Politics
Column: Two years after the Supreme Court's abortion decision, meet the expert on post-Roe America
For two years, ever since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the country has waged a fierce fight over women’s health, government’s reach, individual choice and efforts to either ban or guarantee access to the procedure.
Standing athwart that conflict is Mary Ziegler: Interpreter, guide, prognosticator.
Whenever a law is passed, a court decision rendered, a medical horror story surfaced — which happens not infrequently — Ziegler is invariably asked to weigh in from her perch at UC Davis. She’s given as many as 15 interviews in a day.
That ubiquitous presence, Ziegler’s frequent written commentary and the six books she’s published, with a seventh on the way, have made the 42-year-old law school professor, in the estimation of historian David Garrow, the preeminent authority on the past 50 years of abortion wars.
“One of the hallmarks of Ziegler’s scholarship,” he noted in a laudatory 2021 book review, “is her outreach to activists and litigators on both sides.”
That’s why she’s a trusted and valuable source, residing on the speed-dial of countless reporters nationwide.
Ziegler, who came to Davis in 2022 by way of Florida State University, didn’t set out to become a one-stop clearinghouse for history, commentary and abortion arcana. Her inquisitiveness led her there.
She developed her interest in the mid-2000s, as a Harvard Law School student.
A professed “legal history nerd,” Ziegler found a dearth of scholarly research on the social and political fallout from Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision spelling out a constitutional right to abortion. She began diving into digitized newspaper archives, to learn more, and started writing, prolifically, on the subject.
Initially, “I didn’t think I would do anything professionally,” Ziegler said last week over lunch in this bayside enclave she calls home. “What interested me was just pure curiosity.”
“At the time,” she added, with a laugh, her scholarship “obviously wasn’t as relevant as it turned out to be later.”
(Ziegler’s father, a French professor, urged her to pursue a career that was practical and reasonably well-paying. She considered medicine, but doesn’t like the sight of blood. So law school it was.)
Ziegler, who published her first book-length treatment of the abortion issue in 2015, didn’t necessarily anticipate the reversal of Roe, which helped turn her into a quasi-legal and media celebrity. While opponents continuously sought to chip away at the landmark ruling, many considered the matter “settled law” — which is how Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh described Roe in 2018 as he faced Senate confirmation. (In 2022, Kavanaugh was part of the 5-4 ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson that overturned the nearly half-century-old decision.)
The day the court issued that ruling, Ziegler burrowed into her work, writing furiously and conducting a long series of back-to-back-to-back interviews. When she finished, she broke down and cried.
It wasn’t just the striking down of a constitutional right, said Ziegler, an avowed feminist and supporter of legalized abortion.
“I remember reading Dobbs and the idea that somehow this was going to make it better and people were going to stop fighting. I remember thinking that is definitely not going to happen,” she said. “I thought about all the unintended consequences it was going to have” such as denial of urgent medical care — even in cases unrelated to abortion.
“That doesn’t mean I disparage people who think abortion is wrong. But, to me, criminalizing it and all that comes with that has always been a dark part of American history. I saw it setting us on a path to more conflict, not less.”
Which has proven abundantly true.
Ziegler sees the next several years as a push-pull between conservative judges, anti-abortion lawmakers and the majority of Americans who, by and large, wish to keep abortion legal and accessible.
(Bill Lax / UC Davis)
In a recent piece on Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and her gubernatorial ambitions, your friendly columnist ventured to say abortion rights were rock-solid in California, with its constitutional guarantee and Democrat’s hegemonic control of Sacramento.
Ziegler doesn’t necessarily agree.
“I don’t think Congress is going to do anything,” she said, noting the risk of a severe political backlash. “I’m less sure about [former President] Trump.”
If elected in November, she said, Trump could unilaterally invoke the Comstock Act, a dusty 1873 anti-vice law that could serve as an effective nationwide abortion ban. While she made no prediction, Ziegler didn’t rule out the prospect. With Trump, you never know.
“I don’t think it’s a crisis,” she said. “That seems overblown to me. But I also think complete complacency … is wrong, too.”
“On the one hand,” she went on, “it’s not going to be popular if he does it. On the other, I don’t know what his incentives are if he can’t run for reelection. Maybe his donors like it. Maybe base voters who buy his merchandise like it.”
A pale sun glinted off San Francisco Bay as tourists plied the waterfront promenade. Politics and the abortion debate seemed far off, for the moment.
Ziegler sees the next several years as a push-pull between conservative judges, anti-abortion lawmakers and the majority of Americans who, by and large, wish to keep abortion legal and accessible.
“I think it depends on who’s deciding, and I don’t mean in the classic, ‘It’s my body, my choice’ way of who’s deciding,” Ziegler said. “We’ve seen to date that, for the most part, when you ask voters directly, they want abortion to be broadly legal, particularly early in pregnancy and increasingly later in pregnancy as well… But I think there are lots of possibilities where that doesn’t happen.”
With that, she boxed her leftovers and headed home, to further explain and explore America’s abortion fight.
Republicans were in full celebratory mode following Thursday’s debate between former President Trump and President Biden.
Multiple elected officials took to social media following the debate to celebrate what they described as a “resounding victory” for Trump, and a “disastrous” performance by Biden.
“Three things are clear: America was and is better under a Trump Administration, Biden is unfit to be in office and the people in his orbit should be ashamed of propping him up, Trump dominated. There can’t possibly be a second debate,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is widely believed to be a frontrunner on Trump’s VP shortlist, wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
BIDEN RIPPED FOR ‘OLD’ APPEARANCE, ‘WEAK’ VOICE DURING FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: ‘DEEPLY ALARMING’
Alabama Sen. Katie Britt wrote, “Congratulations to President Trump on his resounding victory in tonight’s Presidential Debate. The Biden-Harris experiment has failed. It’s time to return strength to the White House,” while North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, another possible VP pick, wrote Biden “offered no answers” on the major problems facing Americans.
