It is the height of megalomania to basically have a radio show in the first place, and to think, yes, an entire city, an entire region worth of people should listen to my opinions about things. Definitely, that makes sense. There's certainly more than a little bit of ego involved in an enterprise like this. But what might be even more megalomaniacal is on your own radio show reading an op ed piece that you wrote.
So that's what we're doing right now.
This Saturday kind of had a resume altering kind of deal in which National Review, the big conservative national publication, one of the most important conservative publications in America, decided to run a little op ed column that I wrote about the abortion pill. And I'm going to talk about it with all of you because I think it's really important, especially as it seems that RFK Junior is on track
to get confirmed as HHS Secretary. And basically in the piece, I'm talking about miff of pristone, aka the abortion pill, and I'm talking about why it needs to be regulated, and I want to sort of tell you guys about kind of the history of this.
A little bit of it ties.
Into USAID and those kinds of foreign funding type deals because of how the abortion pill got developed in the first place, how it came over from Europe. Basically, the abortion pill was invented in France. I think in the late eighties it became a more and more popular way to perform abortions in Europe, and Bill Clinton said, boy, I sure could use that. Let's bring that over from Europe.
So Bill Clinton working through allies at things like the Ford Foundation, and I now wonder if USAID was paying for this, just as foreign aid, you know, for different kinds of big nonprofits. The Ford Foundation was getting a lot of money from USAID anyway, just my wild speculation. Clinton and the Ford Foundation worked for eight straight years to bring the abortion pill mif of pristone over from Europe to America and to go through all the necessary
work through the FDA for the drug to get FDA approval. Now, let me explain what the abortion pill is. So first point of clarification, the abortion pill is not the morning after pill. I just want to clarify that for you. The morning after pill largely functions as a contraceptive. Its goal is the morning after a sexual encounter to prevent ovulation. A woman, a woman's ovicular follicle rupturing and releasing an egg.
That is the goal of the morning after pill, also known as levonne or gestrel, So the goal is to prevent ovulation. There is some thought though that it does alter the lining, the interior lining of the uterus, to make it hostile to the implantation of a new embryo, so it could be abortifation, but its chief goal is to prevent ovulation. The abortion pill is what I'm talking about, mifipristone.
And what a lot of people don't understand is that the abortion pill is the dominant method of abortion provision in America today, and that the entire face of abortion provision in America was changed just in the last five years, really starting in twenty twenty one, when President Biden's FDA.
Something I called, by the way, that you know, anyone.
Who was listening to this show or listening to who write to Life Radio, Jonathan Keller and I were calling this during the twenty twenty election. One of the most undertalked about things in the twenty twenty election related to abortion, and it was basically, if Trump is reelected, he will keep whatever existing restrictions there are on the abortion pill. If Biden's elected, he's going to loosen those restrictions to make the abortion pill far more widely available. And that's
precisely what happened. Starting in twenty twenty one, Biden issued his FDA issued new regulations, as he had been urged to do by various pro abortion public policy medical public policy advocates who had been agitating for this throughout the
Trump administration. Biden put in place new regulations allowing the abortion pill MiFi pristone to be prescribed without an in person visit to a doctor or a clinic, so via a telemedicine appointment, and for it to be shipped through the mail, so you never have to leave your house
to get an abortion. Basically, this resulted in basically pill abortions went from about fifty percent of all abortions to now over sixty percent of all abortions, and the total number of abortions in America during the Biden years spiked from nine hundred thousand a year to a million per year, so it jumped like one hundred thousand per year. Now, what does the abortion pill do. The abortion pill, you take it up to ten weeks into a pregnancy. It
cuts off this hormone called progesterone. Without progesterone, basically you can't maintain a pregnancy. The lining, the interior lining of the uterus is altered such that the embryo or fetus who has adhered.
To the interuter and wall.
The embryo or fetus detaches from the interior lining of the uterus, is cut off from food and oxygen, and dies about twenty four to forty eight hours later, the woman takes a second drug called mesa prostole, which results in the child being expelled from the woman's womb. Mesaprostol's a legitimate drug. It's used to induce labor. Now, this is the most common way abortion happens in America. I think most people when they hear the word abortion, they
still think like a surgical intervention. What I'm telling you is no, that's most of the time. That's not how it's happening anymore. Most of the time it's happening as a drug intervention. I'm not going to say treatment, because what illness exactly is abortion treating? What sickness is it treating? If it's treatment, if it's healthcare, what is the illness
it's correcting. Pregnancy is not an illness, guys. It's a natural, healthy, bodily process that we are artificially arresting, making abortion not really healthcare but maybe something kind of healthcare adjacent adjacent. No, Like you know, Michael Jackson getting a nose job was not a healthcare intervention. There was nothing wrong with his nose. It was something he chose for some kind of social reason.
That is the case with abortion in the overwhelming majority of cases, and in cases where it is chosen for health reason, often it's not exactly abortion. I won't get into that whole discussion.
Now. In my piece, I make the point.
So basically, the sequence of events has been Democrat presidents work like mad to deregulate the abortion pill, take away safety respondrictions imposed on it, in order to make it more accessible and to increase the total percentage of American abortions done via the abortion pill. Why the abortion pill increases abortion quote access. And this is the buzzword that the abortion industry today likes. They don't want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare anymore. They want abortion to
be legal. They're willing to sacrifice safety for the sake of legality and not rare, but accessible. They want the abortion pill to be accessible. They want you to be able to get an abortion even if you're in a state where it's illegal. They want you to be able to get an abortion even if you don't live near an abortion clinic. And yeah, the abortion pill is less
safe than a surgical abortion by any standard. The abortion pill process involves usually heavy, extremely heavy bleeding, extremely heavy cramping. About five percent of the time, it involves what's called an incomplete abortion, meaning not everything is expelled from the woman's body. She has dead tissue remaining, which can lead
to serious infection and requires a follow up surgery. Meanwhile, the abortion pill is being marketed to people as if it's a nothing burger intervention that erzos saypher's taking a tile andol, by which they mean the complication rate is about the same as overdosing on tilenol. So again, the
history of this has been. Clinton worked furiously for eight straight years to get the abortion pill FDA approved, gets it approved through an expedited FDA process in September of two thousand because he realizes he's running out of time.
George W. Bush could win the election.
He doesn't want to leave it to chance, so he does this expedited process that was probably illegal. There was this expedited FDA process to approve medications that treat quote, serious diseases or illnesses, which again does not fit the abortion pill. The abortion pill does not treat a disease or an illness. It treats pregnancy. Then it doesn't treat it.
It ends it.
It's not making the situation better. So for eight years Clinton worked to get the abortion pill FDA approved. He gets it FDA approved months before leaving office. George W. Bush is president for eight years and does nothing. Then Barack Obama comes into office. Barack Obama lessens a bunch of the health and safety restrictions around the abortion pill.
Instead of needing three appointments, a preliminary appointment, an appointment to get the pill, and a follow up appointment, Obama reduces it to just one appointment just to get the pill. Obama increases the time frame during which it can be prescribed from the first seven weeks of pregnancy through the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and yeah, the complication rate increases the further along into pregnancy. You are, just like
with miscarriages. The later into pregnancy, a miscarriage happens, the more likelihood there is for adverse outcomes, for risks to the mother's health. So Obama gets rid of all these safety precautions, including the need for follow up care. Why do you need follow up care? Well, what if you have an incomplete abortion and you need a follow up surgery. That's the really helpful thing of having follow up care. No, Instead they say, ah, well no, you don't need to
have the follow up care. Now, just come in the one time and if someone's feeling bad, just go to the er. Leaves someone to the vagaries of the er, because again it's about access. Fewer needed drives to a clinic equals readier access. So Obama deregulates it. And as he's getting rid of these health and safety standards, Obama decides, basically, he decides, we're going to get rid of all adverse
outcome reporting for the abortion pill other than deaths. You have to report deaths, but you don't have to report anything else. So now we're flying blind. Now we have pretty good info for the first like sixteen years of the abortion pills life cycle, the first sixteen years of its being FDA approved, in America for its health and safety risk.
They're not negligible.
But ever since twenty sixteen, we're flying blind because Barack Obama's like, ah, we don't need.
To collect adverse health data.
So Obama issues those regulations three appointments to one, seven weeks to ten, no adverse reporting data in twenty sixteen. Again, just like Clinton did. Months before the twenty sixteen election, here's Obama saying, well, you know, maybe Donald Trump will win, you know, let's not leave it a chance. Trump then spends four years, maybe Trump will win, Let's not leave it a chance. Trump administration one point zero doesn't do anything about the abortion pill for four years.
Then Biden comes in.
Immediately after he comes in, Biden deregulates the abortion pill again, gets rid of more safety standards, gets rid of the need for any in person appointment, says you can just do it via a tele medicine appointment. Get a prescription via tele medicine appointment, which, by the way, how many weeks gestation are you?
I think ten? You can't. You can't expect.
Hundreds of thousands of American women to all guess that they're within ten weeks of pregnancy. You know how many of them are probably gonna get that wrong. And I'm not saying they're idiots or something. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly how far along you are. That's the point of having an appointment in person, so you can have an ultrasound to confirm gestational age. So someone's gonna get the abortion pill for a baby that might be twelve
weeks along, that's gonna severely increase that. That's gonna big time increase all the risks for adverse health outcomes. Eh whatever. Or if a woman's having an ectopic pregnancy, which is where the baby's growing in the filippian tube instead of the uterus, Uh, well, I got a positive pregnancy to us, all right, let's just have the abortion pill. Well, what if she's having an ectopic pregnancy, So if the baby's growing in the Filippian tube, the abortion pill.
Is not gonna work.
The baby's gonna keep growing in the fillopian tube until it bursts, which is going to be serious danger for both the mom and the baby. In fact, New England Journal of Medicine covered a case like that about a year ago. Mom trying to do an abortion pill process didn't realize she was having an actopic pregnancy, was doing the abortion pill process online not in person. Fillopian tube ruptures,
you know, she almost dies. So with after President Obama did his twenty sixteen regulations seven weeks to ten, three visits to one visit, it resulted in the number of pill abortions spiking from about thirty nine percent of all abortions in America to fifty three percent of all abortions in America. After President Biden deregulated the abortion pill further with no required in person visits. Have the abortion pill be shipped to your house or shipped to a major pharmacy.
It's from fifty three percent of all American abortions to sixty three percent of all American abortions. So you're talking, and under the Biden regime, the total number of abortions spiked from nine hundred thousand to a million, and probably that extra hundred thousand was all the result of pill abortions. So in comes Trump two point zero incomes RFK junior. Will RFK junior want to regulate this? Why would RFK junior want to regulate this? Let's how should RFK junior
regulate it? Let's talk about that. In the next segment. This is the John Gilready Show on Power Talk. So we've been talking about my piece that was published in National Review about the abortion pill if a pristone and why Trump and RFK should regulate it now one of the things that has amused my wife and me over the last So the National Review agreed to run the start. I wrote very grateful to my friend's the Spencer family who kind of helped me with getting it submitted.
Thanks Susie.
I got it submitted, it was edited last week. I was really excited. I mean, this is the biggest publication I've ever had anything I've written published in.
So I'm super excited.
And it gets posted on National Reviews website Saturday Saturday, early, early Saturday morning, and I wake up at about I woke up actually extremely early because our two year old Jimmy's been waking up crazy early.
For some crazy reason.
And I woke wake up at like five thirty or six or something, and I look at pull up the website on my phone and I see it and I see just a ton of comments. It's like over four hundred comments. As of today, it's over four hundred comments. But even you know, early Saturday morning. Right ever, was posed a ton of cos and the thing that astonished me was how many of the comments were really negative
on it. Wow, National Reviews readership apparently far more pro choice than I expected, and it was ninety nine percent of the comments seemed to indicate that they hadn't really read the piece, that they thought it was just a generic anti abortion piece, or like some of them were like, why should RFK do anything that National Review wants to do?
Which I'm like, well, I'm not National Review.
I just got a thing published, So why is there any reason RFK would want to REGULARLYMPH for pristone. Now, RFK was specifically asked about the abortion pill, which, again for context if you've missed the first segment, MEPH for pristone's the most common method of abortion provision in America. Today, sixty three percent of all abortions are done via MIPH
for pristone. Since President Biden got rid of a lot of the health and safety standards around it and allowed the abortion pill to be ship through the mail, it has spiked the total number of American abortions from about nine hundred thousand a year to a million per year, and the total the percentage of all abortions done via the abortion pill has massively increased as well. So my contention is this administration, if it's going to do anything
abortion related, this is a federal problem. The FDA regulatory status of mif A pristone is a federal question.
State governments can't do anything about it.
As much as people want to say, oh, abortions for the states, now, all right in certain respects, Yeah, yes, states can regulate it. But states can't do anything about the FDA approval and FDA restrictions on a drug. That's a federal question. And it was brought before RFK during his Senate confirmation hearings. Now, RFK said a couple of things about abortion that I thought were really interesting, and most of them pretty good.
Honestly.
Now he is pro choice, he admitted, But he said, you know what, he really sounds like. RFK sounds like a Democrat from nineteen ninety two. When you talk about abortion with RFK the way he talks about it, he sounds like a Democrat from nineteen ninety two. I think he's still stuck in that kind of Democrat party and the rest of the rest of the Democratic Party abandoned
his position. They the most of the Democrats moved way to the left on abortion, and RFK is still kind of living in this nineteen ninety two Democrat attitude where he says, look, I think every abortion is a tragedy. I don't think we can be a moral nation if we have, you know, over a million abortions per year. You know, I don't support federal funding for abortion. I safe legal and rare. RFK Junior is still living in
the safe legal, rare era of abortion. And while I certainly don't think that's an adequate summation of like what our country's moral and legal approach to the question of abortion should be, it's certainly preferable to the modern day Democrat approach to abortion, which is basically, abortion should be universally accessible with no restrictions on anyone being able to get abortion, meaning you, the taxpayer, should fund it. It should be shipped through the mail to people's houses directly,
without even needing to see a doctor first. Like that, that's the level of insanity we're talking about with Democrats and their abortion activism. All right, So RFK said a couple of good things, and when asked about and if Pristoni said, I haven't decided how I want to regulate it. President Trump hasn't decided what how to regulate it. We're going to discuss it together. So I wrote this column saying, I think the whole pro life movement needs to orient
its focus on this issue. I think everything else practically pales in comparison, because again, the deregulation of the abortion pill under Bien, under Biden has led to one hundred thousand more abortions per year. So what could be done well? First, the FDA could look back at the original approval of
the abortion pill by the FDA. President Obama's loosening of safety restrictions in twenty sixteen three mandated doctor visits before to receive the drug and follow up reduced just to one visit, extending the timeframe from seven weeks into pregnancy to ten weeks in pregnancy where there are more complications, and getting rid of reporting requirements for adverse health outcomes. That was the twenty sixteen regulations and then the twenty
twenty one Joe Biden regulations. First, there's already been a federal court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that has held that the twenty sixteen and twenty twenty one deregulations violated federal law, violated the Administrative Procedures Act, basically that they were arbitrary and compricious regulations that had no relationship whatsoever to the actual health and safety data that was available. So the Fifth Circuit is ruled that it violated them
Inministrative Procedures Act. I think that gives the FDA pretty good grounds to say we're going to roll back those regulations. Make it much more difficult to get the abortion pill. You need three in person visits, it's only within the first seven weeks. Also, they could just reassess the original approval of miphipristone in two thousand. Clinton's FDA approved MiFi pristone in the year two thousand with an expedited process that was meant for this FDA process that's meant for
drugs that treat quote, serious diseases and illnesses. The abortion pill doesn't treat a serious disease. It treats pregnance. It ends pregnancy, it terminates pregnancy. Pregnancy is not a disease or an illness. There's also been huge problems with the abortion pill being shipped illegally into being shipped into states where abortion is illegal from states where it is legal.
So California company or doctor shipping the abortion pill through the mail to Texas, and California set up these shield laws to prevent doctors, prevent companies from any kind of adverse legal action from Texas. Well, maybe the Trump administration could enforce this thing called the Comstock Act. Was that Ulysses says, grant law that prevents shipping abortifations through the mail.
So I really encourage you guys.
Go to Fresno Johnny on Twitter dot com slash Fresno Johnny read my piece.
I think it's really good.
When we return how Trump could restore the executive branch Next on the John Girardi Show, I think one of the most significant and potentially long lasting outcomes we could see of Trump two point zero is the way that it will possibly restore executive power to its proper constitutional constraints.
And this is happening on a number of fronts that there are a lot of court challenges that seem to be getting set up on a number of different fronts for basically allowing the Trump and min Stration to do its job and chipping away at a bunch of laws that were passed at a time when the Supreme Court just really did not care very much or just sort of the political culture was just not as caring about separation of powers problems.
Let me explain what I mean.
We have like a federal workforce. Now, these are employees who work for the various federal executive branch agencies, and we now have this classification system between well, there's political appointees and then there's career appointees, political employees and career.
Employees of the federal government.
That the career employees are allegedly nonpartisan, and they stay when even though a new administration comes in, a new administration can.
Easily fire this whole category of people.
But this category of people, these some of these career people, you can't fire them. An incoming president can't fire them. Why well, because their career employees and basically if you fire them, their union will get involved. Why do federal government workers have a union? That seems maybe a little again that the whole point of labor unions is that they make a lot of sense in the private sector context, where you've got management who has a certain financial interest
in keeping most of the profits for itself. And you have labor, which has a certain financial interest in keeping more of the profits for itself. Two sides that don't have aligning interests. Labor which an individual laborer working for a big company like four does not have the kind of bargaining power for his own individual job that all of the laborers together collectively bargaining have. So labor unions
make total sense in a private sector context. They don't make sense in the context of government employees, where there's no profit motive for the federal government for demanding more for itself. Now, so the idea is the president can't fire these people and beyond just like firing career employees of the federal government, having the total attitude to do that.
A lot of stuff happened after Watergate that was really weird.
Nixon was so despised, so despised, and was so at war with Washington in.
A lot of ways.
Like there's a lot of Nixon in Trump like And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm saying that actually kind of as a compliment. I think Nixon is a wildly underappreciated president. I also sort of think that other presidents did a lot of crap far more wildly abusive of power than Watergate was, and never, you know, never got nailed for it.
LBJ. You know, I'm LBJ was.
Doing stuff with the FBI that I think was far worse than anything Nixon did with Watergate, or or at least as bad. Anyway, after Watergate, Democrats had these massive over two thirds majorities in Congress, and Ford was completely powerless.
And then eventually Jimmy Carter comes.
In, and what happened was Congress wound up passing a bunch of statutes that really empowered Congress and really limited the power of the executive in a certain to a certain way, I think, to a point overstepping the constitutional role of Congress and infringing on the proper constitutional role of the president. So things like the Independent Council Statute, the idea that there can be a federal prosecutor who is independent of the executive branch who can investigate and
prosecute the president. This law eventually was allowed to sunset because it wound up biting both Republicans and Democrats in the rear.
You know, Nixon.
It was obviously an anti Nixon thing, and then it wound up biting Bill Clinton in the rear during his presidency. So I think both Republicans and.
Democrats were like, all right, we'll just allow this to die.
I got replaced by the Special Council, which does have some degree of political accountability to the executive. But beyond that, Congress created these things called the Inspectors General. These were entities were supposed to report to Congress basically bad stuff that was going on within various federal executive agencies. The idea being that they answer to Congress and say, well, what is this entity. It's an employee whose task with executing the law. But he's not under the executive, he's
not under the president. He's reporting to Congress. Doesn't seem to make any sense. That's a constitutional you know, this is a constitutional platypus. You can't have something that sort of has features of the executive sort of as features of the legislative. So Trump made headlines by firing a bunch of these inspectors general, and a bunch of these inspectors general said well, he doesn't have the authority to fire me. He needed to give Congress written notice within
thirty day. A thirty day written notice before he terminates our positions, and the Trump administration's taking the perspective of no, the Trump administration is taking the perspective, we don't think the inspectors general are constitutional, so we're not going to respect that. We're just firing them. If they're part of the executive they can get fired. And I think this makes sense. If someone's an executive official, the president needs to be able to fire them in order to do his job.
The only check that we have.
On the president's ability to appoint people to help him execute the law, because let's remember what Article two says, the executive power of the United States, the power to enforce law in America.
Is vested in one guy uno hombra, the President. That's it.
Everyone else in the executive branch who's doing legal stuff is doing so with his delegated authority. The Attorney General only authorizes things at thesis at the president's pleasure, at the president's pressure, at the president's pleasure. If the Attorney General does something Trump doesn't like, he can fire.
Him like like that.
Because the president controls the executive branch, the only check on it is that for officers of the United States, the Constitution does require, just as a basic test of competence, that the President run that person by the Senate for their advice and consent. But once the Senate gives their advice and consent, that's it. They do what the president wants and they don't answer to Congress other than Congress doing its sort of oversight for funding and creating these
executive departments. But they ultimately do what the president tells them. The president's the one who hires and fires them. When the president is you know, if they do something stupid, it reflects poorly on the president. The president is politically accountable to the people. The president gets rid of them. Okay, that's the political accountability that all the members of the
executive branch have. They answer to this president who has to be concerned with his political standing, that is standing he has with the people. Donald Trump looks at the polls. Okay, he cares what the polls say. He wants to ensure that he's doing things that are popular with the American people with an eye towards well, I don't want my party to lose the twenty twenty six midterms, and I
don't want us to lose the twenty twenty eight presidential election. Now, another aspect that were of this that Trump might challenge is with impounding money. And there's an interesting piece written by John Yu. John You sort of made himself famous, sort of notorious for writing a bunch of legal memos during the George W. Bush administration justifying enhanced interrogation methods
which to put a black eye on him. But he still is very prominent and important legal scholar, and he has this piece in National Review talking about basically the ways in which Trump could really significantly shift presidential power through impoundment. Basically, Trump saying, i know Congress authorized spending on this, but I'm not going to spend this money. I'm pausing federal spending on this. Now. Can the president
do that? Can the president just decide, I know Congress allocated a bunch of money for this, I don't want to spend the money on that. Is that lawless by the president? Is that the president breaking the law? Is that the president violating that? Hey, Congress passed a law saying that the money should be spent for this. Therefore you got to spend the money on this. Now you goes over. There are actually a decent number of circumstances where it's totally foreseeable at the time of the founding.
An originalist vision of things would say that, no, the president doesn't have to spend all the money. If Congress allocates one hundred million dollars to build a bridge and someone figures out a way for the bridge to be built for seventy five million dollars, the president doesn't have to spend that last twenty five million. So if changing circumstances renders the expenditure moot, then the president doesn't have
to spend it that way. But you is basically identifying a couple of things where he's saying, I think there are other ways that Trump could free spending that he'd be on good constitutional grounds. One of them is for anything having to do with foreign policy. So basically, if Congress said, all right, we are spending all this money to fund advancing this American foreign policy, well, the president
is supposed to direct foreign policy. If this is Congress sort of impinging on the president's sole ability to direct foreign policy, a power that is only check by the need to go to Congress for declarations of war, go to the Senate for ratifying treaties. Short of that it's a presidential power, and this is why I think the president might get away with cutting all this stuff at usaid that a lot of it's this foreign policy stuff that the president doesn't support, so why should the president
keep funding it? Now he also sort of wants to challenge, so he wants to challenge the constitutional constitutionality of what's called the Budget Act. Now, the Budget Act is one of these Nixonian post Nixonian congressional.
Things that I think infringes on executive power.
Now, when we return, we'll talk about more about how this could really reshape the whole look of the presidency and the legal impact of the Trump era. That's next on the John Girardi Show. Or I'm thinking that Trump is going to be the most legally significant president in a really long time. That first of all, he's already reshaped the Supreme Court, and he may reshape it further if he replaces Alito and Thomas with some real home. If Alito and Thomas resign sometime in the next two
years here, which I think is very likely. I'm betting they'll resign in twenty twenty six, and maybe maybe both of them will resign it at around the same time, Trump will have completely reshaped the Supreme Court if he gets a leader. If Alito and Thomas resign and Trump gets to replace them, he'll have picked literally a majority.
On the Court.
Also, the ways in which he's challenging executive authority, the ability to not spend on things, the ability to fire larger swaths of the federal workforce. That's going to be a huge shift in executive power in a way that I think stores its proper order within the constitutional framework.
I Between that and overturning.
Roev Wade, the Trump era maybe perhaps one of the most significant The legal impact of Trump may be his most significant impact.
That'll do it for John Geordy Show. See you next time on Power Talk.