New Mexico

Anti-mifepristone order still paused

The Supreme Court extended its stay on lower court rulings on mifepristone until Friday just before midnight, meaning that the drug will remain accessible and available at least until then.

The order, written by Justice Samuel Alito, came “upon further consideration of the application of counsel for the applicants, the response and the reply.”

The Court’s initial stay would have expired just before midnight Wednesday, bringing restrictions to the drug into action.

[…]

While the Supreme Court mulls the case, action hasn’t stopped in the lower courts. In a new, separate lawsuit, the maker of generic mifepristone sued the FDA Wednesday to not revoke its approval or take it off the market without going through the mandated processes, including the Heath and Human Services Secretary declaring that the drug is an imminent risk. The company, GenBioPro, argues that court rulings don’t trump the required steps the agency has to take to remove its approval.

See here for the previous update. I didn’t see any speculation about What It All Means in the news coverage I read, but we do still have Twitter for some things:

At most, this development *maybe* tilts the odds *marginally* more in favor of a stay pending appeal (else why extend the administrative stay).

But I don’t think extending the administrative stay changes the bottom-line probabilities in any material respect.

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) 2:32 PM – 19 April 2023

Yes, it’s very unusual for a Justice to extend an administrative stay—but Alito is the *only* Justice who regularly puts deadlines on them in the first place. For most of the Justices, administrative stays are indefinite, so never need to be “extended.”

Uniformity would be nice.

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) 3:39 PM – 19 April 2023

Pessimistic take: The court denied a stay and a liberal is writing a dissent.

Optimistic take: The court granted a stay and a conservative is writing a dissent.

Panglossian take: The court is writing an opinion reversing the 5th Circuit and directing it to toss the case.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) 2:19 PM – 19 April 2023

Make of that what you will. In the meantime, there’s that other case that was just filed.

GenBioPro, the maker of generic mifepristone, made a bid to establish a backstop Wednesday, should the Supreme Court decide to restrict one of its primary products.

The company sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in federal court in Maryland, seeking assurances that the agency wouldn’t revoke its approval or try to remove it from the market.

This lawsuit, while separate, flows from the chain that started with Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas. That case is currently at the Supreme Court, which is due to hand down a ruling in the case, but which extended its stay on the lower court opinions until Friday just before midnight. As it stands, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to reimpose restrictions on the drug that the FDA had lifted in recent years — and to nix the agency’s 2019 approval of generic mifepristone altogether.

While that case unspooled, GenBioPro, per its Wednesday filing, has been deluging the FDA with letters in an attempt to make sure that its product won’t be yanked off the market. After getting unsatisfactory responses, the company turned to the government’s filings in the case, where it warned that “[t]he generic version of the drug would cease to be approved altogether.”

Now, the company is arguing that the FDA is prepared to illegally revoke its approval without going through the proper steps: A finding by the Heath and Human Services Secretary that the drug is an “imminent hazard” and an expedited hearing once the drug is suspended. These unprecedented court orders, GenBioPro argues, don’t trump the congressionally-delegated processes the FDA must follow to remove its product from the market.

“With the specter of criminal prosecution looming, GenBioPro may be obligated to undertake recalls, cancel contracted manufacturing and hold or destroy perishable inventory,” the company’s lawyers write. “And because of the FDA Decision and the enforcement risk and uncertainty it has created, GenBioPro is suffering irreparable financial and reputational harm, severely threatening its core business model and commercial viability.”

GenBioPro is asking that the FDA be forbidden from suspending or altering its approval, and from using its enforcement power to take it off the market, unless the agency goes through the established process to revoke the drug’s approval. It makes its arguments under a constellation of laws, including the Fifth Amendment, Administrative Procedure Act and All Writs Act.

This lawsuit is the legal equivalent of breaking glass in case of emergency. GenBioPro has its finger in the wind — and is clearly uncomfortable depending on the Supreme Court to maintain its drug’s accessibility.

Isn’t this fun? The Trib and The 19th have more.

Anti-mifepristone litigants respond to SCOTUS appeal

Apr 19th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Today we find out what SCOTUS will do.

The anti-abortion doctors who first brought the case seeking to get mifepristone yanked from the markets filed a reply brief Tuesday, starting the clock on the Supreme Court’s response.

It’s the latest entry in the case that originated in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s court in Amarillo, Texas. After he ruled to stay the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, the Department of Justice appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit broke from Kacsmaryk on the initial approval (though without much conviction) but upheld challenges to virtually all the changes in the drug’s regulatory scheme since 2016, reimposing a slate of onerous restrictions on mifepristone including significantly cutting how many days into a pregnancy it can be taken on-label and barring the pills from being mailed.

The government, along with a manufacturer of mifepristone, asked the Supreme Court to stay or vacate the Fifth Circuit’s ruling while it appeals that decision. The Supreme Court granted an administrative stay last week, putting those old restrictions on ice for a few more days. That stay expires just before midnight on Wednesday.

One of the toughest barriers the anti-abortion contingent has to scale in convincing the Supreme Court to let the case continue to play out at the Fifth Circuit is the clear conflict between this mifepristone case, and another out of Washington state. There, a federal judge ruled — and reaffirmed — that the FDA needs to keep mifepristone available as usual in the states and district involved. Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit ruled to bring back the years-old restrictions nationwide.

The anti-abortion group’s lawyers largely claim that the conflict is inconsequential in their Tuesday filing, since the Washington case is still at the district court.

“There is no current circuit split, and there may never be one,” they write. “In particular, the government has not even appealed the decision from the Washington District Court which, to date, is only potentially conflicting.”

The lawyers also minimize the disruption negating years of FDA changes and updates would cause.

“The agency need only go back to its preapproved 2011 regimen and label,” they write, immediately contradicting themselves: “The ‘threat’ of conflicting orders here is also illusory, as the Fifth Circuit’s order does not require FDA to do anything.”

The government has said that adjusting the drug’s labeling alone would take “months,” and that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling would also revoke the agency’s approval of generic mifepristone — which was only granted in 2019; the branded version of Mifeprex was approved in 2000 — permanently.

See here for the previous entry. It is expected that SCOTUS will rule by tonight, because that is when their administrative hold expires. Of interest, via Axios, is that a whole bunch of Republican members of Congress filed an amicus brief on the side of the mifepristone-banners.

Details: The 147 lawmakers, led by Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) and Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to allow the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling reinstating mifepristone’s restrictions to take effect.

[…]

What we’re watching: The handful of signers facing competitive elections in 2024 should expect it to come up in attacks on the campaign trail, two Democratic operatives told Axios.

Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) are top targets for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — which blasted Boebert last week for signing the 5th Circuit brief.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) are also seen as potentially vulnerable.

Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) is also running to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), while Reps. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) are considering Senate bids against Democratic incumbents.

Meanwhile, 253 Democrats last week filed a brief urging the justices to block the lower court rulings, arguing that Congress has not allowed federal courts “to substitute their judgment for the expert conclusions of FDA’s scientists.”

As before, I appreciate them clarifying the stakes here. And I better see this be a big part of the 2024 campaigns against Cruz and de la Cruz. Either these pro-reproductive choice arguments work here in Texas, or we’ll find out that they don’t and we’ll need to figure it out from there. Slate has more.

SCOTUS pauses that anti-mifepristone ruling

Apr 15th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

A brief timeout.

The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s emergency request to temporarily halt lower court rulings that would have reimposed restrictions on mifepristone that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had lifted in recent years.

The stay is in place until 11:59 p.m. ET Wednesday. The anti-abortion plaintiffs’ response to the government’s request for a stay is due by noon on Tuesday.

It’s just an administrative stay, temporarily putting the lower court orders on ice until the full Supreme Court can decide on the merits of the case. Without it, the restrictions on mifepristone would have taken effect nationwide on Saturday.

“The idea would just be to keep the ruling on hold until the Supreme Court can take a closer look at the merits and decide whether to issue a longer stay pending appeal,” Jessie Hill, associate dean and professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told TPM.

The stay does not guarantee that the right-wing bench will ultimately reverse the lower courts.

[…]

If the Supreme Court majority ultimately prioritizes its hostility to abortion access over the standing issues, the FDA may be able to mitigate some of the damage, depending on how it uses its enforcement discretion.

So far, the White House told TPM that it wouldn’t “ignore” the lower court rulings and keep mifepristone on the market as usual, but it’s unclear whether that stance will hold if the administration is defeated at court.

See here for the previous update. This action was widely expected, and doesn’t mean anything about how SCOTUS will ultimately rule. It’s just that SCOTUS had a clear need to intervene, and we’ll know more on Wednesday. So try to put this out of your mind for a few hours and enjoy the weekend. The 19th has more.

Tuesday mifepristone update

Apr 11th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

First things first, that lawless ruling from the wingnut Texas judge has been appealed.

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday asked a federal appeals court to keep the abortion pill mifepristone on the U.S. market as litigation plays out, days after a federal judge suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication nationwide.

The DOJ asked the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to block U.S. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s unprecedented decision from taking effect. The U.S. government’s lawyers said “there is no basis for extraordinary nationwide relief that would upend a decades-long status quo.”

“If allowed to take effect, that order will irreparably harm patients, healthcare systems, and businesses,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing.

Kacsmaryk of the U.S. Northern District of Texas said Friday that his decision to suspend the FDA approval of mifepristone would not go into effect for seven days so mifepristone distributor Danco Laboratories and the Biden administration had time to appeal.

“The Court should immediately extend the administrative stay and then stay the district court’s order pending appeal,” the Justice Department lawyers told the 5th Circuit.

Danco will likely ask the Supreme Court to intervene if the 5th Circuit does not grant the request to halt Kacsmaryk’s decision from taking effect, the company’s attorney Jessica Ellsworth said.

“I anticipate that if the Fifth Circuit does not grant a stay or at least an administrative stay, which is sort of a short term stay so it has time to consider the stay request in an orderly fashion, either Danco and or the United States will ask the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay,” Ellsworth said during a call with reporters on Monday.

When asked whether Danco will stop distributing mifepristone if Kacsmaryk’s decision takes effect this Friday, Ellsworth said the company will consult with the FDA about how to proceed.

“I think there will be some difficult questions that Danco needs to address and some conversations that it will need to have with FDA around what happens next,” Ellsworth said.

See here and here for the background. In theory, there should be an answer soon on this. In the meantime, the Justice Department has also asked for a clarification from the judge who issued the other ruling.

Eastern District of Washington Judge Thomas Rice ruled Friday that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has to maintain the “status quo” in keeping the drug available for the states involved in the case. A coalition of Democratic attorneys general had filed suit to lift some of the long-time restrictions that make mifepristone singularly hard to access, and which the medical community has long opposed as political and not medical in nature.

Minutes before, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk out of the northern district of Texas stayed the FDA’s approval of the drug nationwide (a ruling that will go into effect after a seven-day delay). The two decisions were forced into conflict, and the issue will likely reach the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the government lawyers involved in the Washington case — where they oppose the bid to get the FDA to lift all of mifepristone’s restrictions — asked the judge for clarification.

“The result of that order appears to be in significant tension with this Court’s order prohibiting FDA from ‘altering the status quo and rights as it relates to the availability of Mifepristone’ in Plaintiff States,” the lawyers write of Kacsmaryk’s decision. “The Court did not address the interaction between the two orders, presumably because they were issued less than 20 minutes apart. To ensure that Defendants comply with all court orders in these unusual circumstances, Defendants respectfully request that this Court clarify their obligations under its preliminary injunction in the event that the Alliance order takes effect and stays the approval of mifepristone.”

The technical legal term for this situation is “clusterfuck”. Don’t ask me how I know these things, I just do. As for what the administration may do if the Fifth Circuit does its usual Fifth Circuit bullshit, they say they will not ignore the wingnut ruling despite some calls for them to do so.

“I believe the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to ignore this ruling, which is why I’m again calling on President Biden and the FDA to do just that,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said Friday. “The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America. If they don’t, the consequences of banning the most common method of abortion in every single state will be devastating.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) recently appealed to the White House to use any tools at its disposal to keep the drug available, including its enforcement discretion. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also called on the administration to “ignore” the Friday decision.

The White House told TPM Monday that it will not heed those calls.

“No,” a White House spokesperson said, when asked whether it plans to ignore Kacsmaryk’s ruling, and any future decisions upholding it, and have the FDA use its enforcement discretion to leave mifepristone on the market.

“We stand by FDA’s approval of mifepristone, and we are prepared for a long legal fight, if needed,” the spokesperson continued. “The focus of the Administration is on ensuring that we prevail in the courts. There is a process in place for appealing this decision and we will pursue that process vigorously and do everything we can to prevail in the courts.”

It’s in keeping with how members of the administration have talked publicly about the case — emphasizing the judicial procedure, though not talking about what it’ll do if its attempts to go through a series of right-wing courts to retain FDA approval are unsuccessful.

[…]

Major abortion providers made it clear that at least for the duration of Kacsmaryk’s delay, nothing has changed.

“Like we said before — we follow directives from the FDA, and not anti-abortion judges in Texas who lack any formal medical training,” Whole Woman’s Health said in a tweet. “Whole Woman’s Health will continue to dispense Mife in our clinics and our Pills by Mail Program for the next week as we monitor both decisions.”

“Nothing has changed yet: medication abortions with mifepristone are still available,” Trust Women tweeted. “Now, as ever, it’s critically important to support your local abortion funds and clinics, and contact your legislators and demand that mife remains legal health care.”

