Not perfect

Abortion Laws Treat “Viability” as a Bright Line. It Isn’t.

Nevada and Virginia enshrined a right to abortion until fetal viability—but the standard leaves some of the most vulnerable patients behind.

Madison Pauly

In 2021, Kate Dineen was standing in her kitchen in Boston when her doctor told her over Zoom that her son had experienced a catastrophic stroke in utero. There was only a 50 percent chance the baby would survive after birth, with zero chance of a healthy outcome. Dineen was devastated; she’d previously had a miscarriage and anxiously tracked pregnancy milestones. Still, the decision about what to do next was clear to her and her husband, she told me: “We felt motivated to protect our son from what would have been a life of suffering, however brief.”

But Dineen was 33 weeks pregnant, and when she asked her doctor about her options, she learned Massachusetts banned abortion after 24 weeks. That cutoff roughly corresponds with the “viability line,” or the point in pregnancy when the fetus has a good chance of surviving outside the uterus. There were exceptions if her own health was in danger, and for “lethal” fetal diagnoses, but the stroke didn’t qualify. Once the fetus reached “viability,” Dineen says, she became “an incubator in the eyes of the state.”

For decades, abortion opponents have slung around sensational terms like “late term” and “partial birth” in their efforts to block abortion outright. On its face, banning the procedure after fetal viability might appear like the moderate position—after all, people of all political stripes express discomfort with later abortions, and abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation are extremely rare. But viability is an imprecise term, more ambiguous than meets the eye, and one state recently opted to ditch it altogether.

Today, anything with the promise to live or succeed can be described as viable: a seed, a business plan, a political candidate. But the word originated as a descriptor for a baby. “Viable” entered the English lexicon in the 1820s, when Dr. Theodric Beck borrowed the term from French to describe the moment a fetus was “capable of living” and could therefore inherit a dead parent’s estate. Another doctor, R.E. Griffith, expanded on the idea in an essay titled “Remarks on Feticide,” arguing that in order to convict the mother of a dead newborn, courts must first establish that her child was “viable” at birth. To prove this, Griffith considered various techniques, including an old method of cutting out the lungs and placing them in water—reasoning that if they floated, the baby had likely drawn breath and was not just “a mere parasite of the mother.”

Even as medicine evolved in the ensuing 150 years, doctors’ use of viability as a metric of personhood held fast. Then, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court seized on the concept as a compromise between abortion rights supporters and opponents, declaring a constitutional right to abortion nationwide—but only until fetal viability. States could ban abortion afterward, as long as they allowed exceptions to save the mother’s life.

What determines viability, though? There was always something fraught about the court drawing a line at a stage that is, by nature, more a calculation of probability than a guarantee of survival. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US professional association for OB-GYNs, fetal viability is based on internal and environmental factors: gestational age, sex, genetics, weight, the availability of neonatal care, and circumstances around delivery. “Even with all available factors considered, it still isn’t possible to definitively predict survival,” ACOG warns. Generally, viability is considered to be 23 to 25 weeks today—down from about 28 weeks in 1973—though babies born so early have only about a 50 percent chance of survival and often suffer long-lasting complications. Artificial uteruses could someday lead to even younger preemies.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito zeroed in on these ambiguities when he voted to overturn Roe in 2022. “Is a fetus viable with a 10 percent chance of survival? 25 percent? 50 percent? Can such a judgment be made by a State?” he wrote, handing states the power to outlaw abortion at any point they wanted.

With more than a dozen states enacting near-total bans, factions of the pro-choice movement embraced viability in their efforts to safeguard dwindling rights. In the years since Roe was overturned, voters in four states have enshrined a right to abortion until viability into their state constitutions, with limited exceptions afterward—language designed to cover most patients while securing support from voters uneasy about abortion later in pregnancy. (In November, voters in Nevada and Virginia passed similar compromise initiatives.)

