For the fourth time since she became the federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is arguing an abortion-related case.

The dispute before the high court on Wednesday, about whether federal mandates for hospitals override strict state abortion bans in medical emergencies, shows how legal fights over abortion rights did not cease when the conservative majority ended a constitutional right to an abortion in 2022.

In the first two abortion-related cases Prelogar argued as the Justice Department’s fourth-ranking official, both heard during the Supreme Court’s 2021 term, the conservative majority rejected her calls that abortion rights be protected. But Prelogar has eked out wins on other issues where the Biden administration was seemingly at odds with the court’s conservative proclivities, including in tussles over immigration policy and voting rights.

The administration’s supporters hope that in the two abortion cases before the Supreme Court this year, Prelogar can bring at least some of the conservative justices to the federal government’s side.

Lawyers with experience arguing before the high court cite Prelogar’s skills in oral arguments, as well as her strategy of putting forward legal points that will attract the support of justices who are otherwise hostile to abortion as an issue – and doing so without undermining the larger arguments in favor of access to abortion.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett famously provided the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. So if you are arguing in favor of an abortion ban, you probably don’t want to alienate Barrett—by, say, condescendingly dismissing her concerns when she points out that your legal theory doesn’t make any sense. Yet that is what Joshua Turner did on Wednesday while defending Idaho’s draconian abortion restrictions, and much to Barrett’s evident irritation. Turner—who represented the Idaho solicitor general’s office in the second major abortion case to come before the high court after it promised us in its Dobbs opinion that the court was out of the abortion business in 2022—might just have lost his case by repeatedly mansplaining his self-contradictory position to Barrett and the other three women justices. In his toneless, dispassionate telling, his entirely incomprehensible position was just too complex for them to understand. And so he just kept repeating it, over and over. These justices, including Barrett, sounded increasingly fed up with his chin-stroking dissembling on an issue that’s literally life-or-death for pregnant women in red states. If the court’s male members noticed Turner’s dismissive attitude toward their colleagues, they didn’t care. The gender divide on the court has never been so revealing.

Perhaps because Dobbs was a threat to unknown future women, whereas real women are now being left to hemorrhage, lose the functioning of their reproductive organs, or be popped onto helicopters to receive out-of-state stabilizing care, none of the life-and-death harms being experienced in red states around the country feel very theoretical to anyone who has thought about pregnancy in a serious way. Yet, for male justices more worried about harms to the spending clause, nothing about potentially lethal pregnancies warranted even a moment’s pause.

Wednesday’s case, Moyle v. United States, revolves around a clash between Idaho law and a 1986 federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (or EMTALA). Idaho’s abortion ban has no exception for the health of the patient; rather, it criminalizes abortion unless it’s “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” EMTALA, meanwhile, requires virtually all hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment for any condition that “could reasonably be expected” to put the patient’s health “in serious jeopardy,” as well as any condition that could seriously impair bodily functions or organs.

The Biden administration argues there’s a conflict between Idaho law and EMTALA: Where Idaho allows termination only when the patient is at the brink of death, EMTALA mandates intervention earlier, to stabilize the patient before she is literally dying, including situations in which she is facing organ damage, infertility, or other serious harms. So the administration sued the state, and a federal judge issued an injunction compelling Idaho to allow emergency abortions to preserve a patient’s “health.” Now SCOTUS must decide whether the federal statute limits the ability of states like Idaho to criminalize abortions that are health-sparing but not necessarily lifesaving. And that means slipping into their white coats and stethoscopes and explaining to America’s emergency physicians how to do their jobs without risking two to five years in prison and a loss of licensure for making poor guesses about what stabilizing care involves.

A federal law requires most US hospitals to provide an abortion to patients experiencing a medical emergency if an abortion is the proper medical treatment for that emergency. This law is unambiguous, and it applies even in red states with strict abortion bans that prohibit the procedure even when necessary to save a patient’s life or protect their health.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning discussing whether to write a new exception into this federal law, which would permit states to ban abortions even when a patient will die if they do not receive one.

Broadly speaking, the Court seemed to divide into three camps during Wednesday’s argument in Moyle v. United States. The Court’s three Democrats, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all argued — quite forcefully at times — that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) means what it says and thus nearly all hospitals must provide emergency abortions.

Meanwhile, the Court’s right flank — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — left no doubt that they will do whatever it takes to permit states to ban medically necessary abortions.