It should be noted that “not ignoring the wingnut decision” does not mean pulling mifepristone off the shelves:

If the FDA uses its enforcement discretion, what it is doing is recognizing that approval is stayed, not ignoring it. In the face of a drug with stayed approval, the FDA is saying we are assessing what drugs are unsafe and risky, and going after those, not mifepristone. /2

— David S. Cohen (@dsc250) 9:39 AM – 10 April 2023

To be clear, we may get to the point of needing to ignore the court. I’m not against that if extreme situations dictate. But Kacsmaryk did NOT order FDA or Danco to do anything. Making his order into something it isn’t gives him too much power and us, Biden, & FDA too little. /4

— David S. Cohen (@dsc250) 9:42 AM – 10 April 2023

PS. Think of it this way: which is the Biden FDA more likely to do? Ignore a court or use a long-recognized legal option supported by unanimous Supreme Court authority? Language matters here!

— David S. Cohen (@dsc250) 10:00 AM – 10 April 2023

Something to think about. Finally, while it’s highly unlikely to get anywhere, there is a legislative solution out there.

Democratic lawmakers are mobilizing in the wake of the decision in Texas that threw access to the so-called abortion pill into flux Friday, introducing legislation Monday to protect access to the most widely used form of abortion in the U.S.

Reps. Pat Ryan of New York and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas will introduce the Protecting Reproductive Freedom Act on Monday during a pro forma session of the House, seeking to reaffirm the Food and Drug Administration’s final approval authority on medication abortion and continue to allow providers to prescribe the abortion pill via telehealth, which was widely expanded during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Texas decision has nothing to do with science or medicine and everything to do with radical groups whose only goal is a national abortion ban,” said Ryan, who credits wins in his swing district in New York state in part to his stance on abortion rights. “My priority is protecting abortion access for women in New York and across the country.”

Fletcher, who called her state, Texas, “the epicenter of attacks on the health and freedom of Americans,” said “the unprecedented district court decision, which, if enforced, would be devastating to women and families across our country and to our established drug-approval system.”

It’s yet another move from congressional Democrats to send a message about the issue of reproductive access, despite the unlikelihood that the legislation will ever pass the GOP-controlled House. Nevertheless, Democrats will continue to keep the focus on abortion access — especially after having seen its power across the country in the 2022 midterms.

There’s basically no chance that this bill will see the light of day in the Republican-controlled House. As a messaging effort, it can be effective. Everyone has to make it clear what is being voted on next year. Daily Kos and The 19th have more.

We await what’s next with mifepristone

Apr 10th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

“Everything is on the table”, whatever that ultimately means.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said the administration is willing to do whatever it takes to protect access to the abortion drug mifepristone, after a federal judge in Texas suspended the FDA’s approval of the medication on Friday. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, the ruling could have “potentially explosive implications for the availability of abortion nationwide, regardless of state laws and policies.” In a conflicting ruling the same day, a federal judge in Washington state ruled that the FDA should not make any changes to access to mifepristone, though it remains unclear what the result of the dueling orders will be.

The Department of Justice filed an appeal immediately after the Texas ruling, and is seeking a stay of the judge’s decision that would allow mifepristone to stay on the market. In interviews Sunday morning with MSNBC and CNN, Becerra emphasized an aggressive legal strategy as essential to maintain access to the pill, which has been proven to be a safe and effective part of medication abortion. “We will make sure that we get that appeal and that stay, and if we can’t get that stay, we will go as far as we need to go in order to protect access to mifepristone,” Becerra told MSNBC Sunday Show host Jonathan Capehart.

[…]

Becerra also said the ruling could have dangerous implications for access to other drugs beyond mifepristone—which was approved by the same FDA process as many other essential medications. He warned that the decision could set a precedent that allows any person with an ideological objection to a medication to file a similar lawsuit. “If you can turn upside down the entire process that the FDA relies on not just for mifepristone, but insulin, vaccines, you name it…you put essentially every drug in America at some form of risk,” he told MSNBC.

See here for the background. I don’t have anything to add, so here’s a bit of additional reading for you.

Think about pharmaceutical companies that want to crush a competitor.

Kacsmaryk has given these companies an opening to secure a nationwide block on a competing drug’s FDA approval, thereby pulling it from the market, by suing over side effects. That is insane.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) 11:35 AM – 8 April 2023

The Anti-Abortion Movement Will Sacrifice Anything to Control Women

The Hideous Resurrection of the Comstock Act

Hopefully things will at least be a bit clearer soon. Until then, well, at least the stakes are clearer.

Mifepristone access banned and expanded

Apr 9th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

So as you might have heard, this happened on Friday.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas stayed the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of abortion drug mifepristone nationwide Friday, including in blue states with robust abortion protections.

The ruling will take seven days to go into effect; the Department of Justice immediately appealed it.

“My Administration will fight this ruling,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “The Department of Justice has already filed an appeal and will seek an immediate stay of the decision.”

The same night, a separate judge in Washington state issued an order stating exactly the opposite: that the FDA maintain “the status quo” in terms of access to the drug in the states involved. The Department of Justice said in a statement it was reviewing the Washington decision.

The conflicting opinions make it highly likely the question will soon end up before the Supreme Court.

It’s not immediately clear what the effect of either ruling will be: The FDA has unfettered enforcement discretion, and there are plenty of drugs without approval on the market.

[…]

The Texas decision was expected by all involved — Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee, is a constant Biden administration antagonist. He presides over all cases filed in Amarillo, and right-wing litigants have learned to file there to be sure they’ll get a judge sympathetic to their cause.

His decision is peppered with anti-abortion language and sentiment. “Because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion, FDA mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb,” he writes. He also refers to providers as “abortionists” throughout.

He regurgitates the common anti-abortion lies that mifepristone is dangerous, blatantly disregarding the consensus of the medical community, and that abortions cause women overwhelming emotional distress and regret.

His handling of the case has been at times bizarre and drawn scrutiny, including an attempt to keep a key hearing in the case secret from the press and the public until the last minute.

That Kacsmaryk has the power to issue a nationwide injunction from just one case only makes the conservative goal-to-sweeping result pipeline even more of a glidepath.

Should the Texas case be appealed, there’s not much guaranteed salvation ahead for supporters of abortion access (and those who support miscarriage care, cancer care and the many other medical treatments that involve abortions). The case will next go to the famously right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then, presumably, to the majority anti-abortion Supreme Court.

Over in Washington, a coalition of Democratic attorneys general filed suit to expand access to mifepristone, arguing that the FDA should lift its years-old restrictions that major medical organizations have long argued are rooted in politics, not science. While the Biden administration made the drug somewhat easier to obtain this January — including allowing certified pharmacies to dispense it — it maintained other restrictions.

In his opinion ordering that mifepristone be kept available, Judge Thomas Rice pointed out that “the record demonstrates potentially internally inconsistent FDA findings regarding mifepristone’s safety profile,” citing the fact that mifepristone prescribed for Cushing’s disease — rather than abortion — is not subject to those onerous restrictions.

Another countervailing lawsuit is still playing out in West Virginia, where a maker of mifepristone is suing West Virginia, arguing that its abortion ban is violating both the Supremacy and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution in overriding the FDA conclusion that the drug is safe.

See here and here for some background; the opinions are embedded in the story above. I had a draft a couple of days ago about the hearing for the mifepristone-expansion lawsuit but didn’t publish it in time; I’ve put that post beneath the fold, as the arguments made during the hearing are worth reading. There’s been a ton of commentary already – see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for so much more. I don’t have anything to add to all that, but I did find it grimly amusing that the long-awaited and feared Texas decision came down a couple of days after State Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht said this;

Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht called on state lawmakers Wednesday to increase judicial salaries and create a new court system to handle disputes between businesses.

The comments came in his biennial speech on the state of the judiciary, during which he also cautioned against the increasing politicization of the third branch of government. He cited the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election in which the winner was an outspoken liberal, and comments by former President Donald Trump and a Democratic U.S. senator characterizing court rulings as partisan.

“I grow concerned that political divisions among us threaten the judicial independence essential to the rule of law,” Hecht, a Republican, said in the Texas Supreme Court courtroom in Austin. “The left and right, and leaders in both the executive and legislative branches, are in agreement: Judges are not independent, and shouldn’t be; they should take sides — my side.”

He urged judges against partisan decisions, saying the pressure to comply with politics “destroys the rule of law essential to justice for all.”

Both the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest court for criminal matters in the state, are made up of all Republicans.

You couldn’t find a more blatant example of this than Matthew Kacsmaryk, whose only qualification for the bench, for which he was hand-selected by the radical conservative legal movement, was his anti-abortion activism. There’s a reason why so many cases, filed by Ken Paxton and various zealots of that movement, get heard by him. Please update your references for future use, Justice Hecht.

(more…)

Whole Woman’s Health opens its New Mexico clinic

Mar 25th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

A little bittersweet, I have to say.

One of the largest independent abortion providers in the nation opened a new clinic in New Mexico on Thursday, nearly nine months after it shuttered its clinics in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Whole Woman’s Health of New Mexico opened its Albuquerque clinic on Thursday. The clinic is expected to see 19 patients over the next few days, with 18 of them coming from Texas.

The clinic currently offers first- and second-trimester abortion procedures to people who are up to 18 weeks pregnant, with plans to expand to up to 24 weeks in the near future.

Whole Woman’s Health opened its first Texas clinic in Austin in 2003 and later expanded throughout the state. The organization had four clinics in Austin, McAllen, Forth Worth and McKinney before it announced plans to leave the state and reopen in New Mexico.

“As we open our doors to both local communities and those forced to migrate from other states for care, we remain unbelievably grateful for the thousands of supporters from around the world that came together to make this clinic a reality,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, said in a news release.

The New Mexico clinic is located minutes from the Albuquerque International Sunport Airport and all of its staff members are bilingual, the news release says.

[…]

Whole Woman’s Health said New Mexico has become a “refuge” for patients seeking abortion care, including from Texas and Oklahoma, which is also among the 13 states that banned nearly all abortions after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“Today marks the next chapter of our organization,” Marva Sadler, senior director of clinical services for Whole Woman’s Health, said in the news release. “In these times when abortion rights, health, and justice are under attack, our Albuquerque clinic will serve as a safe haven for abortion care,”

In June 2022, Whole Woman’s Health launched a GoFundMe campaign to relocate its Texas clinics to New Mexico, with more than 3,500 donors giving more than $300,000 toward the effort.

See here for the background, and here for a copy of the press release. I’m glad they are able to get back to the important business of caring for women and their reproductive needs. Lord knows, we need them. I just hope that someday they’ll be able to open back up here in Texas.

Democratic AGs file lawsuit to ease access to mifepristone

Mar 3rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good, albeit a bit confusing at this point in time.

A dozen Democratic state attorneys general have opened a new front in the legal war over mifepristone, the “gold standard” medication used in the majority of all US abortions. In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, the AGs—from states including Arizona, Illinois, and Washington—accuse the Food and Drug Administration of imposing unnecessarily “onerous” restrictions on mifepristone, which is used in combination with the anti-ulcer drug misoprostol to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks.

The drug has a sterling safety record and has been used by an estimated 5.6 million people since it was approved by the FDA more than 22 years ago. Nevertheless, the FDA has long subjected mifepristone to a set of unusual restrictions known as a “Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy” (REMS). The agency only applies these extra rules, such as a requirement that prescribers receive a special certification, to a few dozen drugs—typically high-risk medications like opioids, or injectable anti-psychotic sedatives. The inclusion of mifepristone on this list has long been controversial. “Many people believe that the strict restrictions on mifepristone reflect political concerns more so than concerns around the safety of the drug itself,” Temple University law dean Rachel Rebouché told me in June, the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Since then, a dozen states have outlawed abortion almost entirely. Medication abortion has only grown in importance as people who want to end their pregnancies in abortion-hostile states source the pills through telehealth, mail-forwarding services, and overseas pharmacies.

Yet while the FDA has recently loosened some of its rules on mifepristone—for instance, by allowing certified pharmacies to dispense it—the REMS remains in place. “FDA’s decision to continue these burdensome restrictions in January 2023 on a drug that has been on the market for more than two decades with only ‘exceedingly rare’ adverse events has no basis in science,” argues the complaint from the attorneys general. “It only serves to make mifepristone harder for doctors to prescribe, harder for pharmacies to fill, harder for patients to access, and more burdensome for the Plaintiff States and their health care providers to dispense.”

This isn’t the only legal battle over mifepristone. For the few weeks, abortion rights advocates have been waiting and watching as an anti-abortion, Trump-appointed judge in Texas considers issuing a nationwide ban on the drug. That case—brought by the religious-right legal group Alliance Defending Freedom—claims that the FDA “exceeded its regulatory authority” when it approved mifepristone in 2000; that the agency had overlooked potentially harmful side effects; and that a 19th-century anti-obscenity law forbids the mailing of abortion drugs. If the judge agrees and issues a temporary injunction, which he could do any day, mifepristone could be taken off the market everywhere from New York to California.

That case, about which I’m sure you’ve already read at least two alarmist articles, is the reason I’m a little confused by this. Who even knows what happens if that whackjob judge in Texas decides to make medication abortion illegal across the country? That said, I do appreciate an effort to go on the offensive. Daily Kos adds on.

The suit is spearheaded by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. In January, the FDA updated the risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for mifepristone to life the requirement that patients pick the medicine up in person from a pharmacy, making it simpler for pharmacies to fill the prescriptions online and through the mail. But the FDA kept a requirement under REMS that forces prescribers to obtain specific certifications, and requires extensive documentation that the AGs say could endanger both providers and patients.

