South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
GOP hoping to overturn Roe v. Wade
Some state lawmakers are hoping anti-abortion restrictions reach the Supreme Court and win approval.
At an intense pace, lawmakers in Republicangoverned states are considering an array of tough anti-abortion restrictions they hope might reach the Supreme Court and win approval from its conservative majority, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a nationwide right to abortion.
A sweeping ban already has been signed into law in South Carolina, only to be swiftly blocked by a lawsuit from abortion-rights groups. Arkansas’ governor recently signed another ban.
A batch of other near-total bans also were blocked in the courts after their passage in 2019.
It’s not clear if or when the Supreme Court might consider any of them, or take some other path. The court could weaken Roe with approval of less drastic restrictions or even leave the core of the 1973 ruling in place.
“Anyone who tells you what the Supreme Court is going to do is pulling your leg,” said Jennifer Popik, federal legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
What’s clear is that the federal judiciary changed dramatically during Donald Trump’s presidency. In addition to three appointments to the Supreme Court, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority, Trump made scores of appointments to federal district and appellate courts. That raises the possibility that previously rejected anti-abortion measures might now be upheld.
State Rep. John McCravy, a Republican who sponsored the South Carolina ban, said Roe v. Wade was on
his mind in crafting the bill.
“This is a decision that the Supreme Court is going to need to make,” he said. “Certainly it’s encouraging to see the court changing and to see hope at the end of the tunnel.”
The South Carolina law, like several passed by other states in 2019, would ban most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically about six weeks after conception.
In Arkansas, the bill Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed Tuesday goes further, banning all abortions except when performed to save the life of the mother. It has no exceptions for rape or incest. Hutchinson had favored including those exemptions but signed the bill as an explicit challenge to Roe.
“It is the intent of the legislation to set the stage
for the Supreme Court overturning current case law,” he said.
Arkansas and South Carolina are among more than 15 states where lawmakers have proposed near-total abortion bans this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access.
Guttmacher’s director for state issues, Elizabeth Nash, said the total number of anti-abortion measures this year is nearly 400 — on par with other recent years. What’s different, she said, is the fast pace at which some bills are moving.
“State legislatures are putting abortion restrictions and bans on the front burner, at the top of their agenda,” Nash said.
In addition to sweeping bans, states are considering an array of other restrictions.
They include limiting access to medication abortions, banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and banning it in cases of fetal anomalies such as Down syndrome.
Some anti-abortion activists suggest the Supreme Court may take an incremental approach, upholding measures that fall short of a near-total ban but still would weaken Roe. That ruling held that abortions should be legal up to the point of a fetus’ viability — roughly 24 weeks.
“It’s been our job as activists to keep passing these state bills and challenging the status of Roe,” said Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony List, a national anti-abortion group.
“There’s always been a concerted effort to give
the court a menu of different options they can choose from,” she said.
Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, suggests the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, may prefer to weaken Roe by curtailing abortion access rather than take up a case that could lead to Roe’s outright reversal.
“Even if Roe stays on the books, it will be harder and harder for people in the South and Midwest and Great Plains to get abortions,” Dalven said, referring to regions where Republicans generally dominate state politics.
One pending case could provide a strong hint about the high court’s intentions. It may announce soon whether it will consider Mississippi’s
bid to enforce a 15-week abortion ban. If accepted, the case would provide an opportunity for the reconfigured court to dramatically change the way Roe is applied.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said it would be “shocking” if the Supreme Court agreed to consider the case.
“The only reason would be to do fundamental damage to Roe,” she said. “We’ve never had a court like this.”
Michael New, an abortion opponent who teaches social research at Catholic University of America, predicts the Supreme Court will move slowly.
“Over time, I think states will be allowed to do more to protect the preborn,” he said. “But court decisions will likely only allow for gradual changes in public policy.”
A few days before the presidential election, the leadership of the antiTrump Lincoln Project gathered at the Utah home of Steve Schmidt, one of the group’s co-founders, and listened as he plotted out the organization’s future.
None of the dissident Republican consultants who created The Lincoln Project a year earlier had imagined how wildly successful it would be, pulling in more than $87 million in donations and producing scores of viral videos that doubled as a psy-ops campaign intended to drive President Donald Trump to distraction. Confident that a Biden administration was on the horizon, Schmidt, a swaggering former political adviser to John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger, pitched the other attendees on his post-Trump vision for the project over a breakfast of bagels and muffins. And it was ambitious.
“Five years from now, there will be a dozen billion-dollar media companies that don’t exist today,” he told the group, according to two people who attended. “I would like to build one, and would invite all of you to be part of that.”
In fact, Schmidt and the three other men who started The Lincoln Project — John Weaver, Reed Galen and Rick Wilson — had already quietly moved to set themselves up in the new enterprise, drafting and filing papers to create TLP Media in September and October, records show. Its aim was to transform the original project, a super PAC, into a far more lucrative venture under their control.
