JEFFERSON CITY — Missouri Republican lawmakers are pushing a pair of bills that would allow for women to be charged with murder for getting an abortion in the state.
The pieces of legislation would give fetuses the same rights as human beings, which would allow for criminal charges to be filed against anyone who gets an abortion, helps someone get an abortion or provides abortion care in the state, which implemented a near-total ban on the procedure after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Republicans state Sen. Mike Moon from Ash Grove and state Rep. Bob Titus from Billings pre-filed the bills on Dec. 1 ahead of next year’s legislative session, which begins next month.
The bills, both called the “Abolition of Abortion in Missouri Act,” do not state explicitly whether getting an abortion in another state would be illegal. While abortion is banned in Missouri in nearly all circumstances, the procedure is still available in bordering states Kansas and Illinois.
Missouri Republican lawmakers want to make charge abortion patients with murder. As I said on TikTok earlier today, at least they’re being honest! The Kansas City Star reports that Sen. Mike Moon and Rep. Bob Titus have both pre-filed bills called the “Abolition of Abortion in Missouri Act,” that would treat fetuses as full citizens.
Rep. Titus told The Kansas City Star, “if you’re going to treat babies as humans and people then the penalties for taking an innocent life should be commensurate with that.” The newspaper also points out that Sen. Moon is known for making comments earlier this year suggesting that 12 year-olds should be able to get married. So, charmers all around.
This legislation is part of the anti-abortion movement’s campaign for “equal protection” that I’ve written about before. A few important things to remember: Other Missouri Republicans are going to come out and claim that these legislators are extremists who are on the margins of the party and anti-abortion movement. That’s just not true. We’ve seen bills like this in multiple states, like Iowa, Georgia and South Carolina.
The other vital thing to know about this bill (and others like it) is that it defines personhood as beginning at fertilization. That means that conservatives who believe that IUDs and emergency contraception stop the implantation of a fertilized egg could argue that a woman who uses those forms of birth control should be arrested for murder. The bills could also criminalize anyone who has a miscarriage, if a zealous prosecutor decides that the pregnant person ‘caused’ it in some way.
Republicans to meet allies of Hungary's Viktor Orbn on ending Ukraine aid
Source: The Guardian
Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine, the Guardian has learned.
Márton Ugrósdy, the deputy state secretary for the prime minister’s political director’s office, and Attila Demkó, a leading pro-Orbán academic, along with members of the Hungarian embassy in Washington, will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank.
Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine, the Guardian has learned.
A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy said: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”
J.D. Vance Is the Latest Prominent Conservative Calling on Journalists to Be Investigated by Russ Choma
December 19, 2023
Introduction:
(Mother Jones) Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that he’d like to see journalists investigated for possibly colluding against Donald Trump in 2020. Vance’s appearance on Tapper’s Sunday talk show followed a letter Vance sent last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding to know if the Department of Justice would investigate a Washington Post columnist for talking about “open rebellion” by blue states if Trump is elected in 2024.
In his comments to CNN, Vance echoed comments made by former Trump aide Kash Patel, who last week pledged that a future Trump adminstration would pursue and prosecute critics in the government and media.
“We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media,” Kash said on the podcast of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Both Patel and Vance are considered strong candidates for senior roles in a second Trump administration, with Vance even discussed as a potential running mate. On CNN, when Vance was asked about Patel’s comments, he didn’t shy away from supporting them. Vance said there was evidence that the media colluded with Biden to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop before the 2020 election. Notably, the laptop was widely reported on, and no evidence has emerged that it contained anything implicating Joe Biden in wrongdoing. Still, conservatives point to reports that Twitter buried links to a New York Post story on the laptop.
“[We] need to look seriously at how there was collusion between members of the press and big technology companies and members of national security state,” Vance told Tapper on Sunday. “It is not journalism to take your security clearance, lie to the American people, and then persuade the big technology companies to censor anti-Joe Biden stories. That’s not journalism. That is cooperation between the government and journalism.”
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump said. “They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
'An unbreakable plurality of the GOP explicitly wants fascism': defense analyst
Defense analyst Brynn Tannehill has taken a look at recent polling of Republican primary voters and has come to the sobering conclusion that many of them want former President Donald Trump to be a dictator.
Writing in the New Republic, Tannehill notes that a recent poll of GOP voters showed that Trump's Nazi-esque rhetoric about migrants "poisoning the blood" of the nation made 42 percent of respondents more likely to support him, while only 28 percent said it made them less likely to support him.
"About half of Republicans hear Trump’s rhetoric and think, 'Yes, this exactly what I want,'" he writes. "Which is to say, an unbreakable plurality of the GOP explicitly wants fascism."
"When Milton Mayer visited Germany in the early 1950s to interview former low-level members of the Nazi party, he concluded that perhaps only a million out of 70 million Germans were 'Fanatiker' (fanatics or true believers)—the rest were just along for the perks or to simply avoid unwanted scrutiny for lack of ideological purity," Tannehill explains. "In my own experience as an analyst in U.S. Central Command who studied insurgency, I estimated that you only needed 10 to 15 percent of the population to be supportive of the insurgents to get a situation like what I saw in Iraq in 2005–2006."
