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Nancy Mace

Are These 'Republican Vixens' Mocking Conservative Morality?

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace was in Washington telling a story about how her "fiance" wanted more action in bed earlier that day. "And I was like, 'No baby, we don't got time for that this morning.'" To which she added, "He can wait. I'll see him later tonight."

The occasion was a Christian prayer breakfast attended by evangelicals.

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert famously vaped in a theater and grabbed her date's privates. When called out for her offensive conduct, she blamed a "difficult divorce." Meanwhile, self-described "Christian nationalist" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene showers the House floor with profanities.

I honestly don't care who Nancy Mace shacks up with. But it is fascinating to hear her refer to the guy in her bed as a "fiance" as opposed to some random dude. Makes her adultery sound like almost-marriage.

What are these right-wing vixens up to? For starters, they're advertising their sexual availability. (Tinder never closes.) And as members of Congress, their forays into exhibitionism provide visibility and opportunities to raise money.

These ladies evidently think that they can get away with dishing this coarseness in public while posing as defenders of old-school morality. You sometimes wonder whether they are mocking social conservatives.

Some evangelicals are quite unhappy about this. They are joined by others who simply want more dignity in the political culture.

The road to right-wing vulgarity was paved with hypocrisy. Some of the credit goes to Bill Bennett, who long ago perfected the art of unprincipled rectitude. Former education secretary under Ronald Reagan, Bennett has long peddled a highly elastic moral code — depends on which party benefits — while maintaining a face frozen in pious judgment.

In his 1998 book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, Bennett piled moral censure on Clinton over his tryst with a White House intern. And he went after Democrats for not sharing his indignation.

The first chapter, simply titled "Sex," pounded the pulpit. "In extramarital affairs," Bennett wrote, "there are victims. In marriage, one person has been entrusted with the soul of another." If true, that's bad news for Melania.

Years later, a Fox News interviewer asked Bennett how a man claiming fixed moral views on adultery could support Donald Trump. As the world knows, the former president cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star and bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

"I understand how you feel about some of the things," Bennett responded, miraculously keeping a straight face. "But it may be better to lower your standards on things the guy says temporarily than to lose your country permanently."

Ah, so he's using the "fiance" gambit. Branding Trump's lewd talk as "temporary" make it an almost-character flaw. As for the "lose your country" part, that sounds a bit dated considering how close Trump got us to losing our democracy.

"Sexual indiscipline can be a threat to the stability of crucial human affairs," Bennett wrote in reference to Clinton. Would someone kindly translate?

Urging voters to look past Trump's licentious record, Bennett argued, "Think about the economy." Years earlier, he rapped the knuckles of Clinton defenders for allegedly contending that "what matters above all is a healthy economy." Actually, the economy was a lot better under Clinton, and the budget was balanced, too.

Look, Bennett has a First Amendment right to make money off hypocrisy. And let the record show, I too disapprove of adultery. But I also regarded Clinton's misconduct as a private matter to be worked out between a couple and the third party. And I extend that courtesy to Trump, Melania and Stormy Daniels.

Uncomfortable as it may sometimes be, consistency is a good thing.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Nancy Mace

Here's How We Know Republicans Are Lying About Their 'Support' For IVF

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has taken the bold step of defending in vitro fertilization by introducing a nonbinding resolution. That way Republicans in the House can pretend that they’re taking steps to protect IVF without actually protecting IVF.

That’s a Republican idea of a win-win: taking credit for something while doing nothing.

It’s also a perfect illustration of where the GOP stands on IVF. Two weeks after the conservative Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos are children and several hospitals and clinics halted IVF procedures as a result, Republicans are struggling with a fundamental issue: how to convince the general public that they support this popular procedure while reassuring their extremist base that they won’t do anything to address this issue.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that over 10 million children worldwide have been born through IVF and approximately 500,000 more are born each year. In the United States, roughly 97,000 babies are delivered each year thanks to assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control.

Families that use IVF are often desperate and have exhausted all other options before facing a physically strenuous process that costs roughly $20,000 per attempt and has an average success rate of 37 percent. Republicans jumping between these families and what they may view as their last opportunity to have a successful pregnancy and build a family comes off as needlessly (and thoughtlessly) cruel.

