Trump compares migrants to Hannibal Lecter in ‘rambling’ CPAC speech: Live

An Alabama court’s ruling this week putting the future of in vitro fertilization (IVF) at risk for thousands of families across the state hit the national discourse on abortion like a brick through its window.

Republican politicians scrambled to defend themselves, even as it was clear that the conservative fantasy of ending the protections of Roe vs Wade had been the direct impetus for the ruling. GOP figureheads from Speaker Mike Johnson to presidential candidates Donald Trump and Nikki Haley fell over themselves to come out in favour of IVF protections (thanks in no small part due to the comparatively wealthy status of families with financial access to IVF).

“Government doesn’t need to get into something this sensitive. This should be between the doctor and the parents. Period,” said Nikki Haley on Saturday, providing a quote that could have been copy-and-pasted from a pro-choice group after Roe’s demise.

But if the IVF ruling hit the political discourse like a brick, then its effects on the actual lives of Alabama’s families was more akin to a bomb going off. Already stories are trickling out from women who were days or even moments away from various stages of IVF treatment, only to be left high-and-dry by a court ruling that in some cases could leave them on the hook for thousands of dollars in money that is now essentially flushed down the drain.

“Now, even if I wanted to get them out of the state and do a transfer in another state or where my surrogate lives, I can’t,” one woman told NBC News. “I’m just kind of stuck until something changes down here, which – who knows how long that’s going to take?”

It’s a reminder that these court decisions have real effects on real lives. Banning a medical practice doesn’t just affect people in the future; it can outright ruin lives for people who are already in a vulnerable position.

At least one member of the Republican National Committee is working to slow Donald Trump‘s attempted takeover of the organization by pushing to keep the committee neutral until Trump is officially the presidential nominee and avoid picking up his legal bills.

Two draft resolutions are being circulated by Henry Barbour, a national committeeman from Mississippi, for consideration at the RNC‘s upcoming March meeting in Houston. Barbour said support for the resolutions among RNC members is growing but he does not yet have the needed cosponsors, and any resolutions would ultimately be nonbinding.

The effort comes after Trump last week publicly called to replace the RNC’s current leaders and install one of his senior campaign advisors and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump in top roles. Lara Trump suggested earlier in the week that GOP voters would support the committee paying her father-in-law’s legal bills as he faces a raft of criminal and civil indictments.

Trump senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita, whom the former president wants to install as the party’s chief operating officer, told reporters Friday night that the RNC would not pay Trump’s legal bills.

One of Barbour’s proposed resolutions says that the RNC and its leadership will stay neutral throughout the presidential primary and not take on additional staff from any of the active campaigns until a candidate has the needed delegates to be the nominee.

The second resolution says the organization will not pay the legal bills of any candidate for federal or state office but will instead focus its spending on efforts directly related to the 2024 election.

“The RNC has one job. That’s winning elections,” Barbour said. “I believe RNC funds should be spent solely on winning elections, on political expenses, not legal bills.”

The RNC was paying some of Trump’s legal bills for New York cases that started while he was president, the Washington Post reported, but current Chair Ronna McDaniel said in November 2022 that the RNC would stop paying once Trump became a candidate again and started running for the 2024 presidential election.

Trump is spending millions on lawyers in civil cases and four criminal cases, but he also has legal debts that top half a billion dollars.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is Trump’s last major challenger in the GOP primary and facing him in her home state’s contest Saturday, said a family member or campaign manager should not be leading the RNC.

“I would hope that the people in the RNC know that they have a responsibility, a responsibility to put in people in the RNC who are going to look out in the best interest of all of the Republican Party, not just one person,” Haley said.

The resolutions were first reported by The Dispatch on Saturday.

The continued presence of Donald Trump on the US political scene has longtime allies concerned over whether the US can be a reliable security partner, former National Intelligence Officer and Trump administration National Security Council official Fiona Hill has said.

Speaking at the Principles First summit, a gathering of anti-Trump and pro-democracy conservatives in Washington, Ms Hill was asked to opine on how Mr Trump would have reacted to the killing of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny on his watch.

She told attendees the twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president, whose performance during a 2018 Helsinki press conference alongside Russian leader Vladimir Putin was so bad that she considered pulling a fire alarm to end it, might actually have reacted negatively to Navalny’s death if he thought it made him look bad.

“It’s really about how it reflects on him,” she said.

Andrew Feinberg has the story:

On Friday evening, during the Reagan Dinner, Bishop Joseph Strickland, the former bishop of Tyler, Texas addressed the topic Republican elected officials have hoped to avoid: the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos could be considered children under state law, saying that conservatives needed to guide Republicans politicians to support the “sanctity of life.”

“This decision by Alabama’s court was correct according to our Catholic faith,” he said addressing the conservative faithful and donors after an auction that included selling off portaits of Donald Trump and Jesus Christ and before a speech by failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Bishop Strickland, whom Pope Francis relieved last year from his position, called upon conservative activists to push Republican elected officials to stand steadfast behind the Alabama court ruling.

Read more from Eric Garcia:

Donald Trump falsely claimed that Californians are being sent several ballots as part of a scheme to defraud elections during his keynote speech at CPAC.

“I will tell you if God came down and God was the vote checker, I believe [Republicans] would win California, I think it’s so crazy,” Mr Trump said. “They send out 36 million ballots, just sent out to people unknown. They’re sent out all over the place. How many people from California know people that get six, seven, eight ballots?”