GOP blocks bid to repeal abortion ban in Ariz.
PHOENIX — Republicans in Arizona’s Legislature on Wednesday scuttled another effort to repeal the state’s 1864 law banning abortion, defying pressure from prominent Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, who had urged them to toss the ban that many voters viewed as extreme and archaic.
“The last thing we should be doing today is rushing a bill through the legislative process to repeal a law that has been enacted and reaffirmed by the Legislature several times,” House Speaker Ben Toma, a Republican, said as he blocked an effort to vote on the repeal.
The Arizona Supreme
Court’s ruling last week to uphold the Civil War-era near-total abortion ban infuriated supporters of abortion rights, exhilarated abortion opponents, and set off a political firestorm in Arizona, where Republicans narrowly control both houses of the state Legislature but foresaw a grave political threat. Repealing it would revert Arizona to a 15-week abortion ban.
Republicans initially resisted Democrats’ attempts to repeal the law last week. But as Democrats slammed the ban — which allows only an exception to save the life of the mother, and says doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines and prison terms of two to five years — Republican leaders including Trump and Kari Lake, the Senate candidate and close Trump ally, said the court had overreached and urged the Legislature to act quickly. Lake, facing a competitive race in November, dialed lawmakers herself and asked how she could help with the repeal effort. NEW YORK TIMES
Barr says he will support the Republican ticket
Former attorney general William P. Barr effectively endorsed former president Donald Trump on Wednesday, despite having previously criticized Trump’s conduct while in office and once comparing him to a “defiant, 9-year-old kid.”
Asked Wednesday whether he would vote for Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, in November, Barr told Fox News that he would vote for the Republican ticket.
“I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket,” said Barr, who remains a Republican. “I’ll support the Republican ticket.”
Barr served as US attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020, resigning from Trump’s Cabinet on Dec. 14, 2020, after publicly disputing the former president’s claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump would later claim he had demanded Barr’s resignation.
Barr also later cooperated with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and defended special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump as a “legitimate case.”
In his 2022 memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Barr wrote about how his relationship with Trump had soured, citing how Trump and his legal team — including Barr’s nemesis, Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — pushed absurd claims of mass voter fraud.
“His legal team had a difficult case to make, and they made it as badly and unprofessionally as I could have imagined,” Barr wrote. “It was all a grotesque embarrassment.”
Trump in turn has castigated Barr, calling his former attorney general a “coward” and vowing that, if reelected, he would not make Barr attorney general again.
Barr refused to endorse Trump in the Republican presidential primary, comparing voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country.” WASHINGTON POST
New Biden ad highlights ties to organized labor
SCRANTON, Pa. — As President Biden tours Pennsylvania, his campaign will run a new ad promoting his commitment to organized labor and attacking the economic policies of former president Donald Trump.
The ad features JoJo Burgess, who is a steelworker and the mayor of Washington, Pa., a small town southwest of Pittsburgh. Biden spoke Wednesday at the headquarters of the United Steelworkers union in Pittsburgh,
where he called on his trade representative to increase some tariffs on steel and aluminum products from China.
“Donald Trump has shown through his history that workers mean nothing to him,” Burgess says in the ad, a minutelong spot. “Right now, we have the most pro-American worker president in office that we’ve ever had in our history.”
The Biden campaign said it was spending in the “mid-six figures” to push the message across television and digital platforms in Pennsylvania, separate from a $30 million ad campaign across the major battleground states. It hopes the ad will complement news media coverage of Biden’s threeday Pennsylvania visit, which is set to conclude Thursday in Philadelphia. Winning the state, where he narrowly defeated Trump in 2020, is crucial to his reelection strategy.
The new ad amplifies the argument that Biden is pursuing against Trump on the economy, accusing the former president of siding with billionaires over workers. In a speech laying out his tax policy Tuesday in Scranton, his hometown, Biden laid into Trump.
“He learned the best way to get rich is to inherit it,” Biden said of his rival. NEW YORK TIMES
At fund-raiser, Trump blasts wind power
Former president Donald Trump repeatedly ranted about wind power during a fund-raising dinner with oil and gas industry executives last week, claiming that the renewable-energy source is unreliable, unattractive, and bad for the environment.
“I hate wind,” Trump told the executives over a meal of chopped steak at his Mar-a-Lago Club and resort in Florida, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Trump’s comments reveal how he is wooing potential donors with his longstanding hostility to wind farms and pledges to halt this form of renewable energy if he returns to office. His stance poses a potential threat to one of the linchpins of America’s clean-energy transition, according to more than a dozen Trump allies, energy experts and offshore wind industry officials.
Even if President Biden were to win reelection, experts say, opponents of offshore wind will remain emboldened by Trump’s stance and well positioned to challenge a new generation of projects in federal waters.
And if Trump were to return to the White House?
“If I were in the offshore wind industry, I would probably be pretty, pretty nervous,” said a former Trump administration energy official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. WASHINGTON POST