of political influence or meddling from the White House,” The Times explained. “That’s one reason that the FBI director serves a 10-year term and does not turn over the reins as presidential administrations come and go. It also means that presidents are not supposed to supervise, initiate or stop law enforcement investigations.”
As president, Donald Trump and his attorneys general would immediately obliterate those protocols, with the then-President literally directing his AGs to acquiesce to his demands, and he would do so publicly, via Twitter.
Under President Joe Biden that wall was quickly rebuilt, with Attorney General Merrick Garland issuing a “directive restricting Justice Department contact with the White House as a firewall against potential political interference,” as USA Today reported in July of 2021.
“The order, which reaffirmed some policies of previous administrations, marks a sharp pivot from the Trump era when the former president casually broke with institutional norms, repeatedly calling on the department to launch investigations of his political rivals, including President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.”
And now, Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to not just rescind that order, if he wins the White House, he apparently wants to direct the activities of DOJ and FBI.
READ MORE: Bill Barr’s Former Special Counsel John Durham to Testify in House Hearing
In a little-noticed portion of his rare Fox News interview Wednesday, DeSantis told former U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy (who once was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and thus should know better,) of his apparent plans to remake the DOJ and the FBI.
“I would not keep Chris Wray as director of the FBI. There’d be a new one on Day One. I think that’s very important,” DeSantis declared, as the right-wing National Review reported. DeSantis is ignoring the fact that Congress has mandated FBI Directors be appointed for a full ten-year term, while allowing Presidents to remove them, generally for cause.
“Under the Constitution,” The National Constitution Center wrote in March of 2017, less than two months into Trump’s term, “the FBI Director is an executive branch official and can be removed if needed. But only in one instance since 1908, after the FBI and its predecessor agency were formed, has a President removed an FBI Director from office.”
Less than two months later, on May 9, Trump became the second president to fire an FBI Director. Trump terminated Jim Comey by falsely claiming it was over how he handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, by announcing to Congress he was revisiting it after obtaining a laptop that had some of her emails. (Many, including FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, and Comey himself, believe that move likely handed Trump the election.)
Now DeSantis, literally on the first day of his presidential campaign, is vowing to become the third president in history to fire an FBI Director.
“I think the DOJ and FBI have lost their way,” DeSantis continued in his Fox News interview. “I think that they’ve been weaponized against Americans who think like me and you, and I think they’ve become very partisan. Part of the reason that’s happened, Trey, is because Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are independent.”
“They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”
Semafor’s David Weigel, pointing to the nascent GOP presidential candidate’s remarks, writes via Twitter, “DeSantis’s answer to Fox on why he’d fire Chris Wray = great example of how a norm fades away. D[emocratic] presidents grudgingly pick GOP FBI directors. Trump fires Comey, huge scandal, Mueller probe. DeSantis saying outright that the FBI is not ‘independent,’ president can reshape it.”
Pete Strzok is a former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. He led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and earlier, as chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section led the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server.
After being viciously targeted repeatedly by Donald Trump, Strzok was fired. He is suing for wrongful termination.
On Friday he responded to DeSantis’ remarks and Weigel’s tweet.
“ALL presidents pick GOP FBI directors. There has never been a Democrat FBI director. Ever,” Strzok tweeted.
He added he agrees with national security and civil liberties journalist Marcy Wheeler, and says, “this isn’t some norm fading away. This is a sudden assault on a generations-long norm by one man and those who support him, or seek the support of his base.”
In October of 2017, nearly one year after Trump was elected President, NPR published a report: “‘Breaching The ‘Wall’: Is The White House Encroaching On DOJ Independence?”
It includes remarks from several Democrats, weighing in on how Trump had been reshaping the White House’s relationship with DOJ and the FBI.
At the time, despite his extreme actions, Democrats generally pointed to a “perception” problem, not the legal crisis it would become.
Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, however, was more forceful.
“There has to be a wall” between DOJ and the White House, Holder told NPR. “History has shown us that when that wall is too low, that’s when Justice departments get in trouble.”
NPR also quoted Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who at a hearing in October of 2017 said: “The attorney general’s master is the people and the law.”
RIGHT WING EXTREMISM
‘Sheer Insanity’: Morning Joe Torches Trump and DeSantis for Floating Pardons for MAGA Rioters
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called out the depravity of the two leading Republican presidential contenders for signaling they would pardon rioters who were convicted of crimes for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have each said they would at least consider pardons for many of the insurrectionists, some of whom were sentenced to years in prison Thursday for taking part in a seditious conspiracy, and the “Morning Joe” host was appalled.
“How can you do that when one of the most grievous crimes committed in the United States this century, other than Sept. 11, happened, and you’ve got the two top Republican candidates saying, yeah, you know what we’re going to do — let the rioters go,” Scarborough said. “By the way, the question asked of Trump was not, what are you going to do for those people who were just touring the grounds on Jan. 6? The specific question was, are you going to pardon the rioters? The rioters — Donald Trump said yes. Then DeSantis follows behind, trying to play catch-up with Donald Trump instead of providing this contrast that Americans desperately want.”
Scarborough said he couldn’t really imagine a GOP contender agreeing the rioters should be prosecuted, despite their claims to the principals of law and order.
