Dana Milbank – Memphis Flyer

Louis Brandeis imagined that states could serve as laboratories of democracy. At the moment, they are serving as a bunch of mad scientists.

The late Supreme Court justice envisioned states trying “novel social and economic experiments.” But he could not have anticipated just how novel the thinking would be of Alabama state Senator Clyde Chambliss (R), author of the state’s toughest-in-the-nation law, which bans virtually all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.
“I’m not trained medically, so I don’t know the proper medical terminology and timelines,” the legislator-scientist said during this week’s debate on his bill. “But from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know a woman is pregnant. … It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.”
Chambliss then argued that, under his law, women would be free to get abortions during this period of time — so long as they don’t yet know they are pregnant. So a victim of incest could get an abortion? “Yes, until she knows she’s pregnant,” he reasoned, as journalist Abbey Crain recounted.

Clyde Chambliss

The genius behind the abortion law elaborated: “She has to do something to know whether she’s pregnant or not. It takes time for all the chromosomes to come together.”
The poor fellow seems to have confused chromosomes, the genetic material that combines during fertilization, with the hormones detected in pregnancy tests.

So, once an egg is fertilized, no more abortions? Chambliss floundered: “I’m at the limits of my medical knowledge, but until those chromosomes you were talking about combine — from male and female — that’s my understanding.” Contradicting himself, he also said that throwing away eggs that were fertilized in vitro wouldn’t land you in jail because “it’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

He similarly was confused about how a doctor, who under the law would face imprisonment for assisting with an abortion, would discern between the identical symptoms of a woman miscarrying (which would still be legal) and one having a medication-induced abortion. “The burden of proof would be on the prosecution,” he said — thus opening the 25 percent of pregnancies that end in miscarriages to law-enforcement probes.

When one woman in the chamber questioned his familiarity with female reproduction, Chambliss replied: “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to be pregnant.”
The better question is whether he’s smart enough to be writing laws.

Thus did Chambliss join the vanguard of clueless male legislators telling women what to do with their bodies. In Ohio, the author of a bill banning insurance coverage for non-life-threatening abortions included an exception for a fictitious procedure in which a doctor implants the fetus from an ectopic pregnancy in the uterus. The bill also appears — inadvertently — to ban coverage of IUDs and possibly birth control pills.

And Georgia, in its bill banning abortion after six weeks, designated “unborn children as natural persons” with “full legal recognition,” thus inviting questions about whether it’s legal for fetuses in the uteri of female inmates to be imprisoned without charges, whether women who have abortions could theoretically be charged with murder and whether, if a tax deduction is claimed for the unborn child, it would be repaid after miscarriages.

And: If fetuses are full persons, could we at least start teaching them biology?

After Justice Brett Kavanaugh provided the Supreme Court with a likely decisive vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents in state legislatures — Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Dakota, Iowa, and elsewhere — have joined a pell-mell rush to come up with restrictive laws to serve as test cases. They say science has improved since Roe, but clearly the scientific knowledge of those writing the laws has not.

The new abortion bans are commonly dubbed “heartbeat” bills because pulsing cells can be detected as early as six weeks — but embryos don’t have hearts at that point. Women may be near or past the six-week abortion window before they know they’re pregnant. And though lawmakers may not intend to ban birth control or to jail women who have abortions, those possibilities are far more realistic than Trump’s claim that Democrats like to “execute” swaddled newborns.

No wonder House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who claims Democrats favor “infanticide,” had difficulty with a question this week about whether Republicans would now be identified with the new laws. McCarthy opposes the Alabama bill, saying the state took an “extreme” position.

So extreme that it departed not just from legal convention but from medical science.

Dana Milbank writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

In the 1992 campaign, President George H.W. Bush created an unofficial and much-mocked motto for his administration during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. “Message: I care,” he announced, as if reading aloud the stage directions.

Melania Trump did much the same last week when she went to Texas to see some of the migrant kids who were taken from their parents under her husband’s policy. The now-famous wording on her jacket made her a human billboard for what should be the unofficial motto of the Trump administration: “I really don’t care, do u?”

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The administration’s cruelty is particularly prominent lately because of photos of the anguish of the migrant children — and Trump’s accompanying allegation of “phony stories of sadness” and his warning that immigrants, like insects, would “infest” the country. But the current episode, though highly visible, is hardly one of a kind. By now, the administration has amassed an extensive catalogue of cruelty.

On Thursday, Trump doomed the latest attempt to protect from deportation the “dreamers,” those 700,000 people who have known no home but America since they were brought here as children. He tweeted that he didn’t see the “purpose” of the House passing an immigration bill — and, sure enough, the House called off the vote. It was his own executive action that exposed the dreamers to deportation in the first place.
I really don’t care, do u?

On Wednesday night, Trump renewed his assault on Senator John McCain, as he dies from brain cancer. Trump again blamed McCain for the failed repeal of Obamacare.

The administration earlier this month decided not to defend the law against a court challenge that if successful would end protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Trump has also ended subsidies to help insurance companies cover low-income people, and acknowledged the Obamacare repeal he championed was “mean.” He gave a green light to work requirements for Medicaid that could deny health insurance even to many poor Americans who work.

I really don’t care, do u?

The Trump administration this month said that fleeing domestic violence and gang violence would no longer be grounds for seeking asylum in the United States.

Trump previously reduced the number of refugees from 110,000 to 45,000 per year — the lowest in almost 40 years; and even fewer are actually being admitted, forcing tens of thousands to remain in refugee camps and return to face persecution or violence in the countries they fled. This is after Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, which resulted in families separated and students and doctors denied entry.

I really don’t care, do u?

Lawmakers complained this last week to Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, that the administration’s haphazard implementation of trade barriers is causing havoc for farmers, small businesses, and manufacturers. Ross responded by calling such notions “exaggerated” and “not our fault.”

A week earlier, as The Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein and Andrew Van Dam wrote, Trump’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wages after inflation have fallen over the past year for production and non-supervisory workers — 80 percent of all privately employed workers. That means economic “gains are going almost exclusively to people already at the top of the economic ladder.” And the tax cuts further widen the gap between the rich and everybody else.

I really don’t care, do u?

Trump’s budget proposal this year, sensibly ignored by Congress, would have cut Medicaid by $306 billion over 10 years, food stamps by $214 billion, nutritional help for mothers and children, and heating assistance for the poor, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Trump administration is also reducing enforcement of fair-housing laws. And Trump said Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was not a “real catastrophe” and said Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them.” It now appears thousands died.

I really don’t care, do u?

Trump said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville last summer. He declared a ban on transgender people in the military and later imposed a partial ban. His administration ordered prosecutors to seek maximum penalties for even nonviolent drug crimes.

I really don’t care, do u?

Now come reports that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller — architects and leading defenders of Trump’s child-separation policy — were heckled in separate incidents in recent days while dining at Mexican restaurants. Another report this last week highlighted the discovery that Miller’s great-grandfather had his naturalization petition denied because of “ignorance.” I don’t like incivility, or cheap shots. But you know what else? I really don’t care, do u?

Dana Milbank writes for the Washington Post Writers Group;

@Milbank on Twitter.