Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

Fascism and climate crisis

brendan
13th July 2022

Fascism and climate crisis

brendan
13th July 2022

Witness Jason van Tatenhove testifies at seventh public hearing, ‘This could have been the spark that started a new civil war’

In powerful testimony to the House January 6 committee, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers militia told Americans to “quit mincing words and just talk about truths”, and to recognise that Donald Trump attempted to mount “an armed revolution” in order to stay in power.

“People died that day,” Jason van Tatenhove said. “Law enforcement officers died, there was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol. This could have been the spark that started a new civil war, and no one would have won there. That would have been good for no one.”

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For Republicans, teaching the histories of America and of the Holocaust is too dangerous to allow.

Republicans are having difficulty deciding how they should think about Nazis and the Holocaust. They deny actions they have publicly taken, propagate and then delete messages, verbally promote and legislatively limit teaching about what the Nazis did. They seem confused, but aren’t. Some Republicans cozy up to Nazis. Some Republicans, often the same ones, call Democrats Nazis. Many Republicans across the country are attacking the foundation of Holocaust teaching. These three arms of Republican behavior around the Nazis have a single result: to trivialize the Holocaust.

Embracing Nazis always makes news. Carl Paladino, Republican nominee for New York Governor in 2010, Trump’s NY campaign chair in 2016, and current House candidate, is simply the latest fascist advocate. In a radio interview last year, which somehow did not become public news until this month, he praised Hitler: “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.” Paladino combines admiration for Nazis and old-fashioned American racism: in 2016, he hoped that Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease and suggested that Michelle Obama be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

The overlap between conservative Republicans and neo-Nazism has a long history. Former Nazis and neo-Nazis were founders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969, which excluded Black and Jewish Americans. Some Republican candidates in the 2018 elections were open Nazis, white supremacists and/or Holocaust deniers: Vox said 5, the Forward said 9. Illinois Rep. Mary Miller approvingly quoted Hitler the day before the January 6 riots, and recently won the Republican primary.

More Republicans stand next to Nazis without themselves praising Hitler. Arizona Republican office holders and candidates appeared at a 2021 rally organized by Matt Braynard, former director of data and strategy for Trump’s 2020 campaign, featuring Greyson Arnold as a speaker, who calls Nazis “the pure race” and supports the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared this year at the America First Political Action Conference, which is hosted by white nationalists who express antisemitism and deny the Holocaust. She posed for pictures with Holocaust denier Vincent James Foxx. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood proudly next to Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes at the same conference, where he later praised Putin and Hitler.

White supremacy has become integral to Republican messaging. A Twitter employee in 2019 argued internally that getting rid of racist content would involve deleting Republican Party messages, including Trump’s: “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material”. Prominent Republicans who have openly promoted the “white replacement theory” that Democrats are trying to replace real Americans with ethnic minorities in order to win elections include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. FOX’s Tucker Carlson has been the most vocal propagator of this theory. German Nazis could not have been so bad if our political celebrities want to take selfies with their American cousins and parrot their racist nonsense.

Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk on Unsplash

It only seems contradictory that for many Republicans, including those who happily consort with American fascists, “Nazi” is a favorite label for politicians and government employees they don’t like. Donald Trump, Jr., in 2018 said the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform was “awfully similar” to Nazi Party platforms. Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania nominee for governor, compared Democrats’ gun control proposals to the Nazis in 2018 and again this year. In June 2021, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said Democrats were like Nazis who want to destroy America. Even though Trump’s most notable achievement was the development of a vaccine, Republicans as a Party have criticized every government effort to save lives through masks and vaccines. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert called government advocates of vaccinations “needle Nazis” and “medical brownshirts” in front of a cheering CPAC crowd in July 2021. Sen. candidate Josh Mandel in Ohio in April 2021 and Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson in January 2022 compared our government’s health policy to the Nazis. Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media’s streaming service, said in November that Anthony Fauci “represents Josef Mengele”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the media for comparing Republicans to Nazis in May 2021, then said the Democrats were the “national socialist party”. When Nancy Pelosi announced rules in May 2021 requiring unvaccinated members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor, Greene said on a Christian Broadcasting Network program: “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” After the American Jewish Congress tweeted back, “Such comparisons demean the Holocaust”, she insisted: “I stand by all of my statements; I said nothing wrong, I think any rational Jewish person didn’t like what happened in Nazi Germany, and any rational Jewish person doesn’t like what’s happening with overbearing mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies.” She was so convinced of her imagery, she used it the next week in a tweet about one company’s vaccination policy: “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

