For weeks, abortion rights advocates have been waiting for a potential bombshell: A conservative federal judge in Texas is expected to effectively outlaw the most popular method of abortion nationwide. Now, the day may finally be here. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee affiliated with the religious right, scheduled a hearing in the lawsuit challenging […]
Author: Madison Pauly
Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country
On a Saturday afternoon in August 2019, South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to introduce that would make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care. “I have no doubt this […]
Democratic Attorneys General Sue the FDA to Drop “Onerous” Abortion Pill Restrictions
A dozen Democratic state attorneys general have opened a new front in the legal war over mifepristone, the “gold standard” medication used in the majority of all US abortions. In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, the AGs—from states including Arizona, Illinois, and Washington—accuse the Food and Drug Administration of imposing unnecessarily “onerous” restrictions on mifepristone, which is used […]
Marianne Williamson is the Only Democrat Running for President—For Now
At this moment, there’s only one confirmed Democratic candidate for president in 2024: Marianne Williamson. The self-help author, New Age guru, and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey confirmed her candidacy in a Facebook post on Saturday, writing that she was running for president a second time to “bring an aberrational chapter of our history to a […]
The Under-the-Radar Legal Battle Protecting Health Care for Trans People
Shauntae Anderson lived for the weekends. Growing up Black and transgender in a small West Virginia city in the 1990s, she spent a lot of time alone, hiding her self-knowledge from her mom and coping with ridicule from classmates. Yet on Friday and Saturday nights, she could lock herself in her room, put on Whitney […]
Trump Confused His Ex-Wife With the Rape Accuser He Called “Not My Type”
Former President Donald Trump has given many denials to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that he cornered her and raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He’s called Carroll’s story “all fiction,” “a con job,” and “a big fat hoax.” “I know nothing about this woman,” Trump insisted in 2019, when Carroll first […]
Hero of 2022: Those LA Police Funding Billboards
About a month after President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union address that the answer to crime is to “fund the police, fund them, fund them,” a mint green billboard appeared above a gas station one block from a northern Los Angeles Police Department precinct. Passerby who happened to look up learned that […]
Hundreds of New York Women Are About to Sue Alleged Rapists (and Enablers) Under a Revolutionary New Law
For years, former president Donald Trump has been able to push off a lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a writer and advice columnist who says he raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. When Carroll decided to come forward—describing the alleged assault in a book excerpt in 2019—Trump […]
Abortion Rights Are a Winning Strategy
In state after state on Election Day, voters sent a resounding message: “Abortion rights matter to us.” They didn’t only matter in California and Vermont, where voters chose to guarantee abortion rights in their state constitutions. They mattered in deep-red Kentucky, where voters shot down a “no right to abortion” amendment that would have blocked the […]
The GOP Is Trying to Throw Out Thousands of Votes in Detroit—Again
Absentee ballot processing is kicking off today in Michigan, and the Trump-backed candidate running to become the state’s top election official is already trying to throw out tens of thousands votes—specifically in the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, which is 78 percent Black. Kristine Karamo, an election denier whose Secretary of State campaign is supported by the […]