The Alabama Senate on Tuesday approved the nation’s toughest anti-abortion ban, hoping the legislation will spark a legal challenge leading to the demise of Roe v. Wade.

The legislation is even stricter than the wave of so-called heartbeat bills that have recently been passed by Republicans in Georgia and other conservative states, who believe the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority is poised to chip away at, or perhaps obliterate, abortion rights. The Alabama bill would outlaw virtually all abortions in the state, and doctors could face up to 99 years in prison — basically a life sentence — for performing an abortion.

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“The Supreme Court is not a body that makes a ruling forever,” said state Republican Sen. Clyde Chambliss, who acknowledged the purpose of the legislation is to overturn longstanding precedent.

The state Senate approved the bill, 25-6, with one abstention, after nearly five hours of debate, during which Democrats did most of the talking. Just days earlier, the state Senate had scrapped a vote amid a heated floor debate over GOP efforts to strip from the bill exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

Democrat Bobby Singleton proposed an amendment Tuesday that would have reinserted those protections. Singleton brought three rape victims to the chamber, and pointed out that under the proposed law, the doctor who performs an abortion can spend more time in prison than the rapist.

“Something is wrong with that,“ he said.

But his amendment failed 21-11. Four Republicans joined the chamber’s seven Democrats.

Several other Democrat-sponsored amendments failed, meaning the bill does not need to go back to the House, which passed an identical version of the legislation last month.

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who has declined comment on the legislation, is expected to sign it.

Abortion rights groups said they will immediately mount a legal challenge to the measure, contending it violates the landmark 1973 Roe ruling guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion until a fetus is viable.

“Politicians in Alabama just passed the most extreme and dangerous policy since Roe vs. Wade,“ said Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “Doctors and public health leaders agree: the cost will be women’s lives. … Politicians who say they value life should advocate for policies to solve the public health crises that are killing women, not dismantle what little access to health care Alabamians have left.“

Other state bans that would outlaw abortion very early in pregnancy have been blocked by the courts, but that hasn’t deterred red states emboldened by the Supreme Court’s rightward shift. Four states this year, including Georgia last week, approved abortion bans once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually about the sixth week of pregnancy. That’s before many women know they are pregnant.

Some conservatives have pushed for these strict abortion bans, believing that the addition of two Trump appointees to the Supreme Court — as well as dozens of federal judges in lower courts — offer the best chance in a generation to limit abortion. Others have supported more incremental efforts to limit abortion methods or access to the procedure, believing they’re more likely to withstand legal challenges.

The newly configured Supreme Court, however, has so far passed on two abortion-related cases since Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the bench in October. It’s still deciding whether to take up a challenge to a 2016 Indiana law — signed by then-Gov. Mike Pence — banning abortion based on a fetus’ race, disability or gender.

Alabama Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, a Republican, last week said the state’s abortion legislation would be a direct challenge to Roe.

“Now that President Donald Trump has supercharged the effort to remake the federal court system by appointing conservative jurists who will strictly interpret the Constitution, I feel confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe and finally correct its 46-year-old mistake,” Ainsworth said in a statement.

The Alabama bill includes exceptions for pregnancies that pose a health risk to the mother, but not for rape and incest. Those have typically been included in other legislation limiting abortion.

The Senate’s judiciary committee originally amended the legislation to allow for rape and incest exceptions, but the language was stripped out on the Senate floor through a voice vote, infuriating Democrats who wanted to put Republicans on the record.

Democrats attempted to add a provision that expands the state’s Medicaid program, and make it a Class A felony for a man to receive a vasectomy. Both those amendments failed.

Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat, argued that the state does nothing to provide for babies that are born. The state does not help pay for day care. The foster care system is inadequate, she said. Other Democrats pointed out that the children’s health insurance program remains underfunded.

“This bill isn‘t about life or pro-life,” she said. “This bill is about control. … The sin to me is bringing a child into this world and not taking care of it; the sin to me is this state does not provide adequate care for this child. We want to bring them here but we don‘t want to take care of them.”

uber and lyft need a “quiet mode” that can notify drivers that you don’t wanna talk.

— i been on (@mscarterinc) April 20, 2019

But really, why do we not have Lyft/Uber quiet mode yet.

