My wife just mentioned this to me this morning, and it's bleak in many ways: patient came to see her--18, female, not sexually active, about to go to college in Kansas. She wants to start birth control because she's worried she might be raped and get pregnant and have no options.
I think when our kids hit high school, I will try to figure out how to pre-order some abortion pills to have on hand. And depending where they go to college, send them off with some.
Particularly given that, as we've discussed here before, BC pills can have very serious side effects for some women. They're fine for lots of people, but taking them isn't necessarily a trivial thing.
Having a 6yo daughter in Utah is depressing right now.
5: yeah. I'd honestly go with one of the IUDs, since you don't have to worry about refilling the scripts while at school.
7: me too. Maybe this isn't an issue for most people, but I remember I threw up more than occasionally in college (stress, food poisoning, drinking too much), and also life in college is hectic and it's not always easy to stick to routines. I wouldn't want a teenager to have to rely on a regimen that requires fairly strict daily compliance for maximum efficacy when the stakes are so incredibly high. IUDs are incredibly painful to insert, though. This is all so terrible.
I do wish America would decide if it's going Nazi or Taliban.
9: Probably neither, but a bit of each with special USA sauce that is mostly guns.
8: Especially since I think they are more painful for nulliparous women. For me, one was impossible, but one was ok. What was more painful was the cramping the afternoon after when I really needed a hot water bottle. I went back again to a specialist clinic, and they gave me a warm blanket and hot water bottle to make it more comfortable. There's a new smaller one for younger women.
They really should look into offering pain management with some kind of anesthesia.
7. Which state is it where they're trying to make IUDs illegal?
Yeah, the IUD wasn't bad at all for me, but I had my first after two kids. (In exciting IUD news, I just found out I can stretch my current one for twelve years instead of ten, which absolutely has to get me past any possible last vestiges of fertility.)
12: Does anyone understand why it's IUDs that they want to ban? Like where does the theory that IUDs may prevent implantation come from? Just that the mechanism is not well-understood? Surely anything might prevent implantation and you'd have no way to tell anyway, so why IUDs and not hormonal birth control? Or is it just that IUDs weren't around when Republican voters were young enough to need birth control?
I think they would also gladly ban hormonal birth control if they thought they could.
Yeah, I think they just see IUDs as an easier lift politically to start with. There's no real reason to differentiate the two even under their (false) theory of how they work.
14: some IUDs use hormones, and some use copper.
I never understood how Thomas Frank got a whole book out of "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
They're assholes! Case closed.
14: that, plus it's thought to be possible for a woman to get an IUD without her spouse noticing.
It is possible to get abortion pills in advance, aidaccess.org probably the cheapest/easiest way for most ppl. It should be better known. They'll mail them even to anti-states since the doctor is licensed in another country. Not risk free but most places criminalize providers rather than pregnant people (but some prosecutors are assholes and don't care what the law says.) They expire, I think it's after 5 years for mifepristone, 2 years for misprostol. https://twitter.com/Krhawkins5/status/1554532515288911875?s=20&t=2SFbUnR7if-VQFUcUjORhg
It is possible to get abortion pills in advance, aidaccess.org probably the cheapest/easiest way for most ppl. It should be better known. They'll mail them even to anti-states since the doctor is licensed in another country. Not risk free but most places criminalize providers rather than pregnant people (but some prosecutors are assholes and don't care what the law says.) They expire, I think it's after 5 years for mifepristone, 2 years for misprostol. https://twitter.com/Krhawkins5/status/1554532515288911875?s=20&t=2SFbUnR7if-VQFUcUjORhg
20 and 21: I feel like they are starting to criminalize women - at least criminalizing
/ deeming negligent the behavior of pregnant women that might be construed as harmful to a fetus.
23: Yep, that's exactly what they're doing. They're being remarkably blatant about it.
Kansas may be ok, according to the Cook Report guy.
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1554639811595669505
Kansas may be ok, according to the Cook Report guy.
