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ProPublica: Georgia GOP Legislators Killed Amber Nicole Thurman

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2024 //
10

Kavitha Surana of ProPublica wrote the story of what happened to Amber Nicole Thurman. She died because it was illegal in Georgia to give her the care she needed when she needed it. She didn’t have to die. The anti-abortion Republican legislators in her state killed her. The “pro-life” movement killed her. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court killed her. Governor Brian Kemp killed her. Shameful!

Please open the link to finish this terrible story.

Surana writes:

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.

Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.

But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.”

Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.

When its law went into effect in July 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” and believed the state had found an approach that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”

After advocates tried to block the ban in court, arguing the law put women in danger, attorneys for the state of Georgia accused them of “hyperbolic fear mongering.” 

Two weeks later, Thurman was dead.

Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death Credit: via Facebook

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school. 

The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.

Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.

At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.

Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.

ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings. The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed. The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.

Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, which says it is staffed at all hours with an OB who specializes in hospital care, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica.

Her lower abdomen was tender, according to the summary. Her white blood cell count was critically high and her blood pressure perilously low — at one point, as Thurman got up to go to the bathroom, she fainted again and hit her head. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.

The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.

After assessing her at 9:38 p.m., doctors started Thurman on antibiotics and an IV drip, the summary said. The OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day.

But that didn’t happen the following morning, even when an OB diagnosed “acute severe sepsis.” By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.

Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine, the summary shows.

Doctors had Thurman tested for sexually transmitted diseases and pneumonia.

They placed her on Levophed, a powerful blood pressure support that could do nothing to treat the infection and posed a new threat: The medication can constrict blood flow so much that patients could need an amputation once stabilized.

At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit. 

At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs. 

At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating. 

Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.

By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.

During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.

Her mother was praying in the waiting room when one of the doctors approached. “Come walk with me,” she said.

Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Thurman and her son in a selfie she posted online in 2020, two years before her death Credit: via Facebook

Kavitha Surabaya wrote about a second woman who died in Georgia because she was unable to get the care she needed when she was pregnant. Her name was Candi Miller, a married woman with two children and a devoted husband.

Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her. 

But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.

At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.

Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.

Due to Georgia’s harsh abortion law, she did not get the routine care that would have saved her life. She was killed by the law.

Candi Miller with her husband and her two children.

Categories Cruelty, Gender, Georgia, Health

Project 2025 Calls for a Resumption of Nuclear Testing: A Terrible Idea!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2024 //
15

Tom Armbuster writes in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about a little-noticed feature of Project 2025, the agenda for a second Trump administration prepared by the Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document calls for a resumption of nuclear testing. Armbruster is deeply knowledgeable about the horrible after-effects of atomic testing, whether in the open air or underwater.

Armbruster was US Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, where several nuclear tests were conducted, which poisoned people, the land and the sea.

He writes:

There are few places more peaceful than a Pacific island. At 6:45 am on a March morning in 1954, that peace was shattered by the largest nuclear test in American history: Operation Bravo.

The Bravo test was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Now, 70 years later, Project 2025 is proposing a resumption of testing. That should alarm every military service member, downwinder, Pacific Islander, and taxpayer.

As US Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, I joined in the solemn observance of “Remembrance Day,” the Marshallese national holiday that pays tribute every March 1 to those who lost their homeland, fell victim to cancer, or were otherwise affected by the Bravo shockwave and fallout.

The shorthand for the 67 nuclear tests from 1946 to 1958, including two undersea tests that wiped out rich Pacific marine life, is the “Nuclear Legacy.” It would be more accurate to call it the “Nuclear Wound.” The tests on Bikini, Enewetak, and Kwajalein wounded the land and the ocean, the people—both Marshallese and American servicemen—and the relationship between our two countries. Healing is marked in decades, if not centuries.

