SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
comstock act
Vance Claims Trump Would Veto Federal Abortion Ban. Warren Responds: 'Women Are Not Stupid'
"We are not going to trust the futures of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Aug 25, 2024
Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded forcefully to Sen. JD Vance on Sunday after the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that Donald Trump—who has repeatedly celebrated and taken credit for the Supreme Court decision that revoked abortion rights at the federal level—would veto legislation imposing a nationwide abortion ban if it reached his desk.
"American women are not stupid and we are not going to trust the futures of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country," Warren (D-Mass.) toldNBC News' Kristen Welker.
The Democratic senator went on to warn that if Trump and Vance win in November, their administration could wield a 151-year-old zombie statute known as the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide, without even needing congressional approval.
Last year, Vance joined dozens of Republican lawmakers in calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to enforce the long-dormant Comstock Act and "shut down all mail-order abortion operations."
"Right now, where we are is Donald Trump and JD Vance take the White House, they have current law, the Comstock Act which, with the right person that they put into the Department of Justice and one of their extremist judges out in the world, they can actually ban all access to abortion all across this country," Warren said Sunday. "So for any woman who's in the middle of a miscarriage who goes into an emergency room and discovers there's no medication and no treatment for her because abortion has been banned nationwide, they can thank Donald Trump and JD Vance."
Warren's comments came after Vance told Welker in an interview that aired Sunday that he believes Trump would veto a federal abortion ban if such a measure passed Congress.
"He said that explicitly that he would," Vance said.
But Welker pushed back, replying: "I don't think he's ever said explicitly that he would. He's said that to you?"
Vance did not respond directly to Welker's follow-up.
Trump said in April that, if reelected, he would do nothing to stop states from imposing draconian bans on abortion, saying they should be allowed to do "whatever they decide."
While the former president stopped short of supporting a federal abortion ban, Trump boasted that he was "proudly the person responsible" for ending Roe v. Wade, which was overturned by a right-wing Supreme Court supermajority that includes three Trump-appointed justices.
When he was president, Trump urged the U.S. Senate to pass legislation banning abortion at the federal level after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Warren noted Sunday that with Roe overturned, 30% of women in the U.S. "live in states that effectively ban abortion."
"Donald Trump and JD Vance in the White House, it won't be 30%, it will be 100%," Warren said. "The only way that we're going to protect access to abortion is to have a Democratic Congress, send a bill to Kamala Harris, she will sign it into law, and then we will restore a right to half the population in this country. And no longer will a woman have to go into an emergency room and be told she's not near enough death to get the medical treatment that she needs."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dems Spotlight Project 2025 Plan to Wield 'Zombie Law' Against Abortion Rights
Project 2025 "includes a detailed blueprint for a future Republican president to impose a backdoor national abortion ban with a stroke of the pen," a pair of House Democrats warned.
Jul 18, 2024
Two congressional Democrats who spearheaded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force warned Thursday that abortion rights opponents are laying the groundwork to revive and wield a 151-year-old "zombie law" to ban abortion nationwide.
In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, who is under growing pressure to drop out of the 2024 race, Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted that the Project 2025 agenda crafted by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups "includes a detailed blueprint for a future Republican president to impose a backdoor national abortion ban with a stroke of the pen by willfully misapplying this antiquated and unconstitutional statute."
The statute in question is the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits the mailing of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that "may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion." Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) is leading the Democratic effort to defang the law.
According to the health policy research organization KFF, the Comstock Act "has not been applied to the mailing of abortion materials in the last fifty years." A trio of legal experts recently described the law as the "most significant national threat to reproductive rights."
Huffman and Raskin noted in their letter Thursday that the statute "was used to prosecute freethinking publisher DeRobigne Mortimer 'D.M.' Bennett," who "was sentenced to 13 months of hard labor in 1879 for mailing an anti-marriage pamphlet that advocated for women's bodily autonomy."
"Emma Goldman was hounded, silenced, and incarcerated for speaking out in favor of contraception," the House Democrats added. "Ida Craddock was charged multiple times for distributing writings on women's rights and sexual relations between husband and wife; she was re-arrested in 1902 after serving a three-month prison sentence, convicted, and died by suicide before serving her five-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Anna Trow Lohman also died by suicide rather than facing trial for distributing birth control and abortifacients."
"MAGA activists are now working to resuscitate this near-dormant law to advance their far-right agenda."
Huffman and Raskin wrote that while the U.S. Supreme Court "largely overturned most of the Comstock Act through landmark decisions on free speech, abortion, and birth control" over the course of the 20th Century, "many of these decisions have been eroded and attacked" by the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court.
