Texas's Freaky Anti-Abortion Justice Gets a Last-Minute Challenger

And a whooole lot of other news stories

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

This newsletter is absolutely packed, so I’m going to re-send an updated version of the second half of it tonight, with some additional news stories, to paid subscribers. I want to make sure that people get all the news they can and that I’m making it as easy as possible for those who so kindly support this work to maximize their value.

Before we get started, two pieces of breaking Supreme Court news:

First, the court announced this morning that it will hear a case over the FDA’s decision in 2016 to expand access to abortion medication, but will not take up a case that sought to overturn the medication’s original approval in 2000. This is actually good news, as the DOJ is challenging limits on the drug imposed by the far-right 5th Circuit.

Shortly thereafter, it also said that it would hear a major case concerning the prosecution of former President Trump and the hooting minions who heeded his call to action on January 6th. This isn’t the case requested by special counsel Jack Smith, and could actually strike a huge blow to both his case against Trump and the convictions of many of his followers.

OK, now to the main event!

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⚖️ 🗳️ It came down to the wire, but rabid anti-abortion terrorist and Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine officially has a Democratic opponent in next November’s election.

Devine, who used to boast about being arrested more than three dozen times for harassing women outside of abortion clinics, will try for a third term on the court in a race against Christine Vinh Weems, who submitted the necessary petition signatures to get on the ballot just before Monday’s filing deadline.

Weems’s timing, however incidental, couldn’t have been better. Devine has gained national notoriety over the past week as a woman suffering physically with an unviable pregnancy sought an abortion under the vague exception to Texas’s otherwise blanket ban on the procedure. A lower court granted Katie Cox an emergency exemption to the law, which state Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed to the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court and threatened to prosecute any doctor who performed the procedure.

The attention led to reporters “uncovering” some batty, Christofascist, and disqualifying details from Devine’s past. In addition to boasting about the serial harassment outside abortion clinics, Devine ran his first campaign on the fact that his wife kept an unviable pregnancy that threatened her own life; she later delivered a daughter who died within an hour of leaving the womb and was fortunate to survive herself.

That’s a deeply personal choice, but making a main point of one’s campaign indicates an inability to be unbiased on such cases.

Her exemption on hold, Cox left Texas on Monday to get care elsewhere, at which point the Texas high court basically denied her request in a precedent-setting way.

There isn’t a ton of information out there about Weems beyond what’s in her campaign biography, which details in broad strokes the various stops in her legal career. I’ll have to review her opinions as a judge and talk to some locals to learn more about how she’s been as a judge. It appears as if she also performs in a variety of local stage productions and appeared as a background actor in the Mike Judge slacker classic Office Space, so that’s fun.

It’d be almost impossible for her to be worse than Devine, and in a statewide race, she’ll need all the help she can get; judging by her website design, she doesn’t have a big campaign war chest (or at least doesn’t want to spend it on digital). With some attention, the public is likely to flock to donating to her campaign after this week.

This isn’t going to be one of those impossible-to-win races, either. Devine will be very well financed and has his base of lunatics, but he’s got a lot of enemies and likely to gain more, given his slate of prejudices; for example, in 2016, he ruled that employers could deny benefits to same-sex couples. Devine was held to a 53.7-46.3 victory in 2020.

😡 😇 Arizona Republicans want a federal judge to ignore the fact that their Senate majority leader is super racist when considering evidence in a trial over the state’s new, super racist voting laws.

Former State Sen. Martin Quezada testified that Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli alleged that “illegals” were coming over the border and voting in Arizona’s elections, which necessitated two laws meant to make it much harder for minorities to vote. Quezada added that former Senate President Andy Biggs ordered Borrelli to apologize to him, which did not go exactly as Biggs envisioned.

“I remember that vividly because he came into my office and apologized — and then went off to say other offensive things on top of that,” Quezada, who lost a close race for state treasurer last year, said.

Borrelli denies having gone on multiple racist rants, though there’s no reason to believe a guy who has lied about beating his wife on multiple occasions and defended State Sen. Wendy Rogers after she posted an outrageously racist tweet after the mass shooting in Buffalo in spring 2022.