“President Trump was clear, and he’s got the record to back it up! This debate was a knockout for Donald Trump,” he added.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Whatley called Trump’s debate performance “dominant,” and said Biden “couldn’t even understand the questions.”
TRUMP VOWS HE ‘WILL NOT BLOCK’ ABORTION PILLS OR MEDICATION IF ELECTED, SAYS HE BELIEVES IN ‘EXCEPTIONS’
Another account linked to the RNC poked fun at Biden’s closing statement, writing, “Biden ends his disastrous and humiliating debate performance just as he began — rambling incoherently. He’s not only not playing with a full deck — he can’t even find the deck. SAD!”
Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Republican Alabama Sen. Katie Britt. (Getty Images)
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., claimed Trump “proved” he is the only candidate who can save the U.S., while Republican conservative firebrand and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake said “[Biden] is clearly unfit for this job. I think it’s time we bring back the President that coined the phrase, YOU’RE FIRED!”
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.
In the presidential debate former President Trump insisted repeatedly that if he had still been in the White House, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine and Hamas would not have invaded Israel.
Both claims are unprovable. But Trump repeated the assertion again and again in his debate Thursday night with President Biden.
It is true, foreign policy analysts have said, that Trump might have been able to discourage Putin from invading Ukraine — but, they’ve asked, at what cost?
Trump, a vocal admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, might have made concessions to Moscow — such as sacrificing Ukrainian territory — that many in the West would find unpalatable.
After the Russian invasion in 2022, Biden was able to rally and fortify NATO in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine. It seems unlikely Trump would have had that influence, given that the largest of NATO countries were generally contemptuous of Trump during his administration.
Trump’s claim that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both militant groups backed by Iran, became emboldened because Biden’s policies built up Iran are also not completely true. The Obama administration did unfreeze some Iranian assets in foreign banks as part of the landmark Iran nuclear deal in 2015, which curbed Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
It was Trump’s decision in 2018, however, to abandon the nuclear deal — he said it didn’t go far enough — that sent Iran on a major quest to enrich uranium, which has now brought the Islamic Republic closer than ever to being able to produce a nuclear bomb.
Trump, whose support for Israel essentially eliminated Palestinian statehood aspirations from the picture, took a swipe at Biden in the debate for what he described as failing to supply Israel with the weapons it needs to fight Hamas. Biden said that is not true. The Biden administration held up a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to prevent them from being used in the overly crowded Gazan city of Rafah during an offensive earlier this month.
Robust weapons shipments have continued, the Pentagon says. Trump attacked Biden for his bungled handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. To be sure, it was a chaotic disaster that killed 13 American service members and dozens of Afghans.
It was one of the darkest stains on Biden’s foreign policy record. However, he was fulfilling the agreement that Trump executed — in rare negotiations with the Taliban — before leaving office.
Trump also revived a lie he told in the months leading up to his first impeachment over attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on the Biden family. He said Biden, as vice president, had sought to get fired a Ukrainian attorney general who was targeting his son Hunter Biden.
In fact, the prosecutor was blacklisted by the European Union, the U.S. and other groups because of his refusal to tackle corruption, which international entities had established as a task for Kyiv before it could be considered for EU membership and other benefits.
On the Ukraine war, Trump said he would be able to “get it settled fast” before he even took office on Jan. 21. In other venues, he has also said he could get Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich freed from Russian authorities who arrested him on what the U.S. says are trumped-up espionage charges. In both cases, Trump is making claims impossible to test.
Case 9:23-cr-80101-AMC Document 655 Entered on FLSD Docket 06/27/2024 Page 2 of 11
CASE NO. 23-80101-CR-CANNON
showing” that the affidavit in support of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant contains any material false
statements or omissions. The balance of the Motion cannot be resolved on the current record,
however, because of pertinent factual disputes, and thus the Court RESERVES RULING on those
issues as stated below, pending an evidentiary suppression hearing to be scheduled by separate
order.
DISCUSSION
A. LEGAL PRINCIPLES GOVERNING A FRANKS HEARING
The Supreme Court has expressed “a strong preference” for searches conducted pursuant
to a warrant and has directed courts to accord “great deference” to a magistrate’s determination of
probable cause. United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 914 (1984) (internal quotation marks
omitted); id. at 922 (“[A] warrant issued by a magistrate normally suffices to establish that a law
enforcement officer has acted in good faith in conducting the search.”) (internal quotation marks
omitted). To this end, affidavits supporting warrants are presumptively valid, Franks v. Delaware,
438 U.S. 154, 171 (1978), and courts should not invalidate warrants by interpreting affidavits in a
“hypertechnical, rather than . . . commonsense, manner,” Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 236,
(1983) (internal quotation marks omitted).
As enunciated in Franks, however, deference to a magistrate’s determination of probable
cause “does not preclude inquiry into the knowing or reckless falsity of the affidavit on which that
determination was based.” Leon, 468 U.S. at 914. This derives from the root assumption that,
when the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause for the issuance of a warrant, the showing
of probable cause will be “truthful.” Franks, 438 U.S. at 164–65. “Truthful” in this context does
not mean, however, “that every fact recited in the warrant affidavit is necessarily correct, for
probable cause may be founded upon hearsay and upon information received from informants, as
well as upon information within the affiant’s own knowledge that sometimes must be garnered
2
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