Texas Legislature Sends GOP-Backed Election Bill to Gov. Abbott's Desk
The Texas state legislature approved a Republican voting bill Tuesday that looks to protect the integrity of elections in the state, sending the legislation to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to be signed into law.
Senate Bill 1 passed through the Texas Senate in a 18 to 13 vote, with zero Democrats voting in favor. Last week, the state House approved the legislation with a vote of 80 to 41.
"Protecting the integrity of our elections is critical in the state of Texas, which is why I made election integrity an emergency item during the 87th Legislative Session," Abbott said in a statement following the bill's passage. "I thank Senator Brian Hughes, Representative Andrew Murr, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Speaker Dade Phelan for stepping up to ensure that this bill made it to the finish line during the second special session."
Abbott lauded the approval of the legislation and indicated that he will sign it once it reaches his desk.
"Senate Bill 1 will solidify trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections by making it easier to vote and harder to cheat," Abbott said. "I look forward to signing Senate Bill 1 into law, ensuring election integrity in Texas."
The bill will expand voting hours, increase voting access for registered voters needing assistance, bans drive-through voting and allows poll watchers to have increased access to additional aspects of the election process.
The legislation will also prohibit the distribution of mail-in ballots to people who did not request one and will require those who do request one to provide their drivers license number or the last four digits of their social security number.
SB1 is a compromise between two separate versions of the GOP-backed election bill that passed the state Senate and House earlier this month. In a party-line approval, seven Republican members of a bicameral conference committee signed onto the compromise while the committee’s three Democrats did not.
The passage of the bill comes after Abbott resorted to calling multiple special sessions after House Democrats looked to delay the bill's passage by walking out of the initial legislative session in May, and then departing from the state for Washington, D.C. during July's special session. Both efforts aimed to temporarily deny Republicans the quorum needed to pass the legislation while Democrats in the nation's capital pushed for federal election reform.
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Taliban Takeover Bodes Return to Dark Ages for Afghan Women
The Taliban is trying to persuade the rest of the world that it will respect human rights, including women’s. But the women of Afghanistan aren’t buying this for a second, and neither should the rest of the world.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid recently warned women to stay inside their homes, saying, “We are worried our forces who are new and have not been yet trained very well may mistreat women.” Some Afghan women fear that the supposedly temporary measure of keeping women indoors will remain in place.
This comes after Mujahid promised last week that women “will be given all their rights within Shariah, the Islamic laws.” However, it’s wrong to put qualifiers on human rights. If Afghan women’s equality is based on the Taliban’s interpretation of Shariah law, then they are not truly equal at all. The women who remember life under the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 know this better than anyone.
Previously under Taliban rule, women could not work outside the home in most instances, leave the house without a male guardian, or receive a proper education. This is a reality that Afghan women don’t want to revert to.
After the Taliban was defeated in 2001, Afghan women began a long struggle for basic freedoms and opportunities. Trailblazing women entered and succeeded in many sectors of Afghan society. They went to college, started businesses, and thrived when given the opportunity.
But the effects of Taliban rule were long-lasting, and the journey for women’s rights in Afghanistan over the past 20 years was difficult and still a work in progress in the male-dominated culture. Now, women fear a return to the way they were forced to live in the 1990s.
Many young women, especially those living in urban areas and who were too young to remember the previous Taliban rule, grew up with the expectation of receiving an education and having the opportunity for a career. When Afghanistan quickly fell to the Taliban, these women’s dreams were crushed.
Some who used to work outside the home now fear they will be punished for it. Author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon reported that a young woman who visited a makeshift camp in Kabul filled with families who fled Taliban fighters in northern Afghanistan said, “Girls who had duty out of house [are] in greater risk, because [the Taliban] recognized them, and then they punish, they ask, ‘You are Muslim. Why are you working out of you[r] home?’”
Niloofar Rahmani, the first female Afghan air force pilot, worries that the Taliban might harm women who served in the Afghan air force as retribution. She has been a Taliban target herself. “They wanted to kill me just for what I have done, so I know what [Afghan women] are going through.”
Afghan women might lose the opportunity to have a career and even have a basic education.
Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, spoke with a room full of Afghan women on Aug. 10. She said, “The Taliban talks about how it’s changed now, and girls can go to school, but I asked if any of these girls will be going to school, and I was told, ‘Absolutely not. Girls don’t go to school.’ When pressed about why they would not be going to school, the women replied that the ‘Taliban says it’s bad.’”
Worst of all, some Afghans who fled into Kabul from Taliban-held areas prior to the group’s takeover of the city claimed that Taliban fighters were demanding that communities surrender their unmarried women to become wives for fighters, essentially treating these women as sex slaves. This is a terrifying possibility for any family.
It remains to be seen what life will look like exactly for Afghan women and girls under the Taliban in the coming months. Yet, many are scared and are facing an unimaginable future. Careers will be destroyed, young women’s safety is at risk, and hope for young girls’ futures is diminishing.