— Melissa Marchionna (@im_melissa) May 8, 2019

defense

Can Trump’s untested Pentagon chief handle the Iran hawks?

The Trump administration’s saber-rattling at Iran has skeptics of military action concerned about the inexperience of acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan — and whether he can stand up to long-time hawks like John Bolton.

Shanahan had held no government posts before joining the Pentagon nearly two years ago, and in his four months leading the Defense Department he has been less inclined than his predecessor, Jim Mattis, to resist President Donald Trump’s most dramatic impulses.

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Now the former Boeing executive risks being overpowered in internal debates by Trump aides such as national security adviser Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say former U.S. officials who worry that the administration is on a path to war. Those fears were inflamed by a New York Times report Monday that said Shanahan had delivered Bolton a plan that could send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East if needed to respond to a provocation.

Mattis, who resigned in December after a dispute over Trump’s Syria strategy, repeatedly watered down or slow-walked Trump policies that military brass opposed or felt uncomfortable with, including on Iran and a 2018 missile strike on Syria. But Shanahan’s critics say he has far less leverage to do so — even if was so inclined.

“Shanahan, in that group, is the weakest link,” said a recently departed senior Pentagon official, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Shanahan hasn’t been around these kinds of decisions and has zero policy experience and zero military experience. Mattis had experience and gravitas that Shanahan simply doesn’t have, and Bolton has years of experience in dealing with bureaucracy in this town, which gives him a huge advantage.”

Ilan Goldenberg, a longtime foreign policy expert who served in both the Pentagon and the State Department in the Obama administration, agreed with that assessment.

“Shanahan is certainly outmatched by Bolton and Pompeo,” said Goldenberg, who is now at the Center for a New American Security. “He has neither the bureaucratic experience or political leverage to fight with them.”

Bolton and Pompeo have trained rhetorical fire on Tehran in recent weeks: Bolton, an advocate of Iranian regime change who has served under four presidents, has threatened “unrelenting force” against any Iranian aggression. And Pompeo, during a stop in Europe this week, argued for a hard line in meetings with U.S. allies.

The latest developments in the White House’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamist regime and its proxies include tougher economic sanctions and dispatching additional bombers and warships to the region. Trump declined Tuesday to rule out military action, even while denying the Times’ report that his administration had drawn up plans to send 120,000 troops.

“Now, would I do that? Absolutely,” Trump told reporters. “But we have not planned for that.”

He added: “If we did that, we would send a hell of a lot more troops than that.”

The report of a new military option has set off fresh concerns about a possible march to war as a time when the Pentagon has an untested leader who may have far more difficulty than Mattis did in shaping Trump’s decisions. Trump hasn’t yet nominated Shanahan to be permanent secretary, although the White House tweeted last week that he “intends to.”

Shanahan has led the Pentagon since January — the longest stretch ever for an acting defense secretary. Before that, the Senate confirmed him in 2017 as deputy secretary under Mattis.

A lack of more moderate voices in the administration’s national security leadership was a major concern in both parties in the days after Mattis resigned over Trump’s abrupt decision to pull American troops out of Syria.

“I want someone like Mattis who will tell the president the truth to his face,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a hawkish member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told POLITICO at the time.

Republicans also expressed concern then that Mattis’ resignation, following the departures of former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and White House chief of staff John Kelly, meant that Trump would be relying on a much narrower set of viewpoints.

On the other hand, Shanahan has more recently won over former skeptics such as Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who promised Tuesday to hold his nomination hearing “as fast as possible.”

During Mattis’ tenure as defense secretary, the White House was often frustrated with Pentagon resistance to more aggressive moves against Iran and its allies, according to a current defense official who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal debates.

The official pointed to the slow-rolling by Mattis, a retired general, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford on military options against Iran’s key ally Syria last year. In that instance, Mattis and Dunford pushed Trump toward the most limited item on his menu of proposed military options — a set of missile strikes against Syrian chemical weapons facilities — by painting it as more muscular than it really was.

Shanahan is now contending with the outsize personalities of Bolton and Pompeo. Bolton previously served as ambassador to the United Nations and undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, while Pompeo, a former congressman and Army officer, was Trump’s first CIA director.

