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abortion medication

Poll: Huge Majority Opposes Ban On Abortion Medications

A large majority of Americans oppose a nationwide ban on abortion medication, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll published on Monday.

The poll found that 64 percent of Americans, including 55 percent of Republicans, oppose a federal ban on mifepristone, a drug that is used in more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The poll was conducted April 17-19, after Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, ruled on April 7 that the Food and Drug Administration had improperly approved mifepristone more than two decades ago.

Kacsmaryk's ruling would have banned the drug nationwide. But after an appeal from the Biden administration, the Supreme Court ultimately blocked the judge's ruling from taking effect while the legal challenge to mifepristone's approval continues to make its way through the courts.

The new poll found that 61 percent of Americans do not believe a federal judge should be able to overturn the FDA's approval of a prescription drug.

The polling suggests that Republicans could continue to find themselves in electoral peril over their opposition to abortion rights in the United States.

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans underperformed expectations thanks in part to voter backlash over the GOP's extreme legislation banning abortion in states across the country. Republican-controlled legislatures passed near-total bans on abortion after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which had affirmed the right to an abortion before fetal viability, usually considered to be 24 weeks' gestation.

An anti-abortion state Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin lost an election in a blowout on April 4 due in part to his anti-abortion stance.

While polling repeatedly shows Americans support abortion rights, Republican lawmakers have continued to pass abortion bans.

On April 14, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a ban blocking the procedure after six weeks' gestation, before many people even know they are pregnant. The day of a pregnant person's missed period, they are considered four weeks pregnant. That means that with a six-week ban, a person who just missed their period would have days to decide whether they wanted an abortion and secure an appointment for a procedure or a prescription for a medication abortion.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been pushing for a nationwide ban on abortion at 15 weeks' gestation, said in a statement to CNN on Sunday that he wants his party to continue to try to pass one.

"I hope the Republican Party can muster the courage to oppose late-term abortion like we have done in the past. My legislation is a good place to start," Graham told CNN. "Like always, it includes exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother. The Republican Party must be the party which values, cherishes, and protects life."

Even some Republicans are warning that their party's opposition to abortion rights could sink the GOP in the 2024 elections.

"As Republicans, we need to read the room on this issue, because the vast majority of folks are not in the extremes. … We're going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities," Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told host Martha Raddatz of ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "The vast majority of people want some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle. They want exceptions for rape and incest, they want women to have access to birth control."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Joe Biden

Polls Show Strong Public Support For Biden To Increase Debt Ceiling

When President Joe Biden addressed the debt ceiling negotiations Wednesday at a union event in Maryland, he uncharacteristically took Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to task, calling House GOP demands "wacko" and "really dangerous."

“We’ve never ever defaulted on a debt. It would destroy the economy,” Biden said while speaking at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 77 in Accokeek. “America is not a dead-beat nation,” he added.

The White House and Democrats are on the right side of public opinion. New Navigator Research polling found that 64 percent of voters believe it would be worse to default on the nation's debt than to raise the debt ceiling, while 36 percent say that raising the ceiling is worse than defaulting.

Biden was responding to the House GOP's debt ceiling “plan,” which ties raising the ceiling (i.e., averting a global meltdown) to major budget cuts. For months, Biden has urged House Republicans to pass a "clean" debt ceiling increase while refusing to link the two matters.

The heightened sense of urgency demonstrated by Biden, who isn't usually inclined to mix it up with political adversaries, is twofold. First, House Republicans are just dumb enough to play with fire, and Biden specifically recalls the fallout from the last time a White House and congressional Republicans played a game of chicken on raising the debt ceiling. It was 2011, Biden was vice president, and the nation came just close enough to defaulting that the U.S. credit rating was downgraded, markets plummeted, and U.S. taxpayers bore the burden of the country's increased borrowing costs.

Second, House Republicans are also just dumb enough to intentionally tank the economy in the name of austerity. Such a move could precipitate an epic global meltdown, and the White House simply cannot afford for voters to blame that on the president heading into his reelection.

Voters support raising the debt ceiling by a 10-point margin, 48 percent - 38 percent, with 14 percent saying they weren't sure. Those findings are in keeping with a PBS/NPR/Marist poll in February that found a 52 percent majority of voters supported raising the debt ceiling.

The notion that roughly half the nation supports a debt ceiling increase while fewer oppose it may seem less than reassuring, but that's more than twice as much support for raising the limit than in 2011, when the same PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that just 24 percent of voters favored a ceiling hike.