We’ve had the nuclear tiger by the tail for a long time. No leader of any country would want their legacy to be the use of such indiscriminate and destructive weapons. When I joined the Foreign Service from Hawaii, Ronald Reagan was President. A chance for nuclear disarmament came and went with his summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Today, the Soviet Union is gone but nuclear weapons are still here. We’ve made progress, but Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world remains out of reach. Until we achieve that goal, maintaining a test ban is in everyone’s interest. It is part of the legacy we leave our children.

It is simply incomprehensible that the people who created Project 2025 would advocate a return to one of the most destructive practices in our history.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Florida: State Health Officials Try to Derail Abortion Amendment

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2024 //
5

At Governor DeSantis’ insistence, Florida enacted one of the toughest abortion bans in the nation. Abortion is banned in the state at six weeks of pregnancy. Very few, if any, women know they are pregnant at six weeks. Advocates for reproductive rights immediately began mobilizing to fight the abortion ban. They drafted a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would protect a woman’s right to an abortion. Despite DeSantis’ opposition, they gathered signatures, fought legal battles, and got the measure on the November ballot, where it is called Amendment 4.

DeSantis continues to fight passage of the referendum.

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the latest state plot to deceive voters:

Florida health officials reiterated Thursday that state law allows abortions at any point in pregnancy to save the life of the mother, responding to concerns that Florida’s new six-week abortion ban is tying doctors’ hands and putting women in danger.

The state’s “provider alert” said abortions can be performed “to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” Failing to provide that “life-saving treatment” could constitute medical malpractice, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health warned in a notice to providers distributed by email and social media.The notice was released a day after several doctors supporting Amendment 4 — which would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — said in news conference that the exceptions in Florida’s abortion ban aren’t real exceptions.

“These so-called exceptions are a mirage,” said Dr. Jerry Goodman, a Sarasota-based OB-GYN, who spoke at the pro-Amendment 4 event on Wednesday. “Patients face overwhelming legal and procedural and logistical hurdles making accessing care nearly impossible, particularly at three ‘o clock in the morning when these emergencies often arise.”Florida’s abortion ban, which went into effect May 1, has exceptions up to 15 weeks for pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or human trafficking, or if a “fatal fetal abnormality” is detected, the notice added. The memo included a line in bold that “a miscarriage is not an abortion.”

Abortions are permissible for women who experience premature rupture of membranes, as well as ectopic or molar pregnancies, all of which are serious complications, according to the memo.

But several doctors supporting Amendment 4 said at the news conference that the state’s abortion exceptions could be hard to meet. For instance, the law requires women who are raped to provide legal documentation, such as a police report, a barrier that the doctors said can delay care or block access.

The state’s ban has sparked fear and led to confusion over what constitutes a serious health risk under Florida’s “narrow medical exceptions,” according to a report from Physicians for Human Rights released on Tuesday.

“Several clinicians described cases of being required by their hospitals to wait until patients become ‘sick enough’ to qualify for care,” the report found.

A physician who performs an illegal abortion could face a third-degree felony charge punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

State officials said they issued the notice in response to “misinformation” about Florida’s abortion laws.

Their guidance comes as voters prepare to take up Amendment 4, which would overturn the state’s six-week ban and protect abortion access up until viability, typically defined as about 24 weeks of pregnancy. If approved by at least 60% of voters in November, it also would guarantee abortion access “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”

Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a Miami-based provider, also urged voters to support Amendment 4. She said she has seen patients with nonviable pregnancies who have been turned away from care.

“I saw a patient a few weeks ago who came to me with four ultrasounds from four different clinics showing a nonviable pregnancy and she was still carrying this pregnancy when she came to me,” Daniels said.

Opponents argue Amendment 4 is vague and misleads voters by failing to define key terms like “viability” and “healthcare provider.” A group called Physicians Against Amendment 4 denounced the measure at an event earlier this month in Orlando, calling it “overreaching,” “too permissive” and “irresponsible.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis and state officials have been under fire from critics who accuse them of unlawfully using taxpayer resources to try to sway the results of Amendment 4. The agency launched a webpage earlier this month, proclaiming that existing Florida law “protects women” while the initiative enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution “threatens women’s safety.”