Greene is not demeaning the Holocaust. Playing with Nazis, calling her opponents Nazis, and comparing herself to Jewish Holocaust victims all serve to diminish the Holocaust. Republicans are attempting to remake the Holocaust into a normal political event. If America’s doctors are like German Stormtroopers, if requiring one’s employees or our members of Congress to follow the most obvious public health rules is like murdering thousands of Jews and others every day for years, then the Holocaust as a singular event has disappeared.

Weeks later Greene apologized. As one of the most public faces of the Republican Party, she had gone one step too fast in pursuit of the Party’s goal of normalizing the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is a dangerous subject for American conservatives, because it was the mass murder of Jews by Christians. A few prominent Nazis espoused crackpot theories of Aryan paganism, and Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox Christians were also slaughtered in vast numbers. But the murder of 6 million Jews was the culmination of centuries of official Christian persecution. Teaching about the Holocaust should begin with the Bible and must explain the violent antisemitism of nearly all Christian denominations right into the 20^th century. Anti-Jewish racism was embedded in Christian European and American societies and their legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white Christians. The recognition of Christian responsibility for Western antisemitism and the Holocaust led every Christian denomination in Western Europe and America after 1945 to repudiate centuries of their own dogma.

The wave of Republican censorship of public school and university curricula in response to the sudden American reckoning on race after George Floyd’s murder purports to be about “critical race theory”. When Florida’s Board of Education banned “critical race theory” from public school classrooms one year ago, the Board seemed to protect Holocaust education by also banning any teaching that denies the Holocaust. But their language points in the opposite direction. Critical race theory “distorts historical events” by asserting “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” The Holocaust was caused by precisely such embedded white supremacy. And like American anti-Black racism, that white supremacy had deep roots in official Christianity.

I have seen my students become uncomfortable when confronted with facts about Christian persecution of Jews and Nazi admiration for American Jim Crow legislation in the 1930s as a model for the Nuremberg laws. The American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose 1916 eulogy for Nordic supremacy was entitled “The Passing of the Great Race”, was equally popular with American segregationists and Adolf Hitler, who called the book his “bible”. They were disturbed by the realization that German Jews, from the passage of Nuremberg Laws in 1935 until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, were treated essentially the same as African Americans here, whose racial persecution continued unabated into the 1960s. That same knowledge frightens today’s right-wing Christians across the Western world. The Christian nationalist parties in Europe all seek to diminish the Holocaust, especially the role played by Christians in their own nations: those in power in Poland and Hungary, and those trying for power in Germany and France.

The literal wording of recent Republican censorship laws bans education that doesn’t exist. The fake narrative that critical race theory is taught in public schools is the basis of this wave of legislation. A different and broader invention imperils Holocaust education: the claim in Wisconsin’s 2021 law that it is necessary to forbid teachers from indoctrinating their students with the idea “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex and that an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex.” That kind of systematically damaging pedagogy was in fact integral to American education for centuries. The long racial reckoning which began in the 1960s demonstrated how white supremacy was written into all levels of educational curricula. The claim that American racism is over, the foundation of the attacks on critical race theory, ignores the continuing power and weight of adult Americans who were subject for years to those curricula, as I was.

Any hint that a teacher is promoting racial or gender superiority is likely to be called out without any help from new laws. The Republicans are not anxiously hunting for hidden examples of white supremacy or male superiority. That’s what they promote. They want their supporters to believe that they will reveal and defeat the teaching that blacks are superior to whites and that women are superior to men, exactly the kind of fake crisis that dominates the politico-cultural war.