A YouGov poll shows a solid 67 percent of Americans believe IVF should be legal. Only eight percent believe that IVF should be illegal.

In the same poll, a 46 percent plurality of Americans believe a law should be passed to legalize abortion nationally. Only seven percent of those responding insisted that abortion should be illegal at any time, in any circumstance, no exceptions.

It’s not hard to understand that these two groups who don’t approve of IVF or abortion are likely to have an almost 100 percent overlap. According to the poll results, those saying that IVF should be illegal were more than twice as likely to consider themselves Republicans and to support Donald Trump.

Many abortion laws are based on the idea that life begins at conception. This is a religious concept that dates back only to the 20th century, as early religious figures had no idea about the stages of reproduction. However, the position was rapidly adopted by the Roman Catholic Church and by some evangelical groups. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and conservative Catholic leaders are still officially (and vehemently) opposed to IVF. So are many evangelical leaders and theologians.

The Republican dilemma is simple: Only a small percentage of Americans oppose IVF, but many of those who do oppose it are among the most devoted, fanatical supporters of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

It might only be a tiny percentage, but it’s their tiny percentage.

Republicans know that losing that portion of their most vocal base would doom any hope of winning a national election. And there is more at stake for Republicans than just votes.

Right-wing figures like Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo are deeply enmeshed in what happened with the Alabama decision. Leo is also the tip of a dark-money iceberg involved in promoting extremist positions on all aspects of reproduction. Republicans are terrified of losing that connection to outside groups, especially when their coffers are nearly bare and the incoming party co-chair is promising to spend every penny paying her father-in-law’s legal bills.

Republicans are left utterly dependent on outside groups to run ads, do opposition research, and take care of all the other things that their own campaigns might do if they had any money. So they don’t dare upset this dark conservative apple cart.

That’s why, no matter what they are saying, Republicans moved immediately to block legislation introduced by Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth that would have provided nationwide protection for IVF.

It’s why there are spectacles like this, where Rep. Anna Luna withdrew her name as the co-sponsor of a bill protecting IVF, even as Republicans are claiming that they support IVF.

Republicans in Alabama may have pushed a bill through the state Legislature that protects IVF facilities (though not parents) from potential prosecution, but the initial version of that bill was very deliberately set to sunset this protection within months of the upcoming election. Legislators removed that April 1, 2025, deadline after it became clear this would have prevented anyone from beginning an IVF procedure for three months before the election, which would have only put this issue right back on the front page at a very inconvenient time.

But absolutely nothing is stopping them from moving to limit or block any IVF protections once the election is over.

Moving to protect IVF through legislation would risk cutting Republicans off from their most fanatical supporters and from sources of cash that Trump can’t directly purloin. It would also leave them vulnerable to questions about why the millions of fertilized eggs destroyed in IVF attempts each year (far more than the number of embryos destroyed in abortions) don’t represent an annual holocaust. If Republicans really believe life begins when a unique genetic signature is created, IVF is unsupportable. If they don’t continue to voice that belief, almost all abortion legislation is left hanging from nothing.

Republicans are flailing, making gestures of support for IVF in hopes the issue will disappear until after the election. They want to pretend to be supportive of desperate families while quietly reassuring their base that they will actually continue to support a position held by only a tiny minority.

Duckworth’s move in bringing forward her bill was a good way to call their bluff. There should be more of this … right up to Election Day.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Nancy Mace

Let's Watch The Making Of An 'Extrauterine Child'!

This week, the Alabama Supreme Court surprised absolutely no one with a ruling that frozen embryos created through the process of in vitro fertilization are children. Somewhere in its blizzard of references to Biblical verses, Christian theologians, even something called “The Manhattan Declaration,” the court essentially confirmed the long-time anti-abortion ideology that life begins at conception and no matter the method of conception, even a flash-frozen fertilized egg is alive. The Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos are protected under the state’s wrongful death statutes. The decision even went to the trouble of coining a word for these new living beings: extrauterine children.

The Alabama decision has caused several of the state’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to close their doors for fear that if a frozen embryo is destroyed, discarded or even lost during the IVF procedure, it would leave the doctors and the clinics and even the patients vulnerable to prosecution for killing extrauterine children.

