Jimmy Carter turns 99 at home with Rosalynn and other family

ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president broke routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

The gathering took place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. As tributes poured in from around the world, it was an opportunity for Carter’s family to honor his personal legacy.

“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

At The Carter Center in Atlanta, meanwhile, 99 new American citizens, who came from 45 countries, took the oath of allegiance as part of a naturalization ceremony timed for the former president’s birthday.

“This is so impressive, and I’m so happy for it to be here,” said Tania Martinez after the ceremony. A 53-year-old nurse in Roswell, Martinez was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. from Ghana 12 years ago.

“Now, I will be free forever,” she said, tears welling.

Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

“Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said in his video message. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and adjacent Carter Center held a weekend of events, including the citizenship ceremony. The museum offered 99-cent admission Saturday. The commemoration there was able to continue Sunday only because Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

The Center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the Center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”

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Gaming out Matt Gaetz’s bid to oust Kevin McCarthy

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has a big decision to make.

In the run-up to preventing a government shutdown, any questions about what the Democrats would do in the event of a vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker were easily batted aside as too theoretical to entertain.

“We haven’t given any thought to how to handle a hypothetical motion to vacate, because we are entirely focused on making sure that we avoid this extreme MAGA Republican shutdown,” Jeffries said last week.

But avoiding the shutdown has now led directly to a vote on a motion to vacate.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) repeatedly threatened that the passage of a continuing resolution would trigger the introduction of the MTV that he’s had in his back pocket for weeks. After the CR passed yesterday, Gaetz promised that it will happen this week.

“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters defiantly yesterday.

“Kevin McCarthy’s gonna get his wish,” Gaetz responded this morning on ABC’s “This Week.”

POLITICO Playbook spoke with a number of House Democrats this morning about how they will respond. So let’s unpack the politics of this.

Let’s assume Gaetz starts with only a handful of Republicans — perhaps just five, maybe as many as 10 — and that McCarthy has no chance of turning this group around. It’s not much, and that means Gaetz needs Democrats — perhaps as many as 200 — to oust McCarthy. (Ironic considering that his line today was that McCarthy is the Democrats’ speaker.)

The biggest pocket of votes for Gaetz right off the bat will be the Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They hate Gaetz, but more important, it could be suicide for any of the CPC’s 100-plus members to vote to save McCarthy. (And a motion to table Gaetz’s resolution, while not technically a vote for McCarthy, will easily be spun that way.)

Not surprisingly, as POLITICO first reported, CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is one of the first Democrats to whom Gaetz reached out. Right on cue, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a D+28 district in New York, was on CNN this morning saying she would “absolutely” vote to oust McCarthy.

Both Gaetz and some Democrats we’ve talked to today believe it is naïve to assume that some discussion of the motion to vacate didn’t come up in the conversations between McCarthy and Dem leaders that birthed the bipartisan CR vote. Since McCarthy knew that the MTV would follow a CR, it would be unusual if he didn’t have some indication from Dems about their views on the vote that will determine his future. One likely response to nudge McCarthy in their direction surely would have been that there would be nothing to discuss if he shut down the government. But for now, the existence of any kind of backchannel discussions is speculation.

One senior Democratic lawmaker told us this morning that the instructions from leadership to “all Dems” right now is “keeping powder dry.”

While Gaetz might be right that he can get lots of votes from progressives, his only chance after that is if Jeffries himself locks down the caucus in favor of the MTV. But that could take some persuading. For a bloc of moderates — a mix of perhaps 25 to 40 Blue Dogs, Problem Solvers and Democrats in Trump districts — a vote to prove their bipartisan credentials by keeping McCarthy as speaker could be very tempting.

All of this is to say that if Gaetz only has 5-10 Republican votes, McCarthy may have an achievable path to victory.

But that’s also not Gaetz’s only potential move.

If McCarthy survives with the help of Democratic votes, Gaetz will no doubt relentlessly attack him, as he has already, as “the Democrats’ speaker.” The overall effort will have done a lot of damage. What if Gaetz offers a second MTV, as anyone who knows him realizes he surely would, and McCarthy again has to survive with Democratic help? What happens on the second or third vote? Does Gaetz garner more Republican support? Does McCarthy need to find more Democratic support? There’s no limit to how many times Gaetz could do this. Eventually, this would become untenable for McCarthy.

Democrats who take a position on the first MTV will need to consider that they may be locking themselves into a position on a vote that might be repeated.