Over years of interacting with teachers of the Holocaust, I never heard of any who told students that they bore “responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex”. Holocaust teachers do mention that this was precisely what Christian churches had been saying for centuries about Jews. Such claims were fundamental to murderous persecution. But inducing guilt in today’s students is hardly useful in teaching history.

The discussions during the Republican effort in Louisiana to ban critical race theory display how the right-wing ideology of the Holocaust plays out at the state level. Republican state representative Valarie Hodges sponsored a bill in 2021 to mandate Holocaust education in Louisiana. Hodges was an avid promoter of the idea that Democrats are as bad as Nazis. She was part of the effort of conservative Republicans in the state to require the teaching of patriotic themes in American history and to block more teaching about America’s racial history. Hodges brought a Metairie resident to testify about the dangers of “communism” in our government: “To put it in Holocaust terms, the communists are now the Nazis and we are the Jews. They are the predators. We are the prey. We need to teach this history to our future citizens so we don’t end up like the Jews.” No Jewish organizations testified in favor of Hodges’ bill. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, speaking for professional historians in America, recognized the ultimate goal. “You’re saying, ‘You have to teach the history of the Holocaust, but you can’t teach the history of institutionalized, deeply embedded racism in the United States.’”

Rep. Ray Garofalo, the head of the Louisiana House Education Committee, sponsored a bill barring teaching about institutional racism. He then slipped and said the right-wing truth: any lessons about American slavery should include “the good, the bad, the ugly”. Garafalo’s other unprofessional antics made him such an easy target, that the Republican Speaker of the House removed him as chair, and replaced him with another Republican. All the bills about mandating and preventing subjects in Louisiana public education ultimately failed.

The legislative history of Republican censorship in Arizona offers similar clues about what the issues are and what will be attempted in the future. Arizona Republicans in the state legislature are unanimously in favor of putting an amendment to the state’s constitution before the voters. The bill’s lengthy section B enumerates seven varieties of fake complaints about non-existent educational practices. The key is section A: teachers in public schools from elementary to high school: “may not use public monies for instruction that promotes or advocates for any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex”. The bill’s sponsor, Michelle Udall, argued that, “If a teacher can’t teach [history] without placing blame or judgment on the basis of race, they shouldn’t be teaching.” She was clear about what she meant: it will be okay to say that a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery story happened, but it would “not be appropriate” to say that the mass murderer was a white supremacist. Her bill would insure that such teachers could be personally punished. Republicans in the Arizona House and Senate unanimously voted in favor. The bill was signed into law as part of a budget whose main item was a tax cut for better-off Arizonans.

How does one teach the Holocaust or slavery without detailing the responsibility of particular human groups for inhuman treatment of fellow humans of other groups based on racist ideologies?

Conservative politicians can count on well-funded organizations to create the local crises around curriculum that alarm enough parents to get educators fired. Nearly 900 school districts across the country, educating one-third of all public school students in the country, were targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021. The most thorough study of the nationwide campaign against teaching about race concluded: “The anti “CRT” effort is a purposeful, nationally/state interconnected, and locally-driven conflict campaign to block or restrict proactive teaching and professional development related to race, racism, bias, and many aspects of proactive diversity/equity/inclusion efforts in schools, while — for some — gaining political power and control. The conflict campaign’s loudest, most powerful voices caricature actual teaching and stoke parent anxiety in a quest to control both schools and government.”

The real danger that Republican curricular censorship presents to Holocaust teaching is not the occasional eruption of stupidity, as in Southlake, Texas. Texas House Bill 3979 requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, told teachers,

“Just try to remember the concepts of 3979 . . . make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” That caused a small scandal. Despite posing for photographs with Holocaust deniers, Republican politicians don’t yet demand that Holocaust denial become part of the curriculum.

But when Holocaust denial comes from within the community, from antisemitic parents, the new laws make teaching difficult. A North Carolina teacher wrote: “My SUPERINTENDENT asked us to advise students to ‘ask your parents’ rather than insist that the Holocaust was real. We received professional development to help us navigate this political environment safely. Our superintendent attended and told us to advise kids to ‘ask your parents’ instead of try to show evidence to a child whose family swears the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

New Republican laws and their emboldened approach to white supremacy will inevitably lead to an attack on any Holocaust teaching which goes beyond the discussion of prejudice to analyze the power of embedded racism and Christian white supremacy.