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1554639811595669505
Omg! I did not expect this! That makes me feel so much lighter, temporarily.
Wow: Riley County, which was 51% for Biden, is so far 75% against the amendment on mail-in votes, 69% on election day. Abortion rights are as popular as optimists say?
Yeah, looking good, here's the Nate I still follow at 538:
https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/1554644404052410368
I'm glad to see the good results so far, I'm not going to relax until more of the votes are counted, but it would be an exciting victory if the amendment failed.
29: The caveat to keep in mind is that voting "no" on ballot initiatives is very popular no matter what the initiative says. A vote to add abortion rights to a constitution that didn't already protect them would be a heavier lift.
That's true, people are generally change-averse.
That's just because American change is too low-value. Loonies and Toonies are great.
And in this cartoonie, they're invading your TV.
AP called it!
Eric won in Missouri. Trump's endorsement was probably critical.
I retract 18. Kansans rock!
32: True, but these margins seem big enough they might be resilient to that effect. Especially in states less red than Kansas.
Also, this was a primary election with 30% less turnout than the last general.
NYTimes Nate is estimating the margin as 14-points (i.e. 57-43).
Seriously, it does seem good that Eric Greitens lost his primary. Not that the other Eric is any good.
40-42: The potential good news in it being a primary (chosen specifically for the amendment because for most of Kansas only R races matter plus it is a "closed" primary*) is that the "no" still is winning handily and it seems to have motivated a Lot of voters to turn out (still low of course).
Total votes cast in abortion amendment is 590,000 right now. 218k YES, 372k NO.
That's 124K MORE votes than the combined Senate primaries for Dem (190k) or GOP (297k) -- independents cannot vote in KS partisan primaries.
So a lot of "independents" showed up to vote just for the amendment as they cannot vote for candidates. I suspect the D vote was boosted compared to similar primaries.
*Pa. did this for it's last stupid amendments and looking to do so for an Abortion amendment.
With 84 percent reporting in Kansas, it's 61-39 in favor of abortion rights. That will move a bit in the direction of the anti-rights folks, I think, but not much.
I don't think the significance of this can be easily minimized. People on both sides know what they are voting on, and this vote was supposed to be close. I think there was definitely an imbalance in which side was more motivated by this issue.
44-45: Me. And KS turnout is actually pretty decent by general election standards. If projections of $ are accurate looks to be heading towards about 1m which is what the 2018 general was with a very competitive governor's race (Kris Kobach losing).
The one thing that sounds hopeful that I'm not sure holds water is relatively small, that the ballot measure was confusing and could have led some voters to think they were voting for limited protections. But I feel like when a measure is confusing, that makes frustrated people give up and vote no as much as it makes confused people vote yes.
A lot of Republicans have voted NO, I think. I doubt that spills over into the congressional races in November, but maybe some marginal state legislative seats will go the other way, if the R is making noises about trying for a ban somehow anyway.
Aha: young people turned out extra, so that Riley County example is perhaps extreme swing.
I put together 2020 % Biden and 2022 % no, and they're surprisingly clustered in how much they swung. Of the 95 counties with results in, the swing is +19% (at the moment), interquartile range 16-23%.
This Kansas result is huge. It seems like the right really has overreached on this.
NYT top headline right now: "Kansans Surge to Polls to Defend Abortion Rights."
Also good news for Alaska, which is in a very similar situation regarding state constitutional protection for abortion.
I'm finding it hard not to be encouraged by the Kansas vote. The venue - a primary vote in a state where the Republican races are naturally more interesting - was designed to be unfavorable. Had it been a close win, I would have taken that as a good sign. This was a blowout.
This thread reminds me that I'm going to Kansas later this month. I probably haven't been to Kansas as an adult.
The question is what is going to happen when the GOP passes a national abortion ban in ~2025. Does the state-level energy translate into anything at that point?