But Shanahan “likes to say that he earned a PhD in world affairs as Secretary Mattis’s deputy, and he draws on his 17 months of experience and tutelage as deputy secretary” in his new role, said Shanahan’s spokesperson, Lt. Col. Joe Buccino.

The Pentagon has already lost one Iran policy debate under Shanahan, during bureaucratic tussles over the decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. The White House and State Department supported the move, but the Pentagon opposed it on grounds it might lead Iran to retaliate against American troops and facilities in the region.

During that debate, Shanahan largely allowed his subordinates who were holdovers from Mattis’s team to “carry the water” on the Pentagon’s argument without challenging Bolton and Pompeo himself, POLITICO previously reported.

The recently departed senior Pentagon official said Shanahan’s slow, deliberate management style may also not be conducive to the fast decisions he could have to make during a military confrontation involving large numbers of troops.

“Shanahan has no experience with this — what kinds of things can happen as you mobilize and deploy forces, how escalation works, what it signals to foreign governments,” said another former senior defense official who still advises Pentagon leaders. “He’s never done any of this, whereas Bolton and Pompeo have been at this a long time. How seriously are they going to take him?”

The first former senior defense official echoed those concerns, citing the battlefield options that Shanahan would have to help choose.

“There are very consequential decisions that will have to be made,” the former official said. “Shanahan has a management style that’s well known in the building and avoiding and delaying decisions. That’s not what you need in the top seat in this situation.”

Moreover, Shanahan “will also have to sell any intervention to the Hill and make troops feel confident about his leadership,” the former official added. “It’s not clear he can do either successfully.”

But many in the Pentagon clearly think Shanahan is up to the task. While “he would not have been a good SecDef” two years ago, “he absolutely has the experience and knowledge to hold his own in interagency debates today,” said a second current defense official who was also not authorized to speak publicly.

Mattis trusted Shanahan to chair updates from commanders on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria during his time as deputy secretary, the official said, and Shanahan also received “more than 500 intelligence briefings” in that role.

On Tuesday, both the U.S. and Iran made notable efforts to lower the temperature, at least for now.

“We don’t seek a war, and they don’t either,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television. “They know it’s not in their interests.”

Pompeo, speaking in Moscow alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said that “we fundamentally do not seek a war with Iran.”

“We’re looking for Iran to behave like a normal country, and that’s our ask and we have applied pressure to the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran to achieve that,” Pompeo said.

Also speaking out was John Abizaid, a retired general and Trump’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He urged caution in reacting to a spate of apparent drone attacks and other alleged sabotage that targeted Saudi oil tankers and facilities in recent days. While Iran immediately emerged as a suspected culprit, Abizaid called for letting investigators determine who was responsible.

“We need to do a thorough investigation to understand what happened, why it happened, and then come up with reasonable responses short of war,” Abizaid told reporters. “It’s not in [Iran’s] interest, it’s not in our interest, it’s not in Saudi Arabia’s interest to have a conflict.”

An official from an Arab country also told POLITICO that it appears that Trump himself is deeply uneasy about engaging Iran militarily. But the president may not be able to control an escalation.

“My concern is that we have a runaway case — some stupid guy shoots [a rocket-propelled grenade] at some target, gets lucky and the world gets unlucky,” the official said.

As the tensions simmered Tuesday, whose judgment would prevail in Trump’s circle was prominent on the minds of many.

“We don’t have a Secretary of Defense who’s a decorated 4-star Marine Corps general with decades of military leadership experience, and we don’t have a National Security Advisor with comparable, significant, national security leadership experience,” Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

“The President did benefit from such a team in his first couple of years,” he added, “and he did not launch any major new wars. I’m gravely concerned that we’ve got folks who are encouraging or tolerating his bumbling forward into a major deployment into the Middle East without a clear strategy.”

trade

Democrats who have long blasted China’s trade policies aren’t supporting the president’s tariffs.

Democrats have pushed President Donald Trump for months to take a tougher stance toward China on trade. But now that Trump has taken their advice, he finds himself on an island with no lifeline from Democrats.

