UPDATED: Decoding disasters in Florida and Israel
UPDATED: Decoding disasters in Florida and Israel
There's more to read
Welcome to an updated Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
One of the hardest things about being a journalist — aside from the growing public distrust and low pay in an industry spiraling into inextricable decline — is the inherently unpredictable flow of news. Two stories that broke late yesterday scrambled my plan for the newsletter, and I wound up writing late into the night.
Inevitably, the newsletter contained some typos and unfixed autocorrections (damn you, AI), which, as a long-time editor, absolutely mortified me. I should probably just take it on the chin and move on, but again, as a long-time editor, my overriding instinct is to make the corrections and honor my readers.
So, here is a copyedited version of last night’s newsletter, along with new updates to the stories it covers. I’m also offering a half-off coupon for paid subscriptions for today only.
Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep this work sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you.
Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors!: Don, Ronald, Valerie, Katherine, Susan, and John!
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, also 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. This will prove devastating to millions of people in the Southeast, where legal access to abortion has been entirely wiped out.
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
The opinion, written by Justice Jamie R. Grosshans, a DeSantis appointee, attempts to both read the amendment exactly as written and divine public knowledge circa 1980. First comes her assertion that the 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. But as I note below, the reason the amendment was such a big deal at the time had nothing to do with people’s fears about warrantless wireless taps.
Florida courts also believed that the right to an abortion was covered 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 even more vague amendment to the US constitution. 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 news coverage that spoke specifically to the amendment’s potential impact on abortion rights. Newspapers were loaded with op-eds in both directions. They showed up in other states, too, noting that anti-choice advocates were beginning to amass some power, organizing across the country, including in Florida. There was a deep awareness of the fact that the amendment protected things beyond wiretapping.
In fact, the amendment was also heavily backed by Florida’s LGBT community, which saw it as legal protection against archaic and bigoted laws, like the statute that criminalized sodomy. Grosshans even acknowledges that in her decision, yet conveniently ignores the public discussions about abortion happening at that time. How the two can be differentiated legally is beyond me.
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 clearly worded enough to appear on the November ballot.
That’s the good news, though it comes with a caveat: While Floridians Protecting Freedom, the coalition behind this amendment, has already collected the nearly one million signatures to get it on the ballot, it will face an onslaught of Republican criticism and conservative dark money. It will require a 60% majority to pass Amendment 4, so there will have to be substantial outreach to Republicans given the party’s massive advantage in voter registration.
Still, they are starting from a place of strength, 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. There’s a solid chance that those numbers will 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 may be preferable for Florida Democrats to stay away from this one in any official capacity. The party’s brand is utterly toxic in the state — DeSantis torched in the 2022 gubernatorial election and the GOP has a supermajority in each legislative chamber — and it continues to get worse. Infighting has also plagued the party, and chairwoman Nikki Fried just triggered a whole internal war by firing leaders in Miami-Dade and other important counties.
Better to let Republicans make this a partisan race, which could do serious damage to the percentage of GOP voters who support the right to choose. It seems they are fully incapable of walking a fine line, even if they know it’s politically stupid to be so aggressive. 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. Demanding an end to carnage is not anti-semitic, just humane. After the events that took place on Monday, it would be not only morally unconscionable to continue to support this nightmare, but also strategically catastrophic for the administration not to take action.
First, 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 seven 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 consulate 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. Iran has already promised to retaliate.
The murder of seven 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. [Note: A few hours after I wrote this paragraph, several stories about the killings were at the top of the NY Times’s website.]
As more details have emerged, Israel has scrambled to contain the damage. Netanyahu, whose public persona is as defiant as it is cruel, issued his first mea culpa of this 179-day massacre after Israel’s role in the bombing was confirmed.
“Unfortunately, in the past day there was a tragic event in which our forces unintentionally harmed non-combatants in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli Prime Minister said in a statement. “This happens in war. We are conducting a thorough inquiry and are in contact with the governments. We will do everything to prevent a recurrence."
There are already doubts as to whether or not the strike was actually unintentional. World Central Kitchen coordinated with the Israeli government to ensure aid workers safe passage through Gaza and the organization’s logo was plastered on the top of the SUV. Israel is also clearly stoking a famine in Gaza, and now the WCK has suspended its operations.
Many Americans are blasé about mass slaughter of Palestinians, who have been and continue to be slandered as terrorists for decades. Frequent lies about Israel’s bombings and missile strikes have been mostly accepted after making their way through the friendly media echo chamber. No small number of politicians continue to blame the ongoing genocide on Palestinians themselves, as if the appalling acts carried out by Hamas on October 7th justify killing well over 33,000 people, including 12,500 children.
The victims of yesterday’s strike came from Australia, Poland, Britain, the United States and Canada, which makes this a truly international incident. Over the past few hours, international leaders, including the Prime Minister of Britain, have condemned the strike and demanded investigations, and it’s unlikely that they will back down so long as there is outrage at home.
Ongoing support for this war will 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. No matter how much Pentagon spokespeople mindlessly insist that Israel hasn’t committed war crimes, the truth is obvious for all to see.
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.
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.
None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.
For just $6 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:
Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
Access to upcoming chats and live notes
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!