WARSAW — A bad-tempered split in Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party is being greeted with joy by the centrist, pro-EU government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but it’s unclear whether it will improve his odds of retaining power in next year’s election.

Tusk’s Civic Coalition is far ahead in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — with 32 percent support, compared with PiS’s 21 percent — but that does not offer a full picture of the electoral dynamics. All of the parties on the right together could still command a majority — but only if they’re able to cobble together a coalition after next year’s vote. Three of Tusk’s four junior coalition partners may fail to clear the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament.

Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, called Tusk’s chances in the 2027 race “far from certain.”

However, the departure of former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki from PiS complicates the balance of balance of power on the right.

PiS, which ruled from 2015 to 2023, formally ruptured last month, when Morawiecki stormed out, taking 40 MPs with him to form the new Development Plus party, leaving PiS with 147 deputies.

The split between him and party founder and leader Jarosław Kaczyński quickly became acrimonious.

Morawiecki criticized his own government’s decisions on Covid-19 restrictions and its push to tighten Poland’s abortion law, which outraged many women and saw PiS take a long-term hit in public support.

“Although I oppose abortion, I believed the change would lead to catastrophe — a polling collapse. Unfortunately, I was right,” Morawiecki said on the popular YouTube show Rymanowski Live this week.

He is now trying to set up a more moderate center-right party focused on economic growth which is less partisan than PiS. “Today, Poland does not need to get bogged down in ideological disputes,” he said in Monday’s interview. However, he has ruled out ever working with Tusk in the future.

Kaczyński responded by appearing to question both Morawiecki’s loyalty and his state of mind.

“Mateusz Morawiecki’s latest statements show clearly that his enemy is not Tusk, but me and Law and Justice. I have the impression that the prime minister is in some peculiar state. God willing, I am wrong,” Kaczyński said in a post on X.

He twisted the knife in another post on Friday, denouncing “attacks based on lies, manipulation, and insinuations,” made by “people who, until recently, pretended they wanted to be part of PiS but decided to break away.”

Tusk is watching the fallout with joy.

“I watch what is happening with a smile,” Tusk said at a press conference last week when asked about the turmoil within the largest opposition party.

Unclear political picture

Although PiS and Civic Coalition have been alternating in power for more than two decades, Poland’s current political makeup is a lot more complicated.

Two new parties are battling for votes on the far-right — the libertarian Confederation, with 14 percent support, and the antisemitic extremist Confederation of the Polish Crown, at 11 percent.

The two far-right parties are fighting each other, and also taking aim at PiS.

“I feel the next prime minister should not be from PiS,” Krzysztof Bosak, one of the leaders of Confederation, said in a radio interview this week.

Wojciech Machulski, a party spokesperson, denounced Morawiecki as a “puppet” with a terrible governing record but also noted: “Kaczyński is no longer the leader of the right; he no longer dominates the right.”

Political analysts warned that Tusk should not assume the split will benefit his coalition.

The Kaczyński and Morawiecki parties could appeal to a broader range of voters by campaigning separately, while Tusk’s prospects depend heavily on the survival of the weakest members of his coalition, said Mieńkowska-Norkiene.

“What is more, Morawiecki could attract more conservative voters from those parties,” she added.

Morawiecki is already campaigning in an effort to reach beyond PiS’s traditional right-wing electorate — this week laying out a new strategy to combat Poland’s low birth rate.

“A right-wing party without a clear identity-based agenda will not be a right-wing party. But a right-wing party without a development agenda and without the ability to implement change will never come to power,” he said in his party manifesto.

Anna Siewierska-Chmaj, a political scientist at the University of Rzeszów, said Tusk’s governing coalition should not rely on its enemies devouring themselves and should instead use the summer break to overhaul its political messaging. Many voters are fed up with the government’s lackluster results — although part of that stems from PiS-aligned President Karol Nawrocki blocking a lot of legislation.

“The old polarization strategy of ‘us versus PiS’ will no longer suffice,” she said.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Todd Blanche — whom Republicans hope to confirm as attorney general by the end of the week — has indicated he could steer the Justice Department to prioritize national abortion restrictions, a major shift from how the Trump administration has handled the issue thus far.

In a call last week, Blanche, who is serving as both acting attorney general and deputy attorney general and has previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer, suggested that under his leadership, the department would prioritize restrictions on medication abortion.

“If states have said we are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception, we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that,” Blanche said on a call organized by the White House Faith Office and posted online in full by Intercessors for America, a Christian organization. The call’s contents were first reported by Politico.

The remarks are only the latest to suggest that if confirmed, Blanche might take a more aggressive approach than his predecessor. In a July hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche said that if confirmed, he would commit to reviewing how the federal government interprets the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s that abortion opponents believe could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of any drug used to terminate a pregnancy. 

Anti-abortion activists have been pressing the administration to revive the Comstock Act since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term; Trump has declined to do so.

