Closing summary
We’re closing the US politics blog now after another day dominated by the fallout from the supreme court’s draft ruling upending almost half a century of abortion rights in the US.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer set a vote for next Wednesday to codify abortion rights into federal law. Democrats don’t have the numbers for it to pass, but Schumer says the symbolic vote will show the country where every senator stands on the abortion issue.
“America will be watching,” he says.
Here are the day’s other key developments:
- Democrats tore into Republican former vice-president Mike Pence over an anti-abortion speech he was set to deliver at a South Carolina Christian “clinic” that serves to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies.
- Republican senate leaders indicated a bipartisan deal was close on Joe Biden’s request to Congress for $33bn in aid for Ukraine. Minority whip John Thune suggested the $20bn the president wants for military support could rise.
- Louisiana Republicans advanced an extreme bill that could see women who have an abortion charged with murder.
- Another audio clip released by the New York Times captured House minority leader Kevin McCarthy discussing the 25th amendment as an option to remove then-president Donald Trump from office two days after the 6 January Capitol attack.
- Supreme court justice Samuel Alito canceled an appearance at a conference of senior judges in New Orleans in the wake of the leak of his draft ruling ending abortion rights for women.
Thanks for joining us today. A reminder you can follow live developments in the Ukraine conflict in our 24-hour blog here.
- This post was amended on 6 May 2022. Mike Pence is a former vice-president, not former president as an earlier version said.
Updated
Biden names Karine Jean-Pierre new White House press secretary
Karine Jean-Pierre has been named the new White Press secretary, replacing Jen Psaki who will depart on 13 May, it has just been announced.
Today’s White House briefing, which was scheduled to have begun at 3pm with Psaki at the podium, is not yet under way.
Jean-Pierre, currently the principal deputy press secretary, has filled in for Psaki on several occasions, most recently while her predecessor was quarantining with Covid-19. She is a former political analyst with NBC and MSNBC.
Biden said in his statement:
Karine not only brings the experience, talent and integrity needed for this difficult job, but she will continue to lead the way in communicating about the work of the Biden-Harris administration on behalf of the American people.
Jill and I have known and respected Karine a long time and she will be a strong voice speaking for me and this Administration.
Jen Psaki has set the standard for returning decency, respect and decorum to the White House briefing room. I want to say thank you to Jen for raising the bar, communicating directly and truthfully to the American people, and keeping her sense of humor while doing so.
I thank Jen her service to the country, and wish her the very best as she moves forward.
Lots to say about how grateful I am to @POTUS and @FLOTUS and the Biden family for trusting me to serve as @PressSec and plenty of time before my last day to share, but today is about @KJP46 so a few thoughts on this remarkable woman who will soon be behind the podium every day.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) May 5, 2022
Jean-Pierre will become the first Black woman and the first openly LGBTQ+ to serve as press secretary, Psaki said on Twitter after the president issued his statement.
The Guardian reported last month that Psaki, Biden’s press secretary since he took office in January 2021, was lined up for a new job as a host at MSNBC.
The White House also announced the return of Anita Dunn as a senior advisor and assistant to the president.
Read more:
Updated
Bipartisan deal 'close' on Biden's $33bn Ukraine aid request
A compromise vote on Joe Biden’s $33bn request to Congress for Ukraine aid could come as early as next week, the Associated Press is reporting.
Senior members of both parties told the news agency that bipartisan talks among House and Senate appropriations committee leaders are under way in hopes of producing legislation Congress could vote on as soon as next week.
Changes in Biden’s proposal are likely. The amount the president is seeking for military aid, currently $20bn, could rise.
South Dakota Republican John Thune, the minority whip, told the agency:
[Republican budget writers] are probably knocking some things out and adding some things. But I think by and large, everybody agrees we’ve got to do all we can to help.
This package may not be robust enough, but I think it probably strikes close to the right balance.
Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell indicated broad backing for the measure but aides said he objected to proposed funding to some international organizations Republicans have criticized for spending money on alternative energy.
McConnell said:
This isn’t about battling climate change. If the Senate is serious about helping Ukraine win, we need to show it by passing supplemental assistance. Clean, no strings attached, and soon.
The Nashville public library has debuted new library cards celebrating banned books amid attempts to censor literature throughout the state.
Patrons of the Nashville public library system can now get limited-edition bright yellow library cards that say: “I read banned books.”
