Abortion is the issue for GOP, or is it?

The recent court ruling against the medication abortion drug mifepristone has created a firestorm of protest among the drug’s manufacturer and women across the nation, as this unprecedented ruling from the judicial bench on a two-decade old approval from the US Federal Drug  Administration seems to be the latest attack after the Dobbs decision that vacated the right to abortion enshrined in the decades old decision of Roe v. Wade.

Moral implications aside, this latest move is still part and parcel of the burgeoning culture wars between the ultra conservative right and the liberal progressive wing in American political life, but supporting abortion in political life goes much deeper for the Republican party, as it attempts to woo and sustain votes, especially in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

The widespread coverage in the media has sparked debates, and legal maneuvers, that give a sustained voice to the issue, yet the depth of concern, supported by supporters of former President Donald Trump, is not the lone voice, as April’s 6-week abortion ban supported by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gives it a further push. 

Or, does it? 

Abortion rights has the support of both President Biden, and the Democratic Party, and they have campaigned on this issue as have other lawmakers across the country, and even some ardent supporters of Trump, having been defeated, want to back away from it, fearing that the GOP might lose another presidential race.

One issue that has the support of many, on both the extreme right and the middle right, are anti-trans bills, whether to ban gender affirming care, for those under 18, or banning transgender boys and girls from playing school athletics with the gender they identify and the issue is red hot and will only increase over time as a winnable issue for both the White House, and statehouse races.

Running almost parallel to the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory in elementary and high schools, the two are hoped to secure a stronger base of support for the right, and also to try and regain the support of suburban women who left them over abortion access.

Reaching back into the past, especially the tumultuous 1960s, the area of gender rights and human sexuality has run the gamut from the advent of the Pill, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation, which seem like a quaint relic of the past, along with miniskirts and bell bottoms.

America’s near obsession with gender, and by extension sexuality, is an issue that can wax, and wane, and even withsame-sex marriage.  A 2022 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, (non-partisan) showed that “68 percent of respondents favored allowing same-sex couples to marry, including 49 percent of Republicans,” according to The New York Times.

The Times also reported that the same-sex ruling by the Supreme Court was a low point for those social conservatives and mourned the loss of fundraising dollars, and they quoted Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, who said, “we knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” and that issue is the burgeoning area of transgender rights , and the rise of young people identifying as trans.

There are now 20 Republican led states that have gone down the path of bathroom access, medically affirming treatments, and the aforementioned athletic participation.

The historic lead was the 2021 success of a veto override by the Republican led Arkansas legislature successfully banning “transition medication or surgery.”

Next up was DeSantis who signed a bill preventing transgender girls from playing K-12 sports,” but recognized a move to shore up his presidential aspirations.

Thursday the US House of Representatives passed a vote banning transgender girls from school sports. The vote passed strictly on partisan lines, and would change the definition of sex to be based “solely on a person’s genetics at birth,” reported The Washington Post, with its target on transgendered women and girls, and a recent poll conducted by the Post and The University of Maryland found a majority of Americans “opposed in high school, college, or professional women’s sports.”

All of this considered, and circling back to abortion, can anyone say that it’s a dead issue for the GOP? Not with uncertainty say most observers of Capitol Hill, and the Supreme Court, and certainly Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, US District Attorney of North Texas, who brought the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs, that argues that there are dangerous side effects to the drug, is an ardent foe of abortion rights.

Also on the agenda is the ant-science stance that the judge’s injunction and statements that there are effects of the drug, despite rigorous study by the FDA, and it’s not hard to see that by extension this could further amplify the anti-vax community who now have a prominent advocate running for the presidency in the person of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and some are even suggesting that he might be a vice- presidential candidate for Trump in 2024.

Dr. Jeremy Levin, chief executive of Ovid Therapeutics told the Times that the Texas lawsuit could not only eat away at the authority of the FDA, it, “much more importantly, it opens it up to a political determination of what a medicine is or isn’t and that is deeply horrific for vaccines, Alzheimer drugs, all the others.”

If successful, what would this lawsuit, on its way to the US Supreme Court, with a stay ending on Friday at midnight, do for a vaccine for the next epidemic?

March Jobs, CPI, and a mixed bag

The March Jobs Report issued by the US Labor Dept, last Friday didn’t deliver quite the eggs needed for a sunny economic Easter, but it did offer some rays of hope for both the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and President Biden, especially as he is expected to soon announce his reelection campaign.

