Texas comes for the right to interstate travel
States' rights for me, not for thee.
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By Lisa Needham
During Tuesday’s debate, as Donald Trump tried to take credit for the demise of Roe while pretending a second Trump administration wouldn’t obliterate abortion protections at a national level, he blurted out what he surely thought sounded like a winning statement: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.”
This is, of course, exceedingly not true. 74 percent of women oppose leaving abortion up to the states, which is the same amount of women who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. There is no evidence Democrats or legal scholars who aren’t employed by Fox News wanted this balkanized nightmare where less than half of reproductive-age women in the country are aware of the current status of abortion policy in their state, millions live in states with bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and infant mortality is spiking.
Despite their unwillingness to be frank about it, conservatives don’t want abortion returned to the states either. Sure, that’s what Justice Samuel Alito smugly declared was happening when he wrote the Dobbs opinion overturning Roe, and sure, that’s what both Trump and JD Vance are running around saying. But it’s the actions of red states — actions that seek to impose their anti-choice views on the entire nation — that speak far louder.
Ken Paxton thinks your business is his business
Look at Texas, where state Attorney General Ken Paxton just sued the Biden administration to block a new rule that protects the medical records of people who cross state lines to obtain abortions.
As Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra explained when announcing the rule, “Many Americans are scared their private medical information will be shared, misused, and disclosed without permission ... the Biden-Harris Administration is providing stronger protections to people seeking lawful reproductive health care regardless of whether the care is in their home state or if they must cross state lines to get it.”
Texas’s lawsuit alleges that the rule interferes with its ability to enforce its own laws on reproductive health. Of course, the rule does no such thing. Texas remains fully able to enforce its extreme abortion ban within its borders. All the rule does is prevent Texas from reaching into other states to demand patient records when people obtain reproductive health care that is legal in that state.
Texas Republicans are also mad that the rule requires reproductive health care to be “interpreted broadly and inclusive of all types of health care related to an individual’s reproductive system” — which means it could also protect the records of people seeking gender-affirming care outside the state.
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The Biden administration enacted the rule amid provider concerns that patient records would be sought and that such a threat would chill people from seeking reproductive health care in other states. This isn’t an abstract fear. Earlier this year, Texas demanded detailed patient information from Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, asking for the number of Texas children treated, the medications prescribed to them, and individual diagnoses. The state made a similar demand of a Georgia telehealth clinic, even asking for records from before Texas banned gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth.
Notably, when it comes to abortion, Texas’s ban very carefully does not make it a crime for a pregnant person to have an abortion, nor does it impose any civil liability on them. Providers face felony charges if they perform an abortion, and anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion can be civilly sued by literally anyone under Texas’s vigilante law, SB8, but the actual patient is free and clear. That’s because even the most hardline anti-choicers have shied away from prosecuting people for abortions — though Trump has mused that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who get one.
So, having an abortion outside Texas’s borders definitely does not violate Texas’s current abortion ban, which makes the assertion that Texas needs to be able to get patient records to enforce its abortion ban absolutely false. No charges could be brought against the patient, so there’s nothing to enforce. What Texas is trying to do here is functionally nationalize its extreme abortion ban by violating the medical privacy of its own citizens and terrorize out-of-state abortion providers into refusing to provide services to patients from Texas.
If this sounds like fear-mongering, it’s not. The architect of SB8, Jonathan Mitchell, has sought to depose two women he claims traveled out of state for an abortion. In both instances, Mitchell represents an ex-boyfriend who disagreed with the woman’s decision. Mitchell is also working with at least one city in Texas, Amarillo, to try to get an ordinance passed that would ban the use of the city’s roads and highways to leave the state to get an abortion. Four counties and a handful of cities in Texas already have such laws.
Texas isn’t the only state trying to criminalize the right to travel out of state for reproductive health care. Last year, Idaho passed a law that would have made it a felony for someone to help a minor who is not their own child to obtain an abortion in another state where the procedure is legal. Tennessee passed a similar law this year, and Republican legislators have proposed bills along these lines in Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.
