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HuffPost contacted the offices of all 38 of the senators who voted for Kacsmaryk and none of them responded, despite the fact that they got what they wanted in Kacsmaryk. It’s not like his credentials as a wild-eyed forced birth anti-LGTBQ+ bigot were a big secret when his nomination came before them. But they really, really don’t want to talk about the reality of it all, the fact that Kacsmaryk was confirmed by them for any reason other than crass, extreme politics perfectly willing to embarrass them all with a really, really bad and lawless ruling.

The usual suspects among House Republicans don’t give a damn about any of that. They are so gung-ho, dozens of them filed an amicus brief asking the appeals court to affirm Kacsmaryk’s ruling (along with 11 GOP senators who prefer to keep their opinion on the ruling hidden in court documents).

“The FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration) unlawful approval and deregulation of chemical abortion drugs subverts Congress’ public policy considerations and safeguards for patient safety,” the lawmakers wrote to the court. Again, the FDA acted entirely within the law when it approved mifepristone back in 2000. It’s actually pretty scary that so many lawmakers have absolutely no idea what law is.

They urged the court to uphold the ruling and move to immediately ban the drug to “protect women and girls from the harms of chemical abortion drugs,” which is also not a thing. The drug is safer than many prescription and over the counter drugs, including Tylenol and insulin. Also, if they really gave a damn about the safety of women and girls, they’d be doing something about the guns that are slaughtering them every day.

For the most part, though, Republicans from the House all the way to presidential contenders are just not talking about it, which the forced birth movement has noticed and is trying valiantly to explain away. “Everyone was at church on Friday night when the decision came out,” Katie Daniel, the state policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told Semafor. “That could be part of it.” Sure Katie, church. Where they’ve apparently all been ensconced since.

The GOP’s reticence to weigh in might also have something to do with their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, which reacted to this with appropriate horror. They immediately responded to the ruling with an open letter siding with the FDA, spearheaded by Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla; Alisha Alaimo, president of Biogen; Christopher Tan, an executive for Merck & Co.; Imran Nasrullah, a vice president for Bayer Pharmaceuticals; and a senior clinical leader at Novartis, Nancy Lewis. Hundreds of pharmaceutical and biotech companies have signed on.

They call out Kacsmaryk as an activist judge who has “no scientific training,” and who “ignores decades of scientific evidence,” that has proven mifepristone to be “safer than Tylenol, nearly all antibiotics and insulin.” They call for the ruling to be reversed, saying it “set a precedent for diminishing FDA’s authority over drug approvals, and in so doing, creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry.”

“As an industry we count on the FDA’s autonomy and authority to bring new medicines to patients under a reliable regulatory process for drug evaluation and approval. Adding regulatory uncertainty to the already inherently risky work of discovering and developing new medicines will likely have the effect of reducing incentives for investment, endangering the innovation that characterizes our industry,” the letter says.

Well that’s kind of a problem for Republicans, isn’t it. The pharmaceutical industry spent $15.6 million in GOP campaign contributions in 2022, and is already much more supportive of Democrats, who got $23.6 million. The forced birth movement, however, coughed up just $1.2 million for the GOP last year.

Maybe this time one of their pet judges went just a little too far.

RELATED STORIES:

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‘Zombie’ abortion bans have a bad week in the Midwest, but it’s a very different story in Idaho

Justice Department is moving quickly in wake of Trump judge’s outrageous order against mifepristone

Joan McCarter

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