What might a deal with McCarthy look like from Jeffries’ perspective? It is highly unlikely that Jeffries would ever demand all Democrats vote to save McCarthy; several Dem members told Playbook this morning that was impossible to imagine. But what he could do is decline to lock down the caucus and let Democrats vote their conscience (or their district). That could leave moderates with room to help McCarthy. But surely those individual moderates would also want something from McCarthy. Maybe a promise not to spend NRCC money in their races? There are a lot of ideas floating around out there.

McCarthy has a card to play if he survives the first (or more) attack from Gaetz: He could try to pass a rule that raises the threshold for a motion to vacate from one member, where it is now, to, say, 10 members. How would he get the votes? Perhaps some of the Democrats who cut a deal to save McCarthy agree to vote for this rule as well. That would finally decapitate Gaetz.

Stepping back from the chess game, the big question all Democrats have to answer — and quick — is whether it’s better to have McCarthy as speaker or not.

On the pro-keeping-McCarthy side of the ledger is that he’s the devil they know, and there is nobody better waiting in the wings. By avoiding the government shutdown, he also just showed he can be more responsible than some Democrats had believed. It could also take two weeks for another speaker to emerge from the ashes of the chaos, all while the White House and Democrats are trying to push through aid for Ukraine and fund the government over the next 45 or so days. And if you are at the White House and care about all of this, in addition to the fate of the impeachment inquiry, which Democrats have already raised as an issue in any discussion of helping McCarthy, then McCarthy may be the better bet. This is the institutionalists’ argument.

The other side of the argument is that McCarthy is the GOP’s greatest fundraiser, and getting rid of him would help Democrats take back the House. No replacement for McCarthy would have the same set of relationships and the donor network and political operation. In addition, the argument goes, the GOP chaos in the House would pay political dividends.

One thing is clear: For the 53-year-old Jeffries, this is an unprecedented situation, one that no minority leader has ever faced. He suddenly has enormous leverage, but will have to weigh carefully how aggressively to use it.

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Police chief who led raid of small Kansas newspaper has been suspended

The police chief who led a highly criticized raid of a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended, the mayor confirmed to The Associated Press on Saturday.

Marion Mayor Dave Mayfield in a text said he suspended Chief Gideon Cody on Thursday. He declined to discuss his decision further and did not say whether Cody was still being paid.

Voice messages and emails from the AP seeking comment from Cody’s lawyers were not immediately returned Saturday.

The Aug. 11 searches of the Marion County Record’s office and the homes of its publisher and a City Council member have been sharply criticized, putting Marion at the center of a debate over the press protections offered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Cody’s suspension is a reversal for the mayor, who previously said he would wait for results from a state police investigation before taking action.

Vice-Mayor Ruth Herbel, whose home was also raided Aug. 11, praised Cody’s suspension as “the best thing that can happen to Marion right now” as the central Kansas town of about 1,900 people struggles to move forward under the national spotlight.

“We can’t duck our heads until it goes away, because it’s not going to go away until we do something about it,” Herbel said.

Cody has said little publicly since the raids other than posting a defense of them on the police department’s Facebook page. In court documents he filed to get the search warrants, he argued that he had probable cause to believe the newspaper and Herbel, whose home was also raided, had violated state laws against identity theft or computer crimes.

The raids came after a local restaurant owner accused the newspaper of illegally accessing information about her. A spokesman for the agency that maintains those records has said the newspaper’s online search that a reporter did was likely legal even though the reporter needed personal information about the restaurant owner that a tipster provided to look up her driving record.

The newspaper’s publisher Eric Meyer has said the identity theft allegations simply provided a convenient excuse for the search after his reporters had been digging for background information on Cody, who was appointed this summer.

Legal experts believe the raid on the newspaper violated a federal privacy law or a state law shielding journalists from having to identify sources or turn over unpublished material to law enforcement.

Video of the raid on the home of publisher Eric Meyer shows how distraught his 98-year-old mother became as officers searched through their belongings. Meyer said he believes that stress contributed to the death of his mother, Joan Meyer, a day later.

Another reporter last month filed a federal lawsuit against the police chief over the raid.

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Four votes, three possible senators: A wild California campaign year lies ahead

Californians have been represented by Sen. Dianne Feinstein for more than three decades. A suddenly scrambled Senate race could give them three senators in the space of a year.

Feinstein’s death has triggered a bewildering cascade of electoral consequences, infusing uncertainty into an epochal Senate contest that was already poised to dominate California’s election cycle.

