May, 03 2017, 11:15am EDT
ACLU Statement on Reports of Impending "Religious Freedom" Executive Order
Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement in response to reports that President Trump will sign an executive order later this week that creates religious exemptions that open the door to discrimination:
NEW YORK
Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement in response to reports that President Trump will sign an executive order later this week that creates religious exemptions that open the door to discrimination:
"The ACLU fights every day to defend religious freedom, but religious freedom does not mean the right to discriminate against or harm others. If President Trump signs an executive order that attempts to provide a license to discriminate against women or LGBT people, we will see him in court."
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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Senate Plans Hearing on 'Healthcare Nightmare' From GOP Abortion Bans
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Patty Murray stressed the need to show "how extreme right-wing abortion bans and restrictions on reproductive healthcare have endangered women, hurt families, and rolled back rights."
May 29, 2024
It's been nearly two years since the U.S. Supreme Court reversedRoe v. Wade, triggering a fresh wave of Republican restrictions on abortion at the state level—the topic of a Senate hearing that progressive leaders are planning for next week.
Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the panel's former leader, announced Wednesday that the hearing—titled, "The Assault on Women's Freedoms: How Abortion Bans Have Created a Healthcare Nightmare Across America"—will be held on June 4 at 10:00 am ET.
While the witness list has not been released yet, Sanders and Murray previewed the event in a joint statement, saying that "in the two years since Roe was overturned, Republican abortion bans have created a full-blown healthcare crisis—forcing providers to close their doors and shut down their practices, putting women's lives in danger, decimating access to maternal healthcare, and forcing women to remain pregnant, no matter their circumstances."
The June 2022 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and "Republican abortion bans have forced women to leave their states under duress or wait until they are near death to receive care," the pair noted. "Providers have been forced to make gut-wrenching decisions about whether to risk jail time to help a woman access the healthcare she needs."
As of May 1, just nine states and Washington, D.C. don't ban abortion or impose gestational limits, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That means 41 states have restrictions: 14 have total bans; seven ban abortion at or before 18 weeks; and 20 ban it after 18 weeks. Some states have exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the pregnant person—though providers and patients have stressed that such policies often don't actually help those seeking care.
"The harm of Dobbs has extended far beyond states with extreme abortion bans" Sanders and Murray pointed out. "In places where abortion remains legal, women are waiting longer for care and providers are struggling to keep up with a dramatically increased patient load."
As Common Dreamsreported last week, after Florida's six-week ban went into effect at the beginning of this month, wait times increased at 30% of the abortion clinics in the closest states and the driving distance for the average Floridian increased by nearly 30 times to 590 miles.
The influx of "healthcare refugees" is impacting places like Illinois, where Planned Parenthood saw its out-of-state patients jump from about 6% to nearly a third each month in the wake of Dobbs. Jennifer Welch, the provider's president and CEO, said in December 2022 that "the number of patients from other states forced to travel to our health centers is at a historic high."
As the GOP has worked to further restrict reproductive freedom since Dobbs, protecting and expanding such rights has become a top priority for voters across the country. For the 2024 cycle, campaigners in several states are focused on ballot measures affirming the right to abortion and other care, while Democratic President Joe Biden and the presumed Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, have campaigned on their respective records.
Though some of Biden's public statements have frustrated rights advocates, the president supports access to abortion care. Trump, meanwhile, has both bragged about appointing three of the six justices who reversed Roe but also recognized the risks of openly backing the most extreme bans—as his allies plot major attacks on reproductive rights if he returns to office.
"The threats to a woman's right to make her own decisions about her body and her future keep coming—right now Republicans are working to rip away access to safe medication abortion, block women from receiving emergency abortion care that could save their lives, ban abortion nationwide, and restrict access to contraception," Sanders and Murray warned.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to soon rule on one case that could restrict access to mifepristone, a medication commonly used for abortions, and another case about whether abortion care is included in the "necessary stabilizing treatment" that emergency healthcare departments are required to provide under federal law, as the Biden administration argues.
"And Republican attacks on basic healthcare are only escalating," Sanders and Murray said. "The anti-abortion movement has shown its cruelty and utter disregard for women's lives again and again, and it is essential that we use every opportunity to continue to make clear exactly how extreme right-wing abortion bans and restrictions on reproductive healthcare have endangered women, hurt families, and rolled back rights."
"We must continue to shine a light on the living nightmare extreme right-wing abortion bans and other healthcare restrictions have been for women across the country," they concluded, "and do everything we can to restore every woman's right to make her own healthcare decisions."
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'We Did the Same Thing,' US Official Says After Israel's Rafah Massacre
One Afghanistan-born journalist said John Kirby's admission "does not excuse what Joe Biden's allies in Israel did in Rafah."
May 29, 2024
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby on Tuesday defended Israel after its military killed and wounded hundreds of Palestinians in attacks on refugee encampments in and near the southern Gaza city of Rafah inside an Israeli-designated "safe zone."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the first of the two attacks—which ignited a fire that burned people, including many women and children, alive inside their tents—a "tragic mistake."
Asked by a reporter what the consequences would be "if there were an American strike on a legitimate terrorist target that ended resulting with 45 civilian deaths and some 200 others injured," Kirby replied, "I can't answer a hypothetical like that."