🍎 🗺️ The New York Court of Appeals ruled that the state must redraw its Congressional map ahead of this year’s election, a ruling that is a major win for Democrats — or at least some of them.

The decision comes after the state was forced to spend an election cycle using a map drawn by a special master (hate that term) appointed by an obscure Republican judge, who was in turn empowered by the old conservative majority on the Appeals Court. That map produced four districts flipped by Republicans last year, a catastrophic result further stoked by a dismal campaign run by a NY Democratic Party that has shown no interest in winning elections.

Between several legislative steps, potential lawsuits, and that party leadership remaining in charge, any new map may not produce dramatically different results than the current configuration. The biggest changes are likely to be in Brooklyn, the border of Queens and Long Island, and the counties just north of New York City.

In particular, Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s district, NY-16, is likely to transform once again. If he gets more of the Bronx, it would likely make it easier for him to beat his AIPAC-backed primary opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer. Naturally, Latimer’s deputy is on the mapmaking commission, and while they’re not supposed to communicate about redistricting, Latimer has already told the press that he doesn’t want the district to add more of that part of the state (ie the part with more Black people).

It’s all classic New York corruption, with backroom deals that play out in the open for all to see. The situation is a sort of going away present from disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who appointed the conservative majority on the high court that empowered that Republican mapmaker.

While Cuomo was forced to resign for being a serial sex pest, his hand-selected chief justice of the Court of Appeals had to step down over some more garden variety corruption. Once more progressive Democrats in the state Senate prevented new Gov. Kathy Hochul from installing her own conservative chief justice and instead rebalance the court, the maps were challenged in the lawsuit that concluded Monday. There’s a chance that this all works out, but not even that would put Cuomo in the rear view mirror.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s own corruption scandals have encouraged Cuomo allies to amp up media hype up for potential return to politics for the bitter former governor. As such, it’s important to remind people whenever possible that Cuomo is a pervert who worked hard to put Republicans in power and keep progressives in check.

📚 ✌️ A county circuit judge in Kentucky ruled that the GOP’s charter school funding scheme violates the state constitution, handing another huge win to public school advocates in the state.

Gov. Andy Beshear, who opposed vouchers and won his re-election handily this fall (pay attention, PA Gov. Josh Shapiro), vetoed the measure but was overridden by the GOP supermajority in the state legislature. Last December, the state Supreme Court ruled that another school voucher law, which created tax credits for donors to private schools, was also unconstitutional.

🙄 😩 Conservatives have all but openly admitted that their uproar over antisemitism on campus is designed to hasten a right-wing takeover of higher education.

This tweet put out by Lauren Boebert over the weekend pretty much lays it all out there:

Rep. Elise Stefanik was busy on Tuesday whining about the New York Court of Appeals decision on redistricting, but she did manage to weigh in on one of the day’s other big news items: Harvard decided not to fire university president Claudine Gay after she botched her response to Stefanik’s misleading line of questioning before Congress.

Notice who retweeted the statement below, because it provides a visual indication of their cynical strategy.

The right’s conspiracy hive mind has been obsessed for the past few days with allegations that Gay included plagiarized passages in her doctoral dissertation and some of her academic papers. The allegation was first made public by Christopher Rufo, a pseudo-intellectual who used to bully homeless people before transitioning to being the white nationalist weenie progenitor of CRT panic and Ron DeSantis’s sidekick.

Writing that he timed its release for “maximum impact,” Rufo on Sunday published a series of screenshots that highlighted paragraphs in Gay’s work that were very similar to ones found in previously published studies and source material. Rufo’s screenshots, along with a story published by the Washington Free Beacon, offered little context, however, as Gay cited each source, even if she omitted some quotation marks.

The Harvard Corporation decided that the offenses amounted to technical mistakes and not intellectual theft. Gay agreed to make several grammatical amendments to her published papers. The New York Times agreed with the Harvard board’s assessment of her work, which only served to piss Rufo off further.