The paper trail “puts both patients and providers in danger of violence, harassment, and threats of liability amid the growing criminalization and outlawing of abortion in other states,” the complaint states. That paperwork puts an unnecessary burden on healthcare providers and on patients, the AGs say in the suit.

Under the REMS, both doctor and patient are required to sign an agreement saying that the drug is being prescribed and the patient intends to take it to end a pregnancy. It doesn’t distinguish between an abortion or treatment for a miscarriage, and that agreement stays in a patient’s medical record.

The lawsuit also points out that there are just 60 drugs among more than 20,000 regulated by the FDA that it has imposed REMS on, that “cover dangerous drugs such as fentanyl and other opioids, certain risky cancer drugs, and highdose sedatives used for patients with psychosis.” It is “improper and discriminatory for FDA to relegate mifepristone … to the very limited class of dangerous drugs that are subject to a REMS.”

“FDA’s decision to continue these burdensome restrictions in January 2023 on a drug that has been on the market for more than two decades with only ‘exceedingly rare’ adverse events has no basis in science,” the AGs lawsuit says. “It only serves to make mifepristone harder for doctors to prescribe, harder for pharmacies to fill, harder for patients to access, and more burdensome for the Plaintiff States and their health care providers to dispense.”

“In this time when reproductive healthcare is under attack, our coalition of 12 states seeks to ensure that access to mifepristone—the predominant method of safe and effective abortion in the U.S.—is not unduly restricted,” Rosenblum said in a statement. “Our coalition stands by our belief that abortion is healthcare, and healthcare is a human right.” The other states joining the suit, filed in the Eastern District of Washington state, are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The suit was filed in the Eastern District of Washington. I’d like to think that if the plaintiffs gets a favorable ruling, the FDA will not appeal. We’ll see where we even are when that happens.

New Mexico sues its “abortion sanctuary cities”

Jan 26th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good.

New Mexico’s top prosecutor on Monday asked the state’s highest court to overturn abortion bans imposed by conservative local governments in the Democratic-run state where the procedure remains legal after Roe v. Wade was struck down.

The move comes after the New Mexico cities of Hobbs, Clovis and two surrounding counties bordering Texas passed ordinances in recent months to restrict abortion clinics and access to abortion pills.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez filed an extraordinary writ in New Mexico Supreme Court to block the ordinances which he said were based on flawed interpretations of 19th century federal regulations on abortion medication.

“This is not Texas. Our State Constitution does not allow cities, counties or private citizens to restrict women’s reproductive rights,” Torrez said in a statement.

[…]

New Mexico’s largest cities of Las Cruces and Albuquerque have become regional destinations for women seeking abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court in June ended the nationwide constitutional right to the procedure.

Located on New Mexico’s eastern plains, Clovis and Hobbs do not have abortion clinics but approved ordinances to stop providers locating there to serve patients from Republican-controlled Texas, one of the first states to impose a near-total ban on abortion.

In direct response, New Mexico Democrats have drafted legislation to prevent cities from overriding state laws guaranteeing womens’ rights to reproductive healthcare. The legislation is due to be debated this month and has a strong chance of passing the Democratic-controlled state legislature.

See here for some background, and here for a reminder that New Mexico has been a regional access point for abortion for some time now.

More details here.

It’s not clear how soon the New Mexico Supreme Court could decide to take up the issue. Torrez said he hopes his petition to the Supreme Court will inspire a quick response within weeks or months — avoiding the potentially yearslong process of pursuing a civil lawsuit.

The filing targets Roosevelt and Lea counties and the cities of Hobbs and Clovis — all on the eastern edge of the state near Texas, where most abortion procedures are banned.

Clovis and Lea County officials declined to comment Monday, citing pending litigation. Officials could not immediately be reached in Hobbs and Roosevelt County.

Prosecutors say abortion ordinances approved in November by an all-male city council in Hobbs and in early January by Roosevelt County define “abortion clinic” in broad terms, encompassing any building or facility beyond a hospital where an abortion procedure is performed — or where an abortion-inducing drug is dispensed, distributed or ingested.

Torrez warned Roosevelt County’s abortion ordinance in particular gives private citizens the power to sue anyone they suspect of violated the ordinance and pursue damages of up to $100,000 per violation.

“The threat of ruinous liability under the law operates to chill New Mexicans from exercising their right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy and health care providers from providing lawful medical services,” the attorney general wrote in his petition to the state Supreme Court.

In 2021, the Democrat-led Legislature passed a measure to repeal a dormant 1969 statute that outlawed most abortion procedures, ensuring access to abortion in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she wants to see legislation that would codify the right to an abortion across the state.

Lawmakers have already proposed measures that would prohibit local governments from placing restrictions on abortion access — and call for putting in place protections for doctors and patients.

During her reelection campaign last year, Lujan Grisham cast herself as a staunch defender of access to abortion procedures. She has called a local abortion ordinance an “affront to the rights and personal autonomy of every woman in Hobbs and southeastern New Mexico.”

In June, the governor signed an executive order that prohibited cooperation with other states that might interfere with abortion access in New Mexico, declining to carry out any future arrest warrants from other states related to anti-abortion provisions.

The order also prohibited most New Mexico state employees from assisting other states in investigating or seeking sanctions against local abortion providers.

She followed up in August with another executive order that pledged $10 million to build a clinic that would provide abortion and other pregnancy care in Southern New Mexico.

Not much for me to add here other than I wish Attorney General Torrez good luck. This is clearly the right approach to take, and I hope the New Mexico legislature follows up as well. I look forward to the day when the state of Texas doesn’t make it necessary for them to do all this extra stuff. The Albuquerque Journal has more.

So many abortion clinics have closed

Oct 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Most of them are in Texas.

More than half of the 23 abortion clinics in Texas have closed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, according to a new report.

Twelve clinics have shuttered their operations entirely in the state, and the rest have focused on other services, which could include cancer screenings, STI treatments and contraception, according to the review by the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health access. The count did not include a list of clinics that have closed.

Nearly half of the 26 abortion clinics that have closed nationally since the court’s decision were in Texas, according to the report.

[…]

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, which lifted federal abortion protections, several independent abortion providers announced they were relocating their Texas operations to states where the procedure is still allowed. Whole Woman’s Health, which is moving its Texas operations to New Mexico, had worked in Texas for nearly 20 years, with clinics in Austin, McAllen, Fort Worth, and McKinney before this summer.

Whole Woman’s Health now offers a program in which Texas patients who are up to 11 weeks pregnant can go to New Mexico or four other states for a telemedicine appointment and pick up prescribed abortion medication in that state. It also plans to open a physical clinic in New Mexico and is in the process of searching for a building.

“We know the same amount of people in the community we serve still need abortion care,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the group’s founder and CEO. “The ban doesn’t do anything to prevent unplanned pregnancies; it just keeps people from getting professional medical care.”

Two things to keep in mind here. One is that the number of clinics in Texas at the time of the Dobbs decision was already way down from the early 2010s. This is because of the the anti-abortion law that was passed in 2013, the one that Wendy Davis famously filibustered against, which was aimed at regulating clinics out of business; this was a prime example of a so-called TRAP law, which stood for “targeted restrictions (or regulations) on abortion providers”. You know, the law that forced abortion clinics to transform themselves into ambulatory surgical units and did things like require minimum corridor widths, under the bullshit guise of “safety”. The Supreme Court in 2015, which still had Anthony Kennedy on it, threw out this law on the grounds that it was a lying pile of baloney that did nothing to actually promote safety and put an “undue burden” on the providers. (The case was Whole Women’s Health v Hellerstedt, you may have heard of it.) For a brief shining moment, clinics and abortion advocates in Texas began making plans to sue the state over other restrictive laws that this decision would have rendered unconstitutional.

And then 2016 happened, and we know the rest. But the point is that in between the passage of the 2013 TRAP law and the 2015 Hellerstedt decision, more than half of the clinics that had provided abortions in Texas had closed. None, as far as I know, had reopened following Hellerstedt, though going by the numbers in both stories it’s likely some new places began offering abortion services. However you slice it, the number of clinics that were around to close this year was down sharply from less than ten years ago. We were already a state where getting an abortion was exceedingly difficult to do for many women.

What this all means is that even if Democrats manage to fill the inside straight and put themselves in a position to re-establish abortion rights nationwide in 2023, we’re a long way off from abortion being readily available in Texas again. That process could take a decade or more, and that’s assuming that Republicans don’t gain a trifecta and do a national abortion ban or some other horrible thing. We have some hope of making the laws right again. Getting back to where we were, let alone where we need to be, that is a much longer-term project. Daily Kos has more.

Don’t give these fools an inch, New Mexico

Aug 17th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Defeat them at every turn.

For New Mexico state Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, the arrival of a new abortion clinic in Las Cruces, the city she represents, is surreal. Over the years, there hasn’t been consistent access to the procedure as providers came and went.

But now — weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to an abortion — the clinic at the heart of that decision has relocated from Mississippi to the city just across the Texas border of El Paso. It’s one of several clinics to announce its move to New Mexico in recent weeks.

It has quickly become Texas’ only neighboring state to protect abortion access and one of the few “haven” states in the southwest. People there have been preparing for a deluge of abortion-seekers — and those who want to stop the state from offering the procedure at all.

“Now people are coming from across the country — at great stress, great exhaustion, great trauma — to arrive in our community, where likely they will be met by a handful of angry protesters, so that they can access health care,” Lara Cadena told The Texas Tribune.

Close behind those traveling to Las Cruces for care are activists like prominent anti-abortion advocate Mark Lee Dickson, who helped Texas towns ban abortion before Roe. v Wade was overturned. The ordinances he championed served as the model for Texas legislation that severely limited when an abortion could be performed, which the Supreme Court declined to block.

Now, Dickson hopes to eliminate some of the next closest options as he tries to expand city abortion bans to conservative-leaning New Mexico towns.

“Southeast New Mexico feels a lot like Texas,” Dickson told the Tribune.

Aware of the looming threat, local leaders and abortion clinics opening in New Mexico remain confident that protections in the state constitution will prevent Dickson from gaining ground.

“We don’t need any outsiders coming here to try to mess with our autonomy and our capacity to shape our own families,” Lara Cadena said. “So when I hear all these activists coming over, I say, ‘Bring it.’”

Dickson isn’t oblivious to the legal and political barriers he’ll face in a state that leans Democratic.

“No matter what state we’re looking at, there’s a way to do this. And sometimes it’s a matter of challenging laws. I mean, that’s how we’ve gotten where we’re at today,” he said.

[…]

In addition to the opening of Pink House West — the new iteration of the now-closed Jackson Women’s Health Organization — New Mexico communities along the Texas border likely will see another health care clinic providing abortions with the arrival of Whole Woman’s Health. The provider recently closed the doors to its four clinics in Texas. Whole Woman’s Health plans to open somewhere just across the border to serve Texans traveling for abortions.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the organization’s president and CEO, told The Texas Tribune that the continued efforts to curtail abortion rights have provided her team with lots of experience on how to best combat anti-abortion regulations.

And she has some advice for New Mexicans who can anticipate the full force of Texas’ anti-abortion advocates: Do “not concede any small thing.”

She pointed to Texas’ previous six-week ban and 24-hour waiting period that Republican legislators once presented as compromises.

“It’s a strategy to make the next restriction they decide to introduce sound reasonable,” Hagstrom Miller said.

See here for some background. The rest of the story goes into some history and the lay of the law in New Mexico, which offers some firm protections for pregnant people, including a prohibition on cities passing their own anti-abortion laws. I’m nobody’s expert on New Mexico, but if the folks there are confident in their ability to maintain their current course, I have no grounds to disagree. That said, let the record show me in full agreement with Amy Hagstrom Miller: Don’t concede an inch to these bastards. Fight them every step of the way, and send them home losers. It’s the only way to be sure.

Abortion penalties will increase on August 25

Jul 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued its official judgment in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, clearing the way for Texas’ “trigger law” banning almost all abortions to go into effect Aug. 25.

The law will increase the criminal and civil penalties associated with abortion, but the procedure is already virtually outlawed in Texas under an old statute that was in effect before the high court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.

The state’s two dozen abortion clinics stopped providing abortions almost immediately after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June, fearing criminal prosecution under those pre-Roe statutes, which make it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to provide or “furnish the means” for an abortion.

Those statutes are separate from the trigger law, which the Legislature passed in 2021. That law, which is triggered by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, increases the penalties for performing an abortion up to life in prison. The trigger law also says that the attorney general “shall” bring a lawsuit to seek a civil penalty of no less than $100,000 per abortion performed.

Both the pre-Roe statute and the trigger law have only narrow exceptions to save the life of the pregnant patient.

While other states’ trigger laws went into effect immediately, Texas’ was written to go into effect 30 days after the Supreme Court issued its official judgment, after which no rehearings or appeals can be filed. That process usually takes about a month.

There’s been a lot of confusion over just when and how the law was going to change in Texas. I suspect that most people quite reasonably expected that abortion was essentially banned as soon as the Dobbs decision was made available, and for practical purposes that’s correct. The difference at this point is that all of the darkly muttered threats about the vengeance that is to be unleashed will turn into action on that date. Whatever constraints there may still be now will be gone. As bad as it is now, it’s going to get worse. I’m sorry to have to say that.

As for the remaining clinics themselves, they’re thinking about what comes next for them as well.