But other advocates argue that viability bans still allow the government to interfere in a decision that should remain between a patient and her doctor. In her 2025 memoir, Beyond Limits, Dr. Shelley Sella, the first female physician in the US to openly provide third-trimester abortions, says that by the time women came to her, they’d considered “all the factors relevant to their wellbeing and to their unborn child’s.” Her patients included domestic abuse survivors, women whose birth control failed, and, increasingly before she retired, those who sought abortions earlier in pregnancy but were prevented by state laws from obtaining them. “You don’t know the story until you are the story,” she remembers a patient telling her.

Dineen ultimately was able to terminate her pregnancy by traveling to Maryland, one of nine states where third-trimester abortions were legal. When she returned home, she started working with reproductive rights advocates to change the law in Massachusetts. First, in 2022, they broadened their state’s exception to include “grave” fetal diagnoses, but patients were still falling through the cracks. So this past summer, the legislature passed a new law eliminating the viability line entirely. Massachusetts now leaves the question of later abortions to the “professional judgment of the physician.”

“Pregnancy is complex, and there’s too much gray area to be governed by laws that are black and white,” says Dineen, now a mother of two. “It’s not about a specific fetal diagnosis, it’s not about the specific number of weeks, but it’s really about who gets to decide: Is it the patient and their doctor, or is it the letter of the law, the government?”

The face of Term Limits... Dump these old dumb fucks....

 

Problem with elections is stupid people vote... Of course they lied to stop the tax on them...

Oligarchs Got Crushed on Election Day, But Still Managed to Kill California’s Wealth Tax Dreams

Their millions tanked Prop. 40 and may have crippled the state’s ability to curb excessive wealth.

Michael Mechanic

America’s oligarchs fared badly overall on Election Day, but they dodged a bullet in California, and perhaps then some.

California’s Prop. 40, the Billionaire Tax initiative, would have been the nation’s first-ever tax on excessive wealth, a concept Americans have supported in poll after poll. Despite its flaws, the measure would have broken the glass. It would have showed that curbing excessive fortunes is possible in an America whose wealth distribution has grown so skewed that it now resembles that of a kleptocratic developing nation.

But some of the state’s billionaires had other plans. After a healthcare workers union sponsored Prop. 40, they put up more than $330 million to create an advocacy group that would plant doubts and fears in voters’ minds, with an assist from prominent Democrats, most notably Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The billionaire opposition effort not only doomed Prop. 40, but may have convinced voters to pass Prop. 42—one of two competing measures they sponsored—which bars the state from enacting future taxes on many types of wealth. On Monday night, with 83 percent of the votes counted, AP called Prop. 40’s defeat. It has not yet made the call on Prop. 42, which remained ahead by 3.2 percentage points.

Prop. 40 was imperfect. As I wrote in a story prior to the election, it was a one-time tax, with revenues earmarked mainly for one purpose (healthcare), which may have convinced rival unions to oppose it. Critics claimed, among other things, that passing Prop. 40 would compel many of California’s roughly 250 billionaires to flee, decimating the state’s tax base and startup culture.

Silicon Valley congressman Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who supported Prop. 40 to the chagrin of his tech billionaire constituents, dismissed the wealth-flight threat as “total propaganda.” The notion that losing a gaggle of tax-avoiding 0.0001 percenters would significantly harm California’s tax base and culture of innovation also struck him as nonsensical. “If anything,” he told me, “more and more wealth is going to accumulate in Silicon Valley as we see the AI revolution. The reason they don’t want to pay the tax is they don’t want to pay the tax.”

The No on Prop. 40 campaign, in the end, was mainly about greed. But money is power, and the billionaires used theirs to muddy the waters. They provided safe opt-out arguments for unions and for Democrats who have relied on campaign cash from the superwealthy, including former US Rep. Katie Porter, governor-elect Xavier Becerra, and Newsom, who needs the billionaires on his side if he runs for president in 2028. (The California Democratic Party supported Prop. 40.)

Of course billionaires should pay their fair share, the argument basically went, but Prop. 40 was the wrong way to accomplish it. Newsom et al. repeated the claims that it would harm the economy, and that you can’t tax wealth at the state level, because that’s like playing Whac-a Mole as the mega-rich scurry from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to avoid taxation. You’ve got to tax wealth at the federal level, Newsom and others have said, likely knowing full well a federal wealth tax is never gonna fly—certainly not with this Supreme Court.

At the same time, Newsom (though not Becerra) endorsed Prop. 42, which, as the state legislative analyst explained, “could reduce future tax revenues. When and by how much future revenues would be reduced is unclear.” (This, ironically, was one of the key arguments against Prop. 40.)

Prop. 42 could reduce state revenues in two ways: First, by prohibiting retroactive taxes—a potential poison pill for Prop. 40, which was retroactive to January 1, 2026. If Prop. 42 passes, as seems likely, it will amend the state constitution to eliminate California’s ability to levy future wealth taxes, as the ballot guide explains, “on the ownership of personal property (all things people own other than real estate).” The current constitution, the Yes on 42 ballot argument warned, allows the Legislature to tax personal property, business interests, and financial assets, including assets in retirement and investment accounts “even though you already paid taxes on that money when you earned it!” 

That was a dirty trick. Beyond run-of-the-mill property taxes on homes and businesses, state lawmakers have never so much as proposed any wealth tax on ordinary Californians. The “pro” argument points vaguely to a handful of past legislative attempts to tax people’s nest eggs, conveniently neglecting to mention that those bills (which all failed) only targeted assets in excess of $30 million, and typically much more.

That is, the “you” in their scenario was actually “them”—families with excessive wealth.

The double-taxation claim, too, was smoke and mirrors. Yes, your $5,000 stock investment or Roth IRA contribution probably did come from your post-tax earnings, but when that investment eventually grows into $25,000, your $20,000 profit isn’t being taxed. And again, the only wealth taxes state or federal lawmakers have ever introduced apply only to the households that wealth managers and estate lawyers categorize as “ultra-high net worth.”

The threat of state tax authorities coming for people’s retirement savings proved powerful, though. Powerful enough to sway many Californians who may not have fully realized they were actually voting to protect the largely untaxed megafortunes of some of the richest human beings on the planet—who now, encouraged by their victory, will keep using their vast hoards to bend government policy to their will, public be damned.

Dump the shit...

Hegseth Lashes Out at Impeachment Push, Accuses Critics of “Sabotage”

The Defense secretary wants you to believe he hasn’t broken the law.

Sophie Hurwitz

Pete Hegseth, the self-styled secretary of war, is facing articles of impeachment introduced by a member of his own party—on allegations including violating the US Constitution and directing the military to carry out illegal actions that led to mass civilian death. But in a press conference early Tuesday, the former Fox News host was defiant.

“This is not patriotism,” Hegseth said, in his first Pentagon news conference in over six months. “This is sabotage.”

He then spent half an hour defending his own record. He framed the wildly unpopular war on Iran as a victory (“History will judge the Iran war quite differently than the conventional wisdom right now”) and noted that during his tenure, not many Americans have died in war (“For perspective, we lost 60,000 Americans in Vietnam over 20 years; we lost 37,000 in Korea over just three years”). Pete Hegseth, according to Pete Hegseth, has been very good at his job.

“The media can never admit the military’s success, because they, you, hate the president more than they love our country and our troops,” he said to the assembled journalists, who were reportedly told before the briefing that if they “get out of line” they would be “removed physically.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican who is spearheading the impeachment push, said yesterday that his effort to remove Hegseth from office was intended to protect the rule of law. “We’re not indicting him for being bad at his job,” Massie told reporters. “In fact, he was very effective at killing schoolchildren in Iran. He was very effective at extrajudicial killings…The argument here is that he’s broken laws and he’s violated the Constitution.”

Massie’s eight articles of impeachment accuse Hegseth of violating the Constitution; of extrajudicially killing “at least 221 persons aboard seagoing vessels alleged to be smuggling narcotics in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, principally in international waters”; and of military orders leading to the death or injury of “more than 200 civilians at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School” in Iran. A UN expert argued in September that US attacks against alleged drug boats may constitute crimes against humanity. A separate UN fact-finding mission that same month concluded that the school strike in Iran may have constituted a war crime.