It also released a “public service announcement” video that includes information about Florida’s abortion laws and an assurance that “Florida cares about women and families.”

Two lawsuits have been filed challenging the agency’s webpage, and Florida Democrats have pushed for a criminal investigation.

Florida law stipulates that “no employee in the career service” shall “use the authority of his or her position to secure support for, or oppose, any candidate, party, or issue in a partisan election or affect the results thereof.”

State officials, though, say the website is informational and complies with that law.

About the same time, a Florida judge ordered an ob-gyn doctor in Orlando to pay a $10,000 fine for performing 193 abortions after the law passed and was caught up in litigation. The doctor and the clinic where she worked tried to get information from the state about when he law went into effect. Getting no response, the doctor continued to provide abortions. The judge acknowledged that the doctor and the clinic unknowingly violated the law but decided that they broke the law and needed to be punished. The clinic was fined $193,000, a fine of $1,000 for each abortion.

Categories DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Health, Resistance

North Dakota: Judge Overturns State’s Near-Total Ban on Abortion

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2024 //
4

Courage and independent thinking show up at unexpected times and unexpected places. That was the case today in North Dakota, where a judge overturned the state’s near-total ban on abortion. It was the second time he had thrown out the ban. After the first time, the legislature revised the ban and passed it again.

Kate Zernike of The New York Times wrote the story:

A North Dakota judge overturned the state’s near-total abortion ban on Thursday, saying that the State Constitution protected a woman’s right to abortion until the fetus was viable.

“The North Dakota Constitution guarantees each individual, including women, the fundamental right to make medical judgments affecting his or her bodily integrity, health and autonomy, in consultation with a chosen health care provider free from government interference,” wrote Judge Bruce Romanick of the district court in Burleigh County. 

The judge, who was elected to his position, also ruled that the law violated the State Constitution’s due process protections because it was too vague in how it defined exceptions to the ban.

The decision is almost certain to be appealed. And while the judge’s order means that abortion will become legal soon, the procedure will remain unavailable because the only clinic in the state has closed, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the suit in 2022 on behalf of that clinic.

The Red River Women’s Clinic, the state’s last remaining provider of abortion services, closed in August 2022 and relocated to Moorhead, Minnesota.

Categories Freedom, Gender, Health

Paul Krugman: Why Do Republicans Oppose Free Lunches for Children?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2024 //
35

Paul Krugman, the economist who writes a regular column for the New York Times, recently explored why Republicans oppose free lunch for students. The simple answer is that it’s just plain weird. The more complex answer is that they don’t want to create an “entitlement” for children. The irony that he does not explore is why Republicans are unwilling to pay for free lunches, yet eager to pay the tuition of students who attend religious or other private schools, regardless of their family’s income.

He writes:

You could say that Tim Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with one weird trick — that is, by using that word to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance, a categorization that went viral. In his maiden campaign speech he upgraded it a bit further to “creepy and weird as hell.” (If you think that’s over the top, have you seen Trump’s bizarre rant speculating about whether Joe Biden is going to seize back his party’s presidential nomination?)

But Walz is more than a meme-maker. He has also been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring that public and charter schools provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.

Perhaps not incidentally, child care has long been a signature issue for Kamala Harris, and Walz’s policies may have played a role in his selection as her running mate.

In any case, free school meals are a big deal in pure policy terms. They have also met fierce Republican opposition. And the partisan divide over feeding students tells you a lot about the difference between the parties, and why you really, really shouldn’t describe the MAGA movement as “populist.”

Now, even many conservatives generally support, or at least claim to support, the idea of cheap or free lunches for poor schoolchildren. The National School Lunch Program goes all the way back to 1946, when it passed with bipartisan support and President Harry Truman signed it into law.