A month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas’ two dozen abortion clinics are slowly coming to terms with a future where their work is virtually outlawed.

Some clinics have already announced that they are shutting down operations and moving to New Mexico and other states that are expected to protect abortion access. Others, including Planned Parenthood, say they will stay and continue to provide other sexual and reproductive health services.

But keeping the doors open will likely come at a high cost for these clinics — financially, politically and psychologically — as they absorb more patients with fewer options.

“It’s really hard to find words in the English language that honor what the experience has been like,” said Dr. Bhavik Kumar, medical director of primary and trans care at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston. “It’s just devastation.”

Planned Parenthood will still be around, doing less than it has been able to do in the past. Whole Women’s Health is moving to New Mexico. Some others will stay, some others will leave. The devastation will increase. As I said before, that’s a feature and not a bug.

Whole Woman’s Health moving to New Mexico

Jul 9th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Sad, but inevitable.

One of the nation’s largest independent abortion provider said Wednesday that it is pulling out of Texas and opening a clinic in New Mexico to support Texans and others facing limited abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision.

Whole Woman’s Health has operated in Texas for nearly two decades, getting its start in Austin in 2003, and later expanding to McAllen, Beaumont, San Marcos, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and McKinney.

The clinic is still searching for a site and seeking financial support from the public to make the move, Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Woman’s Health said in a statement.

“Even when the courts and the politicians have turned their backs on Texans, we never will,” said Hagstrom Miller said. “With the shuttering of our four Texas clinics, we do not have the financial reserves to open in New Mexico. We are asking for your help as we vacate our Texas clinics, move our needed equipment and supplies, buy and renovate a new clinic building, relocate and hire staff, and set up Whole Woman’s Health of New Mexico.”

If you can cast your mind all the way back to 2016, Whole Woman’s Health was the plaintiff in the SCOTUS case against the state of Texas that overturned the then-historically massive HB2, which was intended to shut clinics down by forcing them to adopt a bunch of medically unnecessary building codes. That type of law was called a TRAP law, and though a very different SCOTUS knocked it down it did have the effect of forcing a bunch of clinics to close while the suit was being litigated (thanks to the Fifth Circuit allowing the law to be in effect in the interim). That decision, which for about five minutes was seen as a way to fight back against states like Texas that had been slowly but effectively chiseling away at abortion rights, was largely but not entirely forgotten in the carnage after the Dobbs decision. Just thought it was worth mentioning here.

Anyway. Whole Woman’s Health is asking for your help as they make this move:

.
We are stepping up to ensure everyone has a trusted independent abortion provider as nearby as legally possible, but we need your help.

With the shuttering of our 4 Texas clinics, we do not have the financial reserves to open in New Mexico.

— Whole Woman’s Health (@WholeWomans) 9:50 PM – 6 July 2022

.
We appreciate anything you can give as we navigate a future without #Roe.

— Whole Woman’s Health (@WholeWomans) 9:50 PM – 6 July 2022

There are a lot of thing we need to be doing right now and in the coming months to get things back on a good path. This one should be up there at the top of your list. Please help if you can.

Texas misses the train

May 4th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Greg Abbott’s border hostage-taking has a cost.

The Mexican government said it intends to shift long-range plans to build a trade railway connection worth billions of dollars from Texas to New Mexico in the wake of Gov. Greg Abbott’s stepped-up border inspections last month, which were widely criticized as being financially damaging and may now leave a lasting impact on relations between Texas and its No. 1 trading partner.

Mexican Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier said a planned rail and ports expansion — known as the T-MEC Corridor — to connect the Pacific port of Mazatlán to the Canadian city of Winnipeg would not use Texas, but instead the rail line would be routed along the far edge of West Texas up through Santa Teresa, N.M., about 20 miles west of downtown El Paso.

“We’re now not going to use Texas,” Clouthier said at a conference April 28 in Mexico City. “We can’t leave all the eggs in one basket and be hostages to someone who wants to use trade as a political tool.”

Clouthier was referring to what Mexican and U.S. officials and business leaders on both sides of the border have described as chaos generated by Abbott’s April 6 order requiring that all commercial trucks coming from Mexico to Texas go through “enhanced” safety inspections. Abbott said the move was necessary to crack down on human and drug smugglers.

Critics pushed back, saying the governor’s move was motivated by politics and noting that commercial trucks are already checked by U.S. federal authorities. They also noted that border security is a federal responsibility, and that while DPS officials can conduct vehicle safety inspections, they have no authority to conduct searches.

[…]

During a visit to Nuevo Leon, Mexico’s Foreign Minster Marcelo Ebrard told Milenio TV Sunday night that the stepped up inspections were “an extortion scheme, or rather it is extortion: I close the border and you have to sign whatever I say. That’s not a deal, a deal is when you and I are in agreement on something.”

Abbott’s office didn’t return a request for comment.

Jerry Pacheco, president of the Santa Teresa-based Border Industrial Association, called Clouthier’s announcement “a very positive step for New Mexico,” but cautioned that such a project will take years to complete and “anything can happen in that time.”

“I don’t think they’ve even gotten to finish a design yet,” Pacheco said. “So this is very much in the preliminary stages, but the very fact that we’re being discussed in the early stages is a positive thing. If this particular project doesn’t work out, there’ll be other projects that the Mexican government will have and they’ll speak favorably of New Mexico because they know we want to work with them in a constructive way.”

Pacheco said he’s already seen a sea change from the business community in Mexico and the United States.

“It’s been very interesting, but since Gov. Abbott’s truck inspections went away, our traffic numbers remain higher than normal in terms of northbound cargo shipments, which leads me to believe that what I thought would be a temporary fix is actually going to stick in the long term,” he said. Ciudad Juárez and El Paso business leaders “are referring to us now as a ‘very effective delivery route.’ ”

[…]

In many ways, Abbott’s inspections only boosted Santa Teresa, an already thriving community with a port of entry where companies also produce materials and components for factories in Mexico that assemble everything from computers, wind blades, consumer electronics and processed foods to automobiles and industrial equipment that they then ship back to U.S.-based businesses.

Industrial parks in Santa Teresa house big warehouses for products constantly crisscrossing the border, backed by a transportation network that includes an airport and railroad and distribution firms that manage the constant movement of goods in all directions. The entire industrial zone operates as one of the nation’s largest inland ports for truck-and-train transshipments across North America, although Laredo is the No. 1 crossing point for commercial rigs.

The Santa Teresa port has long offered a rapid alternative to congested border crossings in El Paso, where it generally takes two hours or more for northbound trucks to enter the U.S. In contrast, it takes it can less than 20 minutes in Santa Teresa, according to Pacheco.

“For businesses who haven’t used Santa Teresa Port of Entry, think of this alternative as a great, necessary idea,” said Franz Felhaber, president of Felhaber and Company Inc., a customs brokerage company that serves clients on both sides of the border.

I believe the technical term for all of this is “fuck around and find out”. Do things that are bad for business and business will look for opportunities elsewhere – that’s just Capitalism 101. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans cared about that sort of thing, but culture wars and identity have supplanted those values, so this is what we get.

Bloomberg News adds on:

It’s hard to quantify the economic impact of shifting a single rail line, it’s unclear what authority Mexico’s government has to dictate where the crossing would be, and the entire project is still in the very early stages and would take years to complete if it does come to fruition. And to be sure, Mexico has a history of announcing massive infrastructure projects that never get off the ground. But the minister’s comments underscore the frustration the government has with Abbott and the risk of jeopardizing a tight trading relationship.

Mexico is Texas’ largest trading partner, with more than $400 billion of goods crossing annually, everything from avocados that get turned into guacamole to chassis that get turned into pickup trucks. Exports from Texas are equivalent to 17% of the state’s economy, and about one-third of Texas exports go to Mexico.

The significance of the minister’s announcement is that “it’s not just necessarily them being hostile, but them taking a concrete step,” said Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, an economics professor at University of Texas at Austin. “Firms all over the country trade with Mexico, and many of them use Texas as the base for shipping to Mexico.”

You know the old joke about getting a donkey’s attention. Maybe this will get Greg Abbott’s.

Or maybe not. I have no doubt that Abbott and his minions will rabble-rouse over this – they’ll complain about “woke” companies and continue to throw billions of dollars at the border for the purpose of rounding up traffic violators and other misdemeanants, all for the purpose of ginning up the base. It’s been a successful electoral strategy for the most part (2018 being a notable exception), and they’re not going to change course now, or anytime soon without a strong reason to. That reason is, and can only be, losing a bunch of elections. The lesson that the business community needs to internalize is that the Republicans aren’t on their side any more. If they want their daddy’s Republican Party back, they need to get this current incarnation out of office. You and I know what they need to do, it’s just a matter of if they can figure it out. TPM, the Dallas Observer, Reform Austin, Daily Kos, the Current, and Dos Centavos have more.

And more people are travelling for abortions

Mar 10th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

The number of abortions performed in Texas has declined greatly since the passage of SB8. But the number of Texans seeking abortions has remained the same, which is what abortion advocates have always said would be the case.

The number of women leaving Texas to obtain abortions has grown tenfold since lawmakers here banned the procedure after early pregnancy, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

The findings, coupled with a huge uptick in online orders for abortion pills, suggest that the state’s widespread crackdown has not yet led to a large decline in procedures. While abortions at Texas clinics did fall by about half after the new restrictions took effect in September, many women still sought out to end their unwanted pregnancies through other, often more challenging paths.

The law “has not reduced the need for abortion care in Texas. Rather it has reduced in-state access,” said Dr. Kari White, lead investigator at the university’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project.

More than 5,500 Texans traveled to abortion clinics in six surrounding states between September and December of last year, according to the study. That’s nearly 1,400 trips per month, up from about 130 per month in the same period in 2019. The latest tally is likely an undercount, since some clinics did not participate and the study did not include trips to states farther from Texas.

[…]

Abortion rights advocates are already preparing for states to cut access in more than two dozen states across the South and Midwest, and providers are rushing to build out clinic space in northern and coastal states more friendly to abortion rights.

The new findings from Texas may be an early picture of the scramble to come for women in other states. The vast majority of trips out of Texas were to Oklahoma and New Mexico, where clinics are on average several hundred miles from most Texans. Oklahoma has its own “trigger” abortion ban in place if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision protecting the right to abortion until about 23 weeks of pregnancy.

Women interviewed in the study said they faced heavy obstacles in seeking out abortions since the law took effect, including delays at clinics in and out of Texas. One in four said they had visited crisis pregnancy centers, which often discourage women from getting abortions. Researchers interviewed 65 women in total.

See here for the TexPEP news release, and here for the full report. You can consider this a bookend to the other recent report about the increase in demand for abortion-inducing medication. It may seem like a bit of comfort that there are still options available, but one is much more time consuming and expensive, not to mention about to get more so as states like Oklahoma and Louisiana follow in Texas’ cursed footsteps, and the other is also heavily restricted under state law, with the great likelihood of further restrictions coming in future legislative sessions if Republicans remain in control. It’s just a matter of time before the emphasis changes from “ways to make abortion more illegal” to “ways to increase enforcement of anti-abortion laws and increase the penalties for violating them”. Do not think for a minute that locking up people who seek abortions, and the people who help them, is off the table. I guarantee you, it is not.

In the “I hate it when I’m right” department, later the same day that I wrote this, I saw this on Twitter:

.
NEW

A new Missouri bill would prohibit women leaving the state to get an abortion.

If this style of legislation is somehow found legal, it would have a huge impact in a post-Roe v Wade world.

— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) 3:00 PM – 8 March 2022

Don’t ask how that could be legal, or how it could possibly be enforced. The terror of it is the point. Scare people into thinking they can be locked up for seeking a legal abortion elsewhere, and you’re done.

And on that cheery note, we have this update about the largely futile efforts so far to stop this travesty in the courts.

In its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court created a constitutional protection for abortion through viability, the point at which a fetus could likely survive outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks.

Since then, states, including Texas, have been stopped by the federal courts when they’ve tried to ban abortions before that point in pregnancy.

But Texas’ law has so far managed to evade a similar fate. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop the law from going into effect before Sept. 1, instead allowing lawyers for the abortion providers to bring a pre-enforcement challenge, which was heard in November.

The U.S. Department of Justice also tried to challenge the law, and succeeded in getting it temporarily enjoined by a federal district judge. That ruling was swiftly overturned by a higher court and the U.S. Supreme Court eventually threw out the DOJ’s challenge.

In December, the Supreme Court also threw out the vast majority of the abortion providers’ legal challenge, allowing only one narrow aspect to proceed. That remaining challenge is slowly wending its way through the courts, but even if it is granted, it would not allow abortion providers to resume providing the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

Marc Hearron, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the abortion providers, said Thursday that their challenge in federal court “no longer stands a chance” of stopping these lawsuits from being filed.

“The Supreme Court greenlit this law’s unprecedented vigilante scheme and essentially said that federal courts are powerless to stop it,” he said. “There is no end in sight to this nightmare.”

Abortion providers have had more luck in Texas courts, where state District Judge David Peeples ruled in December that the law is unconstitutional. His judgment did not block lawsuits from being filed under the law, and is currently being appealed.

[…]

Immediately after Texas’ latest abortion restrictions went into effect Sept. 1, one San Antonio doctor, Alan Braid, announced in a Washington Post op-ed that he had provided an abortion after cardiac activity was detected.

“I fully understood that there could be legal consequences,” Braid wrote, “but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.”

