During Wednesday’s Supreme Court arguments over life-saving abortions in emergency rooms, a few things became clear: The male justices are unconcerned by women’s suffering, and Justice Samuel Alito thinks there aren’t enough abortion restrictions across the U.S.—but if you press him on that point, you’re the ridiculous one.

The case, United States v. Idaho, is about whether emergency rooms in Idaho—a state that bans all abortions except those done to prevent death, not to preserve health—are in violation of a federal law that requires E.R. patients to be stabilized. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, says hospitals that accept Medicare funding have to stabilize patients facing threats to their health, and for pregnant patients facing complications, the treatment is sometimes abortion.

But this is not a normal case: Idaho is represented in part by Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a far-right legal activist group that is pushing for nationwide restrictions, including a national abortion ban. Idaho and ADF argued in case briefs and before the court that a fetus is a separate patient under EMTALA and deserves equal treatment in E.R.s. This is a fetal personhood argument, and if it’s taken to its logical endpoint, it would lead to a ban on all abortions nationwide, the end of IVF as we know it (see: Alabama), and restrictions on certain forms of birth control. In practice, women whose water breaks too early could be forced on bed rest to try to save the fetus, or given C-sections against their will. The latter is already happening, and in fact, happened even before Dobbs.

During arguments, some of the male justices seemed content to talk about whether EMTALA’s funding conditions are an appropriate use of the Constitution’s spending clause, while the women were focusing on the medical harm Idaho’s law has caused to living, breathing women. Late in the argument, Alito—who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs that allows laws like Idaho’s to be enforced—was upset that not enough time had been devoted to the existence of the words “unborn child” in the law about emergency room care.

If Nebraska Republicans revise their state’s method of awarding presidential electors to help Donald Trump in November, Maine might match the change to boost President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects.

Nebraska’s governor, Jim Pillen, has said he’s open to calling a special legislative session to push through the change, but only if he’s sure it will pass. It isn’t clear whether the idea has enough support.

But Democrats are concerned.

“If Nebraska’s Republican Governor and Republican-controlled Legislature were to change their electoral system this late in the cycle in order to unfairly award Donald Trump an additional electoral vote, I think the Maine Legislature would be compelled to act in order to restore fairness to our country’s electoral system,” state House Majority Leader Maureen Terry, a Gorham Democrat, said in a prepared statement Friday.

Both states award two electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the statewide tally and then allocate one for each congressional district, awarded to the contender who wins that district.

In practical terms, Maine typically votes for the Democratic presidential hopeful while Nebraska votes for the GOP’s nominee. But each state has one congressional district that the majority can’t count on.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court convened for its final oral argument of the term, ostensibly to decide whether a President Donald Trump can be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In all likelihood, Trump v. United States—both the case’s name and also an apt description of U.S. politics right now—is the last chance to prosecute Trump between now and November, when Americans return to the polls to decide if a guy who once tried to overthrow the government is worthy of leading it.

If, however, you were unfamiliar with the particulars of the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s role in facilitating the events that led to it, the bulk of oral argument would have felt dry, boring, and academic. Throughout, the Republican justices worked diligently to frame the case as a series of abstractions—as fodder for an erudite discussion of constitutional theory that only tangentially and coincidentally implicates the electoral future of their preferred candidate. The calculus was pretty simple: The more time they spend discussing things that are not Donald Trump’s real-world criminality, the less attention Donald Trump’s real-world criminality gets.

A Department of Justice-appointed special counsel has charged Trump with, among other things, conspiracy to defraud the United States. The statutory language is pretty broad, but as the government’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, explained to the Court on Thursday, the law is “designed to protect the functions” of the federal government. “It’s difficult to think of a more critical ‘function’ than the certification of who won the election,” Dreeben said.

Yet even this oblique reference to what Trump actually did was too much for Justice Samuel Alito, who quickly jumped in. “As I said, I’m not talking about the particular facts of this case,” he told Dreeben. Instead, Alito spent much of his allotted time discussing the outer limits of presidential criminality, repeatedly invoking the dangers of a too-lenient test that could allow bad-faith prosecutors to bring groundless actions against hypothetical ex-presidents at some undefined point in the future.

The VP will speak on May 1 as Florida's ban after the sixth week of pregnancy takes effect.

The Vice President is returning to Northeast Florida yet again, in the Joe Biden administration’s latest attempt to focus on the fight for reproductive rights in a state that restricts them.

Per an advisory from the White House, Kamala Harris will be in Jacksonville on May 1.

“The event will take place on the day the state is set to implement an abortion ban even more extreme than the one currently in effect. The Vice President will discuss the harms inflicted by state abortion bans and continue to make the case that ‘Donald Trump did this.'”

The reference is to the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which restricts termination of pregnancy after the sixth week except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother. That replaces the ban on the procedure after the 15th week of pregnancy.

Contrary to the White House claim, though, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature ratified those laws, albeit in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving the states latitude to craft restrictions as they saw fit.

The VP will speak on May 1 as Florida's ban after the sixth week of pregnancy takes effect.

The Vice President is returning to Northeast Florida yet again, in the Joe Biden administration’s latest attempt to focus on the fight for reproductive rights in a state that restricts them.