Why should the government help feed kids? Part of the answer is social justice: Children don’t choose to be born into families that can’t or won’t feed them adequately, and it seems unfair that they should suffer. Part of the answer is pragmatic: Children who don’t receive adequate nutrition will grow up to be less healthy and less productive adults than those who do, hurting society as a whole. So spending on child nutrition is arguably as much an investment in the future as building roads and bridges.

There’s a strong case that in general child nutrition programs more than pay for themselves by creating a healthier, higher-earning future work force. In other words, this is one area where there really is a free lunch.

Schools, then, should feed students who might otherwise not get enough to eat. But why make free meals available to all children, rather than only to children from low-income households? There are multiple reasons, all familiar to anyone who has looked into the problems of antipoverty policy in general.

First, trying to save money by limiting which children you feed turns out to be expensive and cumbersome; it requires that school districts deal with reams of paperwork as they try to determine which children are eligible. It also imposes a burden on parents, requiring that they demonstrate their neediness.

Additionally, restricting free meals to children whose parents can prove their poverty creates a stigma that can deter students from getting aid even when they’re entitled to receive it. I know about this effect from family history: My mother, who grew up in the Depression, used to talk about her shame at not being able to afford new shoes because her parents, although just as poor as her classmates’ parents, couldn’t bring themselves to apply for government assistance.

And it’s not as if feeding children is prohibitively expensive. So if you want to make sure that children get enough to eat, having schools offer free meals to all their students, without an income test, would seem to be simple common sense.

But Republicans in general aren’t on board. The Minnesota law that Walz signed passed essentially along party lines. The people behind Project 2025, in particular, don’t approve. (Yes, despite denials, Project 2025 is a very good guide to what a second Trump administration might do.) The project’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Leadership,” whose 900 pages lays out a detailed policy agenda, singles out feeding students as something that should be reined in. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs,” it warns, as if this is self-evidently a bad thing. A bit farther down, it reads, “The U.S.D.A. should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes.” I guess being hungry isn’t a problem when school is out.

Stories like this are why my hackles rise whenever people call MAGA a populist movement. The people who will almost certainly make policy if Trump wins are as committed as ever to a right-wing economic agenda of cutting taxes on the wealthy while slashing programs that help Americans in need — including programs that help children.

In addition to being cruel, this agenda tends to be unpopular. Most Americans support providing all students with meals, regardless of their income, just as most Americans now support the Affordable Care Act, which Trump will very likely again try to destroy if returned to office.

But the American right lives in an echo chamber that normalizes views on both economic and social policy that are very much at odds with what a majority of voters want. Those extreme views often fly under the radar. But sometimes they do attract attention. And when they do, many people find them … weird.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Elections, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Poverty, Students, Vouchers

Dan Rather: Trump Is Lying About Project 2025

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2024 //
78

When Project 2025, the definitive guide to Trump’s second term, began to generate negative reactions, Trump claimed he was taken by surprise. All of a sudden, he played dumb about Project 2025: He said he didn’t know who was behind it and had barely heard about it.

As Dan Rather and his team at “Steady” determined, he was lying again. Nothing new there, but he wanted to discourage the public from learning more about Project 2025.

Dan wrote:

Donald Trump and his campaign may have disavowed it, but don’t think for a moment that Project 2025 is going anywhere. A newly released hidden camera interview with one of the project’s authors, who also served in Trump’s Cabinet, reveals that the Republican nominee has “blessed it.” 

First, a little background.

Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint to completely overhaul the federal government, is being spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, the daddy of conservative think tanks, with input from more than 100 other right-wing organizations. “The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” the official title, consists of four pillars:

  • A 900-page policy guide for a second Trump term
  • A playbook for the first 180 days, consisting of 350 executive orders and regulations that have already been written
  • A LinkedIn-style database of potential MAGA personnel 
  • A “Presidential Administration Academy,” a training guide for political appointees to be ready on day one

On July 24, Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 author and Republican National Convention policy director, met with two people he thought were potential donors to his conservative group, Center for Renewing America. They were actually working for a British nonprofit trying to expose information about Project 2025. The two secretly recorded the two-hour conversation.

