53percenter's Blog

A University of Utah professor, writing in the Salt Lake Tribune, responded to legislation sponsored by a state Republican that would ban abortion after 15 weeks by calling the representative “immoral” for sponsoring the legislation. UU law professor and adjunct professor of medical ethics and humanities Teneille Brown also opined, “There is no scientific proof that fetuses feel pain.”

Brown was triggered by H.B. 136, from Republican Utah state Rep. Cheryl Acton, which states, “Notwithstanding any other provision of this part, an abortion may not be performed after the unborn child reaches 15 weeks gestational age unless the abortion is permissible for a reason described in Subsection 76-7-302(3)(b).” Those exceptions include when the mother is endangered, when the baby has a defect that is uniformly diagnosable and fatal, or if the child was conceived as a result of rape or incest.

Brown wrote:

Rep. Cheryl Acton, R-West Jordan, is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit abortion after 15 weeks, a ban that she says is supported by “science.” From her comments on “Radio West” on Jan. 22, it seems that she knows very little about science, and she knows even less about the law.

First, there is no scientific proof that fetuses feel pain. Any scientist who tells you otherwise is extrapolating the neuroscience for political gains. Brain structures necessary for feeling pain form in the first trimester. But while this brain architecture is necessary for experiencing pain, it is hardly sufficient.

The truth is, we have no way of knowing whether fetuses feel pain. Pain is physiological, but it is also subjective.

But in 2013, as LifeSiteNews reported, Maureen L Condic, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, stated before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (HR 1797): “The neural circuitry underlying the most basic response to pain is in place by eight weeks. This is the earliest point at which a fetus can feel pain in any capacity.”

Live Action reported in April 2017:

A breaking new study has found that preborn babies in the first trimester have “adult-like” patterns of nerves. Researchers “combined whole-mount immunostaining, 3DISCO clearing, and light-sheet imaging to start building a 3D cellular map” and found that “the adult-like pattern of skin innervation is established before the end of the first trimester, showing important intra- and inter-individual variations in nerve branches.” They also found evidence for “a differential vascularization of the male and female genital tracts concomitant with sex determination.” The full study can be seen here.

Brown continued, “So for Acton to cavalierly propose this bill, foisting her personal views on the entire population of Utah without having done her basic homework — well, that is truly immoral.”

As Frances Floresca writes at Campus Reform, Acton conducted an interview with Campus Reform in which she replied to Brown’s charges, saying, “You don’t have to be a scientist or a lawyer or a religious person to know that a human fetus is a human being and that it deserves to be protected from anyone who would harm it, including its mother. (Brown) has some basic facts wrong.” She added that Brown “objects to my description of dismemberment abortion (the type of abortion performed 95% of the time in the second trimester) as ‘barbaric,’ but how else would anyone describe a procedure that involves crushing the skull of a living fetus before extracting its limbs and body parts piece by piece from the womb?”

A photo emerged on Friday that appears to show Virginia Democrat Governor Ralph Northam appearing in a photograph that shows someone dressed up in a KKK hood and in blackface.

The photo, from Northam’s 1984 yearbook at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and was shows “two people, one wearing white Ku Klux Klan robes and a hood, the other with his face painted black,” The Virginia Pilot reported.

“On Wednesday, in a shocking revelation about the nature of the pro-abortion Democratic Party, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a supposed moderate, endorsed the notion that a woman should be able to let an infant, born alive, die on the table if she decided she did not want the child,” The Daily Wire reported.

Northam made the remarks during an interview with WTOP’s “Ask The Governor.” Northam stated:

This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.

This is a breaking news story, refresh the page for updates.

On Tuesday night, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board instigated a firestorm within conservative media when it reported that President Trump’s new White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, was negotiating with leftist California Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris on a new slate of judicial nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Journal opined that the White House seemed to hope that such a concilitatory capitulatory gesture might “somehow produce less resistance to Mr. Trump’s nominees.” Erick Erickson quickly sounded the alarm at The Resurgent, excoriating the brewing cave as a “terrible, terrible deal.”

Notably, the Journal also reported that the specific target of the California senators’ ire is Patrick Bumatay, an assistant U.S. attorney with a highly acclaimed conservative reputation — who also happens to be 40 years old, openly gay, and Filipino-American.

On Wednesday, less than a day after the Journal’s viral editorial, the White House announced its new slate of judicial nominees. Three of the nominees are for the Ninth Circuit — and Bumatay is not one of them. Instead, Bumatay — likely the most ideologically solid and most committed of all the California nominees under consideration to the original public meaning of the U.S. Constitution — was tapped for a district court judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

Somewhere in Washington, D.C., Miguel Estrada is surely shaking his head.