"MAGA activists are now working to resuscitate this near-dormant law to advance their far-right agenda," warned the two Democrats, who called on Biden to issue pardons for "Bennett, Goldman, Craddock, and any others who were unjustly convicted under the Comstock Act" to make clear that he "stands against any efforts in the past, present, or future to weaponize the Comstock Act against Americans' individual rights to free speech and reproductive autonomy."
Huffman and Raskin's letter came a day after The Washington Posthighlighted that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—the running mate of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—joined dozens of GOP lawmakers last year in calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to "shut down all mail-order abortion operations," citing the Comstock Act and other federal statutes.
The Biden Justice Department has said the Comstock Act "does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully."
While Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and stopped short of explicitly endorsing a federal abortion ban, the platform that Republican delegates approved earlier this week at the party's convention in Milwaukee declares, "We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights."
As The Intercept's Shawn Musgrave observed Wednesday, abortion opponents welcomed that line as an endorsement of the notion of "fetal personhood."
"Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights—without the need for any new laws or amendments," Musgrave wrote. "This aligns neatly with Project 2025's roadmap and Vance's views."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Cori Bush Leads Charge to Defang 'Zombie' Anti-Abortion Law Eyed by Trump Allies
"Anti-abortion extremists and the Republican Party have shown they will stop at nothing when it comes to stripping away our reproductive freedoms," the Missouri Democrat said of the GOP's reliance on the arcane Comstock Act.
Jun 21, 2024
A group of congressional Democrats led by progressive Rep. Cori Bush introduced legislation Thursday that would repeal elements of the 151-year-old law known as the Comstock Act as allies of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump plot to use the statute to enact a federal abortion ban without congressional approval.
Bush (D-Mo.) was the first lawmaker to call for the repeal of the Comstock Act in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The new bill, titled the Stop Comstock Act, was introduced with over two dozen backers in the House and at least 19 in the Senate, where Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) put forth companion legislation.
"As a Black woman from the first state to ban abortion post-Dobbs and someone who has had abortions, I deeply and personally understand the critical need to protect and expand access to abortion care," Bush said in a statement. "Anti-abortion extremists and the Republican Party have shown they will stop at nothing when it comes to stripping away our reproductive freedoms."
"They aren't hiding their playbook: Reviving the outdated and obsolete zombie statute, the Comstock Act, is the GOP's latest hack to bypass Congress and impose a nationwide abortion ban," Bush added. "When people tell you who they are, believe them. I am proud to be working alongside my colleagues in introducing legislation to repeal the Comstock Act and protect access to abortion care."
The Comstock Act bars the mailing of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that "may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion." Legal experts have described the law, which hasn't been applied in a century, as the "most significant national threat to reproductive rights."
The Stop Comstock Act would "repeal provisions of the Comstock laws that anti-abortion extremists want to willfully misapply in order to criminalize providers and ban abortion nationwide without any congressional action," according to a summary released by the bill's supporters.
"It's time we take immediate action to stop Republicans from abusing the Comstock Act to further erode our reproductive rights," said bill co-sponsor Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.).
"Anti-abortion extremists have manipulated laws to ban abortion before, and they are promising to do it again."
The Democratic effort to defang Comstock comes as Trump allies are plotting to use the law to attack abortion rights if the former president wins another four years in the White House.
Project 2025, a sweeping right-wing agenda crafted by conservative organizations with the help of some former Trump administration officials, calls for the U.S. Justice Department to use the Comstock Act against "providers and distributors" of abortion pills. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of preserving access to mifepristone, a medication that is commonly used for abortion care.
Jonathan Mitchell, the key architect of a draconian 2021 Texas abortion ban and a Trump attorney, toldThe New York Times earlier this year that "we don't need a federal [abortion] ban when we have Comstock on the books."
"I hope he doesn't know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don't want him to shoot off his mouth," Mitchell, who is seen as a possible attorney general pick for the former president, said of Trump. "I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election."
Madison Roberts, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU, said in a statement Friday that "Trump's advisers are quietly plotting to bypass Congress and misuse a 150-year-old law to attempt to ban abortion in every state in the country."
"They are arguing that the Comstock Act is a de facto national abortion ban already on the books, and they are wrong," said Roberts. "The Department of Justice has made clear and federal appeals courts have uniformly held for almost a century that the Comstock Act does not apply to legal abortion care. But anti-abortion extremists have manipulated laws to ban abortion before, and they are promising to do it again—even in states that have passed statutory and constitutional protections for abortion."
"We applaud leaders in Congress for introducing the Stop Comstock Act to fight back against extremists' threats to misuse Comstock as a nationwide abortion ban," Roberts added. "We will continue to work with elected leaders to raise the alarm and neutralize this potential anti-abortion attack before Trump allies get the chance to launch it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular