Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The hubris. The narcissism. The convenient and fraudulent anti-elitism. The out-of-his-mind theories presented as out-of-the-box thinking.

Many of us have noted how these fetching traits and tics connect Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in some ways Trump with better manners, fewer lawyers and discernible pecs.

But we underplay another commonality. Like Trump when he made his 2016 presidential bid, Kennedy has zero experience — none at all — in elected office, a fact made comically clear in his interview last summer with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, who did focus on Kennedy’s lack of preparation for the presidency, asking the candidate about his credentials.

“I’ve been around government and studying government since I was a little boy,” Kennedy said, not so subtly stressing his bloodline — he’s a septuagenarian nepo baby — and casting proximity as seasoning. It’s not. I’ve been “around” many physicians in my life. You do not want me performing your appendectomy.

Kennedy added that he has attended most of the Democratic Party’s conventions since 1960, that he has visited every country in Latin America and that he “began writing about foreign policy” as a teenager. I began writing about movies as an adolescent. You do not want me directing another “Manchurian Candidate” remake.

I bring this up for three reasons. One, Kennedy exemplifies the degree to which family connections can act as distraction and shield, protecting someone from a kind of scrutiny that a person without a storied surname would receive. Two, his announcement of his running mate last week underscored his utterly cavalier attitude about experience. Three, he’s not going away. Recent developments, including that running-mate announcement, are reminders that he really could be a spoiler in this election.

Although Kennedy is officially on the 2024 ballot only in Utah so far, his campaign this week said that he’d collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in four additional states — including, God help me, my home state, North Carolina, which President Biden’s re-election campaign has been eyeing with at least a sliver of hope. Kennedy’s naming of a running mate makes him potentially eligible for the ballot in states that require a two-person ticket, and that running mate — the fantastically wealthy tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan — promises to be the kind of cash spigot and fund-raiser that’s hugely helpful to signature collection.

Her riches are her credential, though perhaps — I don’t know — she wrote a paper about vice presidents in the fifth grade. Defending her in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, Kennedy led with this: “I’m guessing she probably has a higher I.Q. than almost anybody who I’ve seen in public life today.”

I won’t press to see the results of an actual intelligence test, but I will recall Trump’s boast, just before his 2017 inauguration, that “we have by far the highest I.Q. of any cabinet ever assembled.” And I’ll observe that one of the contenders Shanahan beat out to become Kennedy’s running mate was the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whom Kennedy has proudly identified as a regular confidant and consultant. A man who sees Rodgers as a plausible vice president is a profoundly and dangerously unserious person.

I understand the impulse to open government to people who aren’t mired in conventional thinking, who aren’t bound by party loyalties, who promise truly fresh perspectives, who can inspire us by surprising us. I support it — within reason.

But while a steep learning curve is fine for a House member and perhaps a senator, the White House is no school. Trump demonstrated that by turning it into a kindergarten. And while Kennedy may be educated in some ways, he lacks the crucial lessons in leadership and accountability that we should not just desire but demand in someone seeking the American presidency.

He also lacks so much as a scintilla of humility, a failing that the rest of us could spend the next four years paying for.

Former president Donald Trump’s social media company generated just $4 million in revenue last year — about as much as the average McDonald’s franchise in the United States, according to a report last year by the fast-food industry publication QSR.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, from granting Trump a share package now worth billions of dollars — or from paying its leaders millions of dollars in salaries, bonuses and stock, according to documents it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump Media, based in Sarasota, Fla., has only 36 employees and lost $58 million last year, the filings show. The online analytics firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social’s traffic is less than 1 percent of Reddit’s, a platform that received $800 million in revenue last year.

But a stock-market frenzy has supersized Trump Media’s value to about $5.5 billion — more than the market values of Macy’s, Columbia Sportswear and Alaska Airlines, which make billions in revenue a year.
[...]
Donald Trump
Trump is Trump Media’s biggest shareholder, with 57.3 percent of the company, or 78.7 million shares — a stake worth about $3.2 billion based on the stock’s closing price Friday.

Through an “earnout” provision, Trump stands to receive another 36 million shares if the price stays above $17.50 for 20 days, which could happen as soon as April 26 and would raise his total stake to $4.7 billion.