This ought to be unacceptable — and I respectfully disagree with Erickson and Ed Whelan that this newly comprised judicial slate is all fine and dandy.

To be clear, I have nothing personally against the White House’s three announced nominees for the Ninth Circuit: Daniel Bress, Daniel Collins, and Kenneth Lee. But there is something here that really does not sit right. Collins clerked for infamously leftist Jimmy Carter judicial nominee Dorothy Nelson on the Ninth Circuit before he clerked on the Suprme Court for the late Justice Antonin Scalia — who, despite his deserved reputation as a conservative jurisprudential icon, was known to occasionally (perhaps frequently) hire an annual Left-leaning clerk to serve as his chambers’ “counter-clerk.” Collins also graduated from Harvard College in 1985, which makes him approximately 15-16 years older than Bumatay. Bress and Lee are younger, but neither nominee’s resume exactly jumps off the page with a commitment to furthering the conservative legal cause in the public arena.

In short, I think Whelan is misguided to suggest that “there is zero reason to view [this judicial slate] as some sort of concession to Senator Feinstein or Senator Harris.” No one outside the White House Counsel’s Office and perhaps the two California senators’ offices can claim to know for sure, but surely there is some reason to view Bumatay’s exclusion from the Ninth Circuit slate as a weak-kneed caving to the California senators’ threat of a “blue slip” veto.

And yet, ironically, The Sacramento Bee reports that new Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham has indicated his stance that, “he [will] continue to honor the so-called ‘blue slip’ tradition when it comes to lower, district court judges, but would not apply that rule to circuit court judges.” Put another way, the White House’s new compromise slate of Ninth Circuit nominees makes up-and-coming conservative star Bumatay uniquely vulnerable to a unilateral veto from either Dianne Feinstein or Kamala Harris.

Let us then say what we really should not need to say: Under no circumstances whatsoever should this White House — which has better mastered the art of judicial nominations than any Republican White House in the Federalist Society era, arguably has not done anything as consistently well as it has handled judicial nominations, and which stands little chance of leading the passage of any notable legislation with a newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — be negotiating, especially in a post-Brett Kavanaugh fiasco world, with hostile Democratic Senators. And this is doubly true when the Senator with whom Pat Cipollone’s office is negotiating, behind closed doors, is perhaps the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Again, conservatives across the country ought to be able to hear Miguel Estrada howling in agony. Unless Lindsey Graham further alters prevailing Senate Judiciary Committee practice with respect to “blue slips,” Pat Cipollone and the White House Counsel’s Office have just given Kamala Harris a golden opportunity to single-handedly nuke the aspiring judicial career of a 40-year-old, openly gay, Filipino-American — who happens to be, by all accounts, a rock-ribbed jurisprudential originalist.

In what world is this a good play for conservatives? In what world is this what the White House ought to be doing?

With Democrats controlling the House but Republicans retaining control of the Senate, now is the worst possible time for the White House to make capitulatory overtures on judicial nominations. One can be as staunchly opposed to judicial supremacy — and as generally opposed to judicial power run amok — as I am while still firmly believing that a commitment to selecting solid, young conservative judges is still an absolutely necessary item for the White House to prioritze. Indeed, this is even truer in our Orwellian judicial supremacist status quo, wherein the idiosyncratic diktats of judges are unfortunately treated by the political and legal clerisy as promulgating broader political principles for the body politic. I would know — I recently clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and I saw first-hand how much jurisprudentially and ideologically solid judges can affect three-judge panel and en banc votes alike.

Whether we operate in a system of judicial supremacy or the true tripartite separation of powers system the Framers devised, then, the quality of judicial nominations matters — a lot. Conservatives ought to settle for nothing less than consistently stellar judicial nominees from this White House. And given what has just happened to Patrick Bumatay, we ought to be vigilant and on guard.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced an executive order to eliminate the Common Core Standards – which were rebranded in the state as the Florida Standards.

Citing the frustration of parents he heard while campaigning for governor, DeSantis, a Republican, said during a press conference Thursday at Ida S. Baker High School in Cape Coral:

I had a lot of parents who were frustrated because they didn’t understand some of the math. So, let’s try to get this right. We want to be very high quality, we want to demand excellence, but I think we want to do that in a way that’s responsive to some of the concerns we’ve had over the many number of years.

A report at WWSB noted that DeSantis would be instructing Florida’s education commissioner to “provide a road map to Florida-based standards, eliminating Common Core, as well as having the commissioner determine how to increase the quality of instructional curriculum, streamlining testing to measure success not teach to a test, and identifying ways to make civics education a priority in Florida.”