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If she is confirmed, she would move the court slightly but firmly to the right, making compromise less likely and putting at risk the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.

One area in which almost no one expects surprises is abortion. Mr. Trump has vowed to appoint justices ready to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

“None of the court’s abortion decisions holds that states are powerless to prevent abortions designed to choose the sex, race and other attributes of children,” the dissent said. It added that the fetal remains law was entirely rational.

You know who really reduced abortion numbers in the U.S.? President Obama, with the Affordable Care Act.

Millions of American Christians are likely to vote for President Trump on Tuesday because they believe it a religious obligation to support a president who will appoint “pro-life” judges.

The National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention both backed a limited right to abortion in the early 1970s, and an article in The Baptist Press welcomed the ruling in Roe v. Wade for advancing “religious liberty, human equality and justice.” A 1970 poll found that about two-thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother’s physical or mental well-being.

Republican Senator Jason Rapert and Rep. Mary Bentley filed a bill on Wednesday that would make abortion illegal in Arkansas except when the mother’s life is at stake.

If passed, the bill will generally prohibit abortion in Arkansas and give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and other pro-abortion decisions.

A conservative education and research organization, Family Council, showed support for the bill.

the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.

To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.

the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient:

Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

What this teaching suggests is that we should have a strong bias in favor of peaceful deliberation so long as deliberation remains possible.

Yiannopoulos  — a raving, crude white nationalist with zero interest in anything approaching conservative theory or history — is, in the eyes of the biggest conservative confab’s organizer, an ideal speaker (if not for the sex-with-children issue.) That in a nutshell is the problem of the right.

As political groupings and causes have gotten stale, the figures left running these groups are intellectually unserious or downright perverse

The old “three-legged stool of conservatism” has been moldy for years now.

I was one of the many who admired the orderly commitment and resolution of the women’s march on Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

Yet my admiration is mixed with worry. As I step through the police lines, I bring a message with me: Your demonstrations are engineered to fail. They didn’t stop the Iraq war. They won’t stop Donald Trump.

With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event.

He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.

most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value

If upheld, Planned Parenthood says the decision would leave 5.4 million Texan women of reproductive age with only 10 abortion providers in their state.

This decreased access would be especially detrimental to already marginalized groups and those with limited economic resources. Forty-two percent of the women who have abortions fall below the federal poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Denying women abortion access only increases the risk of falling into poverty, ThinkProgress reported in 2012.

providers disproportionately affects Latina women, according to Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. "While this politically-motivated attack threatens all Texas women, it's particularly harmful for the 40% of Texas women who are Latina," González-Rojas said in an emailed statement. "Latinas are twice as likely to experience unintended pregnancies as non-Latina white women and are more likely to be of reproductive age.

Ted Cruz asked his communications director Rick Tyler to resign Monday after Tyler distributed a video that falsely depicted Marco Rubio dismissing the Bible.

The incident comes a day before the Nevada Republican caucuses and in the wake of accusations from rival campaigns in recent weeks about Cruz's campaign tactics. Donald Trump has called Cruz a "liar" and Rubio and Ben Carson have also blasted the Texas senator.

Trump, Rubio and Carson have all attacked Cruz for his ethics ever since Cruz's victory in Iowa. Cruz later underperformed in South Carolina two contests later.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

The Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage in every state was also sweeping. It has produced almost no political reaction. The contrast to Roe could hardly be starker.

And the explanation is rather simple: All the great civil rights movements have been movements of inclusion. The first modern civil rights campaign — militating for the end of the British slave trade — set the pattern with its slogan: “Am I not a man and a brother?” Susan B. Anthony asked: “Are women persons?” In the most rapidly successful civil rights movement of our time, gays and lesbians came out to show their communities that LGBT people were their friends and family members. All these efforts expanded the circle of social welcome and protection.

The abortion rights movement, in contrast, is a movement of autonomy. Its primary appeal is to individual choice, not social inclusion. And the choice it elevates seems (to some people) in tension with the principle of inclusion.

No one seems to trust their senses anymore. They’ve forgotten the very basics of campaigns.

Starting with this obvious point: Trump needs Republicans to win. Not just his MAGA-hat-wearing, self-avowed deplorables. He needs all of them. He needs GOP suit-and-tie Chamber of Commerce types, the suburban yoga moms, and the buttoned-up Sunday school teachers alike. Even those camped out in the farthest nooks and crannies of the most gerrymandered districts in the swingiest of swing states. Why? Because he’s never even entertained the concept of reaching out to Democratic and Independent voters.

The 2018 midterm elections showed us two important things: Trump’s historic disapproval rating is real and Democratic turnout in 2020 is going to be off the charts.

The landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade has protected a person’s right to a safe and legal abortion since 1973. But many people, especially low-income women and women of color, still face heightened barriers to access the medical procedure due to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal health insurance programs like Medicaid from covering abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. 

The Hyde Amendment — named after former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, a vocally anti-abortion Republican — was passed in 1976 and has been renewed every year since. Congress has the opportunity to repeal the Hyde Amendment during the federal appropriations process each spring.

Research shows that 1 in 4 low-income women seeking an abortion are forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when lawmakers restrict abortion coverage under Medicaid. Studies also show that a woman denied an abortion is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who is able to get one.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday signed into law one of the country's most restrictive abortion bans, a measure supporters hope will force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 decision sanctioning the procedure.

Under Senate Bill 6, abortion would only be allowed in cases where it's necessary to save the life or preserve the health of the fetus or mother. The law does not allow any exceptions in situations of rape or incest — a line that anti-abortion rights activists and lawmakers have supported in the past.

The measure's supporters expect the law to be challenged by abortion rights activists. It's future is uncertain, as similar attempts to restrict access to abortion services in Ohio, Georgia, and Alabama in the last two years have failed after federal courts struck down local laws.

President Biden's budget proposal fulfills a campaign promise to remove a longstanding ban on federal funding for most abortions known as the Hyde Amendment.

Abortion rights advocates have praised the move; a statement from Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson called the Hyde Amendment "racist, sexist, deeply unjust" and thanked Biden for working to remove it.

Biden reversed his longtime position on Hyde, joining other Democratic hopefuls in saying he would work to overturn it. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," Biden said in June 2019.

Joe Biden is only the second Catholic president of the United States. He's also a supporter of abortion rights — a position at odds with official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, said she hopes for what she describes as a "better dialogue" between church leaders and some rank-and-file Catholics who disagree with aspects of the church's teachings.

Polling suggests a majority of American Catholics support abortion rights in most or all cases and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

As the electoral odds facing President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have continued to diverge in national and state polls, there’s at least one area where the divergence has been particularly striking: By early October, one national poll had Biden leading Trump by over 20 points among registered female voters; Trump and Biden were tied among likely male voters

Nationally, women in the U.S. have had the vote for 100 years. For the last 40 of those years, they have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in greater numbers than men have.

It took 60 years for women to vote in the same proportion as men. In 1980, for the first time since the passage of the 19th Amendment, women voted at the same rate as men. That was also the first time they voted noticeably differently from men.