Another way of looking at it is that having been to this rodeo before, more voters drew similar conclusions to Biden: Quit messing around and just raise the damn ceiling already. In other words, Biden's message on the topic should be one that resonates with most voters.

But recent polling on the matter reveals one other lesson: People need to understand that failure to raise the debt ceiling will result in default. While people steeped in the brinkmanship inherently understand that failing to raise the ceiling will trigger a default, many voters apparently don't and are also hesitant to greenlight more government spending.

When CBS News asked respondents simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, a narrow majority said no, with 46 percent favoring it while 54 percent opposed it.

However, when respondents were asked if Congress should raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on its current debt, fully 70 percent support increasing the ceiling.

Currently, the U.S. has already hit the ceiling on what it can borrow and the Treasury Department has implemented so-called "extraordinary measures" to avoid defaulting on our debt. But sometime in June those measures are expected to come up short, so the reckoning is fast approaching.

Right now, McCarthy is attempting to lure the White House to the table on spending cuts when he may not even have the 218 votes in his own caucus to pass his own debt limit bill. That's not a particularly strong starting point, especially when everyone knows that bill would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate even if McCarthy managed to finagle it through the House by some miracle.

Biden has spent months pressing House Republicans to decouple the debt ceiling increase from negotiations on spending.

"Take default off the table," Biden said on Wednesday.

As the deadline grows closer, Biden is also rightfully pinning the blame on House Republicans.

“Let’s be clear: If he fails, the American people will be devastated,” Biden said of McCarthy.

He's not wrong. The best outcome for everyone involved—particularly average Americans—would be for a deal to come together long before a potential default shakes the global financial markets.

But if, God forbid, it comes down to finger-pointing, the White House appears to be on solid ground with the public, and Biden isn't mincing words.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk Worries Biden Will Be 'Really Hard To Beat' In 2024

It remains to be seen whether or not Democratic President Joe Biden will seek reelection in 2024, and which Republican he will be up against if he decides to run. But Biden certainly sounded like he was planning to run when he gave an aggressive 2023 State of the Union address in February and focused heavily on the economy.

Biden, during that forceful speech, sounded like he was laying out a list of reasons to give him four more years in the White House.

Charlie Kirk, the far-right MAGA Republican and talk show host who heads Turning Point USA, discussed the 2024 election during an April 17 broadcast of his "Charlie Kirk Show" — and argued that Biden will be "tough to beat" in 2024 if he runs.

"Now, we made the prediction that Joe Biden is not going to run for reelection," Kirk told listeners. "That remains to be a mystery. Is he going to run? Is he not going to run? Very soon, we're gonna have to find out. But it doesn't matter. Joe Biden running in 2024 is going to be really hard to beat."

Kirk went on to tell his audience that Democratic organizers will have a strong ground game in 2024.

"Candidate quality means next to nothing right now," Kirk argued. "Because the Democrats have such a structural advantage with how they built the infrastructure in these key states, they can run a brain-dead person like they did — a pseudo-brain-dead person like John Fetterman, who could become a senator. They just chase ballots…. They have their thousands of paid community organizers…. They do not run a campaign; they run 40 different campaigns."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Stephen Miller

Trump Aide Miller Summoned (Again) To Special Counsel Grand Jury

Former White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, the architect of ex-president Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant separation policies, is once again testifying before a federal grand jury as DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith continues his investigation into the January 6 insurrection.

Miller’s appearance Tuesday comes “after the courts ordered that he and other top advisers must share their recollections of direct conversations with the then-president related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot,” CNN reports. “Miller is likely to be asked in the grand jury about his phone call with Trump minutes before the Ellipse rally that day, and other conversations they had about the election. The grand jury is hearing evidence as part of a special counsel’s criminal investigation.”

Trump had tried to block Miller from testifying, claiming “executive privilege,” which he has no legal or constitutional authority to invoke, as courts have repeatedly ruled.

In response to a Bloomberg News reporter tweeting Tuesday morning that Miller had just gone through security at a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte noted, “Stephen Miller was on Fox News the morning of Dec 14 2020 *bragging* about the fraudulent elector scheme they were doing.”

Here is that video, from December 14, 2020. His claims appear to be fallacious.

In addition to reports of him testifying before the D.C. grand jury Tuesday, Miller is trending on Twitter after a just-publishedNew York Times report reveals his child-separation policy, designed to send the message to migrants in Central America to not try to travel to the U.S., “a significant number of U.S. citizen children were also removed from their parents under the so-called zero tolerance policy, in which migrant parents were criminally prosecuted and jailed for crossing the border without authorization.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.