Louisiana lawmakers have locked in one of the nation's most rigid abortion bans for at least another year and the likely foreseeable future.

Legislators in a House committee last week overwhelmingly rejected a bill from Democratic New Orleans Rep. Aimee Freeman that would have allowed voters to consider an amendment to the Louisiana Constitution to legalize abortion.

Other bills that would add exceptions like rape or incest to Louisiana's near total abortion ban are still scheduled for debate, but they will almost certainly meet the same fate in the House Criminal Justice Committee, where members voted 10-2 to kill Freeman's proposed amendment House Bill 245.

And new Republican Gov. Jeff Landry has said he supports the current law as it stands, leaving no room for advancing legislation to alter the curent ban.

Freeman argued her amendment was needed because Louisiana's law that criminalizes doctors who perform illegal abortions has made some providers hesitant to provide legal procedures like terminating a pregnancy to save the life of the mother.

“What I’m worried about is our decline in care for even our healthy pregnancies that are out there,” she said during the hearing. “For people to forgo and not have treatment because doctors are afraid to how to treat them is very worrisome.”

Forget a MAGA takeover in 2024; some conservatives are already looking for ways to get Donald Trump back into the White House four years from now—for a third term.

A feature story in The American Conservative insisted last week that Trump shouldn’t be beholden to the details of the U.S. Constitution, arguing that a win in November could open up the GOP presidential nominee to the possibility of running for another, consecutive term, if the nation repeals the Twenty-Second Amendment.

The amendment, which was ratified in 1951, states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

But clearly, Trump is such a unique prospect that the authors of the amendment couldn’t have foreseen the allure of a far-right candidate with a frenetic base. So why not just do away with it?

“As the primary season has shown us, the Republicans have not moved on from Trump—yet the Twenty-second Amendment works to constrain their enthusiasm by prohibiting them from rewarding Trump with re-election four years from now,” American Conservative contributor Peter Tonguette wrote last week.

Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC

NEW: The Florida Supreme Court simultaneously UPHOLDS the state's 15-week abortion ban (which lets the six-week ban take effect, too)—but also APPROVES a ballot initiative that would amend the FL constitution to protect abortion.

https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285280/opinion/Opinion_SC2022-1050%20&%20SC2022-1127.pdf


https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285282/opinion/Opinion_SC2023-1392.pdf


The Florida Supreme Court also APPROVES a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana.

This initiative, plus the abortion question, will appear on the ballot in November. Both need 60% approval to pass. https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285281/opinion/Opinion_SC2023-0682.pdf

Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC

NEW: The Florida Supreme Court simultaneously UPHOLDS the state's 15-week abortion ban (which lets the six-week ban take effect, too)—but also APPROVES a ballot initiative that would amend the FL constitution to protect abortion.

https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285280/opinion/Opinion_SC2022-1050%20&%20SC2022-1127.pdf


https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285282/opinion/Opinion_SC2023-1392.pdf


The Florida Supreme Court also APPROVES a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana.

This initiative, plus the abortion question, will appear on the ballot in November. Both need 60% approval to pass. https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/content/download/2285281/opinion/Opinion_SC2023-0682.pdf

For Tyler Johnson, an emergency room physician from Grabil, Indiana, November 2022 was a pivotal month. Johnson is one of several named plaintiffs in a legal challenge, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, filed that November in an effort to severely restrict, and perhaps ultimately criminalize, the pill that’s used in the most common form of abortion in the United States. But Johnson, a self-described “Christian conservative” who had previously asked the state legislature to impose “criminal penalties” for abortion and supported “personal choice” against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, had more than the lawsuit to contend with. Johnson would spend the few months between the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June and the filing of the mifepristone challenge occupied with something else: his campaign for Indiana state Senate. Johnson was sworn in for his first term in the state legislature just four days after the mifepristone challenge was officially filed in a court in Amarillo, Texas. His crusade against health care he disapproved of was just getting started.

According to Johnson and others who brought the case the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this week, mifepristone is a dangerous “chemical abortion” drug that has transformed emergency rooms into post-abortion field hospitals; doctors, according to this narrative, have been drafted into serving patients who present with complications that can be indistinguishable from miscarriage. These patients who have complications after taking mifepristone “experience trauma” and may not “understand what the drugs will do to them,” according to Johnson in his sworn declaration in the legal challenge; they may also be lying about having taken mifepristone, he alleged, “unnecessarily presenting in the emergency department,” taking time away “from other patients who need it.”