With only 5,000 limited-edition cards available, the Nashville public library hopes to distribute all of them in May to a variety of library users, with existing patrons and first-time visitors eligible for the special cards.
The newly released cards are a part of the library’s “Freedom to Read” campaign, a rebuttal to escalating attempts in Tennessee to censor books.
“This campaign is our way of bringing our community together in our shared Freedom to Read, which is essential to sustaining our democracy,” said Kent Oliver, the Nashville public library’s director, in a news release announcing the campaign.
In Tennessee, conservative lawmakers have forwarded new proposals that drastically censor material within classrooms.
In January, a Tennessee school board unanimously voted to ban the Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel Maus from all its classrooms. Maus, which tells the story of Holocaust survivors, was reportedly banned for eight curse words used in the book and a drawing of a naked mouse.
A month later, a separate school board upheld a ban on the 1994 novel Walk Two Moons, which focuses on a 13-year-old Native American girl, after the ban was suggested by a chapter of the conservative group Moms for Liberty.
Last month, lawmakers in Tennessee’s house and senate passed legislation that would give a state-run commission the power to ban books in public schools and veto curriculum decisions made by school boards. The Tennessee governor, Bill Lee, has not confirmed if he will sign the bill.
Read more:
Democrats slam Pence over anti-abortion speech
Mike Pence has been slammed by Democrats ahead of the Republican former vice-president’s appearance in South Carolina today at a fundraising event for the Carolina Pregnancy Center, a Christian organization that provides services to pregnant people.
According to a press release, Pence’s remarks would focus on “protecting the right to life [and] restoring the sanctity of life,” per the Charleston Post and Courier.
Pence’s speech comes days after the supreme court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked to the public. The draft decision indicated the court plans to overturn Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion access.
Abortion rights activists have criticized centers such as the one in South Carolina as “fake clinics” over their efforts to dissuade clients from terminating their pregnancies.
Democrats attacked Pence for touting his anti-abortion views just as the supreme court appears ready to override nearly 50 years of precedent and jeopardize reproductive rights across the country.
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on a press call:
Make no mistake, this draft opinion is the direct result of the Republican party’s extreme, decades-long campaign against reproductive rights and Americans’ fundamental freedom to make their own decisions about their health care.
Looking ahead to the midterm elections in November, Harrison added:
We must elect Democrats who will serve as the last lines of defense against [Republicans’] assault on our established and fundamental freedoms.
Schumer sets abortion rights vote: 'America will be watching'
The US Senate will vote next week on legislation that would codify abortion rights into federal law, although the measure has next to no chance of passing the divided chamber and will be mostly symbolic, the Associated Press reports.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, said senators will vote on Wednesday on the pregnant workers fairness act. A similar measure failed in February, following the House passing an abortion rights bill in September.
Although he does not have the necessary 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster and move ahead with the bill, Schumer said it was important members of both parties go on record about where they stand:
Next week’s vote will be one of the most important we ever take because it deals with one of the most personal and difficult decisions a woman ever has to make in her life.
Come next week, senate Republicans will have to answer for everything they’ve done over the years to embolden the hard right’s hostility against a woman’s choice.
The vote will tell next week. America will be watching.
Democratic leaders, lacking the support needed to change senate rules and pass an abortion bill on a majority vote, have signaled they intend to take the fight to voters during the campaign leading to the November election.
The inability of Congressional Democrats to take concrete action, in terms of legislation or “packing” the supreme court to counter the conservative majority, has upset supporters, who have urged the party to “do something”.
Read more:
Louisiana Republicans push abortion 'murder' law
Republicans in Louisiana have advanced a bill to make abortion a crime of murder, as draft decision that would end abortion rights continues to spark nationwide protests and police in Washington raised “non-scalable” fences around the supreme court.
Supporters admitted the bill, under which a woman terminating a pregnancy or anyone assisting her could be charged, was unconstitutional – as long as Roe v Wade was law.
The supreme court is expected to formally overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 case which established the right to abortion, in June.
Danny McCormick, the state representative behind the Louisiana bill, said: “We can’t wait on the supreme court.”
Since the draft ruling that seems set to overturn Roe was published by Politico on Monday night, Democrats have warned of a likely torrent of challenges to established rights.
Joe Biden has sounded the alarm about threats to privacy-based rights including the rights to contraception (Griswold v Connecticut, 1965) and to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015). The president also raised the prospect of attacks on the teaching of LGTBQ+ children.