That left three of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, in the middle. Kavanaugh and Barrett both asked questions that very much suggest they want states to be able to ban medically necessary abortions. But they also appeared to recognize, at times, that the arguments supporting such an outcome are far from airtight.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could have devastating and widespread consequences for pregnant patients, their families, and their health care providers—yes, even considering where we currently are with reproductive health care in this country. It involves Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, which makes it a crime for the state’s physicians to terminate a pregnancy, even when termination is necessary to protect the mother’s health. As a result of that state’s cramped statutory exceptions for emergency abortion care, a woman showing up to an ER in Idaho could be at imminent risk of losing her reproductive organs, and yet a physician could still not be allowed to end her pregnancy to save them, unless or until she is about to die.

By contrast, right now, a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires that hospitals that participate in Medicare (meaning virtually every private hospital in the country) provide stabilizing care when the health of a patient is in serious jeopardy. As any emergency physician can explain, sometimes an abortion is the stabilizing care necessary to protect a patient’s health: to avoid loss of reproductive organs and fertility, loss of other organs, permanent disability, severe pain, dire mental health results, and a host of other horrible consequences, including—but also short of—risk of imminent death.

​Before Idaho’s law took effect, a federal district court in the state found that EMTALA and the Idaho law conflict: When a pregnant patient needs an abortion to stabilize a health emergency and consents to receive one, federal law requires that her doctors give her an abortion. The Idaho ban therefore criminalizes what federal law requires. Whenever that happens, the Constitution’s supremacy clause says federal law wins: Under what’s known as the preemption doctrine, federal law is the “supreme Law of the Land” and overrides the conflicting state law. The Idaho court thus temporarily ordered an exception to the Idaho law, allowing physicians to terminate a pregnancy when EMTALA requires it.

​In January, however, the Supreme Court disagreed. Leaping into the case before it was conclusively resolved, the high court issued a stay allowing Idaho’s law to take effect again, despite the conflict with EMTALA, ruling on its “shadow docket” and offering no opinion explaining its reasoning. On Wednesday, in the final week of the court’s term, the justices will hear oral argument in the case. They have an opportunity to undo the harm their earlier ruling has already caused. Their decision will affect the law not just in Idaho but in every state whose laws clash with EMTALA.

The biggest obstacle to enforcing the Constitution’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting is the Supreme Court. Since 1965, Congress’s primary vehicle for implementing this constitutional command has been the Voting Rights Act; the Court, urged on by Republican elected officials, has been chipping away at the law’s promises ever since. The justices dealt particularly debilitating blows to the law in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021). And now, yet another lawsuit is coursing its way through federal courts that threatens to kill what’s left of it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit is currently considering Pendergrass v. Raffensperger, a challenge to the VRA ostensibly arising out of redistricting in Georgia. A closer look at the arguments made by challengers to the Act, though, suggests that much of the case arises from the Supreme Court itself: Republican litigants are attacking the Voting Rights Act in the way the Republican justices advertised that they should the last time they attacked the Voting Rights Act.

Back in 2021, groups representing Georgia voters sued Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, alleging that the state’s new electoral maps diluted the voting strength of Georgians of color in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 2020 Census showed that Georgia’s growth over the preceding decade was entirely attributable to its minority population, yet there was no corresponding increase in the number of majority-Black congressional and legislative districts. Alongside its considerations of other contextual factors, like persistent racial polarization in voting and discrimination against Black voters in the state, the trial court specifically concluded that the GOP-led redistricting process had left Black voters in west-metro Atlanta with less of an opportunity to participate in the political process.

In his appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, Raffensperger not only argued that the map did not violate the VRA, but also challenged the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutionally out-of-date. “Just because” Section 2 “was justified when it was enacted in 1965—or when it was last amended in 1982—does not mean it remains so today,” he wrote. The relevant question, Raffensperger insists, is whether its “extraordinary measures…continue to satisfy constitutional requirements.”

If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s quoting Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, Roberts wrote that “the Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” but opined that because “our country has changed,” the legislation no longer spoke “to current conditions.” Roberts pioneered the idea that parts of the Voting Rights Act can age out of constitutionality because, in news to people of color, America is so post-racist now.

