Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today Arelis R. Hernández and Patrick Svitek of The Washington Post writing about the dizzying number of federal court rulings involving Texas law S.B. 4 within the previous 48-72 hours and the confusion that it’s causing among migrants, law enforcement officials, and even in Texas politics.
The Supreme Court briefly allowed the law to take effect Tuesday, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked enforcement hours later and heard the oral arguments Wednesday without issuing a ruling. The law makes illegal entry into the country a state crime, allowing state and local law enforcement to arrest people who are suspected of the crime and return them to ports of entry. The law was originally scheduled to go into effect March 5.
It was the most aggressive border proposal pushed last year by Gov. Greg Abbott, a third-term Republican who is a fierce critic of President Biden and his immigration policies. Republicans consider the issue one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities as he faces his GOP predecessor, Donald Trump, in the November presidential election.
But how the Texas law might be enforced remains a point of contention, including among law enforcement agencies who would be tasked with making arrests. In recent days, police departments across the state have put out statements expressing concern about taking on immigration enforcement responsibilities. Some city leaders have been explicit in discouraging officers from making arrests under the new law.
Chris Geidner of Law Dork explains why the Fifth Circuit decided to place a stay on enforcement of S.B.4.
Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, a George W. Bush appointee and the pivotal vote on Wednesday’s three-judge panel, expressed significant doubts about the arguments advanced by Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson for allowing the state to enforce S.B. 4 immediately.
Among other provisions, the law creates a new Texas crime of “illegal entry” and allows for state enforcement of that law, including removal. The removal provision appeared almost certain to remain blocked pending appeal, and the entry provision faced strong pushback from Richman as well. (Those are the two key parts of the law. The remainder of the law is almost all provisions related to implementing those two parts of the law.)
While Nielson was insistent that the law “mirrors” federal law and suggested that the state would be working in tandem with the federal government in its implementation, he lacked information about what several provisions Richman questioned even mean. For other provisions, he argued that they would have limited effect due to declarations submitted by state officials about their enforcement plans.
Rachel M. Cohen of Vox looks at some the factors that may explain why abortions increased in 2023.
The first underlying factor is that travel out of state for abortion has gone up, offsetting some of the newer restrictions in states with bans. More than 160,000 people crossed state lines to end pregnancies in 2023, per Guttmacher, almost double the number who did so in 2020.
This isn’t to say the burden of state restrictions has been offset.
[…]
Another factor explaining the overall increase is that more residents living in states without restrictions are getting abortions.
This seems to have been driven primarily by improved access policies in those states, like expansion of telehealth medicine, more sliding-scale payment options, and wider Medicaid coverage. Some of these efforts began before 2022, though many picked up steam after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
[…]
Another factor likely driving the increase is that more people are choosing to end pregnancies through medication abortion — the two-drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol.
Use of these pills has been trending up over time, but Guttmacher found a particularly big jump over the last three years, where medication abortion accounted for 63 percent of all US abortions in the formal health care system in 2023, up from 53 percent in 2020.
Charles Blow of The New York Times says that the new Lost Cause— Trump’s Lost Cause— is not quite the same as the old Lost Cause.
The Confederate Lost Cause narrative came after enormous loss: Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died, the South was decimated and its economy was hobbled. Trump’s Lost Cause, on the other hand, is about the grievances he promotes, his inability to accept losing to Joe Biden and his utter disregard for democratic norms.
Trump’s version grows out of a more recent vintage of the Lost Cause narrative, one that has been around at least since George Wallace’s first presidential campaign in the 1960s. One in which a sense of displacement and dispossession is driven by a lost cultural advantage. […]
And Trump invokes his Lost Cause in combination with another false telling, one of unprecedented happiness and unity — in which all the glory belongs to him. As he told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday, “African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, women, men, people with diplomas from the best schools in the world and people that didn’t graduate from high school, every single group was doing better than ever before.” He continued, “Our country was coming together.”
I had to get the tape on that one!
John Hendrickson of The Atlantic does one of the more interesting profiles of Trump voters about their feelings about Trump’s insults of people with disabilities.
…Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally trying to get children out of homelessness. Beverly shared that she has a learning disability and has trouble spelling. Even as an adult, she’s regularly ridiculed. “It does hurt my feelings at times,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s hard to “see a lot of people make fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction among members of the community. “We’ll just go in a dark secret hole and not come out,” Beverly said. Yet she also said she still planned to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate Trump’s taunts from her personal feelings by chalking his behavior up to politics. If a child asked her about Trump’s belittlement, she imagined that she would liken it to playing a game: “You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser,” she offered. “It’s just trash-talking.”
Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read jesus is my savior, trump is my president, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.
Kyle Whitmire of AL.com does a long and winding investigation into why a local library director got fired.
The Autauga-Prattville Library Board fired its director last week for releasing confidential information … […]
It started last Thursday, when following a closed-door executive session, the board terminated Foster “for revealing confidential information to the press and violation of criminal law.”
In February, the public board passed a new public policy that “the library shall not purchase or otherwise acquire any material advertised for consumers ages 17 and under which contain content including, but not limited to, obscenity, sexual conduct, sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender discordance.”
Additionally, patrons under 18 may not check out such books from the adult sections without a parent’s permission.
Finally today, Robin Washington of Forward reports on some of the reactions of a Black Queen Esther showing up in a prominent Jewish publication.
It’s not at all surprising that a Jewish newspaper would publish an illustration of Queen Esther just before Purim. But a portrait of Esther as Black — dark skin, dark hair and braids — is bound to get attention.
Lahavah Hila of Brooklyn noticed it immediately.
“Hey, Jewish Press! I love your choice of picture for Esther HaMalkah! Big change from stuff I’ve read in your publication. Keep it up and I’ll have to renew my subscription!” she posted on Facebook on March 15, adding: “Kol ha Kavod, JP!”
Rishona Campbell of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saw Hila’s post and started a Facebook thread of her own. “Oh wow — the Jewish Press put this out today!? And to think, just 15 years ago, you rarely saw any people of color illustrated in Jewish publications,” she wrote. “A dark skinned Queen Esther in a Jewish periodical? Quite a leap.”
Their posts and those on other pages fueled scores of responses about the computer-generated image, which the paper credited as having been created by Meta AI. Both Hila and Campbell are Black — Hila is Orthodox and Campbell describes herself as Conservadox — and familiar with the weekly paper geared toward the Orthodox community. Hila is a current online subscriber (the image was run in print and the paper’s electronic e-edition) and Campbell is a former reader who says she stopped looking at it when the publication shifted to the right in recent years.
Everyone try to have the best possible day!