Congress members campaigning to succeed Feinstein in 2025 must decide whether to also run in a special election for the final slice of Feinstein’s current term. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s replacement pick, who he says will be a Black woman, could have to navigate a contested field — if she even chooses to run.

“You get into some weird things,” said Paul Mitchell, a Democratic consultant and political data expert. “The ticket-splitting, the double-fundraising — what drama.”

Newsom will soon announce his choice to fill Feinstein’s seat. The timing makes it all but certain that special elections to install a senator through the end of 2024 will occur at the same time, on the same March primary and November general election ballots, as fiercely contested votes for a full six-year Senate term. Whoever wins the special election would serve out the last weeks of Feinstein’s term.

That's four elections — a primary and general for the special and a primary and general for the regular — in the space of eight months.

A series of questions ensue: Would Newsom’s pick run in the special elections, asking voters for the briefest of job extensions? Or would any of the three declared Senate candidates — Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Adam Schiff, or Rep. Katie Porter — decide to run in the special election, too, doubling their fundraising capacity and their appearances on ballots?

Those calculations will play out in the coming weeks. A Schiff campaign representative said they were waiting for Newsom to make his choice before commenting on their plans, and a Lee representative said the representative hadn’t made a final decision. Porter did not respond to a request for comment.

But political professionals are already gaming out scenarios. If one of the Congress members enters the special election, the others would likely feel compelled to follow. And all three might choose to run to minimize voter confusion.

Newsom is seeking a Senate replacement who would be content with finishing out Feinstein’s term, but his choice could still decide to run for a full six years. That scenario would be familiar to the governor. Former San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee — who in 2011 was selected to succeed Newsom when he left the mayoralty to become lieutenant governor — reversed on his commitment to a temporary tenure, ran for a full term and won.

And if Newsom’s replacement runs in the special elections, there’s no guarantee she would win. That could mean Feinstein is replaced by Newsom’s choice, who is succeeded by someone else, who is followed by Lee, Porter or Schiff.

“That’s not something that’s free, where you put yourself on the ballot and automatically win,” Mitchell said of the special election. “You could have someone who wants to be U.S. senator for a month, puts $500,000 in, and then they’re in the Senate.”

Past episodes have yielded strange results. Voters split during a 2018 state legislative primary in which the same set of Democrats ran for both a full term and the final sliver of resigned state Sen. Tony Mendoza’s term. One Democrat won the special and the other topped the regular vote, so constituents got one state senator for a few monthsand then a new one for the next four years.

In 2022, Sen. Alex Padilla ran for the rest of Vice President Kamala Harris’s uncompleted Senate term as well as his own six-year term. He won both, but his vote total was lower in the regular election while his top Republican foe did markedly better in the special. Mitchell said he ran exit polling indicating nearly a fifth of primary voters chose different candidates in the special and regular elections.

Despite the confusion and vote-swapping, Padilla’s victory was never in doubt as the Democratic Party coalesced behind him. This time, a crowded Senate race and a short-term pick make the outcomes harder to predict.

“In the past, the appointment was overwhelmingly likely to be elected,” said Mindy Romero, the founder and director and founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “In this case, that calculation is different.”

Newsom’s choice could prompt another candidate to jump into the race, Romero said, noting “all it takes is a few big donors to change the game.” It’s unclear Newsom’s choice would want to seek election. Those types of variables could lead to a dynamic few months.

“We don’t know what that candidate’s going to look like, who that candidate’s going to be, how strong that candidate is,” Romero said. “Anything is possible in politics.”

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'It is a surrender': Why McCarthy reversed with his survival uncertain

When he walked into the Capitol on Saturday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy knew exactly what he'd do to stave off a shutdown: Call up a bill that abandoned the border policy and spending cuts he’d preached for weeks.

McCarthy's move marked an abrupt shift after spending most of the year trying to placate all corners of his party — including a dozen-plus hardliners who have made it next to impossible for him to maneuver anything onto the floor. After the vote, McCarthy all but taunted his critics to come after his gavel if they wanted to.

And their first chance to do that will be Monday night. Multiple House conservatives confirmed in interviews they will begin seriously mulling whether they will try to seize McCarthy’s gavel in the coming days.

“I think it is a surrender,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), one of multiple conservatives who warned McCarthy not to accept Democratic help to avoid a shutdown.