In the video posted on CNN, Vought described the project as the “tip of the America First spear.” He said that after meeting with Trump in recent months, the former president “is very supportive of what we do.” The project would create “shadow agencies” that wouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny as actual agencies of the federal government. Vought also told members of the British nonprofit that he was in charge of writing the second phase of Project 2025, consisting of the hundreds of executive orders ready to go on day one of a new administration. 

When asked how the information would be disseminated, his deputy said it would be distributed old-school, on paper. “You don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” he said, to avoid discovery under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last week, ProPublica, an investigative journalism nonprofit, obtained more than 14 hours of training videos, which are part of Project 2025’s effort to recruit and train tens of thousands of right-wing appointees to replace a wide and deep swath of current federal civil servants. 

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, who was in charge of Project 2025 until he was fired because it’s become such a headache for Trump. “This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” Dans said in 2023. 

Project 2025 is not a new plan; it has been in the works for decades. The first version was published just after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. In 2015 the Heritage Foundation gave the incoming Trump administration the seventh iteration. Should you think that Trump and his cronies know nothing about any of this, the Heritage Foundation boasted that Trump instituted 64% of the policy recommendations in that document, including leaving the Paris Climate Accords.

Trump has tried and largely failed to distance himself from Project 2025. Perhaps because two high-ranking members of his administration were directors of the project. On Truth Social, Trump posted, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it….” As for those training videos, most of the speakers in them are former Trump administration officials.

Many of Project 2025’s recommendations are deeply unpopular with Americans. A survey conducted by YouGov found that almost 60% of respondents opposed several big tenets, including: eliminating the Department of Education, giving tax cuts to corporations, ending the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and changing the law to allow the president to fire civil servants.

It is difficult to convince voters that the project’s policy recommendations are real because they are so radical. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist, spoke about the challenges of discussing Project 2025 with focus groups on the podcast “The Wilderness.”

“When we actually cut and paste verbatim from the Heritage document, people are like, that’s a bunch of bull****. Like, why did you make that up? And what is wrong with you? And why are you lying to us?” she said. 

To that end, here are just a few of the most democracy-threatening suggestions, verbatim:

On child labor: “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”

On education: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the Federal Department of Education should be eliminated.“

On climate change: “Climate-change research should be disbanded … The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be broken up and downsized.”

On LGBTQ+ rights: “The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”

On families: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society … The male-female dyad is essential to human nature and … every child has a right to a mother and father.”

Not to mention several highly publicized recommendations on abortion and women’s rights that are an effort to return to America of the 1950s.

The architects of and adherents to Project 2025 want a white, heterosexual Christian nation. The ideals of our 250-year-old form of government, in which majority rules, are anathema to them. They want to inflict their beliefs on everyone, representative democracy be damned. 

I cannot state it strongly enough: Project 2025, with Donald Trump at the helm, is the greatest existential threat to American democracy in recent history. And make no mistake, should Trump win in November, he will usher in many if not most of the project’s recommendations. 

Perhaps Project 2025 should be referred to as Project 1925. In Trump’s mind, that was the time that America was “great,” and they want to go back to that era of low taxes, no abortions, white Christian male domination, no civil rights laws, low taxes, and a very limited federal government.

No thanks. We are not going back!

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Health, School Choice, Science, Trump, Vouchers

A Dark Day in Arkansas As Court Rejects Abortion Referendum

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2024 //
6

The majority of the Supreme Court of Arkansas opposes abortion. So, they blocked a referendum on abortion access on flimsy technical grounds. Democracy, be damned in Arkansas. To read the background and the Court’s opinions, please open the link.