For Republicans, teaching the histories of America and of the Holocaust is too dangerous to allow. Those educations cause intellectual, then social disturbance. Both explain the role of embedded racism in Western society and the disastrous consequences. The Holocaust is over, and Christian nationalists all over Western society have been calling for Jews to get over it. But American racism and sexism are not. The success of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in demonstrating the continuing influence of male and white supremacy has frightened Christian conservatives. They are using the inevitable discomfort of students learning that their predecessors committed genocide to try to sanitize the history they will learn.

The American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association, along with other educational organizations, released a statement in June 2021 opposing the new rollout of bills restricting the teaching of history. The statement focuses entirely on “the role of racism in the history of the United States”. Thus far, Holocaust teaching has suffered only collateral damage in the Republican war against American history. But without trivializing Holocaust education into anodyne lessons on intolerance, Republicans will never be able to cover up the historical truth that critical race theory foregrounds: racism has been and may still be embedded in American life.

Today teachers of American history are the targets of Republican censorship. Holocaust teachers, you’re next.

This article originally was published by Tikkun: The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith and Secular Humanist Voice for Social Justice, Environmental Sanity and Peace. www.tikkun.org 

The Family Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020 falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwell and Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.” It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair, whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PAC shortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the first Blackwell-Klukowski collaboration. They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

The post The Family Research Council’s Insurrection Connections appeared first on Right Wing Watch.

Following President Joe Biden’s Friday executive order protecting abortion rights, a Planned Parenthood of Montana spokesperson tells Truthout the organization will not reverse its decision to discontinue providing medication abortion to patients traveling from states where abortion has been banned after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

The organization, which operates five clinics in the state, had previously cited legal concerns about patients potentially traveling with abortion pills provided by Planned Parenthood of Montana clinics back home to states that have banned abortion, and then taking the pills there. The organization, however, is continuing to provide such patients with surgical abortion procedures (since they can guarantee the procedure happens in state).

While the safe and effective two-pill regimen may be given at a clinic in a state that has not banned abortions, like Montana, the patient could take one or both pills after returning home to a surrounding state like South Dakota, which is currently enforcing a total abortion ban. Despite President Biden’s executive order, legal questions remain regarding whether physicians who prescribed the pills could be held liable.

“Although we are encouraged by President Biden’s executive action, our decision to provide abortion care must continue to take into consideration the rapidly changing landscape for abortion access across the country and amid the cruel efforts of anti-abortion politicians to ban abortion,” said Laura Terrill, vice president of external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Montana. “We look forward to seeing how the executive order is implemented, including with respect to improving public awareness, addressing misinformation, and protecting people’s privacy.”

Planned Parenthood of Montana’s decision to remain firm on declining many out-of-state patients the most common type of abortion method underscores the legal uncertainty that remains after President Biden’s executive actions on Friday, and that will have to be resolved in courts one way or another. For now, some providers and patients are playing it safe in terms of guessing how far state prosecutors will go to criminalize the procedure beyond their own state border.

Their caution isn’t necessarily unreasonable. In fact, South Dakotans who travel to Montana for abortion could soon find themselves at risk even if their abortion occurs within Montana’s borders, as Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem has called a special session to discuss legislation to potentially restrict out-of-state abortions for South Dakota residents.

“Although we are encouraged by President Biden’s executive action, our decision to provide abortion care must continue to take into consideration the rapidly changing landscape for abortion access across the country.”

Legal experts with whom Truthout spoke say that while there’s plenty of legal precedent establishing the constitutional right to travel across states lines for medical procedures, and as President Biden’s executive order now establishes, abortion; the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case has created legal gray areas in which lower courts could still create new precedent to prohibit people’s ability to travel for abortion. They’re also concerned that legislation like Texas’s Senate Bill 8, which contains an enforcement mechanism that allows individuals to sue anyone who has helped a person obtain an abortion, may significantly threaten abortion travel.