They'd need Congress and the Presidency to do that, unless they had a veto proof majority in the Senate. If the level of energy pro-choice voters have on this issue isn't enough to keep that from happening, I don't think they'll do much against a national ban at the state level. But I think there's a strong chance it won't happen
What happens if the Supreme Court declares a national ban on the grounds that fetuses are babies so not prosecuting their deaths as murder violates the Equal Protection Clause? That one, I don't know what happens, but I'd expect open blue-state defiance. Maybe effective, maybe not.
The anti-abortion people are never going to stop; I won't be surprised when the Kansas legislature goes ahead and passes a total ban at 15 weeks, or 10, or whatever they think that they can possibly argue in their state courts. The language of the Kansas Constitution that the state supreme court has determined protects the right to end a pregnancy is plenty vague: All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's not beyond imagining that a newly staffed judiciary would read Dobbs and think well, the court got this wrong in 2019.
A federal ban -- and I think Republicans will have a trifecta in 2029, if not in 2025 -- is certainly going to be passed. Prosecutors in blue states may well stand down, but providers won't be able to get insurance, and Congress can as well go the Texas bounty route, so you end up with nurses turning in doctors.
60: You know, somewhere there's a Donald Barthelme story, one of the ones that's just dialogue, that goes:
"How bleak, baby?"
"The bleakest."
I honestly can't understand how this court could chose to not enact a national abortion ban. When that issue is brought before the court, who defects from the Fascist Five?
Question for the lawyers: Who would have standing to sue on behalf of the zygotes?
Presumably, the suit will be filed by man who wants a woman to carry his baby when she doesn't want to.
60.2: The Kansas thing has got me seriously wondering about whether doom is inevitable. The question has always been: Is there a floor below which this country will not sink? American politics since 1980 has been a search for the bottom -- and a failure to find it. In the moment, I really thought Jan. 6 was it -- the point where even Republicans would agree that this was beyond the pale. That turned out to be way wrong, but Kansas suggests that maybe forced birth is where a sufficient majority of Americans might draw the line. (I mean, I don't want to get carried away here, but still ...)
I'm not a lawyer, but I also don't listen well.
Question for the lawyers: Who would have standing to sue on behalf of the zygotes?
IANALB an estranged husband?
Yeah, I don't see any ready mechanism by which the US Supreme Court imposes a ban. They've made clear that police/prosecutors don't owe any duties to arrest people in, eg, DV cases with restraining orders, and all those other contexts, so imposing the kind of ruling LB mentions would upset that.
I can imagine, a la Moby's 63, them giving fathers an absolute veto as a national rule.
63, 66: I'm thinking that can't be it -- until we really get into Handmaid's Tale territory. The right that is implicated here is one that belongs to the fetus -- it's not a property right belonging to the male.
I think if the issue weren't the property rights of the male, we'd have a very different political climate.
64 Come November, Kansans will elect a solidly red legislature, and at least 4 red members to their 5 seats in Congress. Most of those politicians will think they would never pay a price for being anti-abortion, and most of those will be right. Some marginal races might be affected.
70: Yeah, as I said, I don't want to get carried away here. The case for hopelessness remains strong, but still ...
It doesn't have to be "property" -- the male can have a liberty interest in his own posterity. There are problems with this frame, obviously, since abortion isn't usually state action, so the question is how our theocrats can find a way around that. I think we're more likely to see a national ban from Congress, once there's a trifecta.
I was thinking of "property" as the woman, so far as being the real issue animating the movement.
62: In several abortion-related cases over the years, judges have appointed lawyers to represent the interests of the fetus, usually by analogy to appointment to represent a baby in a custody case, or a completely incapacitated (e.g. comatose) adult in a termination of life support case. I believe that some states have codified this practice. Not clear if it could be done in federal court.
has got me seriously wondering about whether doom is inevitable
The Boomers will eventually die. It feels like forever, but they will. The under 45's are very different people.
has got me seriously wondering about whether doom is inevitable
The Boomers will eventually die. It feels like forever, but they will. The under 45's are very different people.
The boomers will eventually die
True, but they can take everyone else with them, and credit Jesus/rhe communist threat/the bitch-goddess Success so they feel good about it as they go.