In interviews with a dozen House and Senate Democrats from the Midwest and in leadership, most lawmakers refused to back Trump’s offensive against China, particularly as he’s kept tariffs on U.S. allies.

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Even those most willing to praise Trump on trade have been notably reserved.

“We should not be having a multifront war on tariffs,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Trump’s closest Democratic ally on the topic. “I would focus everything on China. And get the Europeans, Canadians and Mexicans to be on our side and focus on China. Because they are the great danger.”

Schumer has repeatedly urged Trump publicly and privately to “stay tough,” including in a meeting at the White House in April. Later Tuesday, the New York Democrat said he doesn’t “fully agree” with Trump’s approach of imposing tariffs on allies as well as China and warned the president from coming up with a “weak solution.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi — like Schumer, a China hawk for decades — told reporters Monday that Trump’s action toward Beijing is “in recognition that something needed to be done.” But she again criticized the president for “antagonizing” Europe with a separate series of tariffs last year instead of trying to join with European Union allies to pressure China.

“I wish him success in the negotiation. But as I say, we have to use our leverage without antagonizing those who are on our side on this,” she said.

Schumer and Pelosi have not been alone in egging Trump on: A number of Democrats who have soured on free trade deals have offered rare praise for Trump’s trade policies. But now that Trump is embroiled in a trade war with China, there’s very little Democratic support for him — and the party is reluctant to give the president any bipartisan cover, particularly if the tariffs end up doing real harm to the economy.

“I still hope he can reach an agreement, but I don’t know. He’s pretty unaware of the damage they’re doing if they don’t get an agreement soon,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has otherwise supported Trump’s tough-on-China approach. “I did for several months. And he just kept doing it wrong.”

“I am conflicted,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “To ignore what China’s done is not my position at all. But this approach with the tariffs I think has been heavy-handed. And doesn’t leave enough openings for the Chinese to find a face-saving way out.”

Trump’s dramatically escalating trade war with China has resulted in a frantic realigning of the two parties on trade. Republicans have typically been free-traders but have declined to go to war against the protectionist president of their own party. Democrats have often been skeptical of free trade, but most have expressed deep dismay with Trump’s policy implementation, even if his trade rhetoric resonates more with them.

And though it’s popular in both parties to challenge China, the resulting economic pain from retaliatory tariffs is not.

“I don’t think he truly understands what he is doing and what chaos that may be causing,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who applauded Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs last year. “I am for being tough on China, but I believe that he is not the least bit knowledgeable about a trade policy, tariff policy or anything else.”

“This really can be fixed by one guy and he’s in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This is self-imposed, it’s unilateral and he can fix it. And he’s got to fix it, our farmers are hurting,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos who runs the House Democrats’ campaign committee and represents a rural Illinois district.

Republicans are far less critical of China than Democrats are, and the GOP is more focused on removing steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies. Even the most fervent Republican opponents of tariffs, like Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), say that the “jury is still out” on whether Trump’s China strategy can be effective.

But Democrats from states that have lost manufacturing jobs amid rising globalization are not in favor of the president’s stance toward China. It’s a bet, in part, that Trump is unlikely to get a transformative deal, so there’s little reason to back him publicly while Democrats’ constituents are in such pain.

“He’s not going into this fight with allies. It isn’t targeted. It’s just kind of across-the-board tariffs,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, one of two Democrats in the chamber up for reelection in states that Trump won. Asked whether he opposes Trump’s latest China tariffs, he said: “Yeah. I think the way he has done it has not been thoughtful at all.”

“What I’ve got a concern about is going it alone,” said Sen. Doug Jones. The Alabama Democrat faces an even tougher reelection bid than Peters faces. “At the same time we started this with China, we were also kicking our European allies in the shins and we were kicking Canada in their shins and we were kicking Mexico.”

To Republicans, Democrats sound like they are finding excuses to oppose Trump. Not one Democrat interviewed by POLITICO fully embraced the president’s trade policies on China while he also maintains a combative stance toward U.S. allies

“No matter what he says or does, today’s congressional Democrats will demonize, vilify and attack him,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is himself conflicted about Trump’s China strategy. “Their opposition at the end of the day is not based on policy. It is based on a visceral hatred for the man.”