READ MORE: ‘Trump understands he’s in serious trouble here’ after new Mar-a-Lago bombshell: Morning Joe
“They bitch and whine, saying, ‘Oh, there weren’t enough prosecutions of the rioters during the [Black Lives Matter], so the answer is not to prosecute people who tried to take down the United States government?” he said. “It’s sheer insanity. If you think that maybe the Justice Department could have done a better job in 2020, the answer is not to do a lousy job in 2023. It’s to actually do better.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
RIGHT WING EXTREMISM
Republican Complaining It’s ‘Almost Impossible’ for Straight ‘White Guys’ to Get Appointed by Biden Has History of Bigotry
A Republican U.S. Congressman complaining that President Joe Biden isn’t appointing enough straight white men to the federal judiciary has a long history of racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who has spent the past three decades as an elected official, stood on the House floor Thursday to discuss what he called a new “study” that showed out of 97 judicial appointments President Biden made in his first two years in office, just five were “white guys,” and “two were gay.”
“A study was done a little while ago on the federal judiciary. I wish we had these studies for all other appointments by the Biden administration,” Rep. Grothman says. “And apparently in his first two years, President Biden had appointed 97 federal judges. Of the 97 federal judges, I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were white guys, because I know President Biden wasn’t heavy on appointing more white guys.”
“Five of the 97 judges were white guys of those, two were gay. So almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay apparently to get appointed,” the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker complained.
The video, posted to Twitter Thursday afternoon, has quickly gone viral, garnering 1.2 million views in just four hours.
Wisconsin’s finest Glenn Grothman is on the House floor right now complaining that Biden isn’t nominating enough straight “white guys” as judges pic.twitter.com/mdTmqiToxQ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 25, 2023
Grothman’s history of bigotry has been well-documented over the years.
“In 2010 Grothman, who believes that homosexuality is a choice, proposed banning Wisconsin public school teachers from mentioning homosexuality in sex education classes because some teachers had an ‘agenda’ to turn kids gay,” as Mother Jones reported.
In 2015 Grothman responded to the U.S. Supreme Court decision the found same-sex couples have the same constitutional rights and responsibilities to marriage as their different-sex peers. Grothman said the Obergefell ruling, as Right Wing Watch reported, “was an affront to the Americans who died in the Civil War because it was ‘a strong religious war to further a Christian lifestyle by getting rid of slavery.'”
In 2019, he was one of 53 members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives who urged the U.S. Supreme Court, in writing, to rule against LGBTQ people. The lawmakers, all Republicans, said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not – and should not be interpreted to – protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.
In 2021, Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) blasted Grothman after he claimed Black Lives Matter “doesn’t like the old-fashioned family.”
On House floor, @RepGrothman mentioned Black Lives Matter:
“I know it’s a group that doesn’t like the old-fashioned family.”@StaceyPlaskett: “How dare you!” pic.twitter.com/5T6qyXeDQl— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) March 10, 2021
“If you just look up Glenn Grothman, he has a history of making remarks about ‘welfare mommas,’ just very racist remarks throughout his time,” Placket later told MSNBC.
Last year Grothman, who ran unopposed for his seat, was one of 33 House Republicans who sponsored a federal vigilante “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Back in March, all 26 Republicans on the House oversight Committee, including Grothman, refused to sign a simply two-sentence statement denouncing white supremacy.
“We, Members of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, together denounce white nationalism and white supremacy in all its forms, including the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. These hateful and dangerous ideologies have no place in the work of the
United States Congress or our Committee,” the statement from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) read.
Also in March Rep. Grothman was one of just eight members of the House – all Republicans – to vote to suspend normal trade relations with Russia, in response to Vladimir Putin ‘s illegal war against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, many on social media reacted to Grothman’s complaint there are not enough straight white men on the federal bench by pointing to various statistics to show the Wisconsin Congressman that the vast majority of Donald Trump’s appointees to the federal bench were straight white men.
According to Pew Research, in his four years as president, just 16% of Trump’s massive number of judicial appointees were not white. Just 24% were women.
“Glad to see someone standing up for that repressed and beleaguered demographic,” tweeted Steve Metz, sarcastically. Metz is an author and professor of national security and strategy at the U.S. Army War College.
“Republicans are the only party brave enough to dream of an America where white men are finally given a voice on the federal judiciary,” mockingly claimed CREW’s research director Robert Maguire. Maguire posted charts showing the lack of racial and gender diversity in the nation’s federal courts.
“For the first 139 years, all federal judges were white males,” noted a Twitter user whose bio says they are an attorney. “The first woman was appointed in 1934, the first black man in 1950. Even now white males are over represented, 71% of the judiciary versus 61% of the general population. Biden is trying, but we aren’t there yet.”
Another Twitter user observed, “This is what the GOP war on Woke is all about! The GOP is terrified that their white dominance in society is eroding.”
Watch the videos of Grothman above or at this link.
Reporters Reveal Some Republicans Don’t Understand What a Default Means – and Don’t Believe the Debt Ceiling Is Real
‘Start the Kevin McCarthy Death-Clock’ After Biden Wins Debt Ceiling Battle: Rick Wilson
Debt Ceiling: McCarthy Faces ‘Lingering Anger’ and a Possible Revolt as Far-Right House Members Start Issuing Threats
Prosecutors Tell Trump They Have a Recording of Him and a Witness: Report
‘Likely to Be Indicted Soon’: Trump Might Face Seven Different Felonies, Government Watchdog Says
News2 days agoDebt Ceiling: McCarthy Faces ‘Lingering Anger’ and a Possible Revolt as Far-Right House Members Start Issuing Threats
BREAKING NEWS3 days agoProsecutors Tell Trump They Have a Recording of Him and a Witness: Report
- News1 day ago
‘Start the Kevin McCarthy Death-Clock’ After Biden Wins Debt Ceiling Battle: Rick Wilson
RIGHT WING EXTREMISM3 days agoDeSantis Slammed by Former High-Level FBI Official After Declaring How He Would Treat Bureau’s Independence
News4 hours agoReporters Reveal Some Republicans Don’t Understand What a Default Means – and Don’t Believe the Debt Ceiling Is Real
