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THOUGH SUPREME COURT JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER HAS NOT YET LEFT his seat on the nation’s highest tribunal, the Senate appears to be on a fast track to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to take his place.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) – to no one’s surprise, considering her political dependence on the abortion cartel – became the first Republican Senator to announce last week she will vote to confirm the radical nominee.

If, at the time our readers receive this Life Advocacy Briefing, the Senate has not yet voted, our readers are encouraged to contact their home-state Senators and urge rejection of Judge Jackson – at least until she musters an intelligent (or even intelligible) answer to the questions Senators have directed to her. [Capitol switchboard: 1-202/224-3121] Readers are encouraged also to pay careful attention to the commentary we are publishing at the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing and to make a further call to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell to request him to exercise party discipline on the Jackson nomination, if for no other reason than to avert shame on any Senator in his party delegation.

Stateside

• CONNECTICUT POLITICIANS ARE UNDERMINING MEDICAL STANDARDS in their state as an obviously hysterical response to the shrinking pool of abortionists. Fashioning their bill as “Increasing Access to Reproductive Health Care,” lawmakers have filed HB-5261 to allow Advanced Practice Registered Nurses and nurse midwives to commit abortions, apparently without the supervision of a licensed physician. A report on “the state of abortion in Connecticut,” reports Bridget Sielicki for Live Action News, “states that there was a 32% decline in abortions between 2010 and 2019,” and, she notes, “Planned Parenthood Southern New England has had to close one-third of its abortion facilities within the state.” Cause for celebration, not desperation!

• EXPANSION OF THE ABORTIONIST ‘PROFESSION’ to include nurse and midwives and physician assistants has passed both houses of the MARYLAND legislature and needs only to be revisited in the original chamber before being sent to Gov. Larry Hogan. Gov. Hogan is a maverick Republican, whose intention is unpredictable; calls to him from Maryland voters are much in order; a contact number listed for his office via the Internet is 1-800-811-8336. The bill is labeled HB-937 or SB-890, “Abortion Care Access Act.”

• AT LEAST TWO STATES – CALIFORNIA & MARYLAND – have been considering the most extreme abortion legislation we’ve seen yet: proposing to allow “babies to be left to die for as long as the first 28 days after birth.” In MARYLAND, the lower legislative house passed HB-1171, titled, notes Doug Mainwaring for LifeSiteNews.com, “a ‘Declaration of Rights – Right to Reproductive Liberty,’ but Senate President Bill Ferguson is, so far, holding the bill. It would place a proposition on November’s ballot, reports LSN, “asking voters whether the right to abortion should be enshrined in the Maryland Constitution.” In CALIFORNIA, a shell bill, AB-2223, is being amended to provide, notes Ashley Sadler for LSN, “a ‘person shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability or penalty, or otherwise deprived of their rights, based on their actions or omissions with respect to their pregnancy or actual, potential or alleged pregnancy outcome, including miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion, or perinatal death.’ Thomas More Society special counsel Charles LiMandri … told LifeSiteNews in an email [March 26] that … ‘by including “perinatal” in its provisions, [the bill] would authorize the brutal murder of these infants even after they are born.’” The pro-life attorney asserted in the LSN report, “the radical proposal ‘is beyond the pale for any civilized society to even consider and must be aggressively opposed by all people of conscience who value human life.’”

Sen. McConnell Sounds a Warning

March 30, 2022, Senate Floor remarks by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), reprinted from a release by his press office

             Judicial independence is essential to our Republic. It’s integral to the rule of law. And for the most part, since the Democratic Party’s last run at partisan Court-packing in the 1930s, both parties have respected it. But lately, Washington Democrats have gone off the rails.

             In 2019, Democratic Senators tried to openly bully the Supreme Court into a certain outcome. They wrote a threatening amicus brief saying the Court had better “heal itself.”

             In 2020, the Democratic Leader himself stood on the steps of the Supreme Court and threatened multiple sitting Justices by name if they didn’t reach the policy outcome that liberals wanted.

             In 2021, President Biden assisted the delegitimizing campaign by constructing a pseudo-academic commission to ponder ideas like partisan Court-packing and unconstitutional term limits.

             Far-left activist groups mounted a public pressure campaign to push Justice Breyer to retire.

             Just last week, the number-two Senate Democrat – our colleague from Illinois [Sen. Durbin] – claimed that the primary safeguard against partisan Court-packing is the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. That was a very revealing comment, considering that Senator Durbin and the vast majority of his fellow Democrats just tried to destroy that very threshold a couple months back.

