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Idaho passed legislation last week banning adults from helping minors cross state lines to get an abortion without parents’ consent. This is significant because Idaho recognizes that abortion remains legal in neighboring states such as Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and Montana. Under Idaho’s new law, any adult who assists a minor obtain an abortion pill or a surgical procedure within Idaho or across state lines commits “trafficking.” While the U.S. Constitution continues to restrict states’ authority to ban reproductive services provided outside their borders; Idaho’s law distinctly relies on the parent consent clause.

After an exhausting day last Thursday in which Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson and her two Democratic colleagues, faced trumped up charges of misconduct on the Chamber floor. Finally, the verdict resulted in the expulsion of two Black male members of the Tennessee State Assembly Chamber. When their colleague, Rep. Johnson, a white woman, remained saved by one vote, she was asked why she thought she was spared since the three had stood united on the House floor in a call for meaningful gun reform in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville.

“It might have to do with the color of there skin,” Johnson told reporters outside the chamber. Surely, that had some baring but there were also two other significant differences between her and her comrades.

First, there were discrepancies regarding the formal complaint. The errors of facts regarding Johnson, charging that she had shouted, using a megaphone, carried a political sign and pounded a barrel while standing in the well with Pearson and Jones. However, a video screened at the start of Thursday’s proceedings by the state’s Republican machinate clearly showed she had done none of those things.

Kai EL’ Zabar Editor-in-Chief

Thomas has repeatedly used Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet for travel and vacationed with him, including on his super yacht and at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, where guests stay for free, ProPublica reports, citing flight records, internal documents, and interviews with Crow’s employees.

The justice has stayed at Crow’s resort “every summer for more than two decades,” according to ProPublica, and reportedly makes “regular use” of Crow’s private jet, including as recently as last year and for as short as a three-hour trip from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut in 2016. Reality check: if Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162 ft yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. And he’s been doing this for years.

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The apparent Republican payback is real. The supermajority had gone ahead and expelled Pearson despite Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton’s false claims that the trio’s six-minute, non-violent protest represented an insurrection that was “at least equivalent, maybe worse” than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 202. Seriously?

The fact is Pearson and Jones had only raised their voices above a conversational volume and used a megaphone after Sexton had turned off the microphone at the podium and announced the house was in recess. They did not break or disrespect the bylaws.

Lastly, the final distinction separating Johnson from her colleagues Pearson and Jones is her first hand encounter with a shooting at Central High School in Knoxville in 2008 where Johnson had been a special education teacher. Most likely someone was smart enough to realize that expelling her would have been a P.R., nightmare, hence the one vote that spared her.

And then there’s Justice Clarence Thomas, sworn in 1991 to the Supreme Court. The Judge is looking guilty of accepting gifts from the wealthy far beyond what is permitted.

Supreme Court judges are subject to laws that require disclosing gifts that are more than $415 in value, including any transportation that substitutes for commercial transport.

Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said: “First Justice Thomas hid decades of lavish gifts and travel funded by Harlan Crow, but now he’s outright lying when he says this major conservative donor had no interest in the work of the supreme court.”

So, folks, here we are witnesses to what Kellyanne Conway, coined as Alternative facts,” during a “Meet the Press” interview on January 22, 2017.

The very clear manipulation of ‘what is’ fact, has been shoved in our faces as something other than the truth. Clearly Idaho is stepping outside its state jurisdiction, while Tennessee enforced a rule upon three State Representatives which they clearly did not break and expelled two from its roster. And finally, Justice Clarence Thomas wants us to believe that accepting gifts over $500,000 annually for over 15 years is acceptable when their cap is $415.00 annually. How does that make sense?

Chicago’s new Mayor Brandon Johnson will take office May 15, 2023, ushering in a new era of governing. We know that it has electrified progressives, according to experts who saw the race as a referendum on the future of the Democratic Party. Is it and what does that really mean? Stay Woke!