Great. Just when I'm dead, we can start to fix things.
I'm Gen X, but over 45, apparently I'm in a narrow window in American politics.
I'm the exact pivot year (age 50, now). In 2016, I was the age where Dems stopped supporting Clinton and started supporting Sanders.
I'm 51. But my tendons have the elasticity of a much older man.
More good news: Sinema's demands for the IRA are mostly stupid (keep carried interest loophole) but overall quite modest! https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/08-3-2022/sinemas-ask/
Some of them would even make it better! Obviously there's a large element of theater to these sorts of leaks so who knows what's actually going on. But it's a good sign that this is what someone thinks is worth leaking.
The under 45's are very different people.
Many of the more prominent younger* rightwingers seem significantly worse on issues like "democracy...good?" than the older set, though that might just be a function of the older set having grown up in a world where democratic institutions were taken for granted until recent times.
*But possibly still over 45.
76: I share your optimism on this, but I worry that, in the same manner that some Hispanics are becoming white, a lot of young people will get old.
Given the healthcare system and gutted public health efforts, certainly not as many as in the past.
Just because I can't remember: does this parallel McCain in any way? Did he specially ask for anything during the ACA stuff that signaled he'd vote with Republicans if it went his way?
Just asking at all is a good sign, the maximally dramatic approach is just to not ask. I'm not sure ACA repeal had the same kind of details or negotiations, it was just repealing.
Speaking of the broken us health care system, this Mark Cuban pharmacy thing is interesting. I'm trying out Atomoxetine for ADHD and it's $105 a month through my insurance (or $360 a month retail at CVS), but only $10 from Mark Cuban.
The nice thing about Lisinopril is that it is very cheap.
I worry that, in the same manner that some Hispanics are becoming white, a lot of young people will get old.
That's a recognized political pattern partly because of our political economy. But as more and more de-youthening people pay through the nose for housing and childcare and have less and less stable employment, I think they're not going to grow into a comfortable status quo attachment like they used to.
87: For McCain, the stated reasons for his nay were the failure to follow proper procedures -- they skipped over committee consideration of the bill.
I'm not sure ACA repeal had the same kind of details or negotiations, it was just repealing.
No, clean repeal was something attempted in the first month of 2017 or so and it fell on its face. The proposal McCain killed, the American Health Care Act, was awful, but it at least had details and points to negotiate.
93: It's not that simple either. The AHCA couldn't get the support of enough Republicans, and so they tried out the "Health Care Freedom Act" aka "skinny repeal"
After several failed votes within 24 hours of the bill being passed to floor debate, including a repeal without replace bill, the Republican senate leadership attempted to pass the Health Care Freedom Act (HCFA), referred to as a "skinny repeal." The skinny repeal, which was still being drafted on July 27, only repeals some provisions of the ACA, among them the individual mandate, requiring that all Americans buy insurance or pay a tax penalty, and parts of the employer mandate, which requires employers with greater than 50 employees to pay for health care for their employees.[110][111] The bill was brought to the floor vote and the vote reached the predicted 49-50, majority being in favor of keeping the ACA as is. A tie would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to cast a final tie breaking vote. The final vote was to be McCain, who walked to the floor in near silence and held out his hand. In a very climactic moment, he gave a thumbs down and the bill was rejected 49-51, with two other Republican senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, siding with all Democrats and Independents
The thing is that people under 45 are way to the left of where old people ever were. So even if they become more conservative with age, it'll still be a huge huge change. Especially around Christianity, so so many non-religious young people.
94: Wow, I forgot that part, yeah. Still, not clean repeal.
Lol @ thinking this court would let a thing like standing get into their way
People talk about economists having physics envy, but the real lawyer-brain is thinking Federaliat Society judges are bound to consistency and abstract fairness as if liberalism was a law of nature.
