House’s Republican majority gets to work with two abortion

The day so far

Here’s newly elected congressman Anthony D’Esposito becoming the first Republican lawmaker to call for George Santos’s resignation:

Like Santos, D’Esposito is a Republican who represents a Democratic-leaning suburban New York City district.

Here’s Joseph Cairo, chair of the Republican party in New York’s Nassau county, calling for George Santos’ resignation:

Santos’s congressional district includes part of the county in suburban New York City, and his victory in last November’s midterm election flipped it from Democratic to Republican representation.

ABC News caught up with Santos at the Capitol, who said he has no plans to step down:

There’s no shortage of business on the House’s agenda, but several Republicans are doing all they can to make the gas cookstove kerfuffle last.

Consider this, from Missouri’s Mark Alford:

Texas’s Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor to Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is promoting a website…:

… and employing the all-caps approach:

Venture to certain corners of conservative media today and you’ll find lots of discussion of gas stoves. The Guardian’s Alaina Demopoulos explains why:

After Joe Biden’s administration announced it was considering regulating – or banning – gas stoves, Richard Trumka of the US consumer product safety commission (CPSC) offered some words of clarity: “To be clear, CPSC isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves,” he tweeted.

“You will have to pry my gas stove from my cold dead hands,” replied Matt Walsh, the rightwing political podcaster and Daily Wire columnist.

Despite Trumka’s words of assurance, and the fact that no regulation or ban has been put in place or announced as a course of action, conservative figures are trying to turn gas stoves into the next culture war.

Gas stoves have become a hot-button issue in the first weeks of 2022, as new research reveals that the appliances emit toxic chemicals and carcinogens, even while turned off. The report found that 12.7% of cases of childhood asthma in the US are due to the presence of gas stoves.

New York Republicans to call for Santos resignation

Facts First USA, a group recently set up by Democrats to counter the GOP’s investigations against the Biden administration, has hit back on House oversight committee chair James Comer’s request for documents related to Hunter Biden.

“Comer’s latest letter is yet another rehashed conspiracy theory about a Biden family member that has already been thoroughly debunked by fact checkers,” Facts First USA president David Brock said in a statement.

“The interesting news here is that if Comer continues to move forward with this tinfoil hat hearing it is really bad news for the people in his Congressional district, where, ‘over 62,000 reports were filed between 2014 and 2022, averaging one filing for every 12 people in the district,’” he said, citing reporting in the American Independent.

House GOP requests Hunter Biden documents, Twitter execs testimony

George Santos, the Republican congressman who admitted to lying about his qualifications, will not be serving on any major committees, House speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN:

Republicans are today appointing members to some of the chamber’s most influential committees: appropriations, ways and means, financial services and energy and commerce. Santos may be banned from those panels, but the House Republican leadership hasn’t announced any other sanctions against him, though he’s in plenty of hot water nonetheless.

Democratic chair of the Senate commerce committee Maria Cantwell has pledged to investigate the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer outage today that caused flights to be briefly grounded nationwide:

In Texas, some cities are moving to become havens for abortion access in a state where the procedure is otherwise banned, the Guardian’s Poppy Noor reports:

Campaigners in San Antonio, Texas, on Tuesday delivered more than 38,000 signatures to the city clerk’s office, petitioning for a May vote that would decriminalize abortion in the city.

Abortion in Texas has been banned since August 2022, following the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade last summer.

The campaigners hope to pass what they are calling the San Antonio Justice Charter, which would also end criminalization for low-level marijuana possession, and put limits on police use of no-knock warrants and chokeholds.

San Antonio, Austin and Waco – all in Texas – already passed resolutions to de-prioritize the investigation of abortion crimes through their city councils in 2022, at the same time as a string of progressive district attorneys across the country vowed to resist state abortion bans that came into effect when the federal right to abortion ended in June.

In Alabama, the state’s top prosecutor has reacted to the Biden administration’s expansion of access to abortion pills by warning that women who take the medication could be prosecuted under a law meant to protect children from methamphetamine fumes.

“Promoting the remote prescription and administration of abortion pills endangers both women and unborn children,” Republican attorney general Steve Marshall said in a statement to Al.com. “Elective abortion – including abortion pills – is illegal in Alabama. Nothing about the Justice Department’s guidance changes that. Anyone who remotely prescribes abortion pills in Alabama does so at their own peril: I will vigorously enforce Alabama law to protect unborn life.”

Alabama’s governor in 2019 signed the Human Life Protection Act, which bans abortion except to protect the life of the mother. It only went into effect last year, when the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. But the law allows for abortion providers to be punished, not recipients, which is why Marshall is threatening to use the state’s chemical endangerment law against women who end their pregnancies medically.

“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law,” said Marshall, who has also threatened to prosecute veterans affair doctors who perform abortions in cases of incest or rape. “It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law – which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”

The first days of a new Congress are typically when the party in charge lays out its priority, and today, it’s the turn of abortion foes.

The two measures the Republican-led House will consider don’t amount to the sort of draconian laws some abortion foes would like to see passed, and supporters of the procedure fear. They are not, for instance, the nationwide abortion ban Republican senator Lindsey Graham proposed last year.

Rather, they target more niche aspects and consequences of the procedure. One is a resolution condemning attacks on churches, groups and facilities that work against abortion. The other is the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which is intended to protect the rights of babies born after surviving an attempted abortion. Abortion rights advocate argue their rights are already secured by a 2002 law, and just last November, voters in Montana rejected a similar measure that was on their ballots.

Democrats are telling their members to vote against both measures.

Abortion foes have their moment as House GOP gets to work