A six-month “lockup” agreement says Trump can’t sell or transfer his shares until Sept. 25 — or possibly a few days earlier, if the stock hits a certain price threshold. Trump could ask the company’s board to waive that requirement but has yet to do so. The lockup also applies to company executives and board members.

The board
Three people on Trump Media’s seven-member board of directors have been compensated with either stock or cash or both.

Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s chief executive and president, received 115,000 shares, worth about $4.6 million. He was paid a $750,000 salary last year that increased to $1 million this year.

Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California, also will receive a $600,000 lump-sum “retention bonus” this month. A bonus agreement signed by Nunes said the money was designed to help “ensure the continuity” of Trump Media’s business.

Board member Eric Swider, who was chief executive of the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media, and Renatus, his consulting firm in Puerto Rico, received about 153,000 shares as part of the merger deal, a stake worth $6.2 million.

Another board member, Kash Patel, a former Nunes aide who served on Trump’s National Security Council, was paid $130,000 last year as part of a consulting agreement with his company, Trishul. A filing says Patel also serves as a “national security adviser to [Trump] as a private citizen” and receives payment for that service from Trump’s Save America political action committee.

The other four board members — Trump’s former trade representative Robert E. Lighthizer; Trump’s former Small Business Administration leader Linda McMahon; the Louisiana attorney W. Kyle Green; and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. — were not paid last year, though a filing said the board could give itself “stock as non-cash compensation … from time to time.”

One former board member, Dan Scavino Jr., a longtime Trump aide who led his White House’s social media operation and is now advising Trump’s presidential campaign, was paid $240,000 last year through a consulting agreement with his company, Hudson Digital. Scavino will also receive a $600,000 retention bonus this month.

Trump Media also issued a $2.2 million “executive promissory note” to Scavino. The company gave similar promissory notes to other executives, which automatically converted on the day of the merger into stock. The filings do not specify whether Scavino’s note was converted.

The executives
Trump Media’s chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, received 490,000 shares, worth $19.8 million. He was paid $337,500 last year, and his salary jumped to $365,000 when the merger closed. He last worked as the finance chief of a chain of fitness clubs.

Chief operating officer Andrew Northwall received 20,000 shares, worth $812,000. He was paid $365,000 last year. Previously he worked at Parler, the social network that was popular among pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Juhan and Northwall also will receive $600,000 retention bonuses this month.

Other executives will receive a total of $1.24 million in bonuses. They include chief technology officer Vladimir Novachki, who also received 45,000 shares, worth $1.8 million, and general counsel Scott Glabe, who received 20,000 shares, worth $812,000. Glabe served as an associate White House counsel under Trump.

The founders
Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who met Trump on “The Apprentice” and helped launch the business in 2021, received a combined 7.5 million shares through their partnership, United Atlantic Ventures, a stake worth about $304 million.

Arc Global Investments II, the biggest founding investor in Digital World Acquisition, the company that merged with Trump Media to take it public, said in a filing it received 13.3 million shares, worth about $539 million. A previous filing by Trump Media said Arc would receive 9.5 million shares.

Arc and Digital World are involved in a legal dispute regarding how many shares Arc is owed. Arc is managed by Digital World’s former chief executive Patrick Orlando.

The lenders
Trump Media said it had helped fund its operations by issuing 19 convertible notes since 2021 in exchange for loans with a total face value of more than $40 million. The holders of those notes, most of whom the filings do not identify, can convert the unpaid principal into stock. The company said several of the notes had been amended or extended since they were issued, and that it had an “ongoing disagreement” with one noteholder over their “differing interpretations of certain terms.”

The company also said it had issued convertible notes to unnamed investors for “working capital purposes” during the last quarter of 2023, and that more than $1 million of the notes remained outstanding by the end of the year.

The lawyers
The Trump Media deal sits at the center of four ongoing lawsuits, all of which were filed within the last two months:

• Trump Media and Digital World sued Arc and Orlando in Florida, saying their “irrational and disturbing behavior” had “imposed massive costs” and caused “extensive reputational harm.”
•Litinsky and Moss’ United Atlantic Ventures sued Trump Media in Delaware, saying Trump had pushed a “last-minute stock grab” that would dilute their shares. Trump is scheduled to be deposed in that lawsuit this month.
• Arc sued Digital World, its chief executive and three board members in Delaware, saying they had worked to deprive Orlando of millions of shares.
• Trump Media sued Moss, Litinsky and Orlando in Florida, accusing the co-founders of mismanaging the company with a “toxic corporate culture” and seeking to force the forfeiture of their shares. The Delaware judge in the United Atlantic Ventures lawsuit said at a hearing April 1 that he was “gobsmacked” that Trump Media filed this suit when the dispute was already playing out in his court.
Digital World said it spent $19.6 million on “legal investigations” last year, mostly due to its $18 million settlement with the SEC, a Trump Media filing shows.