While jobs in the nation are plentiful, for those that want them, employers have slowed the pace of hiring from the earlier frenzied search, and the plentiful benefits of hiring bonuses, and PTO have tapered off, despite a slight downturn in the unemployment rate, and there are more people returning to work, from the sidelines, than previously seen.

Of course, the elephant in the room is inflation, and the decrease in hiring, no matter how small offers a light at the end of the tunnel for Powell, but not enough to not consider raising the interest rate again, in May; which the odds among economists for another quarter point increase is 67 percent favoring.

Still there are those that are optimistic, and one might be Michael Pugliese an economist at Wells Fargo, who told The New York Times, “I think it’s very clear interest rates are starting to play a role . . . Some of it is just normalizing. You’re obviously not going to be able to sustain the job growth we’ve seen over the past year or two indefinitely.”

The numbers: 236,000 nonfarm jobs were created in March, and the unemployment rate decreased to 3.5 percent, but there was a mixed bag in the following areas: transportation and warehousing, was little changed at 10,000, but warehousing and storage decreased by 12,000; retail, where little had changed, there was a slight decrease of 15,000.

With those numbers the mixed side, there was an increase of prime working age workers, those aged 25 to 54 years old, at 83.1 percent, but some economists debate the significance.

President Biden said, when the report was released, “This is a good jobs report for hard working Americans,” but he added, “there is still more work to do '' to reduce prices that have hit the wallets of many Americans.

Chicago based Challenger, Christmas and Gray reported that there were 89,703 job cuts in March, with 15 percent in February. But the most layoffs are in the tech sector, totaling 168,243, and according to techcrunch.com, Meta, the parent company of Google, laid off 10,000 with another 5,000 open slots canceled; and Microsoft with 10,000 laid off, in a team that was dedicated to AI (artificial intelligence) work.

Adding to this turmoil, Indeed laid off 15 percent of its tech workers, at 2,200, and Accenture 19,000, or 2.5 percent of its workforce.

On the brighter side, job gains included leisure and travel at 72,000, education and health at 65,000, and government workers at 42,000.

Coming from the sidelines, perhaps because of inflation, was a slight bump, not statistically significant, in labor force participation, from previous months, now at  62.6 percent contrasted with 62.5 in February.

Good news is that the employment rate for Black Americans has hit a record low of 5 percent. And, while much of that, and other figures, might be limited by future lower wage growth, which reached a high of over 3.2 percent between January and March, but averaged 4.2 over the last 12 months, (in March average hourly earnings were greater than 0.3 percent), but this still brings good news to those, ”last hired, first fired.”

All eyes turned on Wednesday to the Consumer Price Index, (which measures the prices that consumers pay for goods, and services), to give more detail on another major rising cost, shelter, making many Americans worry about how to house themselves, affordably. And, what we saw was that housing costs increased, despite an offset at the gas pump.

Stripping out the volatile cost of food and energy, the CPI rose to 0.4 percent, and just behind shelter was insurance, 1.2 percent increase,airline fares at 4.0 percent, household furnishings and new vehicles.

Taking a birdseye view the report showed an all time rate of 5.6 percent, year over year with the month of March, without food and energy.

The takeaway is that this report showed the rise in consumer prices was at its slowest since May of 2021, with inflation increasing by 0.1 percent over the last month, and 5.0 percent over last March.

Many economists had predicted 0.2 percent, and the reduction was seen as a sign of progress in the fight against inflation, even with the 5.0 percent increase in housing, and this pause, as some are calling it, is an indicator, along with the March jobs report for the upcoming Fed’s monetary policy moves.

Ending the economic news last week, there is is still the specter of recession for some bankers,and even consumers, and as we have noted before, some seem to gain satisfaction that it will happen, and in a recent Fortune commentary, Murray Sabrin said that it was inevitable, and citing as an indicator, the inverted yield curve, the bane of undergraduate economics, and its focus on “the difference between the 10 year Treasury note and the three month T Bill.”

While not always a perfect indicator, Sabrin seems focused on it, while admitting some curveballs in previous years, (in 1998) when the expected “short term rates rise above the long term rate a recession begins about a year later.”

Tech layoffs may be the tipping point in his prediction, but no one has a crystal ball to state when it can happen. Or, as a saying goes, “it ain’t over, till it's over.”