Three people sued Braid, including two disbarred attorneys who indicated they were more interested in seeing the law tested and getting the money than actually taking a stand against abortion.

Hearron, who is also representing Braid, said Thursday that they have filed a countersuit in federal court against the three claimants, seeking to have the law declared unconstitutional and the suits thrown out.

Beyond those initial three claims, no lawsuits have been brought against anyone for aiding or abetting in a prohibited abortion. But just last week, a group of anti-abortion lawyers asked a judge to allow them to depose the leaders of two abortion funding nonprofits to gather information for potential lawsuits.

So things are bad, and there’s no clear path to them being less bad. If you want something to happen at the federal level, we’re going to need to add at least two more Democratic Senators, which might give us enough to make changes to the filibuster, and we need to hold onto the House as well. If not, well, as the story says, there’s no end in sight.

For now, some Texas women can travel to other states for abortions

Oct 11th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

For now.

Right there with them

The new Texas abortion ban has spurred a flood of women traveling sometimes hundreds of miles to access the procedure in neighboring states.

The law, which prohibits abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and calls for lets private citizens to enforce it by filing lawsuits, has been in effect for just over a month. But already, clinics in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado and New Mexico have said they’re being inundated with Texas patients.

“We haven’t seen numbers like this ever,” Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a Denver OB/GYN, told CBS News last month.

“An abortion can be painful, people can hurt,” Cohen said of the emotional toll. “But this is different. We are seeing patients who are traumatized when they arrive.”

In Louisiana, officials at Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport said they went from seeing no more than 20 percent of their patients from Texas to now over 50 percent. Some patients are driving from as far as McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley.

[…]

The Guttmacher Institute, which supports for abortion rights, estimates that Texans are now traveling an average of 14 times farther to get the procedure. In states such as Louisiana, they then have to go through mandatory waiting periods.

The law is likely to disproportionately impact women of color, many of whom lack the time and money needed to get out of state.

In affidavits last month, abortion providers said Texas patients were undergoing traumatic and sometimes daunting trips to neighboring states. One child who was allegedly raped by a relative traveled with her guardian from Galveston to Oklahoma to get an abortion, and another woman was reportedly selling some of her belongings to pay for the trip to an out-of-state abortion clinic, according to the filings, which are part of a pending federal lawsuit over the law.

I guess it’s a minor consolation that some people are still able to exercise their constitutional right, but not everyone can, and those who are able to are now massively inconvenienced and having to pay a lot more money for the privilege. States like Louisiana and Oklahoma have their own abortion restrictions, like waiting periods, so even those who can travel to get the care they need and deserve have to make an ordeal of it. And of course, all this is available only until Oklahoma and Louisiana pass their own version of SB8, which they are apparently free to do now. As writers like Dahlia Lithwick have observed, SCOTUS does not need to write the words “Roe v Wade is overturned” in an opinion in order to overturn Roe v Wade. It’s already happened here, and we’re just the beginning. We need to be voting a lot of people out of office for this if we ever want to get our rights back.

Postal service update

Aug 19th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

18 comments

Just a reminder, destroying the US Postal Service has real effects on real people.

Delays in mail sorting and processing are leaving Houston-area businesses, brides and voters wary of the coming months. Whether it’s essential medication, ballots or important letters and business items, the USPS is relied upon to deliver in a timely manner. Yet, many Houstonians are already feeling the effects of the slowdown, including month-long wait times and undelivered mail.

Melissa Palacios Gonzalez, a U.S. Navy veteran, runs an accessories and clothing shop out of her home in Spring. When customers place online orders of jewelry or sunglasses, shimmery metallic sandals or distressed baseball caps from Aesthetic Glam, Palacios Gonzalez drops them off at the U.S. post office nearby.

But over the summer, she and other Houstonians noticed shipping delays as first the coronavirus strained delivery times, then systemic cutbacks by the new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, reduced the USPS’s delivery capacity.

A USPS Priority Mail order of flip flops, which was supposed to be delivered in one or two days, took a week to reach its destination, Palacios Gonzalez said.

“If it becomes a routine problem —” she started to explain, then stopped and sighed. “Even if I say, ‘Oh, sorry that happened, here’s a percentage savings on me,’ I’m still potentially losing money and a customer.”

[…]

Due to delays in the U.S. Postal Service, Adrienne Lynch’s baby’s clothes often come weeks late.

The East Sunset Heights resident said her 20-month-old daughter is growing so fast, she often has to order new clothes. Care packages from the toddler’s grandmother also normally come much later than originally estimated by the post office.

Lynch’s mail service is in constant flux, she said. Some weeks, she notices deliveries every day. Other weeks, the household won’t receive mail for a few days.

Lynch first noticed the delays in March and April. They have continued and worsened since then, she said.

“Sometimes our outgoing mail may not be picked up for a day or so,” she said. “Or on the package tracking, you will see that your package is out for delivery, but it’s sent back to the post office at the end of the day because the carrier’s shift is over and they can’t do overtime.”

Uju Nwankwo, 27, sent about 100 to 130 wedding save-the-dates through the mail on July 19 for her February wedding. Almost a month later, many of her Houston friends have yet to receive the letters.

“There seems to be no rhyme or reason, so I don’t really get it,” Nwankwo said of the sporadic deliveries.

When the soon-to-be bride contacted USPS, she said she was told her area was experiencing sorting delays. Now, with no way to track her letters, Nwankwo just has to wait it out.

Neither Nwankwo nor Lynch blame postal workers for the delays.

Carriers have a “really tough job” in worsening conditions, Lynch said. She’s started leaving bottles of water and thank you notes in the shade for postal workers to show her appreciation for their work.

“I think the delays we are experiencing locally are directly related to the system,” Lynch said. “Postal workers and their union want to serve the country, but their hands are tied.”

See here and here for some background. The potential consequences for some folks can be quite serious.

Operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service are causing delays in mail deliveries all over the country. A man in Humble said he had to go without his daily heart medication for a week due to the delays.

Don White, 82, said he has been tracking the package and said it remained at a north Houston mail processing facility for 10 days. He’s hoping to get in on Monday.

He said he’s irritated by the situation because his mail-order medication has never been this late before.

“There have been a few times in which it’s taken a week, week and a half, two weeks, but this is the first time I actually ran out and checking with the post office didn’t do much good, even though I had a tracking number on it,” White said.

He said in the meantime, his daughter has helped him get the medication at a local grocery store pharmacy.

Lucky for him he has someone nearby who can help him like that. Not everyone would be so fortunate.

There are lawsuits.

Let the Postal Service lawsuits begin. There are plenty of plaintiffs, including states. At least 20 state attorneys general are going to court over U.S. Postal Service delays and the threat to the November election, The Washington Post reports. “We’re trying to stop Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service, which we believe to be an attack on the integrity of election. It’s a straight-up attack on democracy,” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat, said in an interview. “This conduct is illegal. It’s unconstitutional. It’s harmful to the country. It’s harmful to individuals.

“We’re asking a court to make him stop,” he said. The ”we” in this case comprises Frosh’s fellow attorneys general from Washington State, the lead state in the case, as well as Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. This suit names Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, as defendants. It and another suit from Pennsylvania, California, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, among others, will argue that DeJoy and the Postal Service broke the law by making operational changes to slow service without the approval of the Postal Regulatory Commission. They will also argue that these changes, which they are seeking to reverse, will impede the states’ ability to run free and fair elections. All of the attorneys general signing on to these cases are Democrats, of course. They have all the standing they need: The Constitution gives states and Congress the power to run and regulate elections. “States have the right to conduct mail-in elections if they choose,” Frosh said. “Trump is trying to undermine that.”

Not Texas, of course. Our Attorney General doesn’t object to this kind of lawbreaking. But at least one prominent Texan finds this all disgraceful.

Austin resident Carolyn Lewis, a George W. Bush-era presidential appointee and 2009 chair of the USPS board of governors, told The Texas Tribune in a series of email and phone interviews Monday and Tuesday that she has been disturbed by reports of sweeping cost-cutting measures that led to a slowdown in the mail and raised concerns that the postal service will not be able to handle an influx of mailed-in ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Mr. DeJoy is failing to fulfill the mission of the USPS to provide prompt and reliable mail delivery at a time when that mission is as important as it has ever been,” said Lewis, who served on the USPS board of governors from 2004 to 2010, in a Monday email interview with the Tribune. “He is also destroying confidence in the organization that will only make its long-term viability even harder to achieve. If he does not change course immediately I hope the [board of governors] makes a change in leadership quickly.”

[…]

Lewis’ tenure also marked a moment of transition for the postal service. With the onset of modern technology, like email, the era marked a call for modernization in order to preserve the USPS’ mission to deliver the mail to all reaches of the country in a timely fashion while also remaining financially viable.

But DeJoy’s approach to modernization “feels different in several ways,” she said.

Alluding to a dysfunctional confirmation process within the U.S. Senate that for the last 10 years left gaping vacancies on the board, Lewis said that the postmaster general and the current board members “are very new and have none of the institutional knowledge that is usually there when you have more staggered terms of Governors.”

“Yet they seem to be rushing ahead to make changes before having time to fully understand the impact of those changes on all the stakeholders and there are many: employees, mailers, Congress and the American public,” she said.

She also has not seen “evidence that the current leadership has communicated their overall plan and goals that are driving the specific actions they are taking,” and “there is clearly not a priority on ensuring prompt and reliable mail delivery or fulfilling the mission” of the USPS.

“I do not know for certain the motivation of the [postmaster general] and the Governors, but their actions are certainly inviting questions, and legitimately so,” she added.

It took a couple of days, but this issue now has the full attention of Congress.

Houston Democratic congressional delegates on Tuesday announced they will propose legislation that would give the U.S. Postal Service an emergency loan and reverse recent cutbacks.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced Tuesday afternoon that he would suspend all recent changes to the postal service until after the November election.

“Even with the challenges of keeping our employees and customers safe and healthy as they operate amid a pandemic, we will deliver the nation’s election mail on time and within our well-established service standards,” said DeJoy in a statement. “The American public should know that this is our number one priority between now and Election Day.”

The postmaster general’s move did not satisfy Democratic lawmakers, who said legislation is needed to ensure the postal service can continue to operate at full capacity beyond November.

“What he’s proposing is not acceptable,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of DeJoy’s statement. “We need the changes to be reversed in totality forever. And that’s what the legislation is about.”

[…]

Previous legislation that passed in the U.S. House of Representatives would have provided the loan. Trump said he would block the funding.

The coming bill, also supported by U.S. Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Al Green and Lizzie Fletcher, would also make administrators within the postal service cease and desist from making any more cuts.

Jackson Lee said she will help oversee an investigation of the extent of recent reported actions directed by DeJoy, such as terminating mail sorting machines, reducing staffing and cutting back overtime at post offices across the country.

“We need to know whether there have been any civil rights violations or criminal acts taking place,” said Jackson Lee.

DeJoy will be testifying before Congress on Friday, and I hope it’s a painful experience for him. But clearly, simply agreeing to stop wrecking the place is insufficient. If I’m caught hauling bags of money from a bank vault, it is not sufficient for me to say “okay, fine, I won’t take any more money from the vault”. Vandals are expected to make restitution, and that should very much include Louis DeJoy. Daily Kos has more.

We still have no idea how many people have been infected

Apr 12th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

There’s just a real lack of testing being done.

Six times in three weeks, Marci Rosenberg and her ailing husband and teenage children tried to get tested for the new coronavirus — only to be turned away each time, either for not meeting narrow testing criteria or because there simply were not enough tests available.

All the while, the Bellaire family of four grew sicker as their fevers spiked and their coughs worsened. They said they fell one by one into an exhaustion unlike any they had felt before.

By March 18, Rosenberg was desperate and pleaded with her doctor for a test. Dr. Lisa Ehrlich, an internal medicine physician, told Rosenberg to pull into her office driveway. But Ehrlich warned Rosenberg, “I can only test one of you.” She swabbed her throat through an open car window. The result came back the next day: positive.

The rest of her family was presumed to be positive but untested – and thus excluded from any official tally of the disease.

As the number of confirmed cases of the potentially deadly virus continues to explode across the Houston region – tripling from 1,000 to more than 3,000 in just the past week – there is mounting evidence that the true scope of the disease here could be far worse than the numbers indicate.

A Houston Chronicle analysis of testing data collected through Wednesday shows that Texas has the second-worst rate of testing per capita in the nation, with only 332 tests conducted for every 100,000 people. Only Kansas ranks lower, at 327 per 100,000 people.

In cities across Texas — from Houston to Dallas, San Antonio to Nacogdoches — testing continues to be fraught with missteps, delays and shortages, resulting in what many predict will ultimately be a significant undercount. Not fully knowing who has or had the disease both skews public health data and also hampers treatment and prevention strategies, potentially leading to a higher death count, health care experts say.

[…]

As the pandemic’s march quickened, Texas was slow to ramp up testing.

The first confirmed case in Texas, outside those under federal quarantine from a cruise ship, was March 4, striking a Houston area man in his 70s who lived in Fort Bend county and had recently traveled abroad. By month’s end, the Houston area had more than 1,000 confirmed cases. A week later, the number had pushed past 3,000.

Yet it was not until March 30 that the rate of testing per 100,000 people in Texas topped 100. As of Wednesday, the state was testing 327 per 100,000, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, which collects information nationwide on testing primarily from state health departments, and supplements with reliable news reports and live press conferences.