According to a letter sent from the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, a Republican, to Ohio Democratic party chair Liz Walters, the Democratic National Convention scheduled for 19 August where the party officially nominates its candidate for president is past the 7 August deadline to certify presidential candidates on the Ohio ballot.

“About two years ago I hit a wall with it,” she said. “I said I was going to listen to my inner voice. The whole vaccination process is based on fear of getting diseases but I would rather put my faith in God to heal diseases.”

What exactly do Christian Nationalists Want?

...Russ Vought, the former Trump OMB director, appears most frequently in conversations about the link between Christian nationalism and a second Trump term. As head of the Center for Renewing America, a think tank formed in 2021, Vought has played an influential role in crafting potential policies for a second Trump term — earlier, as OMB chief, he played a key role towards the end of the Trump administration in implementing them.

Vought laid out his vision for immigration restriction last year in explicitly Christian nationalist terms, and has endorsed the label. Last month, he told Charlie Kirk in a podcast episode titled “Why ‘Christian Nationalist’ should be a compliment” that “as a country, we’ve been too secular.”

Vought added that Christianity, in his view, should define the American nation — “Christian nation-ism would probably be the most accurate aspect of what I believe.”

Wolfe, the former Trump appointee who was a visiting fellow at Vought’s Center for Renewing America, appeared in a Politico article this year in part for his advocacy for hardline policies like an end to same-sex marriage, the banning of abortion, and an end to federal support for gender transition.

He doubled down on those ideas to TPM, and cast the Christian nationalist agenda in broad terms.

“All of politics is about the acquisition of power; the question is to what ends will that power be used?” Wolfe told TPM. “We want to see bold, virtuous leaders who rightly use the levers of power in this nation to promote the good, the true, and the beautiful and to unapologetically defend America’s Christian heritage and the necessity of a Christian foundation for a free and functioning society.”

On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”

Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected.

Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.”

Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russia president Vladmir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.

Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director Paul Manafort as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.

Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”

Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if it were brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.

Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.”

The Trump loyalists echoing Russia who have taken control of the Republican Party appear to be hardening into a phalanx around the former president, but even as they do so, Trump himself appears to be crumbling.

In the week since Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond, halting the seizure of his properties to satisfy the $454 million judgment against him and the Trump Organization, multiple problems with that bond have come to light. It is possible the bond isn’t worth anything at all, and New York attorney general Letitia James has filed papers to require Trump’s lawyers or the bond underwriter to show that it’s good within ten days. A hearing is set for April 22.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trial for election interference in 2016, when he paid people with damaging information to keep quiet before the election and falsified business records to hide those payments, is set to begin on April 15. Evidently very worried about this trial, Trump has already tried eight times to delay it until after November’s election, and today his lawyers tried yet again by requesting a delay so he could fight to get the trial moved to a different venue, but an appeals judge rejected the attempt.

Aside from Trump’s personal problems as a presidential candidate, the Republicans face strong headwinds because of their deeply unpopular opposition to abortion rights. Trump has openly bragged about being the instrument for ending the rights recognized in the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since then, abortion bans are galvanizing opposition, and the Republicans are trying to find a message that can bring back angry voters without antagonizing the antiabortion white evangelicals who make up their base.

After months of waffling on the issue, Trump today released a video trying to thread that needle by echoing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump said in the video that states will decide the issue for themselves, a statement that simply reflects the Dobbs decision.

This was a dodge. In the video, Trump appealed to the antiabortion loyalists by telling the ghoulish lie that women are “executing” their babies even after birth. He also ignored that Republicans are already calling for a national ban, extremist antiabortion Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has tried to take the common abortion drug mifepristone off the national market by challenging its FDA approval, and legislatures in many Republican-dominated states are refusing to implement the will of the people to protect abortion rights even after they have voted for such protections.

Still, antiabortion leaders, including Mike Pence, immediately slammed Trump’s statement.

The video did, though, make an enormously interesting and unintended point: Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies, his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like this apparently heavily edited video.

The Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee (RNC) also appears to be in trouble. This weekend, Trump claimed to have raised $50 million in a single night from billionaires, but that number is conveniently a little more than double the new record of what President Joe Biden raised at an event last week with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and it is long past time for everyone to stop believing anything Trump says about money.

More to the point, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported today that the RNC’s aggressive purge of the staff to guarantee that positions are held only by Trump loyalists means that “the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.” Lowell notes this lack is especially apparent on the RNC’s data team, which is being moved from Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach, Florida, near Mar-a-Lago.

And yet Trump loyalists continue to block aid to Ukraine, threatening the existence of the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent war since World War II. Last week, even Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned Speaker Johnson against “abandoning our Allies at this time of great need, when they are staring down enemies of the free world.”

Overturning Roe V. Wade is the greatest accomplishment the conservative movement has had since the end of the cold war. We should be proud of it. And build on it. Not run away from it.

Republicans fought for 50 years to get Roe overturned and courtesy of Trump, they succeeded but didn't he do the only thing really he could do at this point without committing political suicide

Arizona Supreme Court Greenlights Near-Total Abortion Ban, Making November Ballot Fight Existential

Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, old laws left on state books once again are becoming the law of the land.

In a 4–2 decision, the all-Republican Arizona Supreme Court today said it would not interfere with the authority of the state legislature to write abortion policy, letting the state revert to an 1864 law that bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. “[P]hysicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” the decision read.

The court explained: “A policy matter of this gravity must ultimately be resolved by our citizens through the legislature or the initiative process…. We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens.”

The idea that abortion law must be controlled by state legislatures is in keeping with the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it’s an interesting spin to say that the new policy is protecting the will of the citizens.

The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864.

In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.

And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.

In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.

The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.

Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.

The Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1864 had 18 men in the lower House of Representatives and 9 men in the upper house, the Council, for a total of 27 men. They met on September 26, 1864, in Prescott. The session ended about six weeks later, on November 10.

The very first thing the legislators did was to authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to prepare a code of laws for the territory. But William T. Howell, a judge who had arrived in the territory the previous December, had already written one, which the legislature promptly accepted as a blueprint.

Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called “The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2,500, which was equivalent to at least three years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.

The second thing the legislature did was to give a member of the House of Representatives a divorce from his wife.

Then they established a county road near Prescott.

Then they gave a local army surgeon a divorce from his wife.

In a total of 40 laws, the legislature incorporated a number of road companies, railway companies, ferry companies, and mining companies. They appropriated money for schools and incorporated the Arizona Historical Society.

These 27 men constructed a body of laws to bring order to the territory and to jump-start development. But their vision for the territory was a very particular one.

The legislature provided that “[n]o black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”

And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).

So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as ten able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.

And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

Now, though, women can vote.

Before the midterm elections, 61% of Arizona voters told AP VoteCast they believed abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 6% said it should be illegal in all cases. A campaign underway to place a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on November’s ballot needs to gather 383,923 verified signatures by July; a week ago the campaign announced it already had 500,000 signatures.

It seems likely that voters will turn out in November to elect lawmakers who will represent the actual will of the people in the twenty-first century.

Full Panic Mode Kari Lake

Whatever happens in Arizona in November we got a preview of the difficulty Republican candidates will have in states where high stakes ballot initiatives literally put abortion on the ballot. Shortly after Arizona’s high court ruled that the state must go back to the 1864 abortion law which forbids virtually every abortion, Kari Lake, probable GOP senate nominee (and governor over the water) released a remarkable statement. She first denounced the 1864 law, which she said she supported as recently as last fall. She said she opposed today’s ruling. She then demanded Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican state legislature “come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.” She then said that the decision will be up to voters in the ballot initiative that will be on the November ballot, that is, the initiative she actually opposes.

So let’s review. Lake opposes the law she had consistently said she supported. She denounces the court decision which ruled that the old law is in effect. She thinks the decision should be left to the states. She also opposes abortion. Also, Arizona is a state.

She also wants Governor Hobbs to solve the situation. Which would presumably mean making abortion legal. Even though Lake opposes abortion.

She then comes very close to saying that abortion is a very personal issue that should be left to a state and her doctor. No really. I’m not kidding. Here’s the exact quote: “this is a very personal issue that should be determined by each individual state and her people.”