Hegseth said Tuesday morning that “every one was a lawful operation.” Massie says Hegseth’s actions amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Now it will be up to Massie’s colleagues to decide who they believe.

No. Just fuck them.. Fuck them hard... GOPers need to learn!

Jeffries faces big choice on Trump

Some incoming red-district House freshmen want to see Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempt to collaborate with the president, while plenty of others don’t want compromise.

By Riley Rogerson and Mia McCarthy

Dozens of Democratic House freshmen descended on the Hill this week for new member orientation as their party starts debating how exactly it’ll flex its newfound power.

More than 100 incoming members and prospects — overwhelmingly Democrats, but also new Republicans — flooded the halls of Capitol Hill on Sunday, with vibes landing somewhere between excitement and newbie nervousness.

“I promised my voters that I would come here and get to work right away. So I’m really eager to work with our leadership, find out an agenda for getting affordability, addressing the corruption that’s costing Americans money, and getting to work,” incoming Democrat Rep. Fred Wellman of Missouri told POLITICO.

And while some of the more lighthearted conversations were focused on wanting to get to know Montana’s newest incoming member — i.e. the smoke-jumping Sam Forstag, who Massachusetts’ Dan Koh said he had a gym session with along with Colorado’s Manny Rutinel — the party is already deliberating how to wield the mandate millions of American voters just handed them.

First up this week: the future of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to be speaker next year, told ABC News over the weekend he’s a “hard yes” on impeaching the man leading President Donald Trump’s war effort in Iran.

We’re watching for how many Republicans may join him in that House vote after Democrats pummeled the GOP’s war support in the midterms. Even if the secretary survives the vote — expected by the end of this week — another reckoning is likely to come early next year, when Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress (more on the impeachment move below).

Jeffries this week is also poised to have many of his first in-person conversations with new members as he grapples with the politically tricky decision of how to handle Trump.

Some incoming red-district freshmen want to see Jeffries attempt to collaborate with the president, while plenty of others don’t want compromise.

Jeffries will have to balance his base’s desire to fight back on what they see as the administration’s excesses with party promises made during the campaign to lower costs ahead of 2028 — or at least be seen trying.

Hard-left Rep.-elect William Lawrence of Michigan said in an interview, “We’ll have to put the ball in the president’s court to see what he does.”

“And I hope that he will sign those bills, but we should push him to do so and make clear that Democrats are here to legislate on behalf of the American people and advance popular policies,” he said.

Want more from congressional Democrats

Immigration groups want more from congressional Democrats than oversight

Immigrant rights groups, a lodestar for the Democratic Party’s immigration policies, are looking to play a major role in the party’s policy debates over the next few years.

Eric Bazail-Eimil

Immigration rights organizations and their allies are pushing Democrats to go well beyond investigating the Trump administration. They want Congress to tackle generational issues such as a pathway to citizenship.

In a letter shared first with POLITICO, a coalition of more than 150 organizations urged lawmakers to “prioritize a bold agenda” on immigration in the next Congress and answer voters’ concerns about the tone and tenor of the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown.

They want oversight investigations probing whether the Department of Homeland Security broke the law in its implementation of a mass deportation push. But they’re also looking for Democrats to pursue a pathway to citizenship or permanent legal status for some unauthorized immigrants, a clawback of funds given to immigration agencies via past reconciliation bills, and changes to the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection carry out their jobs.

“The harms inflicted on immigrant communities by this administration will echo for generations,” the groups wrote. “Congress has the opportunity now to stand with communities under siege and show the world that accountability and justice are possible.”

The letter shows that immigrant rights groups, once the lodestar for the Democratic Party’s immigration policies, are looking to play a major role in the party’s policy debates over the next few years. And it underscores some of the divisions within the party between progressives, who want to take a much more ambitious swing at current immigration laws, and moderate Democrats, who have pushed for a more limited overhaul of Trump administration policies.

While Trump said he is willing to negotiate with Democrats on immigration policy, including some pathway to status for longtime unauthorized immigrants, Trump’s decision to elevate immigration hard-liner and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, to the role of White House chief of staff could complicate Democrats’ efforts to get ambitious legislation across the finish line.