This was not the only
private financial arrangement among the four men. Shortly after they created the group in late 2019, they had agreed to pay themselves millions of dollars in management fees, three people with knowledge of the deal said.
A spokeswoman for The Lincoln Project insists, “No such agreement exists and nothing like it was ever adopted.”
The behind-the-scenes moves by the four original founders showed that, whatever their political goals, they were also privately taking steps to make money from the earliest stages. Over time, The Lincoln Project directed about $27 million — nearly one-third of its total fundraising — to Galen’s consulting firm, from which the four men were paid, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
Conceived as a full-time attack machine against
Trump, The Lincoln Project’s public profile soared last year as its founders built a reputation as a creative yet ruthless band of veteran operators. They recruited like-minded colleagues, and their scathing videos brought adulation from the left and an aura of mischievous idealism for what they claimed was their mission: nothing less than to save democracy.
They also hit upon a geyser of cash, discovering that biting attacks on a uniquely polarizing president could be as profitable in the loosely regulated world of political fundraising as Trump’s populist bravado was for his own campaign.
Then it all began to unravel. By the time of the Utah meeting, the leaders of The Lincoln Project — who had spent their careers making money from campaigns — recognized the value of their enterprise and had begun to maneuver
for financial gain. But other leaders had learned of the financial arrangement among the original founders, and they were privately fuming.
Another major problem was festering: the behavior of Weaver, who for years had been harassing young men with sexually provocative messages.
Allegations about Weaver’s conduct began appearing in published reports in The American Conservative and Forensic News this winter. In late January, The New York Times reported on allegations going back several years. The Times has spoken to more than 25 people who received harassing messages, including one person who was 14 when Weaver first contacted him.
Fresh reporting by The Times found that Weaver’s inappropriate behavior was brought to the organization’s attention multiple times last year, beginning
in January 2020, according to four people with direct knowledge of the complaints, though none of the warnings involved a minor. The Lincoln Project’s spokeswoman, Ryan Wiggins, said it would not comment on issues related to Weaver while an outside legal review of Weaver’s actions was ongoing. The group has hired a law firm to conduct the review.
The crisis surrounding Weaver, and the splintering of the group’s leadership, have cast the future of The Lincoln Project into doubt.
Even people once associated with the group, including George Conway, have called for its dissolution. But Schmidt’s faction intends to continue it as a modern media campaign against global forces of authoritarianism, while also monetizing the movement.
Save for Weaver, the project’s top leadership — Schmidt, Galen and Wilson — has not changed. They are hoping that enough of its more than 500,000 donors will remain to keep its coffers filled.
Schmidt, in a recent interview conducted shortly before he took a leave of absence, said this was no time to quit.
“I want The Lincoln Project to be one of the premier pro-democracy organizations,” he said. “We believe there is a real autocratic movement that is a threat to democracy and has a floor of 40% in the next election. And the pro-democracy side cannot be the gentle side of the debate.”
It was not initially clear that the Lincoln Project would be so wildly successful. Then, last May, it released its “Mourning in America” video, a play on a Reagan-era commercial that laid the failures of the country’s pandemic response squarely at Trump’s feet.
The commercial prompted a late-night Twitter barrage from Trump to his tens of millions of followers. He derided the project as “a group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me,” adding, “They’re all LOSERS.”
Trump’s outburst gave the Lincoln Project a flood of attention it could have only hoped for. Fundraising surged.
Initially, the project operated much like a pirate ship. Typical workplace management practices were lacking. The organization has no chief executive. Two of its largest contractors, who were billing The Lincoln Project, were given seats on the three-member board of directors, a breach of normal governance practices.
The executive structure was malleable: The two contractors on the board, for instance, Ron Steslow and Mike Madrid, who were each involved in reaching voters through digital advertising and data targeting, were also referred to as co-founders. So were Conway and Jennifer Horn, a former head of the Republican Party in New Hampshire who joined early on and played a leading role in outreach to independents and Republicans.
As money poured in, robust cost controls were lacking, with founders reaping management fees. And while big payments are common in politics, other Lincoln Project officials and employees were shocked at the scale when federal records revealed that nearly $27 million had been paid to Galen’s consulting firm, Summit Strategic Communications. It is not known how much of that each of the four received. Their private arrangement shielded even from other senior officials the size of the individual payments.
Obscuring payments via intermediary firms can violate campaign finance laws, but it is unclear whether the Lincoln Project crossed that line.
Stuart Stevens, a longtime media consultant who has taken an increasingly prominent role in the project, cried during an interview while talking about his commitment to the cause.
“I helped create this monster that is the current Republican Party,” Stevens wrote in a follow-up email. He called the recent tumult at The Lincoln Project “a rough couple of weeks.”