"But we have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties," he continued. "We did the same thing. We owned up to it. We investigated it. And we tried to make changes... Wae tried to learn from it to make changes so that those set of mistakes wouldn't happen again."
Kirby referred to an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul that occurred during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed an aid worker and nine members of his family including seven children outside their home. A New York Times investigation subsequently revealed that the U.S. military knew that the strike likely killed civilians but initially lied about it, claiming there was "no indication" that noncombatants were harmed in the attack.
"We atoned for it, we learned from it, and we put in place procedures to try and prevent that from happening again," Kirby said of the strike, "and that's what our expectations would be in this case."
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, more than 432,000 civilians in over half a dozen countries have been killed by all sides during the course of the continuing open-ended U.S.-led War on Terror.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks that left more than 1,100 Israelis and foreign nationals dead and over 240 others taken hostage, Israeli forces have killed at least 36,171 Palestinians—mostly women and children—according to Gazan and international officials. Israel's Gaza onslaught has also wounded at least 81,420 Palestinians; another 11,000 are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings.
During Tuesday's press conference, CBS News reporter Ed O'Keefe asked Kirby how Israel's tent massacre doesn't violate U.S. President Joe Biden's shifting "red line" warning against invading Rafah.
"We don't want to see a major ground operation," Kirby replied. "We haven't seen that at this point."
Reporter: How does this not violate the red line the president laid out
Kirby: We don’t want to see a major operation we haven’t seen one
Reporter: How many more charred corpses does he have to see before he considers a change in policy
Kirby: I take offense at the question pic.twitter.com/9LMKl1BuAr
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) May 28, 2024
O'Keefe followed up by asking, "How many more charred corpses does he have to see before the president considers a change in policy?"
"We don't want to see a single more innocent life taken, and I kind of take a little offense at the question," Kirby retorted. "No civilian casualties is the right number of civilian casualties, and this is not something that we've turned a blind eye to, nor has it been something we've ignored or neglected to raise with our Israeli counterparts."
Kirby's remarks came on the same day that Israeli tank fire on a makeshift refugee encampment in southern Gaza killed at least 21 people, at least a dozen of whom were women and children.
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'Time Is Up': Democrats Target Trade Regime That Blocks Climate Progress
"Giant corporations have and continue to weaponize ISDS—a secretive and rigged arbitration system," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "It's time to shut the door and eliminate ISDS from all existing trade agreements once and for all."
May 29, 2024
Prominent Democrats on Wednesday called for ending corporate-backed arbitration provisions in trade agreements as the Sierra Club issued a report showing that fossil fuel companies use the provisions to block climate action.
The report calls for the U.S. government to not only stop signing trade agreements with Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, as President Joe Biden has already done since taking office, but also end or modify existing agreements that have them. ISDS provisions allow companies to protect their investments in a foreign country and seek compensation from an ad hoc arbitration tribunal, rather than the country's courts, if they are threatened by legislation, regulation, or the cancellation of a project.
"While it has correctly rejected ISDS for future trade agreements, the Biden administration has made no effort to remove these egregious provisions from existing agreements," Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said in a Sierra Club statement. "Powerful multinational corporations continue abusing ISDS to intimidate countries from strengthening environmental and human rights protections."
Many ISDS cases pit powerful corporations against low- and middle-income countries, but wealthy nations are also liable to be sued. TC Energy, a multinational fossil fuel company, sued the US for $15 billion following the discontinuation of the Keystone XL pipeline project, and Canada faces a $20 billion suit over a canceled liquefied natural gas project in Québec. Overall, nearly 20% of the world's 1,206 known ISDS arbitration cases have been brought by fossil fuel companies, according to the Sierra Club report.
The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime gives polluters license to sue governments for their public interest policies, including those that would reduce the production of fossil fuels.
Now is the time to end ISDS for good.
— Iliana Paul (@iliana_m_paul) May 29, 2024
"ISDS mechanisms corruptly advance the power of big corporate polluters over the interests of the public and the planet. This new report from the Sierra Club makes it clear that ISDS's time is up," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in the group's statement. He, too, is pushing the Biden administration to remove ISDS provisions from existing agreements.
While the Sierra Club report focuses on ISDS's climate impacts, the authors argue that the effects of the provisions, which give corporations extraordinary power, are much broader. "The dangers of ISDS are stark not just for climate change, but for a broad swath of public interest policies including ones related to public health, labor protections and workers' rights, green jobs policies, and more," they wrote.
Democrats voiced agreement about the broad consequences of the provisions, which have been the subject of a growing chorus of criticism by politicians and public interests groups.
"Giant corporations have and continue to weaponize ISDS—a secretive and rigged arbitration system that multinational companies use to bypass domestic courts and challenge protections for the environment, workers, and consumers around the world. It's time to shut the door and eliminate ISDS from all existing trade agreements once and for all," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the Sierra Club statement.
In November, Sierra Club, Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO and more than 200 other organizations called on the Biden administration to dismantle ISDS provisions between the U.S. and countries in the Americas, saying that the president should "free public interest policies from the shadow of ISDS."
That followed an April letter to Biden in which more than 300 law and economics professors, including Nobel laureate and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz, called for an end to ISDS in existing trade agreements, arguing that there's a "bipartisan consensus" for such reform.
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