             And now, in the last few days, the latest chapter. The Left’s quest to delegitimize the Supreme Court found its latest outlet. This time, it’s a coordinated effort to nullify the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the Court. The far Left wants another crack at what they tried and failed to do in 1991. Washington Democrats are now trying to bully this exemplary judge of 30-plus years out of entire legal subjects, or off the Court entirely.

             Far-left House members are talking about dusting off their party’s impeachment addiction for a third consecutive year. They’re boasting about how they’ve successfully bullied their senior leadership into impeachment in the past.

             Make no mistake. This performative outrage is not in earnest. This is a political hit, part of liberals’ years-long quest to delegitimize the Court. All because our laws and Constitution occasionally inconvenience Democrats’ radical agenda.

             This isn’t new. It’s a tired old tactic. In recent years, the far Left has issued near-constant demands for the late Justice Scalia, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Barrett to recuse themselves from various issues where the far Left feared they might not like a certain ruling. All based on spurious accusations about fake ethical problems or partiality.

             This new inappropriate pressure campaign is just a continuation of this well-worn pattern. It has no basis in Justice Thomas’s decades of impeccable service on the bench. The Justice and the entire Court should feel free to ignore it.

             Justice Clarence Thomas is a great American and an outstanding Justice. He is faithful to the text of our laws and Constitution. His writing is clear. His reasoning is rigorous and transparent. I have total confidence in Justice Thomas’s impartiality in every aspect of the work of the Court.

             Each of the nine Justices should feel free to make every single judicial decision they make with total independence and complete freedom. What cases they hear; how they hear them; how they rule; whether and when they recuse themselves; and whether and when they retire —these are all judicial decisions. All nine Justices deserve total independence as they approach every judicial decision they make.

             This clumsy bullying from the political branches is beyond the pale.

             Justice Thomas is an exemplary jurist who has modeled fidelity to the rule of law for more than 30 years and counting. I hope none of the Justices give any of the radical Left’s various pressure campaigns a minute’s thought.

Just When You Thought They Couldn’t Get Worse

March 29, 2022, Washington Update by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins

             A party that can’t even define the word “woman” would have a field day with “human rights.” That’s what [Sen.] Rand Paul (R-KY) has been warning people since the latest Russian sanctions bill flew through the House and landed at the Senate’s door. Just because Congress wants to help Ukraine stop the senseless killing doesn’t mean it should open the door to senseless killing of another kind: abortion.

             “Somebody ought to read the bills, don’t you think?” the Kentucky conservative fired back when reporters hounded him for holding up the vote. “If you don’t define what human rights abuses are, you set up something so wide open that … a President [could] sanction anyone in the world for anything they feel like,” Paul argued.

             While everyone agrees it’s time to put tighter sanctions on Vladimir Putin for the war in Ukraine, Paul’s beef is with the way the policy to punish Russia is being rewritten, the Global Magnitsky Act. Back when the late John McCain was alive, it was one of those rare pieces of legislation that people on both sides of the aisle supported. Under the original language, Congress used it to target “gross” violations of human rights – obvious crimes like torture or inhumane treatment.

             But in the race to punish Putin, Democrats have managed to sneak a single word into the reauthorization that could change the global landscape on Life – forever. In their latest version of the Magnitsky Act, Pres. Joe Biden’s party wants to broaden the definition from “gross” violations of human rights to “serious” violations – opening the door, many conservatives worry, for radical Democrats to abuse the policy.

             If a country promotes life by restricting abortion, for example, is that a “serious” violation of human rights? A party that calls “reproductive health” a basic human right would say so. What about a nation that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage or embrace the fantasy of transgenderism? Under a President who’s decided “transgender rights are human rights,” Rand Paul’s objections are more than valid. And yet, some senators are in such a hurry to get these sanctions out the door that they seem willing to sign over this expanded power to Biden.

             “We’ve just told them they need to put the definition in there of what a human rights abuse is,” Paul insisted to his impatient colleagues. “But we won’t let them pass it unless they put it in there – so they’re either going to put it in there or they’re going to be here for a week doing it.” Other senators are just as worked up about where this reauthorization could lead, offering every kind of fix – from Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) stand-alone bill with the original language to Mike Lee’s (R-UT) amendment.

             As everyone should know by now, the GOP’s concern (shared by eight House Republicans who voted against the bill) isn’t hypothetical. Language is one of the most powerful weapons in the Left’s political toolbox. Just this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) unleashed a 210-page set of guidelines that calls abortion for any reason – right up until the moment of birth – an international human right. “The WHO document recommends ‘full decriminalization of abortion’ and the scrapping of laws and regulations that ‘prohibit abortion based on gestational limits’ and ‘restrict abortion’ on any grounds.”