Lame-duck session... Go fucking home loser...

Freedom Caucus lays out legislative priorities for lame-duck session

The conservative group is also pushing GOP leaders to not leave Capitol Hill until the list of demands is met.

Mia McCarthy

Members of the House Freedom Caucus are out with a wish list of priorities they want GOP leaders to accomplish before the party loses its governing trifecta in January.

“In the two months remaining in the 119th Congress, we have an enormous amount of unfinished business to preserve and protect the Republic from an incoming majority party hell-bent on radically changing it,” the board for the conservative group wrote Monday in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune

The goal, members said, was to “deny” Democrats “every legislative leverage point possible” ahead of their takeover of Congress next year.

They added, “Let’s hold the line and finish the work.”

The Freedom Caucus is calling on leaders to push through legislation to “codify” President Donald Trump’s border security policies and strengthen voter ID laws in federal elections. The group also wants a government funding package that holds federal spending at existing levels — or appropriations bills without additional policy provisions.

And members said they wanted Republicans to push ahead with a final party-line package that would focus on modernizing U.S. defense systems and providing “significant tax relief for families” — with $1 trillion in spending reductions to offset it.

“Some of us called for action after our first reconciliation package to continue to move to support the American people,” the group wrote. “Unfortunately, the agenda stalled, and now we will no longer have the majority in the next Congress. We respectfully request that we take action in the next 60 days to protect the citizens we represent.”

In the board’s letter, members demanded “a robust permitting bill,” though did not specify if the Freedom Caucus would support a bipartisan bill brokered with the White House that will get its first procedural vote in the Senate on Monday night. They are also urging the Senate to confirm as many of Trump’s nominees as possible.

The letter also highlighted some priorities where they could get Democratic buy-in. One of those areas is expanding a ban on stock trading to the executive and judicial branches.

“We request that we not leave town until we accomplish these objectives,” the members said.

She is sick.....

Haley Stevens’ odd day back in Washington

The Michigan Democrat’s office appeared deserted Monday and she was seen voting on the GOP side of the aisle.

By Riley Rogerson, Katherine Tully-McManus, Mia McCarthy and Kelsey Brugger

Rep. Haley Stevens was nowhere to be found Monday afternoon, but the Michigan Democrat was spotted at House votes that evening — in the GOP cloakroom.

Amid questions about whether the embattled lawmaker would return to Washington after endorsing failed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Stevens was back in town to cast the first votes since September. But rather than huddling with her party, Stevens avoided her Democratic colleagues by camping out with Republicans, according to three people present who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The news, first reported by The Washington Sun, prompts new questions about how Stevens might vote on critical year-end legislation between now and when her term ends — and Democrats retake the majority — at the beginning of January. It also comes as her fate in the House Democratic Caucus remains in question as she may have broken the House rules for crossing party lines to endorse Rogers.

Requests for comment emailed to both Stevens’ campaign and congressional office went unanswered Monday, but Stevens saw a mass exodus of staffers last week after she made her 11th-hour endorsement of a Republican candidate in a state viewed as key to flipping the Senate.

The door to her office in Rayburn House Office Building was locked Monday afternoon. No one responded to a reporter’s multiple knocks nor to knocks from a staffer from another office who tried to enter.

A sign reading “please come in” hangs on the locked doors.

The lights appeared to be off inside the office, however, and a peek through the mail slot revealed. Multiple calls Monday to Stevens’ Capitol Hill office went unanswered, sending callers straight to voicemail without a single ring. A message directed constituents to contact the district office in Farmington Hills, Mich.

A call to that office rang, but no one answered. POLITICO left a voicemail asking whether Stevens planned to return to Capitol Hill for votes.

Impeach Hegseth now!

The House may impeach Hegseth — but Mike Johnson could force it into the next Congress

The speaker on Monday declined to say whether he would commit to sending impeachment articles to the Senate.

By Kyle Cheney and Mia McCarthy

The House may vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week. But even if the articles pass, they may never reach the Senate.

