Florida court's abortion ruling is based on lies

They also kicked off the biggest reproductive rights battle yet

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

I was about halfway done with writing a deep dive into a handful of important but under the radar stories when the Florida Supreme Court went and did exactly what you’d expect of a contemporary Florida Supreme Court.

There’s a lot to discuss about today’s bombshell rulings, including how they happened and what comes next, so that will be our focus tonight, followed by some thoughts on the increasingly untenable situation in the Middle East. Tomorrow, we’ll dive back into the other news in a newsletter exclusively for paid subscribers. And if that’s not tantalizing enough, I’m also offering 30% off paid subscriptions below.

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NO SUNSHINE: The Florida Supreme Court on Monday delivered a devastating blow to reproductive rights while handing activists a glimmer of hope and extra motivation for the coming election.

A high court consisting entirely of Republicans upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, affirming a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022. The ruling also triggers a six-week abortion ban, signed by DeSantis last year, one month from now. How long that ban will last depends on how Floridians vote on a constitutional amendment that the court on Monday approved for the November ballot.

The abortion ban now in place contains no exceptions for rape or incest, making it one of the most draconian limits on reproductive rights in the nation. The number of abortions obtained in Florida has spiked since the Dobbs decision in the summer of 2002. Last year, more than 84,000 people got an abortion in Florida, including nearly 8,000 people from out of state.

To uphold the state’s ban on abortion, the court had to overturn 35 years of precedent, ignore important context, and disregard the results of several ballot initiatives. Prior to today, the right to an abortion in Florida was protected by a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1980. The amendment codified a broader right to privacy, guaranteeing Floridians “the right to be let alone and free from government intrusion into private life.”

The Precedent

Justice Jamie R. Grosshans, a DeSantis appointee writing for the majority, wants to both read the amendment exactly as written and divine public knowledge circa 1980. First comes her assertion that legislators who drafted the original amendment were thinking more about government surveillance than abortion, which is not untrue — this was just few years after the Roe v. Wade decision made that point moot.

Even so, Florida courts have long held that the right to an abortion is included in the 1980 amendment. The first real challenge was a lawsuit over a law requiring parental consent for teenagers to get an abortion. Re TW, as the case was called, saw the state Supreme Court definitively interpret the right to privacy as including the right to obtain an abortion.

“Florida's privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman's decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy,” the court wrote. “We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one's body that one can make in the course of a lifetime, except perhaps the decision of the terminally ill in their choice of whether to discontinue necessary medical treatment.”

Grosshans cited the overturning of Roe as a key factor in the decision, ignoring the fact that Roe was based on an implied right, not an explicit one. The justice also tried to bridge that significant difference by trying to rewrite historical context. To do so, she alleged that the 1989 decision did not consider “how Florida voters would have understood the text of the provision” when it passed in 1980.

That is simply not true. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Jorge Labarga cited plenty of coverage, including one Florida newspaper article after another from around that time. They showed up in other states, too; advocates were beginning to amass some power, organizing across the country, and challenging Planned Parenthood on the ground and in court. There was a deep awareness of the fact that the amendment protected things beyond wiretapping.

The Future

Despite state attorney general Ashley Moody’s best efforts to sink the abortion rights amendment, the court ruled 4-3 that it was sufficiently worded and could go to the ballot. Floridians Protecting Freedom, the coalition behind this amendment, has already collected the nearly one million signatures to get it on the ballot and now has to organize even more.

Using the “freedom” frame for the amendment — chef’s kiss.

It will require a 60% majority to pass Amendment 4, and early returns look promising. At the end of November, 62% of Floridians told pollsters for the University of North Florida that they supported the abortion rights amendment, including 55% of Republicans. Expect those numbers to increase now that the ban is in place, even if Republican officials have already started to bark like seals and call the amendment, which permits abortions until fetal viability, a “radical” plan.

There’s already been speculation the development could help Democrats in Florida in November, but counterintuitively, it’d be preferable for Florida Democrats to stay away from this one. The party’s brand is utterly toxic after DeSantis torched in the 2022 gubernatorial election, it continues to slip in polls, and chairwoman Nikki Fried just triggered a whole internal war by firing leaders in Miami-Dade and other important counties. Florida is one of 11 states where abortion will be on the ballot.

Republicans want to make this a partisan race, which could do serious damage to the percentage of GOP voters who support the right to make choices for their own body. At the same time, they’re going to have to walk a fine line — DeSantis signed the six-week ban in the middle of the night last year, hoping to avoid attention for the vile, unpopular limit on freedom that he’d just sent to home.

The United States should have pulled the plug on its support for the Netanyahu regime’s war as soon as Israeli diplomats began openly promising and executing the indiscriminate mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. Boasting about the initiation of mass ethnic cleansing — even when it’s just days after a horrible terrorist attack — should violate international norms.

It’s a dark moral stain on this country that the Biden administration has enabled more than six months of ethnic cleansing without so much as adding conditions to the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid sent to Israel. After the events that took place today, it would be not only morally unconscionable to continue to support this nightmare, but also strategically catastrophic for the administration not to take action.

Today the Israeli army ended its occupation of Al-Shifa hospital, leaving it in smoldering ruins in a scene that was said to resemble a horror movie — journalists found “entire families dead and their bodies are decomposed in houses around the hospital,” CNN reported.

The IDF also killed four relief workers who were trying to stop a famine with Chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, and executed an air strike against the Iranian embassy in Syria, killing several generals in what was a clear act of war.

Any retaliation by Iran’s (abhorrent) theocratic regime will likely put American lives at risk and draw the US into a blooming regional war. With no clear objective, giant targets that are hard to defend against guerilla fighters supported by Iran, and the potential for mass American casualties, it would be beyond catastrophic.

The killing of the four of José Andrés’s relief workers will become a bigger story than the Iranian embassy bombing. The guy is portrayed like a saint in the media — and for good reason — and nobody can possibly justify or shrug it off as many will do with the Iranian generals who were killed in the embassy bombing.

Ongoing support will also be political suicide. The horrors of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza — its screaming child amputees, sobbing parents, and life reduced to rubble — have been documented and disseminated in real-time, counteracting increasingly desperate attempts by AIPAC and allies to control the narrative and distract from the carnage.

Whether you like it or not, refusing to actually change course is seriously hurting Biden with core voters in swing states that he won by fractions of a percent in 2020. A new poll out of Wisconsin found that 1 in 5 voters say that the Gaza situation will impact their vote in November, while 71% of voters support an immediate ceasefire. Biden won Wisconsin by a 0.63% margin and currently trails Trump in most statewide polls.

If nothing else, Biden should want to save some face after being insulted, undermined, or humiliated almost daily by Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister has not only defied the president’s suggestions, he’s done so openly and gleefully, seemingly certain that the administration will just continue to help him keep power no matter how many children, parents, journalists, doctors, relief workers, and other civilians he sentences to death.

Biden should know that keeping a stiff upper lip while regularly being dunked on by Netanyahu does not project patience or wisdom. As he tolerates the mass death, the president seems meek and just not up to the job. Maybe appealing to his pride will change his mind.

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