Dallas-based global tax services and software provider Ryan has filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the Federal Trade Commission’s new non-compete rule. It’s the first challenge filed against the rule, which “would upend companies’ IP protections and talent development and retention by invalidating millions of employment contracts and nullifying the laws of dozens of states, according to the FTC’s own public estimation,” Ryan said.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the lawsuit says the new rule “imposes an extraordinary burden on businesses seeking to protect their intellectual property and retain top talent within the professional services industries.” Ryan is seeking to prevent “the immense, undue burdens the FTC’s rule would impose on service-driven companies of every size nationwide.”

FTC rule aims ‘to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide’

On Tuesday, the FTC announced it had issued a final rule “to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.”

Noncompetes are “a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business,” the FTC said, often forcing workers “to either stay in a job they want to leave or bear other significant harms and costs, such as being forced to switch to a lower-paying field, being forced to relocate, being forced to leave the workforce altogether, or being forced to defend against expensive litigation.”

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — As transgender people in Louisiana watched surrounding states in the deeply conservative South implement a slew of laws targeting nearly every facet of their lives in recent years, they counted on their ally in the governor’s office to keep their home a relative oasis.

Former Gov. John Bel Edwards, the only statewide elected Democrat at the time, was indeed able to block most of the bills.

But this year, nothing stands in the way. Edwards has been replaced by Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by former President Donald Trump who has shown support for such legislation. And the GOP holds a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature. That means previously introduced legislation hostile to transgender people now has a clear path forward, as do new proposals.

“These bills are absolutely going to become law,” said SarahJane Guidry, executive director of the LGBTQ+ rights group Forum for Equality. “And that is such a tragedy, but it doesn’t end there. We are going to continue to fight.”

As the only Democratic governor in the Deep South at the time, Edwards used vetoes to block anti-transgender legislation, including one broadly barring teachers from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation in schools, a type of policy critics have dubbed “Don’t Say Gay”; and a measure requiring public school teachers to use the pronouns and names students were assigned at birth.

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee said Monday that he thinks workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga made a mistake by voting to unionize under the United Auto Workers in a landslide election but acknowledged the choice was ultimately up to them.

Ahead of the vote, Lee and five other Southern Republican governors spoke out publicly against the UAW's drive to organize workers at factories largely in the South, arguing that if autoworkers were to vote for union representation, it would jeopardize jobs.

Instead, the union wound up pulling 73% of the vote at a facility whose workers had narrowly rejected the union in 2019 and 2014. The Volkswagen plant vote was the first to follow a series of strikes last fall against Detroit’s automakers that resulted in lucrative new contracts. Workers at Mercedes factories near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, will vote on UAW representation in May.

Lee told reporters Monday that the Volkswagen vote was “a loss for workers." He noted that he has a “long history with skilled workers" — workers are not unionized at his family's business, Lee Company, which employs about 1,600 people in home, facilities and construction projects.

“I think it's unwise to put your future in somebody else's hands,” Lee said at an event in Gallatin. “But those workers made that decision based on the individual circumstances of that plant. I think it was a mistake, but that's their choice.”

President Joe Biden will deliver an abortion-focused speech in Florida next week, capitalizing on a looming abortion ban there to make a broader case for reproductive rights.

At a campaign event in Tampa on Tuesday, Biden is expected to tie the 2024 election to access to reproductive rights across the country, a campaign aide confirmed to POLITICO. NBC News first reported Biden’s planned speech.

The Biden campaign has hammered former President Donald Trump over abortion in recent weeks, after Trump announced this month that he would defer to state-level abortion laws. In quick succession, a number of state-level cases put Trump and the GOP on the defensive on the issue. In Arizona, the state Supreme Court reinstated an 1864-era abortion ban, while in Florida, a six-week ban, approved by the state Legislature, will soon go into effect.

Biden’s addressing of abortion head-on is also significant, as the devout Catholic has often displayed discomfort with the issue. Instead, he’s regularly leaned on other messengers, including Vice President Kamala Harris and women who have been directly affected, to argue for abortion rights. His campaign has released several testimonial-style ads that feature women sharing personal stories about abortion.

“Since the overturning of Roe, whenever reproductive rights have been on the ballot, they have won, and this November will be no different,” Morgan Mohr, the Biden campaign’s senior adviser for reproductive rights, said in a statement. “While Donald Trump continues to brag about unleashing these extreme and dangerous bans, President Joe Biden is running to restore reproductive freedom.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn't offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.

“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care -- this is inconceivable.”

It's happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.

Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. Medical facilities must comply with the law if they accept Medicare funding.