U.S. leaders and intelligence officials knew how bad the Taliban would be, especially for women. When President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, knowing what the consequences would be, was he also giving up on women’s rights in Afghanistan? Afghan women have just been sent back in time 20 years, and they have a long road ahead of them to reclaim their basic freedoms once again.
Every single woman in Afghanistan is created in the image of God, possesses inherent human dignity, and deserves to be treated with respect and honor. Pray that they will be.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/27/taliban-takeover-bodes-return-to-dark-ages-for-afghan-women
***********************************************Abortion will effectively be banned in Texas if ‘sue thy neighbor’ law is allowed to take effect
SB8 effectively puts a $10,000 “bounty” on the head of abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion past roughly six weeks’ gestation, by allowing private citizens to sue those who “aid and abet” women in exercising this constitutional right.
Opponents have warned the law could also provide a backdoor to attack other controversial civil rights, such as gun rights or free speech.
“The law is really unprecedented in the sense that it bans abortion, but then has no government criminal penalties to enforce the law,” said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, and an attorney representing a group of plaintiffs who have sued to stop the law from going into effect.
“It authorizes anyone in the country to file a lawsuit against any abortion provider, or anyone who helps someone get an abortion, and seek a penalty of that person of at least $10,000 per abortion,” said Amiri.
Abortion became legal across the United States following the 1973 supreme court decision Roe v Wade. The decision provided women a constitutional right to abortion up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks. A full-term pregnancy is 39 weeks.
However, that right has been under assault by state legislators for decades, and incursions on abortion rights became particularly aggressive after Tea Party Republicans helped win control of state legislatures in 2011.
In addition to a $10,000 penalty, SB8 would saddle violators of the law with their opponents’ attorneys fees. It provides no such relief for defendants, even if they win. The result would be crushing legal expenses and duplicative lawsuits that would in effect end abortion access in Texas.
Proponents of the law – including a self-described virgin and traveling preacher, and a well-heeled former Texas solicitor general – have already found success in the strategy. In Lubbock, Texas, a similar law was passed via referendum and has forced a Planned Parenthood in the city of 253,000 to stop providing abortions while it fights the case in federal court.
The new law, called “heinous” and the “sue thy neighbor” law by opponents, is part of a three-prong strategy to end abortion in Texas, including a separate ban on the most common surgical abortion procedure after 15 weeks’ gestation, and a third campaign to outlaw medication abortion after seven weeks’ gestation.
“Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, said at a signing ceremony, the Texas Tribune reported in May. Abbott had in effect banned abortion for one month in April 2020 by arguing it was not “immediately medically necessary” because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lawyers representing 20 abortion providers are hopeful they will prevail. However, a reprieve in the form of an injunction could come just hours before the law goes into effect, and any delay holds the potential to throw abortion access in Texas into chaos.
“It’s astounding, because what it is doing is deputizing private citizens to become prosecutors in a way,” said Nina Ginsberg, a criminal defense attorney who recently examined how states have built a criminal framework to prosecute abortion should Roe v Wade be overturned, in a report for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Should SB8 succeed, it would ban about 85% of abortions, since most women do not know they are pregnant at six weeks. Although proponents describe SB8 as a “fetal heartbeat” bill, the term can be misleading because, though embryos have cardiac activity at this stage, they do not have functioning hearts.
SB8’s provisions, which allow anyone, anywhere, unconnected to an event to sue, make it highly unusual both as an abortion law and in terms of civil litigation broadly. It would essentially upend the way civil courts consider “standing”, the concept that people must be sued where they live or work and by plaintiffs who have been harmed in some way.
The law is so broad and unconventional that more than 370 Texas lawyers, former judges, legal professors and local officials signed an open letter opposing it.
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Attorney General Dave Yost Joins Lawsuit Against Biden Admin, Pushes Back Against Federal Overreach in Schools
Columbus, OH—Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has joined with 19 other State Attorneys General in suing the Biden Administration’s Department of Education decision to require all public schools to allow boys in girls' restrooms, locker rooms, and athletics.
The Biden administration is threatening to remove schools’ federal funds if they protect the privacy and safety of girls, and if schools don’t force students to use “preferred pronouns.”
The lawsuit challenges the Biden administration’s sweeping use of executive authority to implement this policy.
“The Biden administration continues to abuse executive authority to enforce a dangerous and radical ideology on children. The president knows this kind of attack on the privacy and safety of girls could never pass Congress, so he’s taken matters into his own hands by issuing a sweeping order that will harm countless children,” said Center for Christian Virtue (CCV) President Aaron Baer.
“CCV and families across Ohio are grateful to have a leader like Attorney General Yost willing to say, 'Enough is enough,' and to fight for our children and the Constitution in court. Attorney General Dave Yost has consistently stood up for the rule of law and for families. "
Email from CCV. info@ccv.org
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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