In a mind-numbing series of tweets on Tuesday, Rufo blamed the decision not to fire Gay on campus diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which have been his prime obsession this year. To be fair, Rufo has been less outspoken on the antisemitism issue, but that’s largely because he’s antisemitic…

Rufo also spent the afternoon trashing Harvard, which is more than a little ironic, as he spent years telling people that he received a master’s degree from Harvard before it was revealed that he actually attended Harvard Extension school. It may share a name with the prestigious university, but Harvard Extension is a scammy online school that has hardly any barriers to entry and focuses on “access and equity.”

I doubt those are words that Rufo would emphasize on his resume.

Their shared hatred of the woke left has led Rufo, the antisemite, making common cause with make-believe university chancellor and professional blowhard Bari Weiss, who has been been accusing everyone she possibly can of antisemitism since she was a college student herself.

“Lots of organizations claim to be defending young Jews on campus,” she tweeted. “Simple litmus test: do they oppose DEI? If not, do not take them seriously.”

Weiss, once just an annoying NY Times columnist, began her rebellion against the liberal cosmopolitan elite that raised her by taking a stand against cancel culture, which she parlayed into huge paydays from the conservative cosmopolitan elite. Whereas she once condemned Donald Trump for rhetoric that led to the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue outside of Pittsburgh, she’s now aligned with him and other conservatives in their obsessive loathing of DEI initiatives.

Unlike many Republicans, who don’t have the critical thinking skills to explain just they think why campus diversity and inclusion initiatives are so dangerous to Jewish people, Weiss has spent the past few months writing nonstop on the subject. What it boils down to is that she fears that Jewish people will suffer in a system that consciously provides opportunities to historically marginalized groups:

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

Weiss is essentially arguing that merely recognizing the basic reality that society makes life more difficult for some groups of people is the equivalent of accusing Jewish people of not deserving their success. It’s a preposterous conclusion and likely the product of her own personal paranoias and complex over growing up wealthy, spending her undergraduate years heckling Arab professors, and then becoming famous for whining.

In striving to prevent equity in opportunity, Weiss is unwittingly doing far more to perpetuate what she calls a “hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.” Weiss is virulently pro-Israel and tried to get peaceful pro-Palestinian students kicked out of Columbia when she was there as an undergrad in the early 2000s.

Despite being a supposed free speech champion and enemy of counter-culture, Weiss hates is appalled by the idea of sharing spaces with people with whom she disagrees, and clearly hates the idea that being white and wealthy may have helped her ascend up the ladder of prestige grifters into high society.

Again, as a white person (who happens to be Jewish), I can recognize that I’ve benefited from systemic societal advantages and would in fact think less of myself if I didn’t embrace policies that could even the playing field for people who are subject to socially inherent and unfair disadvantages.

As the number of Jewish Democrats calling for Israeli restraint and a ceasefire continues to grow, several are moving in the other direction. Reps. Jared Moskowitz (a former Ron DeSantis appointee) and Josh Gottheimer (Congress’s top recipient of private equity cash and the reason why Dems couldn’t pass a better pharmaceutical price reform bill) are sponsoring a bipartisan resolution to demand the resignations of Gay and her MIT counterpart, Sally Kornbluth.

Moskowitz, along with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is also backing a Republican-sponsored bill to investigate antisemitism in the US. While a noble cause, it contains legally enforceable subpoena power that does not allow people to plead the Fifth Amendment, which has caused critics to liken it to the power granted to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Given sponsors’ close members with the Anti-defamation League, which has taken a hard right in recent years and now considers almost all criticism of Israel to be antisemitic, that’s a scary prospect for everybody, many Jews included. A Republican government that could enforce those subpoenas is even scarier.

As I wrote on Sunday, McCarthyism explicitly targeted Jews, and the sort of people who run the GOP right now are allied with Israel in large part because they think it is key to triggering the rapture. These people are not our friends.

🛂 😖 President Joe Biden has indicated that he’s willing to agree to some of Republicans’ most heinous border policy demands in exchange for $100 billion in aid for the Ukrainian and Israeli militaries.

With an election less than a year away and the president sitting at historically low approval ratings, it’s breathtaking to see the White House continue to find new and efficient ways of alienating Democrats’ various supporter bases.

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