Twenty-six states in the U.S. are testing at least double the number of patients per capita as Texas, in some cases six times more. New York, for instance, is testing 1,877 per 100,000 people while neighboring Louisiana is testing 1,622 per 100,000. Even smaller states, such as New Mexico, are testing triple the rate of Texas.

Texas officials defended the state’s response.

“We’ve consistently seen about 10 percent of tests coming back positive, which indicates there is enough testing for public health surveillance,” said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Department of State Health Services, in an email, “If we saw 40 or 50 percent or more of test coming back positive, we’d be concerned that there could be a large number of cases out there going unreported, but that has not been the case.”

It is unclear if that is a reliable measure. Nearly 41 percent of New York tests were positive, the second-highest rate in the country. In Texas, about 9.4 percent of tests were positive — roughly the same as Washington state, where one of the largest outbreaks of coronavirus has occurred.

Not the first time we’ve talked about this, and it won’t be the last. This also means that the official number of deaths attributed to coronavirus is likely too low. This has been the case globally, especially in the hardest-hit places, where the difference between the normal daily mortality rate and the observed mortality rate during the crisis is a lot bigger than the official count of COVID-19 deaths. The good news is that as yet our hospitals have not been overwhelmed, but we can’t say with confidence that that will continue to be the case.

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Houston area is continuing a steady climb, not close to crisis levels but unnerving enough that experts still aren’t sure when the area’s grand experiment in social distancing will start showing up in daily counts.

After a week in which COVID-19 hospitalization numbers more than doubled in Harris County, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists said it likely will be another week to 10 days before they know if the stay-at-home orders and closures are reducing the rate at which the coronavirus is spreading and keeping health care facilities from being overwhelmed.

“Even though we’ve been social distancing for three weeks, it’s too early to know when we’ll be on the downward slope,” said Catherine Troisi, a professor of epidemiology at UTHealth School of Public Health. “The numbers we’re seeing now reflect people who were exposed to the virus up to four weeks ago.”

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, said the social distancing has paid off in terms of keeping hospital volumes under control so far but added that the pay-off in terms of ending the pandemic is unclear. He said that “we need to continue stay-at-home orders until the end of the month, then reassess whether to extend them longer.”

Hotez and others said that aggressive social distancing is more important now than ever, given modelers are projecting that the number of COVID-19 cases in the Houston area should peak in the next few weeks. They said people venturing out during the peak period will put themselves at high risk of contracting the virus.

[…]

The study, released on March 24, originally said the virus’ spread in the Houston area would peak April 7 and burn out by mid-May if stay-at-home orders are continued until May 12. It was not clear Tuesday when the study projects the virus will burn out now.

Eric Boerwinkle, the lead researcher, could not be reached for comment Tuesday and UTHealth officials had no update on the study. Boerwinkle, who did not make the original modeling publicly available, has briefed top local government officials on the work.

Another modeling study, conducted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, now projects that the Texas peak use of hospital resources for COVID-19 will be April 19, some two weeks earlier than it previously projected. The study, reportedly relied on by the Trump administration, foresees no bed shortage in the state, including in intensive care.

“That’s why you shouldn’t place too much weight on any one model,” said Dr. James McDeavitt, Baylor’s dean of clinical affairs. “They depend on assumptions plugged in and can show everything from Houston being able to handle the surge to a New York City-like situation.”

McDeavitt noted the wild cards that go into modeling — the number of people admitted to a hospital, the percentage that need intensive care, how long it takes to get patients off ventilators, how long they need to recover in a regular bed once they move out of intensive care. Those are the assumptions that drive models, he noted.

McDeavitt said he doesn’t think the number of cases will come down in the Houston area until the end of the month.

That story was from earlier in the week, so all of the numbers are a bit out of date by now. But the bottom line remains that we don’t know where we are on the curve because we don’t really know how many people are or have been sick. Models all rely on data, and we’re also not good with the data.

The information Texans are working with is too damn thin.

Where to start? Not enough tests have been completed, or taken, to really know who has or doesn’t have the disease, where the Texas hotspots are, or whether people who have died of respiratory problems had COVID-19. The relatively small number of test results also means we don’t know which people had the disease and recovered (and how many people have recovered) and whether the projections being made with that skimpy data are accurate enough to guide our public health decisions.

It’s not enough to say that the testing is getting better, that we know more than we knew just a few days ago. What we still don’t know overshadows what we do know.

We’re like pilots flying in clouds without instruments. We know a little bit, but not enough to make really solid decisions or to figure out what’s next. We’re learning as we go. As of Thursday, Texas was reporting 10,230 cases and 199 deaths, 1,439 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and 106,134 tests conducted.

Given the level of testing right now, it’s hard to know how many cases Texas really has. Because the best way to get tested for the new coronavirus is to show symptoms that a medical professional finds troublesome, it’s probably safe to say we’re not testing many people who are carrying the virus but don’t have symptoms.

It’s easier — because it’s more obvious — to map the institutional cases. When someone in a nursing home or a state supported living center or a prison tests positive, testing everyone in that location is simple and smart. It’s simple to figure out that everyone in a given building or campus might have been exposed.

Even that data isn’t always available. The state of Texas initially wasn’t sharing details about the data it has collected from nursing homes where COVID-19 cases have been found. But a few days after The Texas Tribune’s Edgar Walters and Carla Astudillo wrote about it, the state revealed 13% of nursing homes have at least one confirmed case.

We’re doing a lot of flying blind. If we want to make good decisions about things like when and how to restart the economy, we need a much better understanding of where we are, and where that means we’re likely to be going.

Census lawsuit proceeds

Jul 29th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good.

A federal judge in New York on Thursday allowed a lawsuit challenging the addition of a citizenship question to the Census to move forward. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman’s decision rejected the Trump administration’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, which was brought by numerous states and localities.

The judge said that the court has jurisdiction to review Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add the question, rejecting the administration’s arguments that Ross could be insulated from judicial review.

Furman said that while Ross indeed had the authority under the Constitution to add the question, the judge concluded that the exercise of that authority in this particular case may have violated the challengers’ constitutional rights.

At this stage of the proceedings, Furman is required to assume the challengers’ allegations are true, and he must draw any inference from those allegations in the challengers’ favor. In doing so on Thursday, Furman said that the challengers “plausibly allege that Secretary Ross’s decision to reinstate the citizenship question on the 2020 census was motivated by discriminatory animus and that its application will result in a discriminatory effect. ”

See here, here, and here for the background. Nothing really new here, just another chance for me to say that this absolutely was motivated by discrimination and that it would be very nice to have it halted by the time the counting actually begins. Daily Kos and NPR have more.

Census lawsuit may proceed

Jul 6th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Good.

A federal judge said Tuesday that there was a “strong showing of bad faith” by the Trump administration in adding a controversial question about US citizenship to the 2020 census. The judge hinted that he would allow the case to move forward over objections from the administration, and senior administration officials will be subjected to questioning under oath about why the question was added.

Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said the administration “deviated from standard operating procedure” by adding the question with no testing. Furman ruled that the plaintiffs challenging the question—including the state of New York and the American Civil Liberties Union—can depose senior officials from the Commerce Department and Justice Department as the case moves forward.

The census has not asked respondents about their citizenship status since 1950. Civil rights groups say the citizenship question will depress response rates from immigrants, imperil the accuracy of the census, and shift political power to areas with fewer immigrants. The census determines how $675 billion in federal funding is allocated, how much representation states receive, and how political districts are drawn.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, approved the citizenship question in March, saying it was needed for “more effective enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. Ross said at the time and in subsequent testimony before Congress that he approved the question after the Justice Department requested in December 2017 that it be added.

However, Ross stated in a memo he filed to the court on June 21 that he first considered adding a citizenship question to the census after he was confirmed as commerce secretary in February 2017, months before the Justice Department requested the question. He wrote that he had approached the Justice Department about the question, not the other way around, after consulting with “other senior Administration officials” who had “previously raised” the citizenship question.

Furman cited Ross’s memo to question his truthfulness and the administration’s motives in adding the question. “It now appears these statements were potentially untrue,” Furman said of Ross’ claims that the question was added at the Justice Department’s request. “It now appears that the idea of adding a citizenship question originated with Secretary Ross and not the Department of Justice.”

See here and here for some background. The judge did subsequently allow the lawsuit to go forward, while also granting the motion for discovery. I for one can’t wait to see what bits of treasure that digs up. Time is of the essence here, so I hope there’s a speedy schedule to get us towards a resolution.

Rio Seco

Jun 6th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This is not good.

By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Mario Rosales, who farms 365 acres along the Rio Grande, knows the river is in bad shape this year. It has already dried to a dusty ribbon of sand in some parts, and most of the water that does flow is diverted to irrigate crops, including Rosales’ fields of wheat, oats, alfalfa and New Mexico’s beloved chilies.

Because last winter’s mountain snowpack was the second-lowest on record, even that irrigation water may run out at the end of July, three months earlier than usual. But Rosales isn’t worried. He is sure that the summer thunderstorms, known here as the monsoon, will come.

“Sooner or later, we’ll get the water,” he said.

The monsoon rains he is counting on are notoriously unpredictable, however. So he and many of the other farmers who work 62,000 acres along 140 miles of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico may get by — or they may not.

“Nobody’s got a whole lot of water,” said David Gensler, the hydrologist for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, whose job is to manage the river water that is delivered to Rosales and the others through diversion dams, canals and ditches. “If we use it up early in the season and don’t get any rain further on, the whole thing’s going to crash.”

Parts of the state got some much-needed rain this week, which may help Gensler extend his irrigation water a bit. But whatever happens this spring and summer, the long-term outlook for the river is clouded by climate change.

The Rio Grande is a classic “feast or famine” river, with a dry year or two typically followed by a couple of wet years that allow for recovery. If warming temperatures brought on by greenhouse gas emissions make wet years less wet and dry years even drier, as scientists anticipate, year-to-year recovery will become more difficult.

“The effect of long-term warming is to make it harder to count on snowmelt runoff in wet times,” said David S. Gutzler, a climate scientist at the University of New Mexico. “And it makes the dry times much harder than they used to be.”

Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. I mean, that part of the river isn’t even in Texas. I’m sure it will all be fine.

Multiple cities and states sue over Census citizenship question

Apr 5th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Good.

Seventeen states, the District of Columbia, and six major cities sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over the addition of a controversial new question about US citizenship to the 2020 census. This is the third major lawsuit against the administration’s action, after California and the NAACP sued last week, marking a major escalation of the legal and political battle over the census. Civil rights advocates say the question is designed to spark fear in immigrant respondents and will cause many immigrants not to be counted, diminishing the political power and financial resources of the jurisdictions where they live.

“This is a blatant effort to undermine the census and prevent the census from carrying out its Constitutional mandate,” said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who organized the multi-state lawsuit, at a press conference in lower Manhattan. New York has the third-largest immigrant population in the country, after California and Texas. More than 1 in 5 New York residents are foreign-born. “This is an effort to punish states like New York that welcome immigrants,” Schneiderman said.

The lawsuit says the new question “violates the constitutional mandate to conduct an ‘actual Enumeration’” of the country’s entire population, not just citizens, as well as a provision of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act barring federal agencies from taking “arbitrary, capricious” actions.

The lawsuit was filed by New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia, and joined by the cities of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, San Francisco, and Seattle. The bipartisan US Conference of Mayors, which represents the 1,400 cities with a population of 30,000 or more, also joined the suit.

[…]

Past leaders of the Census Bureau and current advisers to the bureau have also blasted the question. Six former bureau directors, who served under Republican and Democratic presidents, told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in January that “an untested question on citizenship status at this late point in the decennial planning process would put the accuracy of the enumeration and success of the census in all communities at grave risk.” Members of the bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, who are appointed by the director, blasted the decision at a meeting of the Census Bureau last week.

“I want to say in no uncertain terms that I think this is an absolutely awful decision,” said D. Sunshine Hillygus, a professor of political science at Duke University. “I am dumbfounded that this decision is coming in at such a late date. My view is that this is going to have severe negative implications for data quality and costs.”

She began her PowerPoint presentation at census headquarters with the phrase “W.T.H.,” short for “what the hell.”

The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, said the new question was needed to better enforce the Voting Rights Act, but Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Barack Obama, told Mother Jones that was “plainly a ruse to collect that data and ultimately to sabotage the census.”

See here for some background. Even with the involvement of the US Conference of Mayors, I say every city of decent size should want to get involved, because it’s their residents who are going to be undercounted as a result of this malevolent policy, and that will cost them in terms of funding, representation, and more. This is a big, serious deal and it needs to be treated as such. Think Progress, which also looks at the effect of this policy on Texas, has more.

The New Mexico abortion option

Mar 23rd, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This should come as a surprise to no one.

Right there with them

Though abortions among residents are down the number of out-of-state women traveling to New Mexico for abortions has grown significantly over the past three years.

According to state Department of Health data, about 20 percent of the roughly 4,500 abortions performed in New Mexico in 2014 involved women from out of state, the Albuquerque Journal reports. Reports suggest that number can be attributed to New Mexico’s few restrictions on abortion.

New Mexico hasn’t passed an abortion law in 16 years and is one of seven states that permits abortions at any stage in a pregnancy.

Comparatively, neighboring Texas, Arizona and Oklahoma each adopted 10 or more abortion restrictions from 2011 to 2015.

Texas women had nearly 9,000 fewer abortions in the first full year since those restrictions were put into place.