National anti-abortion groups and Republican state legislators are already advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is now banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere. Republican Texas State Rep. Tom Oliverson told The Washington Post that his anti-abortion group, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, has begun working with the authors of Texas’s SB 8 to explore model legislation utilizing the law’s novel private civil-enforcement mechanism to restrict people from crossing state lines for abortions.

A separate anti-abortion, right-wing legal group, The Thomas More Society, also hopes to utilize Texas’s SB 8 enforcement mechanism to draft model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside that state.

A July 7 letter from 11 Texas Freedom Caucus conservative Texas state legislators likewise outlines plans to introduce legislation next session that would utilize the private civil-enforcement mechanism to go after anyone who pays for or reimburses costs associated with abortion, regardless of where it occurs.

Groups like the Association of Christian Lawmakers are even utilizing the language of “fugitive moms” and “human trafficking” to describe abortion seekers, providers who administer abortions to people who travel across state lines and/or the people who help them. “Many of us have supported legislation to stop human trafficking,” Association President and Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert told the Post. “So why is there a pass on people trafficking women in order to make money off of aborting their babies?”

“Right now, legally, that [human trafficking terminology] doesn’t make any difference unless the courts start — which is I think the goal — to start viewing [cases] in that terminology.”

This kind of language offers important insights about how legal contests around interstate travel for abortion are likely to be framed moving forward, as well as how abortion rights advocates can work both inside and outside the legal realm to push back against them.

“Right now, legally, that [human trafficking terminology] doesn’t make any difference unless the courts start — which is I think the goal — to start viewing [cases] in that terminology, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see some right-wing judges start picking up on that terminology in their decisions,” says South Texas College of Law Professor Charles “Rocky” Rhodes.

Even within states like Texas, Republican legislators are looking for ways to blur jurisdictional lines. In the July 7 Texas Freedom Caucus letter, lawmakers said they plan to introduce a bill allowing anti-abortion district attorneys to prosecute abortion-related cases outside their home jurisdiction when a local, progressive DA “fails or refuses to do so.” Now, Texas Freedom Caucus lawmakers and others also want to extend that logic so that aggressive DAs can use prosecutorial discretion to read state laws in a way that tries to apply to people in other states, even without the new draft legislation specifically targeting travel.

Professor Rhodes tells Truthout he’s skeptical that courts would uphold a private civil-enforcement mechanism to prevent interstate travel for abortion since the question of the constitutional right itself is separate from its enforcement mechanism.

“If you have a constitutional right to go out of state and be able to have an abortion, the fact that the state enforces that through private mechanisms or through public mechanisms doesn’t matter.”

“If you have a constitutional right to go out of state and be able to have an abortion, the fact that the state enforces that through private mechanisms or through public mechanisms doesn’t matter,” Rhodes tells Truthout. “Either way, you still have the right, so you have to separate the substance of the right from the procedure about how rights are brought up in court.”

A law utilizing such a civil enforcement mechanism is more difficult to challenge in court overall because abortion rights groups don’t have a clear target to sue. However, Professor Rhodes explains that if the individual in question has a constitutional right, they will win the case, whomever they do decide to sue, and whether or not the case utilizes private or public enforcement.

Yet Rhodes concedes that when the right at issue is legally uncertain, SB 8-style private enforcement often has a chilling effect since providers and others are sometimes unwilling to take the risks involved with the legal fight for their constitutional rights. The very possibility of a large civil fine or unresolved legal questions is often enough to chill legal challenges entirely, as seems to be the case with Planned Parenthood of Montana’s precautionary withholding of services.

Still, in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rebuffed the idea that states could decide that their residents can’t travel out of state for an abortion, because of the constitutional right to interstate travel, writing that the issue isn’t even “especially difficult as a constitutional matter.” While this statement doesn’t carry any legal weight in terms of setting precedent, it could still inform decisions made by lower courts.

Justice Kavanaugh’s statement in his concurring opinion, however, appears limited to states trying to prevent their residents from traveling. It wouldn’t necessarily stop states from attempting to prosecute providers in others states, says University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Greer Donley, who specializes in medication abortion law and has closely studied the proposals now being floated to restrict abortion across state lines. Kavanaugh’s statement also fails to address the novel civil enforcement strategy out of Texas that is gaining traction in Republican legislatures, Donley points out.