When asked about the possibility of enforcing the law to ban mailing of abortion medications, the Department of Justice confirmed that its Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and attorney general, “is undertaking a thorough review” of policies and procedures related to abortion.

Blanche requires one more vote to secure support from a majority of the Senate. Two Senate Republicans — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — have not yet indicated whether they would vote to confirm him. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican up for re-election, said Tuesday she would not vote to confirm Blanche, citing his abortion-related remarks as a key factor.

The confirmation fight comes months before a midterm election in which Republicans — already facing an uphill battle to control both chambers of Congress — have largely avoided talking about abortion. Though reproductive rights dominated the 2024 election, polling suggests that the issue has taken a backseat, with voters primarily concerned about the cost of living. 

Still, national restrictions on abortion remain unpopular. 

Abortion pill restrictions have emerged as a top priority for the anti-abortion movement. Even as bans have proliferated across the country, medical professionals in protective states have continued to prescribe and mail them to people living under abortion bans. This telehealth practice is medically safe and has enabled thousands of people to circumvent their states’ laws and end their pregnancies. 

Anti-abortion activists have called on the federal government to intervene, arguing that the existence of this telehealth model has undercut states’ abilities to enforce bans. But so far, the Trump administration has taken no action to block telehealth abortion, despite pressure from top anti-abortion groups.

Blanche’s remarks suggest that could be changing, though it’s unclear when or how that shift might take place. 

In the White House Faith Office call, he did not reveal what approach the administration might take to limit the availability of abortion medication, or when any switch might take effect — only saying that “victory will be soon and victory will be permanent.” 

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

Abortion opponents have pressed for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its decision approving mifepristone, one of two drugs used in most abortions, to be dispensed without an in-person visit. The FDA is currently reviewing mifepristone’s approval, despite a vast body of medical research showing the drug’s safety and effectiveness, including by telehealth. 

They have also pressed for the Department of Justice to revive the Comstock Act to bar the mailing not only of mifepristone, but also misoprostol, an ulcer medication that is prescribed off-label as part of the abortion medication regimen. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department argued that the Comstock Act could not be enforced to enforce a blanket ban on the mailing of mifepristone or misoprostol. 

Democrats have argued that Blanche’s remarks are disqualifying. 

“He wants to strip Americans of their right to choose and strip states of their right to govern,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Tuesday during a meeting of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, posted on the social media platform X that “Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”

Abortion opponents are concurrently pursuing restrictions on mifepristone through the courts, notably in a case filed by Louisiana, in which the state has argued for the government to reverse its decision approving mifepristone for telehealth. That case is set to be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September.

The post Trump’s attorney general pick hints at making national abortion restrictions a priority appeared first on Salon.com.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and a handful of women’s rights and reproductive freedom groups are sounding the alarm over recent reporting that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has vowed to use the Justice Department to roll back abortion access nationwide — a break with both President Trump’s own campaign promises that places him much further out on a limb on abortion than other Trump admin officials have been willing to go.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

Editor’s note, Aug. 5, 6:20 am ET: Kansas voters rejected a proposed amendment to change how state supreme court justices are selected. This piece below was originally published on August 4.

Four years after the Dobbs decision, abortion battles have largely taken a backseat in national news to other policy fights this cycle. Leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they’re disillusioned with President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to push for further restrictions. The federal battle over access to abortion medication seems to be settled — for now. Public awareness of that fight is limited, and even at the state level, a couple years have passed since the high-pitched but successful state-level efforts to protect abortion access in red states.

Yet a little-known battle has been playing out in Kansas, where a ballot measure to change the way state supreme court justices are selected serves as a reminder that these fights over abortion are still active, even if they take the form of creative procedural and administrative efforts. 

If it succeeds, opponents say, it would open the floodgates for similar efforts in other states to politicize the remaining independent state courts (13 other states use a method similar to Kansas) and provide a road map to undoing abortion protections in other states that have safeguarded them.

On Tuesday, Kansans are deciding whether to change the way judges on the state’s highest court are selected. Up until now, judges were selected through a nonpartisan merit-based system: When a spot opens on the bench, a nine-member commission submits a list to the governor, who then selects a replacement.

The referendum would replace this system with direct, partisan elections of judges, like any other politician. Proponents say it’s a democratic move, a way to better express the will of voters over “unelected” bureaucrats. Yet critics say it’s first and foremost about restricting abortion rights — which both the court and voters have rejected.

How Kansas became an abortion rights flashpoint

In 2019, the state supreme court recognized the right to abortion in the state constitution; three years later, after Dobbs, voters rejected a Republican-championed proposal to overturn that ruling, choosing to preserve abortion rights by a 59-41 margin in a deeply red state.

It was after that failed vote in 2022 that then-state attorney general Republican candidate Kris Kobach outlined a new strategy for undoing these protections: changing the way the supreme court is selected, electing anti-abortion candidates, and “slowly and quietly” overturning the 2019 decision and 2022 vote.