Per an advisory from the White House, Kamala Harris will be in Jacksonville on May 1.

“The event will take place on the day the state is set to implement an abortion ban even more extreme than the one currently in effect. The Vice President will discuss the harms inflicted by state abortion bans and continue to make the case that ‘Donald Trump did this.'”

The reference is to the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which restricts termination of pregnancy after the sixth week except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother. That replaces the ban on the procedure after the 15th week of pregnancy.

Contrary to the White House claim, though, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature ratified those laws, albeit in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving the states latitude to craft restrictions as they saw fit.

This is a story about Clarence Thomas

For forty years Clarence Thomas has been an albatross for Black people, an arbiter of “do as I say, not as I do” politics, a mime whose silence on the bench has been deafening. And, he’s been all the things he claims to hate about Black people: He’s a welfare queen, a duplicitous double agent, a diversity hire, a beneficiary of reparations and a minstrel show.

And Anita Hill tried to warn us.

She tried to tell us that Thomas was inappropriate at best and vile at worst. She tried to tell us that Thomas was not the man he presented himself as. He was not an upstanding man of good moral character.

A Black woman once again tried to save America from itself, but America doesn’t care about Black women.

Having followed the infallible Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court, Thomas had all the intangibles needed to become a freedom fighter. He grew up dirt-poor in South Carolina and initially wanted to become a priest, until he realized the Catholic church was full of racism.

But something happened as Thomas began his climb to the highest court in the land. Instead of making the road easier for Black folks who would come behind him, he resented them for not having to work as hard as he did. He became the uncle who walked uphill forty-six miles both ways in the snow just to get to school, and he hated that we didn’t. Instead of breaking down walls of racism, the same racism that’d held him back, he ensured that hurdle stayed on the track.

One month after a federal court upheld Gov. Ron DeSantis’ erasure of a Black-held congressional district in North Florida, voting-rights groups have asked the court to reconsider in light of the discriminatory intent the judges suggested the governor might hold.

A three-judge panel sitting in the federal Northern District of Florida ruled on March 28 that evidence suggested DeSantis might have set out to quash Black voting power in the area to boost Republican strength, but that that didn’t matter because it found no evidence of bias within the Legislature, which actually passed the map.

Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now, the Florida State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Branches, and 10 individual voters argued in a brief filed this week that the distinction is meaningless under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

“The court’s opinion seems to suggest that, when multiple state actors jointly bring about the challenged state action, all of them must share an illicit racial motive for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be triggered. That is not correct,” the brief reads.

“[A] plaintiff need only show ‘that a discriminatory purpose has been a motivating factor’ behind the challenged state action — not ‘that the challenged action rested solely on racially discriminatory purposes,’” it adds.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history.

I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself.

So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some.

If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election.

And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants.

Thursday’s argument in Trump v. United States was a disaster for Special Counsel Jack Smith, and for anyone who believes that the president of the United States should be subject to prosecution if they commit a crime.

At least five of the Court’s Republicans seemed eager to, at the very least, permit Trump to delay his federal criminal trial for attempting to steal the 2020 election until after this November’s election. And the one GOP appointee who seemed to hedge the most, Chief Justice John Roberts, also seemed to think that Trump enjoys at least some immunity from criminal prosecution.

Much of the Court’s Republican majority, moreover, seemed eager not simply to delay Trump’s trial until after the election, but to give him extraordinarily broad immunity from criminal prosecution should he be elected once again. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, argued that when a president exercises his official powers, he cannot be charged under any federal criminal statute at all, unless that statute contains explicit language saying that it applies to the president.

As Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Smith’s prosecution team, told the Court, only two federal laws meet this standard. So Kavanaugh’s rule would amount to near complete immunity for anything a president did while exercising their executive authority.

Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, played his traditional role as the Court’s most dyspeptic advocate for whatever position the Republican Party prefers. At one point, Alito even argued that permitting Trump to be prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election would “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes ... our democracy,” because future presidents who lose elections would mimic Trump’s criminal behavior in order to remain in office and avoid being prosecuted by their successor.

With just days until Florida’s six-week abortion ban takes effect on Wednesday, providers are rushing to perform as many abortions as possible while planning contingencies for a future where they will need to turn thousands of women away.

Clinics have expanded hours, prioritized ultrasounds and added appointments in these final weeks. They’ve fortified their patient navigation efforts and strengthened relationships with abortion fund groups like the Florida Access Network that provide financial and logistical support to people seeking to terminate pregnancies.

Though the ban has limited exceptions, Planned Parenthood will stop offering any abortions past six weeks at all, instead helping navigate those people to other states or referring them to other providers, said Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida’s interim CEO Barbara Zdravecky.

“Planned Parenthood’s motto has always been ‘care no matter what.’ And we don’t turn patients away. So this is a very devastating and tragic situation for our staff, who have to say, ‘we can’t take care of you, we have to send you someplace else,’” Zdravecky said.

Patient panic

As medical providers race against the clock, many patients are unaware their time is running out, said Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and an abortion provider in South Florida. When she tells patients about the imminent ban, she’s mostly met with shock.