94, 96: I had forgotten all of that as well. Also more ploys within ploys per NPR:
The bill was deeply unpopular, but GOP leaders worked to assure members it would never become law. Instead, they wanted the Senate to pass it in order to advance the legislation to a third round of negotiations with the House to try to craft a final bill both chambers could pass.
OT: John Wick is the world if Bill and Ted failed and Ted got sent to military school.
Sinema is a yes! Looks like this thing is actually happening.
Thank you. I've been deliberately avoiding news on that for fear of failure. And because of the mass murder in James Colburn's birth place.
Josh Marshall has a good take on Sinema and how she's still terrible even though she seems to be getting on the right side here.
106: I don't approve. How is she going to improve if she gets such harsh criticism even after doing the right thing? We should all agree to say nice things about her until the vote and maybe even for a week after.
She is legitimately doing the right thing and being a team player here. Even her demanded changes to the bill were mostly (small) improvements.
109: If it's still roughly carried interest 14 billion, drought prevention 5 billion, I still see that as majority bad, measured by dollars.
In theory rewarding improvement is good, but I wonder how much scope there is at this point. She's shit the bed so often, particularly on minimum wage.
Alexandra Petri nailed it again: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/sinema-ira-tax-loophole-satire/
I mean, majority bad influence on the bill. Obviously continuing to support it is the biggest good.
I suspect she will vote yes on at least one of the Republican-proposed "amendments."
What will be the wackiest ones of those?
And wait the frigging parliamentarian has ruled thst limiting drug prices in private health insurance not allowed in reconciliation?
Christ.
If it's still roughly carried interest 14 billion, drought prevention 5 billion, I still see that as majority bad, measured by dollars.
Taking out the carried interest piece is bad, but the stock buyback tax they replaced it with is apparently good policy on its own merits so I think it does net out to a slight improvement overall.
112: So far so good from everyone. (I'm a bit confused how far we are into the process.)
And as for 113 and the similar insulin cap, I assume they can be included with a 60 vote amendment? So at least vote on that. Symbolic votes can cut both ways.
I watched fairly late last night, and have picked it up again. R amendments keep failing 50-50 -- they've really stayed at it all night -- and Sanders' amendments (they're voting on another right now) fail with margins more like 99-1, or 97-3. I think the current one is going to fail 99-1. I guess there's a constituency for this kind of thing.
When the Dems think that a particular amendment is a tough vote -- like the immigration ones -- then a Dem introduces something similar that requires 60 votes. These fail with 54 or 56 votes or so.
Was going too smoothly. so Thune coming up with a Sinema-supported carve out of 15% min tax for "private equity" subsidiaries.
Pay for is more SALT stuff, which risks activating the House dudes. Jesus Fuck. Just fucking do the agreed to thing.
In the meantime, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separation-policy-immigration/670604/
A couple of others too: 57-43. Here's the Thune: https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/5472.pdf
It's such sausage, that it's hard to tell what is really going on. The SALT change looks pretty innocuous, but I don't know all the ins and outs.
Uggggh . . . 119.last is exactly right.
123.last: It is just such a trigger for Gottheimer et al. Appears there is some non-SALT alternative to raise money.
125 Warner's, which went 50/50 but the VP broke the tie. I think the bill's going to pass, and the House is going to get this done. No way does Pelosi want to put them through this again.
It passed the Senate! Hurray for Manchin and Sinema!
And it's done. Easy as pie. On to the house, where I expect someone will somehow provide some drama.
And 112 was annoyingly a good prediction.
As for the wackiest, I think Collins' amendment requiring the new IRS people authorized to be hired work in person at the office has to be a real contender. The war on working from home is truly the lamest culture war.
Wow. The Kansas vote plus Sinema, everything really is coming up
milhouse.
127: It must be real because I've already gotten a text asking for $15 to enable a stronger majority with more and better legislative things.
This is funny (Yglesias reposting an old report that suggested that one of his columns influenced the congressional debate -- and, true to his style, does so in an ironic way that will annoy people): https://nitter.net/mattyglesias/status/1556401087367749634#m