Idaho’s law is on hold right now after advocacy groups sued, saying the law is too vague to be able to tell what conduct would be prohibited, that it violates their First Amendment rights, and that it hinders the right to travel between states.
It’s the right to travel that is most under attack here. Indeed, the right to interstate travel is a lot like the right to abortion once was: a core freedom that is grounded in our Constitution but does not appear in the text of the document. Rather, it’s a right inferred from multiple sources, but it dates back to 1777 when the first 13 states adopted the Articles of Confederation. Article IV provided for the “free ingress and regress to and from any other state” and also that out-of-state visitors were entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the state they were visiting.
The language regarding travel didn’t make its way into the current Constitution. Instead, it only states that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in several states.” The Supreme Court has routinely upheld the right. But …
Precedent might not save us
We’ve now seen how blithely this Supreme Court will ignore its precedents to achieve their desired results.
They didn’t just get rid of abortion. They threw out affirmative action, decided it was just fine to have school personnel lead students in Christian prayers, and dramatically shifted the balance of power between the three branches of government in a way that allows conservative judges to continually thwart any regulations made by a Democratic administration. There’s no reason to believe that this Supreme Court would treat the right to travel as sacrosanct if throwing it out would give red state Christian conservatives the ability to impose their will on everyone else.
And if Trump and Vance prevail in 2024? First, there’s no reason to believe Trump is being truthful when he says he would not sign a nationwide abortion ban. During Tuesday’s debate, he twice refused to directly answer a question about whether he would veto such a ban, instead saying there would be no reason to sign a ban because “we’ve gotten what everyone wanted.”
As much as Vance is currently busy trying to provide cover for Trump’s ever-shifting stance on abortion, he has already explicitly stated he wants abortion to be illegal nationwide.
And if Vance can’t get a nationwide ban? As he outlined during a 2022 podcast appearance, he wants a “federal response” to people traveling to other states for abortions, invoking a racist and antisemitic vision of George Soros thwarting an Ohio abortion ban by “send[ing] a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.” He went on to say, “Hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it.” (Audio of these comments below via the KamalaHQ twitter account.)
You heard that correctly. The Vance vision of abortion rights is that a state with an abortion ban gets to reach into a state without one and prohibit that state from performing a perfectly legal and routine medical procedure for a visitor.
That’s not leaving things up to the states. Nor is demanding private medical records from out-of-state clinics or criminalizing the use of roads to leave the state. All of those are moves designed to force blue states to bend to the will of red states while also terrorizing their own citizens into staying put and not seeking healthcare elsewhere.
Conservatives style themselves as the party of states’ rights and limited government, but when it comes to abortion, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Cutting through Trump’s border lies
By Andy Hirschfeld
During Tuesday’s debate, Donald Trump doubled down on some very common but highly misleading MAGA talking points about the US-Mexico border.
He characterized Kamala Harris as the “border czar.” He once again suggested that immigrants have caused a crime wave in American cities. And he alleged that the United States has an open border. None of this is true.
Harris’s immigration record will be a focus of Trump’s attacks over the next two months. Let’s unpack a few of his favorite lies.
Harris has never been in charge of the border
In March 2021, only two months into the Biden-Harris administration, the president announced that Harris would be tasked with addressing the root causes of migration to the US from the northern triangle of Central America.
In a press conference announcing the move, Biden said that “the best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave.” During that same presser, Harris said that the administration “must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek.”
Three months later, Harris met with then-Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to launch a task force to help weed out corruption in Central American governments and give millions to advance economic opportunities across the region. The goal was to deter migrants from making the dangerous journey north.
By March of this year, the administration reported that, thanks to the task force, the region added 23,000 new jobs, provided 63,000 farmers with new technology to improve agricultural output, and arrested 275 people tied to leading and organizing human trafficking operations.
So while Republicans may want to pretend that Harris was in charge of border security, her actual portfolio was quite different.