On Wednesday, Biden said Republicans pushing such cases constituted “the most extreme political organisation … in recent American history”.
Read the full story:
Numbers are growing and tempers are fraying outside the supreme court. My colleague David Smith has just sent this video of protestors on both sides of the abortion rights debate facing off:
Outside Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/6ntroQk7n1
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) May 5, 2022
Celebrities are sharing their abortion stories as the backlash to the supreme court’s draft ruling removing women’s rights to the procedure grows. My colleague Lizzy Davies has this report:
Television presenter Cathy Newman has become the latest high-profile woman to go public with her experience of having an abortion, as the possibility of the US supreme court overturning Roe v Wade sparks a defiant outpouring of testimony.
Posting on Twitter on Thursday, the (UK) Channel 4 News presenter wrote that she was sad to have had an abortion but had “never for one second regretted it”.
“Every woman – here, in America and the world over – needs to have that choice,” Newman said.
Since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion was leaked to Politico on 2 May, setting out his belief that the landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing the right to abortion had been “egregiously wrong from the start”, women have been speaking out about their own terminations.
On Tuesday, the American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers tweeted: “I had an abortion in October of last year while I was on tour. I went to Planned Parenthood, where they gave me the abortion pill. It was easy. Everyone deserves that kind of access.”
In Manhattan, New York attorney general Letitia James told a crowd of protesters that for her abortion, she had “walked proudly into Planned Parenthood – and I make no apologies to anyone. To no one.” Describing herself as a woman of faith, James told the rally: “My God says that you’ve got to make the best decision for you and your life.”
Read more:
Updated
McCarthy discussed 25th amendment for removing Trump from office: report
Let’s step away from abortion rights for a minute and take a look at the latest audiotape scandal engulfing Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader and see-sawing Donald Trump ally.
The California Republican might have hoped recent revelations that he lied about telling colleagues he would ask for Trump’s resignation following the 6 January Capitol attack were behind him.
No such luck.
New York Times journalists Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, authors of the book This Will Not Pass, have published another potentially damaging audio recording, reported by CNN.
McCarthy, the would-be House speaker if Republicans seize control of the chamber in November’s midterm elections, is heard in the leaked recording discussing the setbacks of using the 25th amendment to remove the then-president from office.
“That takes too long too. It could go back to the House, right?” McCarthy is heard asking an aide who had already suggested the 25th amendment “is not exactly an elegant solution here”.
The recording was made on 8 January 2021, two days after the Trump-incited Capitol riot, for which McCarthy said at the time the president bore responsibility for:
What the president did is atrocious and totally wrong.
I do think the impeachment divides the nation further and continues the fight even greater. That’s why I want to reach out to [Joe] Biden. I wanted the president to meet with Biden, but that’s not going to happen.
I want to see about us meeting with Biden, sitting down, make a smooth transition...
In public, McCarthy has transformed from a vocal critic following the insurrection into a loyal defender as Trump mulls another run at the White House in 2024.
Previous audio clips have caught McCarthy telling Republican leadership colleagues that he would seek Trump’s resignation, which he initially denied, and one in which he accused rightwing Republicans in the House of “putting people in jeopardy” with their responses to the Capitol attack.
It remains to be seen if the recordings will damage McCarthy’s pursuit of the speaker’s gavel. House colleagues gave him a standing ovation at a caucus meeting last month, and Trump himself has indicated he is not concerned by the furore, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Updated
Medical professionals are speaking out over the impending reversal of abortion rights. In this special for The Guardian, first published in The 19th, health reporter Shefali Luthra finds doctors warning of “unnecessary suffering and unnecessary deaths”:
Dr Herman Miller didn’t learn the news until he turned on MSNBC on Tuesday morning.
According to a draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the supreme court was ready to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that guarantees the right to an abortion up until a fetus can live outside the womb – typically around 22 to 25 weeks. Someone had leaked the draft to Politico.
Miller was not surprised. He has provided abortions since he was a medical resident in 1978, and has watched for years as Republicans chipped away at abortion protections.
The 75-year-old doctor is semi-retired, but still works three days a week providing abortions as the medical director of A Woman’s Choice, a clinic on the south side of Jacksonville, Florida.
He’s the only doctor in the clinic who provides abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Many of his patients are teenagers; some are incest survivors.
So that morning he drove to the clinic. He saw maybe 16 patients for abortions. He counseled another 16 who were scheduled for Thursday appointments, and he told each of them the same thing: abortions were still legal right now. But their rights – enshrined for almost 50 years – were in grave danger.
Florida just recently passed a ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which will take effect if Roe is overturned. But Miller worries that’s just the first step. He’s waiting for when, not if, lawmakers move to ban abortion entirely.
“I tell my patients that that’s why they need to get out to vote,” he said.
Read the full story:
It’s not just Democrats wrestling with the supreme court’s draft ruling on abortion rights... Republicans must find a way to sell the overwhelmingly unpopular justices’ decision to voters as November’s midterm elections loom.
So far, at least, the strategy of senior party officials appears to be to concentrate on the leak of the draft document instead of what the ruling actually says.
And with good reason: voters want the abortion protections of Roe v Wade preserved by a ration of two to one, according to separate polls this week by Politico/Morning Consult and ABC/Washington Post.
Unsurprisingly, one of the most vocal in condemning the leak is Mitch McConnell, the senate minority leader who maneuvred conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett onto the supreme court bench during Donald Trump’s single term in office.
Here’s an in-depth look at McConnell’s strategy from Slate.
In the chamber on Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican was outraged, the Hill reported:
This lawless action should be investigated and punished to the fullest extent possible. If a crime was committed, the department of justice must pursue it completely.
Notably, McConnell was silent about the implications of the imminent ending of abortion rights. And, by prominent contrast, he has defended supreme court justice Clarence Thomas after his rightwing wife Virginia Thomas was implicated in Trump’s 6 January insurrection.
It didn’t escape the notice of White House press secretary Jen Psaki during her Wednesday briefing:
Our focus is on not losing sight from what the content is in the draft and what is at risk here.
Republicans have wanted to talk about [the leak] and not about whether they support the protection of a woman’s right to choose, a woman’s right to make decisions with her doctor about her health care.
That’s maybe not a surprise given by more than a two to one margin Americans want the supreme court to support abortion rights.
If leadership Republicans are attempting to downplay the ruling, fearing it could hurt their midterm prospects, extremist party members have no such qualms.
The bellicose Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, himself under a justice department sex-trafficking inquiry, is receiving a social media backlash, according to The Hill, for tweeting that protestors are “over-educated, under-loved millennials”.
How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) May 4, 2022
And there were curious tweets from Marco Rubio, Republican Florida senator:
If we have “pregnant people” then how can Roe be about “a woman’s right to choose”?
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 5, 2022
From Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert:
Where’s the outrage from all the pregnant men?
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) May 3, 2022
And from Marjorie Taylor Greene, rightwing congresswoman for Georgia:
Our God is bigger. pic.twitter.com/ljNIeglFKS
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) May 3, 2022
Updated
Supreme court analyst and Ashe family chair of Georgia state university’s college of law Eric Segall posts this picture this morning from the US supreme court, the respected and symbolic home of American freedoms and justice:
Good morning. Live shot which says it all. pic.twitter.com/Xj3kphKyIr
— Eric Segall (@espinsegall) May 5, 2022
Alito bails on senior judges' conference
Vocal in his leaked draft ruling about the “egregious” right of American women to an abortion, it appears supreme court justice Samuel Alito has nothing to say to his colleagues in the judiciary.
The conservative has bailed on a conference of senior judges Thursday in New Orleans, Reuters reports, just three days after his opinion indicating the high court would overturn its landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision that guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide was leaked.
According to the news agency, Alito had been set to appear at the 5th US circuit court of appeals’ judicial conference, a gathering of judges from the New Orleans-based federal appeals court and the district courts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a person familiar with the matter said.
But he has since canceled, the person said, and Patricia McCabe, a spokesperson for the supreme court, said he was not attending. No reason was given for why Alito, who is the justice assigned to hear emergency appeals from the 5th Circuit, was not going.
Reuters further reports that the 5th circuit’s office of the circuit executive declined to confirm its conference was occurring this week, citing security, but in a press release last week the the legal society American Inns of Court detailed the date and location.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas were slated to speak separately on Thursday and Friday at the 11th circuit’s judicial conference in Atlanta, according to an event program. It is unclear if they will still attend.
The in-person circuit conferences are among the first to be held since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic Similar events are planned this year in at least five other circuits, Reuters says.