The Arkansas Times reported:

The Arkansas Supreme Court today likely drove a final stake through the heart of a ballot initiative to restore abortion rights in Arkansas. In a 4-3 decision, the court denied the request from the group backing the measure to restart the review process after the secretary of state preemptively disqualified the group last month due to a piece of paperwork the group failed to include in its final submission of the petition.

Despite collecting signatures from more than 100,000 Arkansans — and despite the fact that the plain language of the statutes appeared to show that the review process for the petition should have continued — the court ruled that paperwork omission was fatal to the group’s effort. 

For those following the case, this has always been the fear: Even if the law was on their side, the majority of the court opposes abortion. Ultimately the law is what the Supreme Court says it is. Among the grab-bag of flimsy arguments offered by Attorney General Tim Griffin, they found a couple they could stretch to suit the purpose of disqualifying the abortion petition.

In a blistering dissent, Associate Karen Baker took the majority to task for their descent into Calvinball:

Even a cursory review of how the present ballot initiative has progressed since its inception demonstrates that both the respondent and the majority have treated it differently for the sole purpose of preventing the people from voting on this issue.

“Today is a dark day in Arkansas,” said Rebecca Bobrow, a spokesperson for Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), the group leading the petition effort. “This morning, by a vote of 4-3, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Secretary Thurston’s disqualification of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment. More than 102,000 Arkansas voters exercised their constitutionally protected right to engage in direct democracy by signing the petition to get the Arkansas Abortion Amendment on the ballot. The Court’s majority ratifies Secretary Thurston’s decision to silence those voices.”

Theoretically, AFLG could file a lawsuit in federal court. But for procedural and timing reasons, that is extremely unlikely to help. In all likelihood, it’s over: Citizens will not have the opportunity to vote to restore abortion rights in November.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Democracy, Education Reform, Gender, Health

RFK Jr. Considering Dropping Out of Race and Endorsing Trump

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2024 //
41

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to amaze. He is a lawyer; he worked for years for environmental protection. Then he became involved in opposing vaccines and spread the claim that vaccines cause autism. Most members of his illustrious family have publicly opposed him as a candidate.

He found a very wealthy running mate, Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google. She poured millions into the campaign.

The Kennedy-Shanahan ticket has had trouble getting onto the ballot in every state. So far, they have succeeded in 19 states. Their ticket has declined in the polls, and it’s running short of money.

Kennedy has approached both of the major candidates about joining forces with them. Trump was enthusiastic and even hinted that there might be an important post for him, something like a major Cabinet post (Health and Human Services, perhaps?). Imagine RFK Jr. with the power to recall or ban vaccines.

He also tried to meet with Democratic leaders, but they rebuffed him. After Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, he offered to take Biden’s place at the top of the ticket. When Kamala became the consensus candidate, he tried to meet with her, but she was not interested.

It turns out that RFK Jr. draws more votes away from Trump than from Harris. The anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists like him.

The New York Times reported that Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate, was interviewed in a podcast, where she mentioned that they were thinking of joining forces with Trump. She expressed bitterness towards the Democrats and blames them for undermining the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket. She said that one of the options for the future is forming a third party.

Hmmm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working on behalf of Donald Trump? Trump is a guy who doesn’t believe in climate change. He says it’s a hoax. Will RFK Jr. abandon his many years as an environmentalist to get a shot at political power? Shameful.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Jess Piper: Abortion Is on the Ballot in Missouri!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2024 //
10

Jess Piper is a former teacher who lives on a farm in Missouri and fights for democracy. She urges Democrats to run everywhere. In most districts like hers, the elections are uncontested. She writes here about a groundswell to restore reproductive rights in Missouri.

Abortion is on the ballot in November in Missouri. Missouri will be the first state to overturn a complete ban. And, you read that right…I do not doubt that we will have enough votes to overturn the ban and enshrine the right to reproductive healthcare in Missouri.
Abortion rights supporters have prevailed in all seven states that already had decided ballot measures since 2022: California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Vermont.
And now Missouri will have the chance.

