@GuillaumeRossolini @AlexanderKingsbury

Nitpicking. This is about a portfolio of technologies that work together. Problem with #coal #nuclear is that they are expected to run ALL the time. Their #economic #viability goes for a toss when they are not #reliable - something #solar and #wind is accused of all the time.

#Arizona #abortion #rights #measure cleared for the #November #ballot

The Arizona #AbortionAccessAct collected around 578,000 #valid #signatures, significantly more than the nearly 384,000 it needed to #qualify for the #ballot. The Amendment would #guarantee the #right to an #abortion up to the point of #fetal #viability.

https://19thnews.org/2024/08/arizona-abortion-rights-ballot-measure-november/

In the months after Roe fell, their efforts would reach beyond the outlines of that one document.

A.D.F. lawyers would get involved in the two high-profile Supreme Court cases,
argued before the justices this spring,
that could define post-Roe abortion access for American women;

they focused on🔹 the legality of medication that is the most common method of abortion 🔹
and on 🔹emergency care for pregnant women who face grave medical complications🔹 in states where abortion is banned.

But all that was to come.

Onstage that night, Fitch beamed.

For so many decades, Roe had seemed indestructible,

the backdrop to the lives of three generations of American women
and their families.

Soon it would be a relic of an earlier time.

“We’ve got tough times ahead,
but we’re ready,” Fitch told the audience.

“This has been certainly a God thing.
We’ve all been called.
We’ve all been waiting.”

Now, she said, they would not stop.

“Everyone in this room, you’re ready.”

(15/15)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.

Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.

A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.

Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”

victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.

The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.

That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.

They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸

The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.

In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”

They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.

A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.

(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

(14/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.

Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.

The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.

Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.

Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.

Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.

“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.

“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.

“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.

“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.

Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.

It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.

It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.

The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.

A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.

Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.

An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.

There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.

“I actually reject that,” he said.

“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.

But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

(13/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project
during the Trump administration.

For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible.

Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities.

To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so.

A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country,
they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause.

Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies.

Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them,
all fostered by the bench that Leo built.

And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress.

Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”:
a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022.

“Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began.

The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget,
estimated as up to $231,000,
to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund,
according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July,
his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century,
in plain language.

“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote.

“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text,
structure, history,
or tradition.”

That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice
— before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall.

At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books,
making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion,
with very limited exceptions.

And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions.

A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

(12/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin