I don't want to start a new thread on this but have seen little discussion of this. That Paxton and Abbott are considering parents who help their children transition are being investigate for child abuse is not only a dangerous misuse of the resources but makes a mockery of the what many recent Conservatives say, that they are for parental rights. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/texas-transgender-child-abuse.html Texas Court Halts Abuse Inquiries Into Parents of Transgender Children A judge said the governor’s order to consider medically accepted treatments for transgender youth as abuse had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution. HOUSTON — Investigations of parents with transgender children for possible child abuse were temporarily halted across Texas on Friday after a state court ruled that the policy, ordered last month by Gov. Greg Abbott, had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution. The injunction, issued by Judge Amy Clark Meachum in Travis County, stemmed from a legal challenge by the parents of a 16-year-old transgender girl. Her family was among the first to be investigated by the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services under Mr. Abbott’s order, which directed state officials to consider medically accepted treatments for transgender youth — including hormones and puberty-suppressing drugs — as abuse. In issuing the ruling, which came after a day of testimony, Judge Meachum said the governor’s actions, and those of the agency, “violate separation of powers by impermissibly encroaching into the legislative domain.” She said there was a “substantial likelihood” that plaintiffs would prevail after a trial on the merits because the governor’s order was “unconstitutional.” The ruling applied to all investigations initiated across Texas under Mr. Abbott’s order, which the court said could no longer be enforced pending a trial on the issue, set for July. Though it was not clear how many inquiries had already been initiated, several parents of transgender children had come forward in recent weeks to say they had been contacted by officials from the state agency about the treatment their children had received. A spokeswoman for the department did not respond to a request for comment. Judge Meachum last week temporarily halted the investigation of the family, which was named only as John, Jane and Mary Doe in court papers, but had left the question of the policy’s broader legality open until the hearing. “The judge understood loud and clear the harms being experienced by families like Jane Doe’s,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, which represented the plaintiffs along with the American Civil Liberties Union. “She heard also loud and clear that this was an unauthorized action by the governor,” she added, “unilaterally changing the way that child abuse is interpreted.” The state immediately appealed the decision. Friday’s hearing brought out new facts about how investigations had been conducted since Mr. Abbott’s order in late February. An investigations supervisor at the Department of Family and Protective Services testified that after the governor’s order, abuse investigators had been told to prioritize cases involving the parents of transgender children and to investigate them without exception. The supervisor, Randa Mulanax, said the agency’s investigators were not given the freedom to determine that a given report involving a transgender child was likely not in fact a case of child abuse — known as “priority none” status — and she said investigators were not able to close the cases. “I’ve been told about that directly,” said Ms. Mulanax, who has submitted her resignation to the department. “You cannot priority-none these cases.” Ms. Mulanax’s testimony came at the start of the Friday hearing over whether investigations into families with transgender children should be halted statewide. The abuse investigations had represented a victory for conservative groups and activists who have engaged in a new round of action in state capitals aimed at transgender Americans. Mr. Abbott’s order — the first of its kind, according to transgender advocates — had placed medical providers and families of transgender children in the sudden position of fearing state investigations and possible criminal penalties for providing what is seen as medically accepted treatment. There has been “outright panic,” Dr. Megan Mooney, a licensed psychologist whose clients include transgender children, testified on Friday. Dr. Mooney, who is required to report suspected child abuse under Texas law, is also a plaintiff in the case. “It puts medical professionals I work with in a horrible position,” she said of the order. At least one major hospital, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, has restricted its care for transgender children. The hearing took place on the same day that more than 60 major businesses, including Johnson & Johnson, Google and Levi Strauss & Co., began an advertising campaign in Texas protesting Mr. Abbott’s order and the abuse investigations. The case began with the challenge last week by the 16-year-old transgender girl and her parents. The teenager’s mother, an employee of the state’s family protective agency, has remained anonymous in court filings. Wearing a wig and glasses, the mother testified on Friday about the details of the investigation into her family and its emotional toll. Her testimony, unlike that of the other witnesses, was not shown on the video stream of the hearing. In a declaration filed with the suit, Ms. Doe said that she was “terrified” for her daughter’s health and well-being, and that she felt “betrayed by my state and the agency for whom I work.” The plaintiffs in the case sought a statewide injunction, arguing that the governor’s order violated the State Constitution, as well as the rights of the parents and their transgender children. Ms. Mulanax, a witness for the plaintiffs, described a virtual meeting of senior leaders last month in which they discussed the handling of investigations under the governor’s order, which was issued on Feb. 22. She said she and others were told not to put information about the cases in email or text messages — instructions that she said were highly unusual in her years of experience at the agency. “Have you ever been told not to put information on cases in writing?” asked Brian Klosterboer, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. “No,” she said. “What did you make of the instruction to not put anything in writing?” “It was very unethical,” Ms. Mulanax said. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has struggled for years to care for children in its foster care system and to conduct investigations into child abuse. The agency has been the subject of a decade-old federal lawsuit over its foster care system, in which children faced abuse as well as long waits to be adopted or placed in safer homes. Federal monitors have been overseeing the process of carrying out judicial orders since 2019, among them a directive to improve the handling and investigation of reported child abuse. A federal court held an emergency hearing on Thursday, unrelated to the fight over transgender children, regarding a report of sex trafficking, abuse and neglect of children at a foster care facility in Bastrop that is under contract to the state. Mr. Abbott called the report “abhorrent” in a statement, and said that “child abuse of any kind won’t be tolerated in the state of Texas.” But the bounds of what constitutes child abuse was the question being wrestled with at the hearing on Friday in front of Judge Meachum. Ms. Mulanax, the state investigations supervisor, said that she disagreed with the governor’s order and with her agency’s response to it, and that she had decided to resign because of it. “I have always felt that the department has the children’s best interest at heart,” she said. “I no longer feel that way with this order.” Reports of parents possibly providing puberty-blockers, hormones or other medically accepted treatments to their transgender children were being handled differently from other reports of child abuse, she testified. “These are not being treated the same,” Ms. Mulanax said during the hearing. “We had to be investigating these cases.” A spokeswoman for the agency did not respond to a request for comment about Ms. Mulanax’s testimony. During cross-examination, a lawyer for the state said that Ms. Mulanax’s job at the agency was to apply the law regarding child abuse, which the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, had determined in a nonbinding legal opinion included medical treatments for transgender youth. The state’s lawyer, Courtney Corbello, asked whether any major steps had been taken as a result of the investigations into parents of transgender children. She asked whether any children had been taken away from their parents. “To my knowledge, no,” Ms. Mulanax responded. Had a child been taken off medication prescribed by a doctor? “I’m not aware of that,” she said. The state did not present witnesses or evidence of its own during the hearing.
Also the TX Supreme Court has shut down the last lawsuit in TX against the bounty abortion law. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/texas-abortion-law.html Texas Supreme Court Shuts Down Final Challenge to Abortion Law The ruling says state officials have no authority to enforce the law, which empowers private citizens: “We cannot rewrite the statute.” The Texas Supreme Court on Friday effectively shut down a federal challenge to the state’s novel and controversial ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, closing off what abortion rights advocates said was their last, narrow path to blocking the new law. The decision was the latest in a line of blows to the constitutional right to abortion that has prevailed for five decades. The Texas law, which several states are attempting to copy, puts enforcement in the hands of civilians. It offers the prospect of $10,000 rewards for successful lawsuits against anyone — from an Uber driver to a doctor — who “aids or abets” a woman who gets an abortion once fetal cardiac activity can be detected. It is the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, and flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning the procedure before a fetus is viable outside the womb, which is currently about 23 weeks of pregnancy. By empowering everyday people and expressly banning enforcement by state officials, the law, known as S.B. 8, was designed to escape judicial review in federal court. Advocates of abortion rights had asked the Supreme Court to block it even before it took effect last September. The justices repeatedly declined, and said that because state officials were not responsible for enforcing the law it could not be challenged in federal court based on the constitutional protections established by Roe. But the Supreme Court left open the smallest of windows, saying in December that opponents of the law could file suit against Texas medical licensing officials, who might discipline abortion providers who violate the law. On Friday, the justices of the Texas Supreme Court, all Republicans, said that those officials did not, in fact, have any power to enforce the law, “either directly or indirectly,” and so could not be sued. The justices said the law had effectively tied their hands. They agreed that the state’s licensing officials had the authority to discipline providers for violating other abortion restrictions. “But we conclude that the Heartbeat Act expressly provides otherwise,” the court said, using the title of S.B. 8. “The act’s emphatic, unambiguous and repeated provisions” declare that a private civil action is the “exclusive” method for enforcing the law, the justices wrote. They added, “These provisions deprive the state-agency executives of any authority they might otherwise have to enforce the requirements through a disciplinary action.” “We cannot rewrite the statute,” the justices wrote. “With this ruling, the sliver of this case that we were left with is gone,” said Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, declared it a “major victory.” “This measure, which has saved thousands of unborn babies, remains fully in effect, and the pro-abortion plaintiffs’ lawsuit against the state is essentially finished,” he wrote on Twitter. Abortion rights supporters and legal scholars said the Texas law would encourage other states not only to pass similar bans on abortion, but to attempt to nullify other precedents they oppose. The law allows no exceptions for abortion even in the case of women who have been raped or are victims of incest. It has thrown Texas abortion providers into crisis, and similar legislation is pending around the country. The Supreme Court is considering a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and in oral arguments in December, the six conservative justices on the court appeared inclined to uphold that law. Several justices indicated that they would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade outright, as Mississippi has asked. And lawyers for abortion rights groups argued that even if the court only upholds the Mississippi law, it would effectively overturn Roe because of its central holding on viability. Already, state legislatures are advancing bans on abortion as if Roe were overturned. Some have passed outright bans on abortion that are to take effect immediately if the court rules to overturn Roe even “in part,” and others have prepared to ban the procedure at six, 10, 12 and 15 weeks. Legal experts said the court’s decision on Friday would further embolden states to enact aggressive measures to restrict abortions. “The combination of the U.S. Supreme Court and Texas Supreme Court rulings on this unique law means that other states are going to see this as a way to insulate their own laws from judicial review,” said David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. The innovations of the Texas law — its civilian enforcement and bounty system — could be adapted to shield other kinds of laws, including ones making it a crime to travel to another state for an abortion or to obtain abortion drugs in the mail, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and historian at Florida State University. Tennessee lawmakers have proposed a bill allowing civilian enforcement of a ban on the delivery of abortion pills. “If conservative states want to do things that may not look constitutional even to this Supreme Court, they can use a bounty system to achieve that,” Professor Ziegler said. “The message sent by the Texas litigation was that if you have concerns that you might lose a constitutional challenge, that shouldn’t hold you back. Because you can use this road map to keep the case out of federal court entirely.” Kimberlyn Schwartz, a spokeswoman for Texas Right to Life, said abortion opponents believed they were seeing real gains after decades of chipping away at the constitutional right to an abortion. “We’ve known that this lawsuit all along was just invalid and should have been dismissed, and now the fact that we’re on that trajectory now is encouraging,” Ms. Schwartz said, adding that the movement “is not going to let our foot off the gas yet.” Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, the clinic that sued to stop S.B. 8, said “the courts have failed us.” “This ban does not change the need for abortion in Texas, it just blocks people from accessing the care they need,” she said. “The situation is becoming increasingly dire,” she said, as the surrounding states pass their own restrictions. Data released in February shows that the Texas law cut the number of abortions in the state by 60 percent. Planned Parenthood clinics in neighboring states have reported an 800 percent increase in women seeking abortions. But that avenue, too, is likely to close soon. Many women have traveled to Oklahoma for the procedure, but this week the State Senate passed its own six-week ban modeled on the Texas law. The Idaho Senate passed a similar law last week. Lawmakers in other states have proposed similar bans, but have held off in hopes that the Supreme Court decision, expected in June, will allow them to ban abortion entirely.
The Putin's way, prosecuting and jailing transgenders. This was why a large portion of the GOP like Putin.
Seriously, he might be the most corrupt AG in the country, and he's saying this? Texas doesn't need an AG with a mug shot. Vote him out!
They embarrass us as humans. The reality is that courts are supposed to uphold all laws. Ken Paxton has been under indictment for at least 10 years. He has been the chief law enforcement officer for the State for that entire time. The Abbott/Patrick/Paxton triumvirate is disgusting for Texas. Cruz too. Our State deserves better.
Texas Soldiers Are Unionizing After Facing Attacks by a Right-Wing Governor In Texas, National Guard members faced painful cuts and absurd assignments by Republican governor Greg Abbott. So they did what many exploited workers before them have done: they organized a union. https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/texa...or-greg-abbott-tseu-national-guard-organizing
Do both sides do bad crap? Yes. Is it equal? No Let me know when the leftist Democratic President tries to deny democracy and encourages insurrection.
You're again focusing on Trump which is all the left side goes to. Let me know when I made posts in support of any of that. When you can't you'll fall in the same category as other leftists who can't support their argument and lump everyone as Trump supporters
I'm not talking about who support or don't support. I'm talking about your claim that both sides are the same. They aren't. They both are bad, corrupt, stupid, and subservient to big money. But one side is much worse than the other. It's the side that overwhelmingly supports Trump whether you personally do or don't. Are you aware of Trump's support among Republicans? If you don't like Trump, take it up with Republicans
We’ll see at the polls but it seems there are far more republicans that think the party is headed in the wrong direction. However, a lot of that will be offset by the conspiracy psychos… Really though, are you right dressers on board with the anti globalist, nationalistic ****?
Also the belief among some Republicans that while the party is headed in the wrong direction, they still aren't as bad as the Democrats which are spawned from hell, so they'll vote for the Republicans even though they will publicly declare the party is headed in wrong direction.