Just as a reminder, Texas Republicans passed HB2 on the (false) grounds that all those requirements and restrictions would make abortion safer for women. The state then argued in court that all of the clinics that would or did close as a result did not present an undue burden for women who sought abortions because the ones in the west could just go to New Mexico, which didn’t have all of those allegedly safety-enhancing (and clinic-closing) rules. The numbers bear that out. Funny how these things work, isn’t it? The Press has more.

The Fifth Circuit hears the HB2 arguments

Jan 8th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Maybe it’s not a slam dunk for HB2, though I refuse to get my hopes up.

In a long line of tough questioning Wednesday over a new Texas abortion law, federal appeals judges here questioned whether part of a provision requiring abortion facilities to meet hospital-like standards should be struck down.

The possibility that the three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would rule in favor of the abortion providers seemed slim before this week’s hearing, given that two of the judges had previously upheld some of the state’s abortion restrictions. But on Wednesday, the judges took turns grilling attorneys in taking a deeper dive into the provision.

The provision is part of House Bill 2, which the Texas Legislature passed during a special session in 2013. It requires facilities that perform abortions to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers. This includes minimum sizes for rooms and doorways and additional infrastructure like pipelines for anesthesia. A decision from the Fifth Circuit is not expected for at least several weeks.

Judge Catharina Haynes, the most vocal of the three judges Wednesday, questioned the state’s argument that all of the hospital-like standards being imposed on abortion facilities would improve women’s safety.

“What about that improves the standard of care?” Haynes asked Jonathan Mitchell of the Texas solicitor general’s office, referencing requirements for larger rooms in abortion facilities that would force most abortion providers to retrofit their clinics. “Why can’t you have a sterile environment in a 3,000-square-foot building?”

[…]

The judges also zeroed in on the effects of the abortion law on women living in West Texas. Aside from the challenge to the ambulatory surgical center provision, the lawsuit also asks for a reprieve for two clinics from a separate provision of the law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of an abortion clinic.

A separate three-judge panel, which included Haynes and Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, upheld the provision last year. But the providers’ attorneys argue that the two clinics in question, Whole Woman’s Health in McAllen and Reproductive Services in El Paso, shut down because of that provision. The poor, mostly minority women in these areas are disproportionately affected by the law, they argue.

On Wednesday, Elrod questioned whether a substantial amount of women in this area would face challenges in obtaining an abortion when they could travel to New Mexico for the procedure.

Toti said that the state’s argument that the abortion law is meant to improve patient safety is invalidated if they are going to rely on New Mexico as a nearby alternative because its abortion regulations are not as strict as in Texas.

“The state of Texas is essentially forcing abortion providers out of practice and shuttling these patients to New Mexico,” Toti said.

Haynes agreed, questioning whether the state was “undercutting” its own argument. “If these restrictions are so necessary, why send women across the border to New Mexico?” she said.

I still think the fix is in, but at least they made an effort to appear impartial. I assume that one way or another, this will wind up on SCOTUS’ doorstep. Expect the worst but hope for the best. And let’s keep working on how we can win more elections, since keeping this crap from getting out of the Legislature is ultimately the best medicine.

One more thing, from the Chron story:

The American Medical Association has filed a brief supporting opponents of the law, while groups of abortion survivors and state lawmakers have written in support of it.

WTF is an “abortion survivor”? Would you call a woman that has successfully carried a pregnancy to term a “childbirth survivor”? Because as anyone with an ounce of information knows, childbirth is vastly more hazardous than abortion is. I suspect this is a sleazy attempt to equate abortion with a traumatic event. Shame on the Chronicle for uncritically accepting that kind of bullshit. Unfair Park, Newsdesk, and RH Reality Check has more.

Just a reminder that “more gambling” does not necessarily mean “more revenue”

Aug 24th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

If Atlantic City can go bust…

The winning streak has run cold for Atlantic City, N.J.

Earlier this week, the upscale Revel Casino Hotel announced it will close, bringing the total number of casinos in the city expected to close by the end of the year to four. Thousands of workers are confronting unemployment.

The state has long guaranteed Atlantic City a monopoly on gambling within New Jersey’s borders, but gambling revenues there have been declining due to increased competition from new casinos in neighboring states and the lingering effects of the financial crisis. The monthly report from the state Division of Gaming Enforcement issued Wednesday shows that the trend is continuing, as July’s take declined 7.7 percent year over year.

Pennsylvania, which only legalized casino gambling in the past decade, has replaced New Jersey as the state with the second-largest gambling industry. More casinos have been proposed in New York. Yet revenues have been disappointing across the region. In New Jersey, they have declined by around half from a high of $5.2 billion in 2006.

Most disappointing for investors has been the performance of the casinos’ new online gaming businesses. The prospect of online revenues has kept several casinos open despite declining income.

“A lot of these casinos have been unprofitable for quite some time,” said Alex Bumazhny, an analyst at Fitch Ratings.

Online gamblers haven’t anted up, though, and several casinos have folded. Bumazhny estimates that online gaming revenues for New Jersey businesses will total only around $125 million this year. Revel follows The Atlantic Club, which closed in January, and the Showboat and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, also expected to close this year.

I like to note this sort of news item because as sure as the sun rises, at some point in the fall as the elections get settled and legislators start pre-filing bills, I’m going to get a press release from a pro-gambling expansion group touting the economic benefits of slot machines at horse racing tracks and/or casinos. Said press release and its accompanying economic study will point out the vast number of Texans that are currently gambling in Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and other non-Texas states, and will lament the money that could have been spent and gambled right here. My point is that the casinos and riverboats and what have you in Louisiana and New Mexico and Oklahoma and wherever else won’t simply give up the business those traveling Texans bring them without a fight, and the competition they will bring to hold onto their existing customers as well as lure new ones may possibly have a downward effect on those numbers in those press releases and economic studies. This isn’t about whether one does support or should support expanded gambling in Texas – as you well know by now, I am deeply ambivalent about it. It’s just a reminder to keep a sense of perspective when the issue heats up as it always does every two years.

If it can happen in Utah…

Dec 21st, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Wow. Just, wow.

A federal judge struck down Utah’s same-sex marriage ban Friday in a decision that marks a drastic shift toward gay marriage in a conservative state where the Mormon church has long been against it.

The decision set off an immediate frenzy as the clerk in the state’s most populous county began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples while state officials took steps to appeal the ruling and halt the process.

Cheers erupted as the mayor of Salt Lake City led the state’s first gay wedding ceremony in an office building about three miles from the headquarters of the Mormon church. Dozens of other couples were lined up to get marriage licenses.

Deputy Salt Lake County Clerk Dahnelle Burton-Lee said the district attorney authorized her office to begin issuing the licenses but she couldn’t immediately say how many had been issued.

Just hours earlier, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby issued a 53-page ruling saying the constitutional amendment Utah voters approved in 2004 violates gay and lesbian couples’ rights to due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Shelby said the state failed to show that allowing same-sex marriages would affect opposite-sex marriages in any way.

“In the absence of such evidence, the State’s unsupported fears and speculations are insufficient to justify the State’s refusal to dignify the family relationships of its gay and lesbian citizens,” Shelby wrote.

[…]

The Utah ruling comes the same week New Mexico’s highest court legalized gay marriage after declaring it unconstitutional to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples. A new law passed in Hawaii last month now allows gay couples to marry there.

If the ruling stands, Utah would become the 18th state to allow gay marriages, said Jon Davidson, director of Lambda Legal, which pursues litigation on LGBT issues nationwide. That’s up from six before the U.S. Supreme Court last summer struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The District of Columbia also allows same-sex marriage.

“The momentum we are seeing is unprecedented in any human rights struggle,” Davidson said. “To have this fast a change in the law and in public opinion, is quite remarkable.”

Between this ruling and the one in New Mexico (more on that in a minute), I’d say equality opponents in Texas now truly have something to worry about. I still don’t think the Fifth Circuit will cooperate, but I’m less certain of that than I was two days ago. One reason for that is the way the judges in these cases made their rulings. For example, the Utah judge cited Justice Scalia’s dissent in the DOMA case in support of his ruling, and though the New Mexico case was decided in state court, the judge that wrote the opinion there clearly had one eye on SCOTUS.

The “responsible procreation” argument is utter bunk.

These days, conservatives shy away from arguing that gay people make bad parents, because they definitely, unquestionably, absolutely do not. Instead, the argument has subtly shifted to a new sophism: Marriage laws are meant to encourage “responsible procreation” by opposite-sex couples so that if the woman gets pregnant, the state won’t have an orphan on its hands. The implication, of course, is that gays play no part in this schema, and so it would be absurd to allow them into the marriage club.

Wrong, says Justice Edward L. Chávez, speaking for the court—in fact, New Mexico’s own marriage law makes no mention whatsoever of procreation, exposing the argument’s gesture toward tradition as the claptrap that it is. Instead, “the purpose of New Mexico marriage laws is to bring stability and order to the legal relationship of committed couples … [and] their children.” Plus, “fertility has never been a condition of marriage,” so heterosexual gay marriage opponents clearly aren’t even playing by their own rules. Finally, Chávez drives in the knife:

[W]e fail to see how forbidding same-gender marriages will result in the marriages of more opposite-gender couples for the purpose of procreating, or how authorizing same-gender marriages will result in the marriages of fewer opposite-gender couples for the purpose of procreating.

These points may seem obvious, but the “responsible procreation” argument has gained some ground since it made an appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court last March. Now a court has been fully briefed on the matter, and the verdict couldn’t be clearer: This argument is dead in the water.

The state of Utah made that “responsible procreation” argument as well, as I’m sure Texas will in February. But now there’s a lot more precedent for swatting down these hurtful, discriminatory laws down. That makes this upcoming hearing that much more important. To all the couples in Utah now getting married, congratulations and mazel tov! To everyone in Utah and elsewhere now freaking out that the end of civilization is nigh, relax. It totally isn’t, as you will soon see for yourself. It’s just more love and happiness and equality and justice, and last I checked those were all good things.

More on the local GOP’s lawsuit against same sex spouse insurance benefits

Dec 20th, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Family Court? What’s up with that?

City Attorney Dave Feldman said Wednesday that the city of Houston and Mayor Annise Parker were not given notice before a family district court judge halted a recent policy change extending health and life insurance benefits to city employees in same-sex marriages.

“I’m not even sure how this ended up in family court. This is not a divorce, adoption or custody case,” Feldman said.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Judge Lisa Millard’s court by Jared Woodfill, Harris County’s GOP chairman, claims the policy change violates Houston’s city charter, the state’s Defense of Marriage Act and the Texas Constitution. Millard signed a temporary restraining order late Tuesday, halting the policy change until a Jan. 6 hearing.

“If this had been filed in a regular civil district court, be assured the city would have received notice and been given the opportunity to be there before any restraining order was entered,” Feldman said. Feldman said he plans to appeal Millard’s ruling on Thursday.

I don’t quite get filing this suit in Family Court. I’d have assumed a Civil District Court would be the normal route. I don’t know that it makes any difference, I’m just curious. Any lawyers want to weigh in on that?

Because the Defense of Marriage Act is a statute in the Texas Family Code, a family court is the appropriate venue, Woodfill said. He also said he sent Feldman two emails before the Tuesday hearing in Millard’s court.

“He didn’t respond to direct email,” Woodfill said. “We notified him twice and he didn’t respond.”

Woodfill said he hopes the case will pique the interest of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who could intervene in the case.

“Because we are talking about an elected official who has recognized same-sex marriage, in violation of Texas law, I would think that would be an issue the Attorney General’s Office would want to weigh in on,” Woodfill said. As of Wednesday evening, Abbott had not made a statement about the case.

Yes, I’d love to hear what Abbott has to say, too. As noted before, he seems to be picking his spots. He might prefer to avoid getting tangled up in this sort of brouhaha, which is exactly why I hope he gets pressed on it. Abbott is at least aware enough to realize that he’s on the losing side and that the more he fights the faster he’s likely to bring about his side’s demise. Woodfill doesn’t appear to suffer from that level of clarity. Don’t look now, Jared, but same sex marriage is right on your doorstep. Are you ready for the change that’s coming?

I do not expect another Ardmore

Jul 2nd, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

The AusChron tries to get out the Democrats’ strategy for Special Session 2.

When the Texas House convened last last month to pass, on third reading and onto the Senate for final passage, Senate Bill 5, the omnibus abortion regulations bill, Austin Rep. Elliott Naishtat heard several colleagues discussing whether House Dems would be ready to walk out – to break quorum – in order to stop the measure from moving forward.

Among the questions before Democrats as they face today’s start of a second-called special session, with passage of abortion regulations first on Gov. Rick Perry’s to do list, is whether a mid-summer, out-of-state sojourn may be in the cards. “There was talk about it” on the floor last month, he said, “and there will undoubtedly be talk about it again.”

[…]

With the 30-day special-called session only getting under way today, there is plenty of time for Republicans to maneuver to pass the divisive measures – as one Capitol staffer said last week, not even Davis can talk for 30 days. But there remain other strategies to explore, said Austin Democratic Sen. Kirk Watson – though he declined to offer specifics. “I’m not going to get into strategies,” he said, “but we’re not going to give up the fight.”

[…]

Requiring testimony in each chamber may be one way to moderate the legislation’s forward progress, but it is unlikely to do much to halt the ever-forward movement. So, might a mid-summer trip to a nearby state be the way to go? That’s certainly an option, says [Rep. Donna] Howard. Though, realistically, says Naishtat, he isn’t sure that it would work to derail the measure completely. “I don’t see how House or Senate Democrats could break quorum for the amount of time necessary to defeat the bill – it could be as much as three weeks,” he said. “On the other hand, other people doubted that Sen. Wendy Davis could pull off a filibuster. So what I’m saying is, you never know.” Indeed, Naishtat agrees that at this point, every option is on the table. And it would be “foolish,” he said, for Republicans to “underestimate our power, our intelligence, our mastery of the rules, and our commitment to doing everything legal to prevent the passage of … anti-pro-choice bills.”

