Gavin Newsom In Battle Of The Pottymouths With Louisiana Over Extraditing Abortion Provider
Git 'em Gavin.
Prepare to clutch your pearls, a Democrat has cursed out a Republican again. How uncouth!
The guilty fiend this time is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. The object of his rebuke is Liz Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana. The conflict is that Newsom will not extradite a California doctor to Murrill’s backwards hickville of a redneck state to face charges for providing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident. So Murrill is suing him, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, who has been refusing to extradite a doctor there for going on a year now.
Murrill told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that this lawsuit is the only way to address New York and California “protecting people who are openly committed to nullifying and violating our criminal laws in our state.” A spokeswoman for Newsom responded that “as a champion for reproductive freedoms,” California will “assert its lawful authority to defend the fundamental rights that define” the state.
That was on Wednesday. On Thursday, Newsom — or whatever comms staffer runs his X account — had a slightly more direct take:
Ah, the most shining example of the magnificent dignitude of American politics in one tweet. At least until Friday morning, when President Trump posted a picture of the Obamas’ heads on the bodies of a couple of gorillas, an image so racist that even Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was offended.
Murrill responded thusly:
First of all, everyone knows that “bless your heart” is Southern for “go fuck yourself.” You are not fooling anyone with the genteel Steel Magnolia act, lady.
Second of all, gey zikh baren, which is Yiddish for “bless your heart.”
Were you wondering when wingnuts were going to get around to using the Comstock Act of 1873 to enact a de facto abortion ban nationwide? Well, this is a case that could do it if courts determine that doctors in California and New York mailing mifepristone to patients in Louisiana criminally violates Comstock, which in the past has mostly been used to prosecute people for sending child porn through the mail.
Luckily for pedophiles, they can just get Elon Musk’s Grok AI to generate it for them. No mail involved! That Elon is truly a genius.
The Supreme Court already sidestepped confronting the mifepristone issue in 2024 in the case of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The AHM is an antiabortion group that in 2023 had sued the FDA over its approval of the drug in 2000. Back then, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that the group, which was only founded in 2022 (possibly for this exact purpose), did not have standing to sue. It was a little surprising, since we are primed to think the worst of this SCOTUS. But even Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas seemed to have recognized FDA v. AHM as a weak case for instituting a backdoor abortion ban.
We don’t know if America can get that lucky with the Supreme Court twice. In fact, we highly doubt it will give up the chance to invent a Fugitive Slave Act for the 21st century. If we know anything about this Court, it’s that it loves to invent laws that just happen to align with Republican political priorities.
With national abortion rights at stake, we think a little cursing is very much in order. If we were Gavin Newsom, we would not have limited ourselves to one expletive. You might as well go for the gusto in this situation. It’s one thing to have told Murrill to fuck herself, but it would be another to tell her to fuck herself sideways with a rusty chainsaw. You have to get creative if you want to really make your contempt clear.
As of this writing, Kathy Hochul is the only official involved who is maintaining a dignified silence and not telling Louisiana to go fuck itself. Though we are sure, as a New Yorker, that she’s thinking it.
Wonkette survives to curse prodigiously another day thanks to the generous support of our readers.
https://bsky.app/profile/lebassett.bsky.social/post/3me7fann6k22i
They've removed the racist video that earlier they were defending, and are blaming a staffer for something that, again, they were earlier defending.
As a New Yorker, we invented the “Fuck You, You Fuckin’ Fuck” T-shirt as a souvenir.
None of these people grasp how federalism works, and they don’t care to learn.