People like husbands, lovers, parents, even older children of pregnant women attend the live births of children all the time, so, if Alabama is now saying that any embryo is a child, whether fresh, frozen, or in the process of being used in an IVF, why don’t we attend the medical procedure that amounts to the creation of one of these brand new microscopic children!

The process begins with a woman, although not necessarily the woman who, if the IVF is successful, will actually give birth to a living, breathing child. In vitro fertilization involves what is euphemistically called harvesting a woman’s eggs. It begins with the production of a woman’s eggs being chemically encouraged using something called “ovarian hyperstimulation.” Adequately stimulating the ovaries isn’t enough, however. In order to be able to retrieve eggs, the time of ovulation must be predictable, and that’s where the “trigger shot” comes in. Once the ovarian follicles are developed enough, a shot of hormones is administered, setting the ovulation schedule for 38 to 40 hours after the shot.

Now comes the time for harvesting the eggs via “transvaginal oocyte retrieval.” The woman, who throughout the process is referred to as “the patient,” is taken to an operating room and usually put under general anesthesia so that a fine needle guided by transvaginal ultrasound can be inserted through the vaginal wall into her ovarian follicles, from which multiple eggs, usually somewhere between 10 and 30, are aspirated. The eggs come out in a solution of follicular fluid and are quickly removed to another room where they are cleansed of cumulus cells and prepared for fertilization.

Meanwhile, a man’s sperm has been similarly prepared in a process called “sperm washing,” which removes seminal fluid and inactive, or dead, sperm cells.

Any eggs or sperm that are not to be used can at this point be separately frozen. It should be noted that either of these two necessary elements in the creation of life that are not chosen to be used can be destroyed. That’s okay with the state of Alabama, because it takes the next step for them to become “extrauterine children.”

Now the eggs and the sperm are introduced in a liquid medium, the proverbial “test tube” or “petri dish,” although neither is actually used in the process. In certain cases involving low sperm count, a single sperm can be injected into a single egg by intracytoplasmic injection. This is done under a microscope.

Once the eggs are fertilized, they are put into a so-called growth medium and allowed to grow for two to four days, through the cleavage stage, when the embryo splits into two cells, to the blastocyst stage of six to eight cells.

Get this: At this point, the embryos are “graded,” to determine the quality of the embryo and its likelihood of resulting in a live birth. By removing one or two cells from the blastocyst stage, embryos can be genetically analyzed for birth defects or inherited diseases, and depending on who’s doing the grading and what the criteria are, one or more of the embryos can be chosen over the others. An embryo at this point can even be chosen to provide embryonic cells that can be used to cure a sick child the woman has previously given birth to.

Now the embryo, or more often, embryos, can be inserted into the woman’s uterus through a thin catheter. If one or more of the implanted embryos attaches to the wall of the uterus and grows into a fetus, they can become actual, live, breathing children.

Or they can be frozen and become extrauterine children.

Amazing, isn’t it? The Alabama Supreme Court decision was made by nine Republican justices because there are no justices appointed by Democratic governors and confirmed by the state Senate. The vote was 8 to 1. Alabama is one of the states that has a law declaring that life begins at conception, the holy grail of the anti-abortion movement.

There are two other states with laws declaring that life begins at conception: Missouri and Mississippi. Legislatures in at least 14 more states have introduced so-called fetal personhood bills this year alone. But when the IVF clinics in Alabama began to shut down on Wednesday and the shutdowns continued yesterday and today, all of a sudden it occurred to the geniuses in the Republican Party who have been pushing for religion to be a determining factor in our government and laws, and for laws to be passed declaring that life begins at conception, that maybe this whole blastocyst-is-a-kid thing isn’t such a good idea.

Suddenly it occurred to Republicans that all those couples out there who have problems having children, or single women who want to give birth via IVF, won’t be able to do it because the process by its very nature involves the destruction of some of what Alabama called extrauterine children.

Republican presidential candidate Niki Haley, whose initial response to the Alabama ruling was, “Embryos, to me, are babies,” was described as “walking back” her comment.

South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is a sponsor of the federal Life at Conception Act, which would write into law that life begins when an egg is fertilized, was on Twitter-X today saying, “We should do everything we can to protect IVF for women everywhere.”