We’ve plenty more coverage of the aftermath of the leaked supreme court draft ruling overturning abortion rights. My colleague Joan E Greve analyzes the justices’ previous comments on Roe v Wade, and whether this week’s developments constitute “a betrayal”:
Chief Justice John Roberts has condemned the leak of a draft supreme court opinion overturning Roe v Wade as a “betrayal”. But for the majority of Americans who support the right to abortion access, the true betrayal was committed by the five justices who have initially voted to overturn the landmark case.
That is especially true of the three conservative supreme court justices who were nominated by Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. During their Senate confirmation hearings, each of those three justices was asked about Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey, the 1992 case that upheld the right to abortion access and could now be overturned as well.
The comments that the three justices made during those hearings are now coming under renewed scrutiny, as they face accusations of having misled politicians and the public about their willingness to overturn Roe.
During his 2017 confirmation hearings, Gorsuch said: “Casey is settled law in the sense that it is a decision of the US supreme court.” When Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate judiciary committee in 2018, he similarly described Roe as “important precedent of the supreme court that has been reaffirmed many times”, and he defined Casey as “precedent on precedent” because it upheld Roe.
But legal excerpts say Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s comments about Roe and Casey did not clearly indicate how they might vote in a case like Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, raising the prospect that some people may have read into their statements only what they wished to hear.
“When people are nominated to the supreme court and they testify in Senate confirmation hearings, they are very careful about their language,” said Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School. “Something like ‘settled law’ actually has no concrete legal meaning. What it means is that that’s a decision from the supreme court, and I acknowledge that it exists. But it doesn’t carry any kind of significance beyond that.”
Read the full story:
Updated
Democrats are facing increasing pressure to do something about protecting abortion rights before their predicted loss of control in one, or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
But options are limited, and Joe Biden’s administration sees no easy path forward as the supreme court prepares to finalize its reversal, in the coming weeks, of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that guaranteed women’s constitutional rights to the procedure.
Legislation to protect abortion rights, which has already passed the House, looks certain to stall again in the senate, despite Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer’s promise to bring it up for another vote.
The women’s health protection act failed in the chamber in March, sunk by Republicans and the West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, and stands no chance of securing the support of the 60 senators it would need.
Progressive voices such as the Democratic Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, are calling for the “packing” of the supreme court with liberal judges to nullify the conservative majority, another likely non-starter given the reluctance of Manchin and other moderates to play along.
The Biden administration’s frustration became apparent during Wednesday’s media briefing by White House press secretary Jen Psaki:
I can’t speak for what actions could be possible.
What I can tell you will happen, and this is what we are preparing for, if Roe were to fall, abortion would probably be illegal and about half the states in the country, up to 26 states, particularly in the south and midwest and west.
What we’re really focused on is the impact. Tens of millions of women may lack access to reproductive health care services as soon as the summer.
Women, the majority of whom are below poverty level, and are Black, Hispanic, or API [Asian Pacific islanders], are going to be forced to figure out how to travel, how to take time off work, how to get childcare. It is a prohibitive cost, it will not be safe.
That is what we’re focused on, working to address, as we’re making policy decisions.
But anger is growing. As my colleagues Lauren Gambino and Lauren Burke report, furious protestors at the supreme court and in cities around the country, are demanding action. “Do something, Democrats!” is the rallying call.
Read more:
Good morning, and welcome to the blog. We’re edging towards the end of an already drama-filled week in US politics that, incredibly, still has two full days to run.
Washington DC, and the nation, is still reeling from Monday’s bombshell news that the supreme court stands ready to strike down almost half a century of abortion rights.
Democrats are under increasing pressure to do something about it before their predicted loss of control in one, or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterms.
But legislation to protect abortion rights, or “packing” the supreme court with liberal judges to nullify the conservative majority, would face significant obstacles.
Republicans, meanwhile, must find a way to sell to voters the overwhelmingly unpopular supreme court move.
Russia’s assault in Ukraine continues, and you can follow developments in our 24-hour live blog here.
In the US today:
- Immigration comes under scrutiny on Capitol Hill with officials from the state, homeland, and health and human services departments testifying this morning to lawmakers about security at the southern border.
- The White House press secretary Jen Psaki will brief at 2pm. Expect more questions on abortion rights, immigration, the economy and Covid-19.
- We’re waiting to see if other high-profile attendees at last weekend’s White House correspondents’ dinner come down with Covid-19. Secretary of state Antony Blinken declared he tested positive yesterday.
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Joe Biden will greet Mexico’s first lady Beatriz Gutiérrez Mueller de López Obrador at a White House reception this afternoon to commemorate Cinco de Mayo.