I’m not privy to the Dems’ thinking, and I certainly wouldn’t dismiss any feasible possibility out of hand, but I have a hard time seeing how a quorum break would be successful. As with the Davis filibuster, all it can do is delay. It can’t prevent any of this awful legislation from passing, because Rick Perry can just keep calling more sessions, which you know he will. The reason why Ardmore was doable in 2003 was that the Dems only needed to be gone for five days. As with the previous special session, the re-redistricting bill came up late, and it was close enough to the deadline for passing bills out of the House for the Senate to take up that they could bug out on Monday and return on Saturday having accomplished their task. Busting quorum now would be like what the Senate Dems tried to do later that summer. As was the case back then, there was no magic day after which you could say you were in the clear. Maybe they’ve though this through and they know what their endgame is, but I have my doubts. It’s asking an awful lot of a lot of people, and I don’t know how practical it is. I hate to be a wet blanket, and I could be wrong about this, but that’s how I see it.

Two more factors to consider. One is that in the aftermath of Ardmore and Albuquerque, there were some rule changes made in each chamber to make future quorum busts more difficult and more punitive to the fleeing party. I don’t remember the details, but I do feel confident that the Rs would be extremely vengeful towards a caucus that skipped town. Two, back in 2003 the Governors of Oklahoma and New Mexico were both Democrats, and thus unwilling to cooperate with the efforts to locate and extradite the Killer Ds. Both Governors are Republicans now, so no such assistance would be in the offing. The only neighboring state now with a Democratic Governor is Arkansas, but I would not want to put my fate in that state’s hands. The nearest state where I’d feel safe, politically speaking at least, is Colorado. Point being, any out of state excursion would need to be done by air, not by bus, which increases the cost, the risk factor, and the likelihood of something going wrong because there’s just too much you can’t control.

Anyway. If it were up to me, I’d do everything I could to drag the proceedings out, while giving the crazier members of the GOP caucus as many opportunities to say something as stupid as Rep. Laubenberg did last session, and I’d lay whatever groundwork I could for litigation to block the law. The name of the game is the 2014 election. Go down fighting, keep everyone engaged, and be ready to pick up where you left off as soon as the session ends. Be sure to read the whole AusChron story, there’s a lot more in there besides quorum breaking.

We’re exporting feral hogs

Mar 24th, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

You’re welcome, neighboring states.

Feral pigs have already taken over Texas and are expanding their numbers in other states, but federal and state land managers think they have a chance to tip the balance in New Mexico. They’re willing to bet $1 million in federal funds on a yearlong pilot project aimed at eradicating the pigs and using what they learn here to keep them from gaining a foothold elsewhere.

It marks the first time the U.S. Department of Agriculture has teamed up with a state to develop a comprehensive plan for getting rid of the pigs.

A small army of state and federal employees has been trained to stalk, trap and kill New Mexico’s feral pigs. Various techniques have been used by wildlife managers and landowners for decades in the fight against feral swine, but the New Mexico team is focusing on determining what combination works best in which circumstances and how effectively helicopters can be to track the pigs across vast landscapes.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the curve with this so we can prevent a lot of the damage that we know will be coming if we don’t do anything about it,” said USDA Wildlife Services state director Alan May. “Sport hunting pressure alone won’t be enough to stop a population from spreading.”

You can say that again.

In Mississippi, peanut farmers often wake to find uprooted plants. In Texas, where there are an estimated 2.6 million pigs, the animals have moved from destroying pastures and crops to tearing up suburban gardens.

Texans spend about $7 million a year on trying to control pigs and repair some of the damage, said Billy Higginbotham, a professor and wildlife specialist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center.

“We’re not like New Mexico, Nebraska or Kansas, for example, where we’re just beginning to get a few and can probably think in terms of eradication,” he said. “What we’re simply trying to do here is not even use the “e” word — eradication — but to think in terms of managing the damage.”

SciGuy reminds us how challenging that is.

In 2010, an estimated 750,000 pigs were harvested, or 29 percent of the population. That sounds harsh, but it’s really not.

The scientists estimate with such a harvest the feral hog population will still double every five years. Even a high harvest — 41 percent of the population, annually — will allow the wild pig population to actually grow by 12 percent a year.

An annual harvest rate of 66 percent is required to hold the feral hog population in check, the scientists believe.

That’s something like 1.8 million of the beasties a year, at current population levels. There aren’t enough helicopters in the state for that. Good luck controlling your hog invasion, New Mexico.

Who gets the water?

Jan 20th, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This will be worth watching.

A simple idea has guided appropriations of Texas water for decades: First come, first served.

Now, with drought conditions returning to almost the entire state, the principle is being put to the test by a fight over water in the Brazos River.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is withholding water from some, but not all, rights holders to meet the needs of the Dow Chemical Co., which operates a massive manufacturing complex where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Farmers have sued to get their water back, saying the state agency overstepped its authority by exempting cities and power producers with rights younger than theirs from the suspension order. The agency based the decision upon “public health, safety and welfare concerns.”

No one disputes the chemical maker’s rights, which date to the 1920s. The legal question is whether TCEQ may consider factors beyond seniority when deciding who gets water first in times of shortage.

“This really will be a precedent-setting case if the courts uphold TCEQ’s position,” said Ronald Kaiser, professor of water law and policy at Texas A&M University. “It is about whether we still believe in the priority system. It is elegantly simple, but its limitation is that we don’t consider the highest economic use of water.”

[…]

In the lawsuit, the Texas Farm Bureau and two growers argue that TCEQ does not have the authority to divert from the priority system during drought.

The order leaves more than 700 farmers without surface water for irrigation, while dozens of others with junior rights, including the cities of Houston and Waco and NRG Energy, will not be restricted in their use.

“It turns the priority system on its head,” said Regan Beck, assistant general counsel for public policy at the Farm Bureau.

Mark McPherson, a Dallas-based lawyer who specializes in water rights but is not involved in the lawsuit, agreed.

“When the historic state priority system is changed so materially, it makes those who planned based on the priority system look foolish, and it makes those who benefit from the change look lucky,” McPherson said. “I don’t think that’s a proper use of agency power.”

The solution, he said, is for those who need more water to pay for it. State law allows TCEQ to transfer water rights to meet urgent public health and safety needs, but doing so requires compensation, which was not offered in this case.

“The correct answer is perhaps harsh, but nonetheless necessary: Go acquire more water rights, at the market cost, and pass those costs on to the users,” McPherson said. “And if this were allowed to happen, we’d quickly feel, and finally understand, that water supply is a critical factor in economic competition.”

I’m not a lawyer and I know precious little about water rights, but what McPherson says makes sense to me. I can’t wait to see what the court says. I imagine the Lege will be interested in this decision as well, as it may force them to rewrite some existing laws, and it may give them some extra incentive to tackle that long-term water issue.

Meanwhile, in other water dispute news, the state of Texas has filed a complaint with the Supreme Court against New Mexico over water from the Rio Grande.

In its complaint, Texas says that New Mexico has dodged a 1938 agreement to deliver Texas’ share of Rio Grande river. Instead, New Mexico is illegally allowing diversions of both surface and underground water hydrologically connected to the Rio Grande downstream of Elephant Butte reservoir in New Mexico, according to the filing.

The complaint, filed after New Mexico took its own legal actions and after years of negotiations, asks the Supreme Court to command New Mexico to deliver water apportioned to Texas.

The Rio Grande is the primary, and at some places the only, source of water for much of the agricultural land within Texas. Water from the river constitutes, on average, half the annual water supply for El Paso, according to the filing.

“So long as New Mexico refuses to acknowledge its Rio Grande Compact obligations to Texas, no amount of negotiation or mediation can address Texas’ claims,” the filing said. “And so long as the matter continues unresolved by this Court, New Mexico can simply continue to divert, pump and use water in excess of its Rio Grande Compact apportionment, to the continued detriment of Texas.”

Conservation in El Paso has been emphasized for decades, said state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso. “The community has rallied behind conservation as important,” he said. “But we have rights to access to water: Water in the desert is crucial.”

New Mexico Attorney General Gary King fired back Thursday in a statement that Texas’ court filing was “tantamount to extortion.”

New Mexico farmers already can draw less water from the Elephant Butte reservoir following an agreement several years ago between the two states. King said the Texas complaint, if successful, would “deplete the water in southern New Mexico in a manner that would destroy the long-term viability of water resources.”

The Trib also covered this and another dispute between Tarrant County and Oklahoma that SCOTUS has agreed to adjudicate. I figure we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the coming years.

There’s an app for registering voters

Jun 13th, 2012

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

In New Mexico. It needs to go nationwide.

Jason Libersky is a deputy voter agent in New Mexico. He spends much of his time at community events throughout Albuquerque registering people to vote using an iPad application he created — the Evotee.

While sitting in a Central New Mexico Community College classroom he explains how the Evotee app works.   
“I’ve always had a passion for politics, but not necessarily participating in it as much as I should. And when I realized what those hurdles were to my participation is when I started thinking of things like a voter registration app,” Libersky said.  

The Evotee app is used on an iPad. It’s an electronic voter registration form that compiles essential data, like date of birth and Social Security Number. It also attaches copies of supporting documents like a picture of an ID. And the form can be signed on the tablet.

With a click of a button the information is electronically sent directly to the voter registration office. For Libersky this new mobile application means more people, in more remote communities, have a chance of registering to vote.

“Society is now moving at the speed of information and government’s not,” Libersky said. “And, so, I was looking for ways to improve the process and facilitate communication between citizens, politicians and government.”  

That’s what caught the attention of the clerk’s office in Bernalillo County, where Libersky lives. Like most counties, Bernalillo has a voter registration form that must be completed, signed and mailed. So, when county officials learned about Evotee earlier this year, they decided to test it.

“It’s been real exciting and nice to see these applications coming in,” said County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver. She said the app has become the preferred way for registering future voters.

“Anything that we as election officials can be doing to encourage, simplify, and break down the barriers to the election process is and should be our priority.”

Isn’t that a refreshing attitude? Voter registration is at its heart filling out a form and then submitting it, with the back end being a database. Which is to say that it’s pretty much identical in structure to the vast majority of other apps out there. It’s exactly the sort of thing that apps are supposed to be for. You can easily include whatever proof of identity you might want or need – a scan of a driver’s license or other acceptable ID, a photo of the registrant – iPads have cameras in them – or whatever else. Hell, you could probably do fingerprint and retinal scans if you really wanted to – just about anything short of a urine sample would be doable. There’s no valid technical argument against this idea. Just politics.

“While like it sounds like a wonderful idea for democracy in getting more people involved, we’re currently seeing, you know, a lot of push-back,” said Matt Barreto of the political research firm Latino Decisions. He’s talking about laws like the one in Arizona, and in other states like Texas, that make it more difficult to register voters.   

“I think they’re gonna be very reluctant to allow this technology to come in and say hey here’s a process that makes it very easy to register to vote,” he said. Those states could reject Evotee, with a concern the app would be susceptible to ID fraud.  

No more than they would be when used in commerce, as these devices increasingly are. Again, you can equip these things with a magnetic stripe reader to swipe a drivers license or other ID card, and you can take a picture of the registrant and include it with the form. Of course, as things stand now this would almost certainly be illegal in Texas, though perhaps the current litigation will help clarify things. Even with a favorable outcome for the plaintiffs in that suit, don’t expect to see this in Texas any time soon. Link via NewsTaco.

The western SUPERTRAIN

Jul 13th, 2009

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

You’ve heard of the Texas T-Bone SUPERTRAIN proposal that would link up Houston. San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. That’s already been designated as one of the high-speed rail corridors that are in line for federal funding. There’s another such corridor that includes Texas and it’s farther out west.

New Mexico, Colorado and Texas are applying for federal funds to study the viability of a high-speed rail system in the hopes of putting new life into passenger railroads in the Intermountain West.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said Thursday the 720-mile high-speed rail system would travel at speeds of 110 mph to more than 200 mph from El Paso, Texas, through Albuquerque to Denver.

“The West was connected to the rest of the country by railroads. Our history is until the 1880s and the coming of the railroads, we were isolated,” Udall said. “You could view (the proposed high-speed rail corridor) as a second wave which revives the railroads that we’ve allowed to wither.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Udall, a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said the three states will submit a joint pre-application Friday for up to $5 million to pay for the study.

Congress has authorized up to 11 high-speed rail corridors nationwide. Ten have been designated, and the three states hope to become home to the 11th.

“Today, you cannot get from Albuquerque to Denver by rail without changing trains in Los Angeles or Chicago, and our regional railways run from East to West, with no North-South connections,” Udall said.

[…]

The Federal Railroad Administration will decide which region gets the 11th high-speed rail corridor designation based on the strength of their applications, FRA spokesman Rob Kulat said.

New Mexico, Colorado and Texas may have competition. Kulat declined to say how many pre-applications for feasibility studies the FRA has received so far.

“Quite a few are in already, but the number is going to grow by tomorrow,” he said.

Final applications for the grants are due Aug. 24, he said.

Seems like a reasonable place for a rail corridor. I wish them luck.

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