Read more: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... index.htmlHouse Republicans have selected Rep. Mike Johnson as their next speaker nominee.
What happens next: Republicans will hold a roll-call vote behind closed doors tomorrow morning to see if Johnson can secure the 217 votes to win the gavel.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... index.htmlHouse Republicans have elected Rep. Mike Johnson as the new speaker – a major moment that comes three weeks after Kevin McCarthy’s historic ouster.
There were 220 votes for Johnson and 209 votes for Democrat Hakeem Jeffries. There was unanimous GOP support behind Johnson. One Republican – Van Orden – was absent from the vote.
Johnson has been a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump and was a key congressional figure in the failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Johnson was first elected to the House in 2016 and serves as vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, as well as GOP deputy whip, an assistant leadership role.
An attorney with a focus on constitutional law, Johnson joined a group of House Republicans in voting to sustain the objection to electoral votes on January 6, 2021. During Trump’s first impeachment trial in January 2020, Johnson, along with a group of other GOP lawmakers, served a largely ceremonial role in Trump’s Senate impeachment team.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/ ... mccarthy/(Mother Jones) Mike Johnson is the new speaker of the House. The conservative Louisiana lawmaker—a man described by the New York Times as the “most important architect” of congressional Republicans’ attempt to throw out Joe Biden’s 2020 victory—is now second-in-line to the presidency. It’s a win for MAGA extremists. A win for Donald Trump. A win for anyone who thinks that elections should be decided by GOP politicians instead of by voters.
And House Democrats helped make it possible.
Yes, I am aware that this has somehow become a controversial take—as if acknowledging Democratic culpability somehow excuses GOP extremism and the complicity of so-called “moderate” Republicans. But that culpability is real.
Back on October 3, every single Democrat present—all 208 of them—teamed up with eight ultra-conservative Republicans to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The GOP rebels, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)—who has always loathed McCarthy—were angry that, after weeks of chaos, McCarthy had averted a government shutdown by working with Democrats to pass a temporary spending bill.
Gaetz and his allies couldn’t have removed the GOP speaker on their own. They needed a lot of help from across the aisle. And the Dems delivered. They offered a lot of reasons—many of them pretty compelling—for refusing to bail out McCarthy: McCarthy had voted to overturn the 2020 election. McCarthy had tried to thwart Congress’ January 6 investigation. McCarthy had launched a partisan impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden. McCarthy couldn’t be trusted. McCarthy refused to make any concessions to Democrats. McCarthy was largely subservient to the Trumpist right. And so on.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/25/politics ... index.html
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a history of harsh anti-gay language from his time as an attorney for a socially conservative legal group in the mid-2000s.
In editorials that ran in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper, The Times, Johnson called homosexuality a “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle” that would lead to legalized pedophilia and possibly even destroy “the entire democratic system.”
And, in another editorial, he wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do,” he wrote. “This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”
At the time, Johnson was an attorney and spokesman for Alliance Defense Fund, known today as Alliance Defending Freedom, where he also authored his opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas – which overturned state laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults.
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Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -house/(Mother Jones) Mike Johnson, the new Republican speaker of the House, has a very dark view of America. He believes that the United States is “a completely amoral society” and that global “sinister” forces have a hold on some of its governmental policies.
Immediately after Johnson—a little known congressman from Louisiana whose most notable act to date has been leading the effort to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory—was elevated by the House GOP to be speaker, people started digging into his background and discovered that he was a far-right Christian fundamentalist who seeks to ban all abortions, who has called for getting rid of no-fault divorce, who has decried same-sex marriage, and who has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. He is a culture war extremist.
He also seems to hate America—at least, modern-day America.
In a 2016 sermon he preached at the Christian Center of Shreveport—while he was running for Congress—Johnson summed up his take on the United States. Standing before an American flag and an Israeli flag, Johnson delivered a 90-minute-long presentation in which he traced all present ills to the countercultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s that undermined “the foundations of religion and morality.” He ticked off the culprits: no-fault divorce, the sexual revolution, radical feminism, and legalized abortion. “Collectively as Americans,” he declared, “we began to get together in growing number and thumb our noses at the Creator and say we don’t believe that anymore.” The nation, he bemoaned, chose a path of “moral relativism.” He pronounced a harsh verdict: “We’re living in a completely amoral society.”
That was quite an indictment: the United States as a godless nation and a moral wreck. But Johnson meant it. He continued: “We’ve taught a whole generation, a couple of generations now, that there is no right or wrong, that it’s about the survival of the fittest, and you evolved from the primordial slime.” One result, he claimed, was school shootings. Yes, the teaching of evolution has led to these bloody massacres.
By Steve GormanLOS ANGELES, Oct 28 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court ruled on Saturday that California's assault weapons ban will remain in force while the state attorney general appeals a lower court decision declaring the 30-year-old measure unconstitutional.
A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the injunction issued last week by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in San Diego from taking effect while the case remains under review.
The panel also unanimously agreed that state Attorney General Rob Bonta's appeal in support of the gun law would be heard on its merits on an expedited basis.
Siding with gun rights advocates, Benitez ruled on Oct. 19 that assault weapons prohibition deprived law-abiding citizens of semiautomatic firearms like the AR-15 in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-med ... a58e82aa7f
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas judge on Monday put a new state law on medication abortions on hold and blocked older restrictions that for years have spelled out what providers must tell patients and forced patients to wait 24 hours to end their pregnancies.
The ruling was another big victory for abortion rights advocates in Kansas, where a statewide vote in August 2022 decisively confirmed protections for abortion access under the state constitution. District Judge K. Christopher Jayaram’s order suspends some restrictions that have been in effect for years. The waiting period had been in place since 1997.
“The Court has great respect for the deeply held beliefs on either side of this contentious issue,” Jayaram wrote in his 92-page order. “Nevertheless, the State’s capacity to legislate pursuant to its own moral scruples is necessarily curbed by the Kansas Constitution and its Bill of Rights.”
Jayaram’s order is set to remain in effect through the trial set for the end of June 2024 for a lawsuit filed by abortion providers, against state officials who would enforce abortion restrictions. The providers filed their case in Johnson County in the Kansas City area, home to two clinics that provide abortions.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/infant-mo ... =104505952
Infant mortality rates in the United States increased last year for the first time in two decades, according to new federal provisional data. For the report, published early Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Vital Statistics, researchers looked at birth/infant death data collected through the National Vital Statistics System.
Provisional data showed there were 5.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2022, which is 3% higher than the rate of 5.44 per 1,000 live births in 2021. Although rates have been declining over the last several years, this marks the first year-to-year increase in more than two decades when the rate rose from 6.8 deaths per 1,000 in 2001 to 7.0 deaths in 2002.
The neonatal mortality rate -- infant deaths at less than 28 days of life -- also rose 3% from 3.49 per 1,000 live births in 2021 to 3.58 in 2022 and the postneonatal mortality rate -- infant deaths between 28 and 364 days of life -- grew 4% from 1.95 per 1,000 to 2.02 over the same period.
Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, an associate professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine who is an expert on women's access to reproductive health care, told ABC News she's not surprised by the findings and that she sees a couple of reasons for the increase in infant mortality rates. One is maternity care deserts -- where’s there a lack or absence of maternity care -- which limits the ability to care for infants properly. The second is limiting of access to abortion, particularly following the Supreme Court decision of Dobbs v. Jackson in June 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