There is going to be a lot of Republican shifting into reverse in the coming days and months. When you mix politics and religion, bad things can happen. And when you take away the rights of more than 50 percent of the population to make their own healthcare decisions and turn those decisions over to a bunch of state legislatures and governors and state courts, worse things happen.

One of the major reasons that the anti-abortion movement has been squeamish about IVF for decades is that fundamentalist Christians don’t like the idea of messing around with nature, which introducing needles and drugs and operating rooms and all that medical gear certainly amounts to.

They are not squeamish about telling women what to do with their bodies, however. The result that is emerging from this political shitstorm is that Republicans are fine with prodding and poking and injecting and inserting things into women’s uteruses so long as it results in the birth of a baby, or as the Alabama Supreme Court has proven, the creation of an extrauterine child.

But prod her and poke her and give her shots and insert things in her uterus because she doesn’t want a child? That’s a no-no.

There is an essential contradiction Republicans have constructed: if you’re pregnant and don’t want to have the baby, you can’t stop your pregnancy. But if you’re infertile and you want to start a pregnancy, you can’t do that, either. Either way, if you are a woman, you are not in control of your own body. Laws, and court decisions written by Republicans are.

Despite their attempts to back and fill and shift into reverse and obfuscate and tell outright lies to solve this contradiction, it is about to come home for Republicans at the ballot box.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Nancy Mace

'We're Going To Lose Huge': Mace Warns Of GOP Wipeout Over Abortion (VIDEO)

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) warns that the GOP risks facing a wipeout at the polls in 2024 if her colleagues remain focused on passing strict state-level abortion bans rather than finding a “middle ground” on the issue.

Mace, a sometime Trump critic who survived reelection last year, sounded the alarm on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court chose to keep abortion pills legal, freezing a Trump-appointed federal judge’s ruling that restricted the drug.

Taking aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new six-week abortion ban legislation and a Republican bill in the South Carolina legislature that proposes “punishment by death” for women who undergo abortions, Mace said the GOP was sending "the wrong message heading into '24."

The Republican insisted that the anti-abortion extremists within her party were out of touch with their constituents, a majority she contended didn’t want abortion severely restricted or outlawed.

"We're going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities and finding that middle ground. The vast majority of people want some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle," Mace told ABC anchor Martha Raddatz.

"They want exceptions for rape and incest — they want women to have access to birth control,” she added.

Indeed, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National poll, released Monday, found that two-thirds of Americans (64 percent), including a majority of Republicans, opposed banning medication abortion — that is, the use of a prescription pill to end a pregnancy.

A CBS News/YouGov poll released over a week before found that 69 percent of Americans who support abortion wanted the Biden Administration to ignore court rulings seeking to end widespread access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

Americans’ broad support for abortion after the Dobbs decision has remained the same since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade last June, with a Pew Research Center poll showing that support rose from 61 percent in March 2022 (before the ruling) to 62 percent in July (after the ruling).

Mace’s comments offered a window into the divide within the GOP over abortion bans, an issue Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, recognize was central to the party’s historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms.

TheWashington Postreported last Thursday that Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, urged her party’s candidates in private to “address abortion” before it damaged them politically.

“You have to address it, not avoid it,” McDaniel reportedly said. “And then you can talk about other things.”

Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway implored Republican donors and candidates to infuse “compassion” into their discussions on abortion and emphasize the need for exceptions in abortion legislation.

During her ABC interview, Mace suggested that anywhere but the fringe of anti-abortion extremism were “commonsense positions that we can take and still be pro-life.”

"I saw what happened after Roe v. Wade because I represent a very purple district, as purple as this dress, and I saw the sentiment change dramatically," Mace said. "And as Republicans, we need to read the room on this issue."

Mace also argued that dancing around or wholly ignoring the issue of abortion wasn’t a position Republicans should take, considering the widespread support for abortion among voters.

"We've buried our heads in the sand. We're afraid to talk about it. Because we're afraid, we want to go to the extreme corners of this issue. But that's not where the vast majority of Americans are right now. And we've got to show compassion, especially to victims who've been raped," said Mace, who has often shared her experience of being sexually assaulted at 16.