Trump and GOP plot to punish women while everyone is focused on hurricane recovery

Millions of Americans in Puerto Rico are literally begging for help from the White House, but Donald Trump and his Republican allies on Congress are more focused on punishing women and taking away their rights.

Trump opened up the White House to a group of extremist activists who have been scheming to install officials and Supreme Court justices with the expressed goal of overturning Roe vs. Wade.

One of those activists was Marjorie Dannenfelser of the extreme anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List. Dannenfelser bragged to the EWTN television network that Trump had been “very successful” in enacting the religious right’s agenda.

She highlighted the installation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — whose presence on the court is due to Republicans’ refusal to hold hearings or a vote for President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland — hailing him as a “complete success.”

She went on to gush, “If we can get even one more like Neil Gorsuch, we’re talking about overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Frank Cannon of the American Principles Project said Trump has offered anti-choice extremists “more than I think most social conservatives had hoped for,” while Concerned Women for America’s Penny Nance said, “We didn’t have this kind of access” when former President George W. Bush was in power.

Kaylie Hanson Long, national communications director for NARAL Pro-Choice America, slammed the meeting in a statement to Shareblue Media:

The Trump Administration’s cozy relationship with radical anti-choice organizations is deeply concerning, and demonstrates the Administration’s desire to work with an extreme, fringe base rather than fight for the rights of women and families.

Anti-choice groups have continually championed judges like Gorsuch. As Hanson Long noted, “They’re individuals who, if confirmed, will bring life to Trump’s anti-choice agenda for decades, spelling disaster for generations of Americans.”

Trump has pushed an anti-choice agenda all along, including his decision to put Mike Pence on his ticket. Pence, who has been exceedingly hostile to reproductive freedom for his entire career, bragged that the Trump White House has “literally filled” his administration with abortion opponents, and described them as an “A-team.”

Trump has implemented a plan that would pull back millions being used to fight global health issues, if any clinics around the world being supported by the United States offer women abortions. He even tried to deny tax credits to people in pro-choice states, as part of the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare.

The meeting with anti-choice radicals comes as Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill — rather than focusing on urgently needed aid for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico — are making another run at women, with a planned vote on an abortion ban, which was announced by Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The legislation is the type of extremist measure favored by the groups who met with Trump. It calls for punishing abortion providers if they terminate a pregnancy after 20 weeks of gestation. That would work to undermine Roe, which guarantees the right to an abortion up until around 24 weeks.

In 2014, the Supreme Court kept a lower court’s finding that such a law was unconstitutional in place. Conservatives have justified the legislation with pseudo-science, arguing that fetuses can experience pain after 20 weeks — which  doctors and scientific research have found to be wholly untrue.

But if Trump and his religious right allies, working in concert with Republicans in Congress, have their way, things like science and facts won’t matter in the long run.

Judges will be installed that ignore reality and bolster ideology, voting to restrict women’s rights as much as possible, and greatly pleasing Trump and his virulently anti-choice cronies.