The ultimate decision on that question comes down to Speaker Mike Johnson, who could simply refuse to send the articles to the Senate before the current Congress expires — kicking the matter to the next one, when both chambers will be under Democratic control.

“I’m not going to talk about that right now,” Johnson said Monday when asked if he would commit to sending Hegseth impeachment articles to the Senate, instead predicting that the articles — being pushed by GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky with nearly unanimous Democratic support — would fail on the House floor.

“We’re going to follow the rules,” the Louisiana Republican said, adding that he had not yet discussed holding the articles should they pass the House.

The tactic of withholding articles of impeachment from the Senate was deployed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019, when she took the unprecedented step of waiting a month after the House impeached Donald Trump to send the articles to the Senate for a trial.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) in her delay sought to extract concessions from Senate Republicans about how Trump’s trial would be run. And her strategy highlighted the extent to which there are few rules and precedents governing the House’s tactical decisions on impeachment.

Johnson may have even more of a reason than Pelosi did to withhold the articles: A Hegseth impeachment would be the first time in history an executive branch official was impeached on votes derived almost entirely from the House minority. Yet Johnson would be tasked with naming the “impeachment managers” — essentially Hegseth’s prosecutors — who would try the case in the Senate. A speaker has not, at least in modern history, appointed impeachment managers opposed to the underlying effort.

Hegseth’s impeachment would also be unusual because the House didn’t investigate him or establish a factual record for the Senate to consider at trial.

Transmitting the articles and naming impeachment managers would also trigger automatic action in the Senate, cutting into the GOP-led chamber’s limited floor time ahead of the Democratic takeover in January.

If Johnson withholds the articles, it’s unclear if a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) could quickly appoint his own impeachment managers and continue the process early in the next Congress or whether the chamber would have to vote on new articles of impeachment.

Republican Misused taxpayer dollars. No surprise...

Gooden likely misused taxpayer dollars, spent extravagantly on travel, congressional watchdog says

The House Ethics Committee also has an open inquiry into the Texas Republican.

Chris Marquette

Congressional investigators found “substantial reason to believe” Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden used taxpayer dollars for personal luxury travel and may have misreported his campaign spending.

The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Conduct’s findings, made public Monday in a report, identified a pattern of “extravagant expenditures” by Gooden that appear to be outside his official duties. The report also highlights that Gooden sought more in reimbursements — $140,000 in 2025 alone — than any other House member.

Gooden is the latest in a line of House members facing ethics allegations this year, with several forced to resign. Midterm polling showed voters citing corruption in Washington as a key reason for souring on the Republican party, although Democratic lawmakers have also faced allegations.

The OCC report was referred to the House Ethics Committee, which is the entity that can discipline members. The Ethics Committee’s investigation remains ongoing.

Gooden in a statement called the report “bogus,” criticized the OCC and called for the House Administration Committee to investigate the office.

“There’s a reason the Senate doesn’t have an OCC—because of insane, bogus referrals like this one,” Gooden said in a statement. “The Ethics Committee will expose this witch hunt, and I’m calling on House Administration to launch an oversight investigation into the OCC’s target selection and record of failed inquiries.”

The OCC declined comment.

Gooden also provided a response to OCC from his lawyers.

The OCC said in its report that Gooden and several members of his team did not cooperate with the inquiry.

Gooden, the OCC report says, received over $72,000 in lodging reimbursements from taxpayer money that shows a pattern of brief stays at luxury hotels between $700 and $4,000 per stay. The lawmaker also received more than $58,000 in airfare reimbursements in 2025 — almost exclusively for business or first-class — using taxpayer money.

The report pointed to instances where official travel was booked using the Chase Travel account of Gooden’s wife. House rules prohibit lawmakers and their relatives from benefiting from the Members’ Representational Allowance, which is a taxpayer funded budget for each House member’s office.

“Using a relative’s account allows for the accumulation of private rewards and benefits from official funds, which is prohibited by House rules,” the report said.

The OCC also found “several discrepancies” in Federal Election Commission reports submitted by Gooden’s campaign for credit card and travel-related reimbursements from 2025 to 2026.