In the end, the 45-day funding patch that is on track to keep the government open passed with more Democratic than GOP votes, in a repeat of the spring debt vote that first inflamed McCarthy's opponents.

The bill was finished just before midnight on Friday. But McCarthy didn’t unveil his plans to take up the bill until almost 11 hours later, after a choreographed parade of Republicans took the mic during a private 90-minute meeting to argue for exactly his proposal.

Dozens of conservatives ended up voting against the bill, which gave in on their two biggest priorities — spending cuts beyond McCarthy's spring debt deal and hard-right border policies. Still, McCarthy wanted the groundswell of support for it to look like an organic move by his members, rather an order down from leadership.

Mere hours later, a majority of House Republicans backed the type of shutdown-averting bill that the California Republican had repeatedly sworn was unacceptable. McCarthy's 180-degree turn could soon threaten his speakership, giving conservatives who have threatened to try to eject him plenty of fodder to make their move.

“You can’t form a coalition of more Democrats than you have Republicans who you're supposed to be the leader of, and not think that there's going to be serious, serious fallout,” Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) said. He confirmed that after Saturday's spending vote, they would start discussions about ousting the speaker.

Freedom Caucus member Rep. Byron DonaldsByron Donalds (R-Fla.) acknowledged that McCarthy’s speakership is “probably” in danger, but added: “I’m not even getting into that right now. There are other members that have to decide if they want to bring that or not.”

House Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Scott Perry (R–Pa.) said he did not expect an effort to oust McCarthy because Republicans didn't “have any other option" but to bring up a clean spending patch after GOP holdouts tanked their own party's plan.

But Perry — who has himself lost sway with some more conservative members — didn’t commit to opposing a McCarthy ouster. He told POLITICO: “The case has to be made. So we’ll listen to the argument.”

McCarthy’s biggest antagonist, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), has not yet declared that he intends to force a vote to boot the speaker over the Saturday vote.

"That will be something I will chat with my colleagues about,” Gaetz said, just before the bill passed on the floor.

Republicans are waiting and watching the Floridian: Many observed him on the floor attempting to speak at the podium minutes after McCarthy ally Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) moved to adjourn the House after the bill passed. But before Gaetz could speak, as he held his hand up — Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), another McCarthy ally, who controlled the floor, swiftly banged the gavel down.

Gaetz shortly thereafter told POLITICO that he would have requested a vote on a motion to adjourn, which could have kept the House in session through the weekend, rather than what many are waiting for him to attempt: a motion to eject McCarthy.

There's no unanimity within the Freedom Caucus, with some trying to distance themselves from the gambit deployed lately by Gaetz, who is not a member of the group. One Republican in the bloc, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, estimated that there weren't “many members beyond Gaetz" talking about booting the speaker and predicted McCarthy ultimately came out of the spending fight strengthened — for now.

McCarthy, meanwhile, was defiant: “If someone wants to make a motion against me, bring it.”

He's heard clear warnings from his right flank for weeks that if he relied on House Democrats to keep the government open, he would likely face a forced vote to take his gavel. Gaetz was polling Democrats this week on whether they would back him if he made a move against McCarthy — conversations first reported by POLITICO.

On the other side of the conference, some of McCarthy’s centrist allies have started quiet talks with Democrats about how they could help save the speaker in what would be a historic ouster vote. (The move was last attempted in 1910 and has never succeeded.)

“We’re just prepared for it. Take it head on, don’t run from it. We’ll work our best to defeat it. We’re not going to get pushed around by a handful of people,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a centrist McCarthy ally.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has refused to engage in hypotheticals involving his party helping save McCarthy’s gavel, deferred on Saturday when asked if the speaker did the right thing by putting up the bipartisan spending bill.

“The House, led by Democrats, was able to accomplish the right thing on behalf of the American people,” the New York Democrat said.

Many of the speaker’s allies have grown tired of the threat dangling over his head, saying that perhaps it’s time for those defectors to put up or shut up.

“I don’t think he’s lost any strength. But if someone wants to do this, just come on. I’m tired of talking about this fight,” said Rules Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “They didn’t have a candidate last time, they don’t have a candidate this time. None of the people that would vote against him have the guts to run against him.”

Some are quick to claim that the failure to achieve any conservative policy victories in Saturday's vote stemmed from conservatives' antics.

Womack, who had overseen the floor, later chided McCarthy’s intra-party foes: “This is what happens when you can't get to yes.”

Nicholas Wu contributed.