Democrats do not want an open border
Trump has continually claimed that Democrats like Harris want an open border, including during the debate, where he alleged Biden could close the border right now if he wanted to. Also on Tuesday, Trump’s running mate JD Vance said in a post on X that Harris “can't run from the pain and suffering that her open border policies have caused too many American families”
In reality, there’s no record of Harris or any Democrat for that matter authoring a bill that would meaningfully open the border, nor has the Biden administration taken any unilateral action toward that end. The US-Mexico border hasn’t been open for more than 100 years, and there’s no reason to believe that’ll change anytime soon.
The Biden-Harris administration very specifically tightened immigration in recent months. This was a result of border encounters hitting record highs at the end of last year despite the administration’s moves to address root causes.
In June, the Biden-Harris Administration tried to curb border crossings by restricting entry for many non-citizens and greatly limiting the ability for migrants to seek asylum. These moves were successful. Within a month, the Department of Homeland Security reported a 50 percent drop in encounters. CBS News reported that crossings fell to 2020 levels.
The ACLU even sued the Biden-Harris administration over the new policies, which some human rights advocates called draconian and harsh. That’s definitely not the open borders Republicans say Democrats want.
Finally, as Harris emphasized during the debate, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who earlier this year blocked a bipartisan border security bill that two thirds of Americans supported. Trump pressured Republicans to vote against the bill, later admitting he did so to help his presidential campaign.
Migrant crime is not on the rise
Trump talks relentlessly during his rallies and interviews about the wave of migrant crime that is purportedly ravaging American cities. He’s gotten help from right-wing media in his fear-mongering efforts.
A July report from Media Matters pointed out that Fox News ran roughly one thousand segments on migrant crime, many of them highly sensationalized. And while it’s true that migrants commit crimes — every demographic group does — there’s no data to back up Trump’s hysterical claims.
In fact, it’s the opposite. Of the six cities that Texas’s Republican leaders have bussed migrants to in recent years, only one reported an escalation in crime — Washington DC — but that increase is not attributed to migrants. Crime in New York City in particular is way down. And the murder rate nationally has dropped significantly this year.
Even before Biden took office, FBI data showed no correlation between sanctuary city policies and a rise in violent crime. That makes sense, because study after study suggests migrants are less likely to commit and be convicted of crimes compared to native born citizens.
A 2020 report from the libertarian Cato Institute about crime rates in Texas found that illegal immigrants are 25 percent less likely to be convicted of murder than native citizens. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that in Texas undocumented migrants were two and a half times less likely to be arrested for drug crimes than native born citizens. Another study from the National Bureau For Economic Research found that immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native born whites.
If the notion that migrants pose a grave threat to Americans was backed up by facts, right-wingers would run with them. But since it isn’t, they resort to sensationalizing individual violent crimes and trying to tar migrants with collective guilt.
Migrants are also not to blame for drug overdoses
Republicans have been quick to point the finger at Democrats, as JD Vance did in an X post last week, regarding fentanyl overdoses. But here too the facts are not on their side.
Even though drug seizures are on the rise, it’s no secret that fentanyl coming over the southern border has been a growing problem in recent years. But it’s almost never migrants who are the ones doing the smuggling. Roughly 90 percent of all fentanyl seizures at the border involve people who are legally authorized to travel back and forth, with more than half being US citizens.
Facts (should) matter
Trump started his political career by dehumanizing migrants, calling Mexicans rapists and criminals after he descended down a golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015. That rhetoric was shocking then, but in the nine years since, Trump has normalized fear-mongering to a point where he has a good shot of returning to the presidency campaigning on a platform of “bloody” mass deportation.
Harris, however, is in a good position to win — especially coming out of her strong showing in Tuesday’s debate. And while the immigration issue is regarded as one of Trump’s strengths, it’s telling that his go-to talking points are a pack of lies.
That’s it for this week
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We’ll be back with more Monday. Have a great weekend.
Paxton is such a hollow, soulless creature that he has to hang his identity as a mini-me trumper. He even wears the duplicate blue suit with the ridiculously long red tie uniform of the knuckle dragging alpha beast.
Trump doesn’t need to sign a national ban. Remember how he went on about how much he loved acting agency heads bc they didn’t need senate confirmation. All he needs is an acting head of fda to rescind approval for mifepristone & misoprostol & an acting head of DOJ who would enforce the Comstock Act.