The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is Dangerous
Over this last weekend, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) began to host a private retreat for major corporate donors at the opulent Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The luxury event, which began on Sunday and is scheduled to run through today, has included over 20 corporations and trade groups, including lobbyists and executives from Comcast, Match Group, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, Juul Labs, Koch Industries, Lowe’s and Walmart.
The event, titled ERC & Victory Fund Retreat, is being hosted just weeks after a Conservative Majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. RAGA is undoubtedly using this fancy retreat to seek more donations in the continuing effort to fend off ongoing legal attacks concerning the protection of abortion rights. According to a group fundraising email from June 24, “every donation [to the RAGA fund] will help the Republican Attorneys General combat the Democrats’ pro-abortion agenda and stand tall for life.”
Since the 2020 election cycle, almost all the corporations listed to attend this private retreat have contributed a combined $4 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association — this amount was collected in the first quarter of 2022 alone. Several of these companies play both sides of the field and donate heavily to Democratic causes as well. Since the recent landmark ruling overturning Roe, Comcast and Match Group have both publicly announced that they will cover travel costs for employees who have to travel out of state for abortions.
Several weeks ago, we saw how RAGA sprang into action when it was publicly made known that a 10-year-old girl in Ohio, who had been raped and impregnated, traveled to Indiana to receive a medical abortion. The Republican Indiana Attorney General, Todd Rokita, launched an all-out legal and public relations attack on the child’s medical provider that culminated in extremist threats to Dr. Cailtin Bernard’s own daughter.
Dr. Bernard, who performed the procedure on the 10-year-old rape victim, was one of six doctors named on the website of extreme anti-abortion group Right to Life Michiana in a section entitled “Local Abortion Threat.” Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has been linked to this extremist group since at least 2006, when both she and her husband signed their names to a treatise published by the group in the South Bend Tribune. The Coney-Barrett endorsed open letter demanded an end to Roe v. Wade and referred to the legal precedent established by the case as “barbaric.”
Dr. Bernard stated last year that she had stopped performing first-trimester abortions at a clinic in South Bend, Indiana, after the FBI had alerted Planned Parenthood of a threat to kidnap her daughter made by this extremist Right to Life group endorsed by Coney-Barrett.
Indiana’s Republican AG intentionally shifted his attention to Dr. Bernard in an attempt to retaliate by further damaging her career and putting her family in more jeopardy. On July 6, Rokita appeared on Fox News and vowed to investigate the obstetrician-gynecologist, suggesting the doctor may have engaged in criminal misconduct (see video below).
Rokita issued a written statement a day later, questioning whether the physician followed reporting requirements. “The failure to do so constitutes a crime in Indiana,” Rokita’s statement added. A few hours later, the Fox affiliate in Indianapolis reported that Bernard “not only filed a terminated-pregnancy report but filed the report within the required timeframe.”
The outlet’s report was based on records obtained through a routine public records request — a step the Indiana attorney general’s office could have easily taken before Rokita started accusing the doctor of wrongdoing. Rokita also raised the prospect of a possible HIPAA violation, but Indiana University Health officials concluded that Dr. Bernard did not violate any privacy laws.
An attorney for Dr. Bernard sent a cease-and-desist letter last Friday to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita citing comments he made regarding Bernard on Fox News Channel Wednesday night. "Your false and defamatory statements to Fox News on July 13, 2022, cast Dr. Bernard in a false light and allege misconduct in her profession," Bernard’s attorney wrote.
A spokesperson for Rokita's office responded by saying merely that the letter will be reviewed when it arrives but "no false or misleading statements have been made." Whether or not this is determined to be appropriate, legally, remains to be seen and there is no information at this point about any civil charges by Dr. Bernard against the Indiana Attorney General’s Office.
This is far from the first time that the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) has involved itself in the systematic attack on human rights in the United States. There are links to RAGA and the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
On January 5, 2021, the night before the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol Building, an elite meeting supposedly took place at the private residence of the president at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, just blocks away from the White House. According to the social media posts of failed Nebraska Gubernatorial Candidate Charles W. Herbster, several influential arms of the Republican Party were involved, including Sen. Tommy Tuberville and RAGA. You can read more about this in my article from Jan. 27, 2021, entitled Tuberville and RAGA Now Directly Implicated in Trump's Coup.
It is clear that the Republican Attorneys General Association is well entrenched in politics and has been working for years to destroy the abortion rights granted by Roe v. Wade. But their latest moves include involving themselves with an attempted coup of the federal government and using their political power to attack an abortion provider who has broken no laws, reflecting an even more emboldened brazenness that is frightening.
Add to that RAGA’s major corporate donations from companies that support RAGA’s actions, all funded by your own patronage, and we have an alarming reality: in addition to the new law helping to facilitate statewide abortion bans, RAGA now has the money and desire to pursue retaliatory attacks on professionals and citizens whose ideologies oppose theirs.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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Republicans are now highly emboldened to do whatever they want to whomever they want. This became obvious with Fat Don. They are almost daring the Democrats and sane Americans to stop them and sadly we are losing this battle. Much attention is paid to suburban women who enjoy Republican policies but loathe their outward hatred of everything not white-male yet their loyalty still seems to be to Republicans. Until pretty suburban white women are getting dragged out of their McMansions in handcuffs for having a miscarriage this blatant assault on women will only get worse. Democrats starting with Biden need to be out there daily beating the drum calling these people what they are, misogynist tyrants running on nothing but hatred. But of course the democratic establishment is never able to muster the level of grievance that animates the right. What a mess we're in.
Michael is right--the Republicans fear nothing at this point. They have paid zero price for sedition, and with our 24 hour/7 day a week news cycle, there is a good chance that they will pay zero price for the end of national abortion rights. Spearheaded by the RAGA, they will now go after interstate travel, as they seek to bar those who can afford abortions in red states from traveling to blue states to get the procedure done. Of course, this will be challenged in court, but with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, would you (or anyone else) bet against the reactionary majority finding some twisted logic to justify the ban?