If approved, the initiative would amend the state’s constitution to establish a right to make decisions about reproductive health care, remove the state’s current restrictions on abortion, allow the regulation of reproductive health care to improve a patient’s health, and require the government not to discriminate against people providing or seeking reproductive health care.

Listen, I am not going to blow smoke up your you-know-what and act like Missouri will flip blue this year, but I am going to be optimistic for a minute. Optimistic about Missouri…a state with a 22 year GOP supermajority and a GOP trifecta.

Missourians have had enough. We currently have a total abortion ban — no exceptions for rape or incest. We were the first state to ban the procedure after Roe fell with our AG out in front of cameras within minutes of the Dobbs decision.

Missourians needed 180K signatures to put reproductive rights on the ballot. We gathered 380K signatures. 200,000 more than we needed. We crushed it. We killed it. We proved that not only do most folks want to vote to restore abortion rights, but that hundreds of thousands would crawl across broken glass to find and sign a petition. 

When I was gathering signatures in rural Missouri, one woman was waiting for us as we set up the petition, signed it, and then texted her Bible group to remind them to come by and sign it. Yes, her Bible group.

And the language is clear. We were able to take out extremist language that could have confused voters. Here is the language as it will be presented on the ballot in November: Missouri Ballot Measure.

Rural folks are ready to regain access to abortion.

The protest photo above was taken in 2019. But, in rural spaces, we have been fighting much longer. People in my part of the state haven’t had access to abortion for over a decade. The only functioning clinic in the state was in St Louis and that is a 5-hour drive for folks in NW Missouri. We’ve been dealing with a lack of access for much longer than most realize. 

Even more than having abortion on the ballot? We have other initiatives to legalize sports betting and raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave. These three initiatives will bring out folks who may not vote regularly…these initiatives could be game-changers themselves by increasing turnout which is usually good for Democrats.

More than that? We have Harris at the top of the ticket and we have a pro-choice woman running to be governor in Missouri. Crystal Quade will be tasked this November with beating Mike Kehoe, our current Lt Governor, but don’t think that it can’t be done. 

Quade is a current legislator and the Minority Leader in the House. She is a proud working-class woman who has fought for Missourians by arguing for funding public schools, fighting for abortion rights and union wages, and feeding kids. 

On the other hand, Mike Kehoe voted to sell off Missouri farmland to foreign governments and for union-busting Right to Work legislation. Kehoe believes in “school choice” measures that drain public schools of funding that is then sent to private religious schools. He is also in favor of the current abortion ban.

While serving in the Missouri Senate, Kehoe backed abortion restrictions and claimed that he “voted for every pro-life, every sanctity of life bill since I’ve been in the Senate.” 

During his tenure, he voted to pass restrictions on abortion, like HB 400 in 2013, which “would require a doctor to be physically present when an abortion-inducing drug is first administered.” That bill restricted abortions, particularly in rural areas where doctors are not readily available. Additionally, in 2014, Kehoe voted to pass HB 1307 to increase the waiting period for abortions from 24 hours to 72 hours. 

So, here’s the thing…we have a chance to change Missouri in November. I don’t know that we can flip enough seats to defeat the supermajorities in the House and the Senate, but I know we can elect Crystal Quade if we all work together. And that’s exactly what we did to get the signatures to put abortion on the ballot in the first place.

It was hard work — we did it. We can elect Harris and Quade with an education campaign, engaged voters, including young voters, and an increased turnout. This is hard work. This can be done.

Everywhere I look, people are excited. Whether I’m at Walmart or Ace Hardware or Casey’s, there is hope. People, even rural people, are filled with optimism. And I’m not going to act like that is normal. Excitement and hope are sometimes hard to find in rural progressive politics, but it’s all I hear and see. 

Eyes are bright and people aren’t whispering about it. Look around…this is what democracy looks like.

~Jess

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Missouri

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim
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