Moreover, Donley notes that Justice Kavanaugh stated during his confirmation hearing that Roe was settled law, and then sided with the conservative majority in Dobbs to overturn it. “If there’s a real case involving real facts, [Kavanaugh] might end up coming out differently and saying, ‘Yes, generally there’s a right to travel in the Constitution, but given the facts here, it does not apply,’” Donley says.

When it comes to the issue of extra-territorial application of state laws, she says, the questions courts are going to consider are going to be entirely dependent on what states that have banned abortion do to try to apply their laws, and how strong the laws are in states that do allow abortion.

“A lot of the doctrines that both sides are going to rely on are unknown. They just don’t have a lot of precedent in this context at all, so we really have a lot of uncertainty. Truly, it’s a profound amount of uncertainty.”

“A lot of the doctrines that both sides are going to rely on are unknown. They just don’t have a lot of precedent in this context at all, so we really have a lot of uncertainty. Truly, it’s a profound amount of uncertainty,” Donley tells Truthout. “We’re going to have to see what the courts do, and the courts are going to almost certainly disagree. And then, how [the courts] handle those disagreements is just another level of uncertainty.”

Much will come down to whether abortion-rights states have adequately protected themselves against cross-state prosecution. Only Connecticut, New York, Delaware and New Jersey have passed laws specifically shielding providers from being prosecuted under abortion restrictions passed in other states. Meanwhile, governors in Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico and Nevada have issued executive orders saying they will not extradite providers to states that have banned abortion, and that state employees won’t comply with out-of-state investigations.

Donley described Connecticut’s shield law as the nation’s strongest protections, upon which other abortion-rights states could model their legislation. The law offers broad protections from anti-abortion laws that try to reach across state lines. The measures shield people from out-of-state summonses or subpoenas issued in cases related to legal abortions in Connecticut. The law also prevents Connecticut authorities from adhering to another state’s request to investigate or punish anyone involved in facilitating a legal in-state abortion.

At the federal level, President Biden’s Friday executive order formalizes instructions to the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services (HHS) to combat state-level efforts to restrict pregnant people from traveling across state lines for abortion services and to protect access to federally approved abortion pills.

With the new executive order in place, providers like Planned Parenthood in states like Montana can be assured of at least some level of protection, since the order instructs medical providers that they are not required to disclose patients’ private health information to law enforcement.

Biden’s Justice Department has already warned states restricting abortion that it will fight legal attempts to prohibit interstate travel or prosecute providers in abortion-rights states, saying that such attempts violate the constitutional right to interstate travel and commerce.

“Certainly, if the federal government passed a statute that codified a right to travel, that would be a very, very, very helpful and preemptive thing for it to do.”

Still, President Biden’s ability to protect abortion rights by executive action is limited without congressional action codifying abortion rights at the federal level. Biden’s executive order is expected to push HHS and the Justice Department to fight in court to protect abortion providers and seekers, but the order cannot guarantee courts will take their side against aggressive prosecution by states that have banned abortion. Additionally, the action does not protect people who seek abortion pills by mail from other states, which could still be criminalized.

Legal experts also point out that the Justice Department’s strategy of opposing Texas’s SB 8 six-week abortion ban ultimately failed, and that new state laws involving interstate travel could raise additional legal questions.

Donley tells Truthout that the federal government has an enormous amount of power to regulate interstate commerce, and that President Biden could do more at the executive level to attempt to regulate issues related to it, including declaring a public health emergency to support abortion access. “Certainly, if the federal government passed a statute that codified a right to travel, that would be a very, very, very helpful and preemptive thing for it to do,” she says.

Professor Donley also pointed out that the impacts of laws banning residents from traveling across state lines for abortion or cross-state prosecutions of providers are likely to have legal implications that go beyond abortion.

“Many of the proposals we’ve been hearing about for trying to chill interstate travel are using an SB 8-style mechanism to provide further removal from constitutional protections,” Donley says. “So, to the extent that states are allowed to prohibit travel or prosecute people in other states, the question does become: What other ways can states use those same mechanisms for other types of things?”