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Judge blocks 2 provisions in North Carolina's new abortion law

RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal judge on Saturday blocked two portions of North Carolina's new abortion law from taking effect while a lawsuit continues. But nearly all of the restrictions approved by the legislature this year, including a near-ban after 12 weeks of pregnancy, aren't being specifically challenged and remain intact.

U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles issued an order halting enforcement of a provision to require surgical abortions that occur after 12 weeks — those for cases of rape and incest, for example — be performed only in hospitals, not abortion clinics. That limitation would have otherwise taken effect on Sunday.

And in the same preliminary injunction, Eagles extended beyond her temporary decision in June an order preventing enforcement of a rule that doctors must document the existence of a pregnancy within the uterus before prescribing a medication abortion.

Short of successful appeals by Republican legislative leaders defending the laws, the order will remain in effect until a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and a physician who performs abortions challenging the sections are resolved. The lawsuit also seeks to have clarified whether medications can be used during the second trimester to induce labor of a fetus that can’t survive outside the uterus.

The litigation doesn’t directly seek to topple the crux of the abortion law enacted in May after GOP legislators overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto. North Carolina had a ban on most abortions after 20 weeks before July 1, when the law scaled it back to 12 weeks.

The law, a response to the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade, also added new exceptions for abortions through 20 weeks for cases of rape and incest and through 24 weeks for “life-limiting” fetal anomalies. A medical emergency exception also stayed in place.

On medication abortions, which bill sponsors say also are permitted through 12 weeks of pregnancy, the new law says a physician prescribing an abortion-inducing drug must first “document in the woman’s medical chart the ... intrauterine location of the pregnancy.”

Eagles wrote the plaintiffs were likely to be successful on their claim that the law is so vague as to subject abortion providers to claims that they broke the law if they can't locate an embryo through an ultrasound because the pregnancy is so new.

“Providers cannot know if medical abortion is authorized at any point through the twelfth week, as the statute explicitly says, or if the procedure is implicitly banned early in pregnancy,” said Eagles, who was nominated to the bench by then-President Barack Obama.

And Eagles wrote the plaintiffs offered “uncontradicted" evidence that procedures for surgical abortions — also known as procedural abortions — after 12 weeks of pregnancy are the same as those used for managing miscarriages at that time period. Yet women with miscarriages aren't required to receive those procedures in the hospital, she added.

Republican legislative leaders defending the law in court “have offered no explanation or evidence — that is, no rational basis — for this differing treatment,” Eagles said in her order.

Abortion-rights advocates still opposed to the new 12-week restrictions praised Saturday's ruling.

“We applaud the court’s decision to block a few of the onerous barriers to essential reproductive health care that have no basis in medicine," said Dr. Beverly Gray, an OB-GYN and a named plaintiff in the case.

A spokesperson for Senate leader Phil Berger, one of the legislative defendants, said Saturday that Eagles’ order was still being reviewed.

Lawyers for Republican legislative leaders said in court documents in September that the provision requiring the documentation of an intrauterine pregnancy was designed to ensure the pregnancy was not ectopic, which can be dangerous. And “North Carolina rationally sought to help ensure the safety of women who may require hospitalization for complications from surgical abortions,” a legal brief from the lawmakers read.

State Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, abortion-rights supporter and 2024 candidate for governor, is officially a lawsuit defendant. But lawyers from his office asked Eagles to block the two provisions, largely agreeing with Planned Parenthood's arguments. Stein said Saturday he was encouraged by Eagles' ruling.

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Federal court temporarily blocks race-based grant program

A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked a grant program for Black women-owned businesses.

American Alliance for Equal Rights, a nonprofit backed by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, sued the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund in August, alleging that the venture capital fund’s grant program violated the 1866 Civil Rights Act’s “guarantee of race neutrality” in making “contracts” by discriminating against other races.

The lawsuit follows a Supreme Court decision in June that struck down race-based affirmative action in higher education after challenges brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group also backed by Blum.

After a district court judge in Georgia refused to issue an injunction earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit granted the injunction in a 2-1 decision on Saturday. Robert Luck and Andrew Brasher, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, were in favor. Charles Wilson, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, dissented.

The targeted program intends to support Black women-owned businesses by awarding grants and providing mentorship and business support services — however, in the Saturday opinion, the judges said that it was “substantially likely” that the program was illegal.

Blum has filed similar suits against several businesses that he says use the same kind of racial classifications previously used in higher education admissions — such programs are likely the next target for conservative legal activism.

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