“If you look at the various proposals, one of the proposals that is crystal clear is allowing people to popularly elect justices to the supreme court, which is the most common system among all of the states in the country,” Kobach said in 2022.

He’s a bit more careful talking about this in 2026: “There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” he told the New York Times this week. “It’s not just about abortion.”

Tuesday’s results would have huge ramifications, critics said, given that nonelected state courts have been a final bulwark against Republican supermajorities and governors in red states. Kansas has been an island for abortion access for women in the South and central US since the Dobbs decision.

The victory in 2022 also inspired abortion rights advocates to try to use ballot measures to enshrine these protections in about a dozen other states, which successfully overturned abortion bans in Missouri and Ohio. State courts in Utah and Wyoming, meanwhile, blocked bans.

The next frontier in the abortion wars

These independent checks on power have been under attack for years, Michael Milov-Cordoba, a court expert and counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s judiciary program, told me. 

“State legislators across the country are increasingly trying to undermine those courts. … That retaliation takes a few different forms, but changing how judges are selected is top of the list,” Milov-Cordoba said. “And what we’ve seen is that in many states where courts stand up for abortion rights and strike down abortion restrictions, efforts to change state judiciaries have followed.”

He noted the complete reworking of the Utah supreme court in the last year, including by expanding and packing it. Similar retooling of the state supreme court happened in Iowa in 2022. Montana is likely the next battleground, where Republican legislators are exploring various avenues to strip or limit the state supreme court’s powers. That in turn has led the ACLU to get involved to boost a constitutional amendment this year that would preserve the nonpartisan status of judicial elections.

And in recent years, state supreme court elections have been inundated with spending and attention from both in- and out-of-state backers. Last year’s Wisconsin judicial election, for example, became the most expensive race of its kind in US history, with more than $100 million spent — just two years after a contest for a different seat on the state supreme court had set its own record at more than $50 million spent.

“If these courts become partisan, then they will be just like any other election fight — subject to being bought and sold by billionaire political funders,” Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told me. “They become a race to the bottom … and [Republicans] are finding backdoor ways to seize power to push their ideological agenda.”

Already, Kansas has seen heavy spending: More than $12 million have been spent from both sides, including about $5 million from the ACLU, Schifeling told me.

”Everyone’s focused on the Michigan Senate race, other kind of big-ticket, sexy elections,” Schifeling said. “Well, this is just as important and much more under the radar. Without a balanced court, we are going to lose rights and liberties across the board in a state like Kansas.”

This story was originally published by States Newsroom.

The Trump administration has a new plan for teenagers learning about pregnancy: Beginning this summer, it will steer millions of dollars toward organizations that focus on anatomy, fertility tracking, hormonal production and “reproductive goals counseling.”

The plan will also emphasize abstinence from sex and the importance of marriage. 

A Texas appeals court has handed Attorney General Ken Paxton a setback in one of the state’s highest-profile abortion enforcement cases, ruling that prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to justify shutting down the clinics of a Houston-area midwife accused of illegally providing abortions.

In a decision issued Thursday, the Fifteenth Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s injunction against midwife Maria Margarita Rojas and her clinics, finding that the state relied largely on affidavits filed in a parallel criminal case rather than admissible evidence in the separate civil proceeding.

“The trial court abused its discretion by considering incompetent evidence in support of the temporary injunction,” the three-judge panel wrote.

The ruling does not dismiss the underlying allegations or the criminal charges against Rojas, who in March became the first person charged under Texas’ near-total abortion ban. Prosecutors allege she illegally performed abortions and practiced medicine without a license. Rojas has pleaded not guilty.

Paxton’s office filed the civil lawsuit shortly after the criminal charges were announced, seeking to permanently close Rojas’ clinics and impose financial penalties. The appellate court concluded, however, that the state failed to meet the legal standard necessary to support the injunction because much of its evidence could not be considered in the civil case.

The attorney general’s office said it plans to appeal the decision to the Texas Supreme Court.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Rojas, welcomed the ruling, saying the state had failed to produce evidence supporting its claims and arguing the injunction should never have been granted. The organization also noted that the criminal prosecution remains pending.

Although the decision technically removes the court order shuttering the clinics, Rojas’ attorneys said the facilities are not expected to reopen while the criminal case continues.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

The case has drawn national attention as one of the first major tests of Texas’ abortion ban since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The law generally prohibits abortions except when necessary to save the life of the pregnant patient, with providers facing severe civil penalties as well as potential criminal prosecution for violating the statute.

The appeals court’s ruling addresses only whether the state presented sufficient evidence to obtain the temporary injunction, leaving the broader legal fight over the allegations — and the future of the criminal case — to continue.

The post Court: AG Paxton didn’t prove abortion claims appeared first on Salon.com.