             In other words, if you’re a pro-life nation – or you try to limit abortion in any way – you’re violating human rights, WHO says. “[That’s not] where the rest of the world is,” Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch explained on Washington Watch. In our new report comparing abortion laws around the world, we found that more than half of all nations protect life in all cases or with a handful of specific exceptions like rape, incest and fetal anomaly. “What this tells us [is] that over 50% of countries are actually protecting unborn children. And only three percent of countries allow the kind of tragedy, the exploitation of the unborn child in the womb, the destruction of life in the same manner as the World Health Organization is promoting. And those countries, of course, include North Korea, China and the United States.”

             And in case Covid didn’t prove it, WHO could care less about people’s health, arguing that the gestational age limits shouldn’t matter for the mother. “That’s just false,” [Ms.] Szoch pushed back. “We know that early second-trimester abortions have a 15-times higher mortality rate than early abortions. We know that abortions after the point of viability have a 76-times greater mortality rate than early abortions. So, what the World Health Organization is promoting is abortions that will result in not just the death of an unborn child, but the death of many more mothers as well.” Science has made it abundantly clear that abortion is dangerous for women – but, like the other inconvenient truths that hurt their narrative, the Left is sweeping that under the rug.

             Meanwhile, unlimited abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy isn’t even what Americans want. It’s the extremist view. Only a handful – six percent – agree with WHO and fringe Democrats that you should be able to take a baby’s life seconds away from birth. And yet, our State Department under the Biden Administration would almost certainly use WHO’s guidelines to twist the arms of other governments – or go so far as to link our overseas funding to these policies, like we witnessed from Barack Obama.

             Back then, foreign officials complained about the bullying of the State Department, who wanted to link US aid to their governments’ views on social issues. Now, Democrats are poised to do it again by lowering the bar on what a human rights violation actually means. It’s time for the Left to abandon this stalking horse – or else the protection of real human rights, like life and liberty, will continue to suffer.

What a Farce!

March 25, 2022, Commentary by Calvin Freiburger for LifeSiteNews

             Were the United States Senate a serious institution, the past few days’ worth of confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would have been more than enough to get her nomination withdrawn in favor of someone remotely fit to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Sadly, seriousness is not a concept the nation’s capital understands.

             So far, Jackson has disqualified herself on at least two major grounds, the first being her record of relatively light sentencing for possession of child pornography. National Review’s Andy McCarthy has gone out on a limb to defend Jackson on this point, arguing that the sentences she handed down in representative cases were well within the range of what prosecutors and/or the US Probation Dept. had asked for.

             McCarthy’s argument might have been persuasive … until Jackson opened her mouth and suggested that the ease with which images of tormented and degraded children can be acquired ought to somehow mitigate the penalties for acquiring them. That, combined with a 1996 Harvard Law Review article in which she argued that community notification of the presence of registered sex offenders in a neighborhood “subjects ex-convicts to stigmatization and ostracism, and puts them at the mercy of a public that is outraged by sex crimes,” indicates that Jackson’s record on the issue runs deeper than some unfortunate legal technicalities.

             The second is Jackson’s refusal to answer incredibly simple questions, from claiming not to know when life begins to claiming she can’t define “woman” because “I’m not a biologist.” If we took her responses at face value, they would mean that she’s too scandalously ignorant to preside over traffic court, let alone the Supreme Court.

             It’s much more likely, however, that Jackson does know the correct answer to both questions but is pretending not to because the correct answers are inconvenient to her ideological fellow travelers. Simply put, leftist dogma’s dominant legal and biological fictions require her to play dumb, so she’s happy to do so. After all, the only politicians, jurists, academics and journalists whose approval she needs and respect she desires are all in on the same jokes, so it’s not as if the farce will hurt her in their eyes.

             But for any Senators who take their jobs seriously, they should have already seen enough. If a judge is willing to go this far to deny simple, incontrovertible facts for the sake of ideology, no more inquiry is necessary to conclude she would treat legal texts, statutory history and authorial intent with similar abandon.

             Again, however, the Senate is not a serious institution. Given its narrow Democrat control, it is virtually guaranteed that Jackson will be confirmed, meaning that conservatives should focus our efforts on the two things we can influence: First, by demanding that Republicans lay down the law for their squishier Senators that there will be consequences for anyone who crosses the aisle and gives Democrats the ability to call Jackson’s confirmation “bipartisan” (we’re looking at you, Mitt Romney).

             Second, conservatives and Republicans need to mount a full-court press to publicly brand Jackson as an unfit extremist, any majority opinions to which she contributes as suspect, and Joe Biden and the Democrats as having abused their duty to the Constitution by putting yet another left-wing activist on the nation’s highest court. Alas, Washington, DC’s seriousness deficit is by no means confined to the Democrat Party, so how much of the above the GOP will do remains a very open question.