Mifepristone, in reality, has long been known to be safe and rarely results in serious adverse reactions. But in the world that Johnson and the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine occupy, people who use mifepristone to self-manage abortion are at once vulnerable innocents and deceitful burdens, all of them abandoned to doctors who, against their conscience, must care for these purported casualties of medical abortion.

In order to argue that they have personal grounds—“standing”—for bringing this case, Johnson and the others doctor-plaintiffs claim mifepristone “harms” not only patients but also physicians. Some of the other named plaintiffs emphasized ethical objections, that they are “opposed to being forced to end the life of a human being in the womb for no medical reason, including by having to complete an incomplete elective chemical abortion.” For his part, Johnson argued that the Food and Drug Administration had “created a culture of chaos for emergency room physicians,” one that “puts us in increasingly high risk situations, which increases our exposure to claims of malpractice and liability.”

A federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked enforcement of new regulations adopted during the Biden administration that sought to overhaul how lenders extend loans and other services to low- and moderate-income Americans.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, sided with banking and business groups including the American Bankers Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in finding the new rules ran afoul of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

The judge, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction blocking their enforcement before they could take effect Monday. The agencies and trade groups did not respond to requests for comment.

The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last year updated their rules enforcing the 1977 fair lending law, which seeks to ensure banks lend in their local communities.

Conceived to prevent red lining - a discriminatory practice where banks refuse or offer only limited lending to certain areas or populations, primarily minorities - CRA regulations gauge how well banks service areas where they operate.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood filed a legal challenge on Friday to some of Ohio’s abortion laws, now that Ohio voters have enshrined voting rights in the state’s constitution.

The lawsuit filed on behalf of abortion clinics says that since Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to protect such rights in an amendment last November, it violates the constitution to require women wanting abortions to endure mandatory waiting periods and multiple in-person informational appointments.

"These laws are now in clear violation of the newly amended Ohio Constitution, which enshrines the explicit and fundamental right to abortion and forbids the state from burdening, prohibiting, penalizing, and interfering with access to abortion, and discriminating against abortion patients and providers,” attorney with the ACLU of Ohio Jessie Hill said in a press release.

The laws ultimately interfere with patient well-being, don't provide tangible health benefits and lack medical justification, the ACLU alleges. Instead, the ACLU says, such practices “unnecessarily” delay time-sensitive care and force “harmful, distressing and stigmatizing” information on patients.

The ACLU is asking the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas to declare the restrictions to be unconstitutional and permanently unenforceable.

(Reuters) - A federal court in Texas that has become a favored destination for conservatives suing to block President Joe Biden's agenda has decided not to follow a policy adopted by the judiciary's top policymaking body that aims to curtail the practice of "judge shopping."

Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey of the Northern District of Texas announced the decision in a Friday letter to Democratic U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had urged him to implement a new policy that aimed to ensure cases challenging federal or state laws are randomly assigned judges.

The policy announced by the U.S. Judicial Conference on March 12 would require a lawsuit challenging federal or state laws to be assigned a judge randomly throughout a federal district rather than stay in the specific, smaller division, or courthouse, where the case was initially filed.

If implemented, that policy would disrupt a tactic used by conservative litigants of filing cases in small divisions in Texas' four federal districts whose one or two judges were appointed by Republican presidents and often rule in their favor on issues like abortion, immigration and gun control.

Following blowback from Senate Republicans and some conservative judges, judicial policymakers later clarified that the policy was discretionary, leaving it to each district court to decide how to implement it.

A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.

“When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that’s wrong and should not happen,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview Thursday. He added, “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law.”

The unusual media statement by a sitting federal judge came after Trump blasted New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan and his daughter, Loren Merchan, criticizing her affiliation with a digital marketing company that works with Democratic candidates and erroneously attributing to her a social media post showing Trump behind bars.

Walton, who was appointed by presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to courts in Washington in 1981 and 1991, said “any reasonable, thinking person” would appreciate the impact of Trump’s rhetoric on some followers, intentional or not. The judge recalled how a disgruntled litigant killed the son and wounded the husband of New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas at her home in a 2020 shooting.

Since late 2020, as Trump began escalating his attacks on the judiciary, serious investigated threats against federal judges have more than doubled, from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, as first reported by Reuters. Federal judges in Washington say at least half of trial judges handling cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have received a surge in threats and harassment, including death threats to their homes, with Trump’s election obstruction trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, placed under 24-hour protection.