DL Open Thread: Sunday, April 16,2023

Anti-Abortion Judge Hid Off-The Wall Screed From Senate During Confirmation:

In 2017, Matthew Kacsmaryk, then deputy general counsel at the right-wing First Liberty Institute, criticized protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions in a draft law review article. The Obama administration, he wrote, was ignoring doctors who, for religious reasons, “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”

What’s unusual is what happened next. The Washington Post reports that Kacsmaryk, now the federal judge issued who issued the temporarily-stayed decision to ban the abortion drug mifepristone across the country, asked an editor at the law journal a few months later to remove his name from the article because of “reasons I may discuss at a later date.” Instead, he asked the journal to put the names of two of his colleagues on the article. At the time, Kacsmaryk was being considered for a judgeship.

From the Washington Post:

As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”

The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings in which Kacsmaryk’s past statements on LGBT issues became a point of contention.

Arbiters of the law who place themselves above the law.  BTW, Chris?  Both sides don’t do it.

8-4.  Good Enough To Impose The Death Penalty In Florida:

Gov. Ron DeSantis is on the verge of signing a bill that would allow people in Florida to be executed without a unanimous decision by a jury. Instead, an 8-4 vote would be enough for someone to be put to death in the state.

The bill passed the Florida Senate last month and passed the House on Thursday by an 80-30 margin. The bill has been a priority for DeSantis, who opposed the decision not to sentence to death the Parkland school shooter who killed 17 people in 2018. Three jurors voted against the death penalty in that case.

“I’m sorry, but if you murder 17 people in cold blood, the only appropriate punishment is capital punishment,” DeSantis said in October. “We need to reform some of these laws.”

I think the bill will backfire.  A unanimous decision to convict is still required.  If you’re a juror, you will likely recognize that a guilty verdict will be a de facto death sentence.  You might not vote to convict under such circumstances.  But what do I know?

The Rethugs’ Transgender Offensive Offensive?  Merely a strategy to gin up votes.  As in ‘We’re getting our asses kicked.  We need to find another community we can convince the masses to hate.”  In other words, fascism:

Republicans have seized on transgender rights ahead of 2024, with policy proposals including punishing doctors who treat transgender youths to barring transgender women and girls from playing on school sports teams with their peers.

In a February campaign video, former President Trump pledged to enact a federal law that recognizes only two genders if he is reelected in November, claiming that being transgender is a concept that has only recently been manufactured by the “radical left.” The former president in the video also announced his intent to enact close to a dozen policies if he is elected in 2024, all of them targeting transgender people.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is seen as a top 2024 GOP contender, has called for physicians who provide gender-affirming health care to transgender minors to be sued, and Florida under his administration has barred transgender minors from accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries. A state health department rule adopted in August prohibits transgender Floridians, regardless of age, from using Medicaid to help pay for gender-affirming health care.

Despite consensus among most major medical organizations that gender-affirming care for both transgender youths and adults is safe and medically necessary, more than 100 state bills introduced this year seek to restrict access to care, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Meanwhile, state Republican parties across the country have targeted transgender identities in their party platforms. In its official party platform adopted last year, the Texas GOP said state Republicans should oppose “all efforts to validate transgender identity” and said the party recognized homosexuality as an “abnormal lifestyle choice.” Maine Republicans similarly adopted a platform that promised to classify the “promotion of biological genders other than those of male and female homo sapiens” in public schools as child sexual abuse under state law.

This is sick and dangerous stuff.  Ignore it at everyone’s peril.

What do you want to talk about?