I could get into the debate over whether the Wicked Witch of the West was calling for Dorothy to surrender, or demanding that her friends surrender her, but here's the thing: Elphaba forgot the comma. Case closed.
Anyway, today's cartoon is about Attorney General Pam Bondi subpoenaing detailed information on minors who receive transgender therapy, including names and Social Security numbers of patients.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in a statement July 9 that the department had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that provide [gender-affirming] care. The request represented an elevation in President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to halt the medical treatment for transgender youth, even in states where it’s legal.
Bondi said the requests were part of investigations into “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” No charges have been announced so far, but the probes have had a chilling impact on the availability of care.
Specifics of the requests were not made public until a court filing in a separate lawsuit this week.
Court filings last month revealed that at least one of the subpoenas, sent to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, ran 18 pages long listing detailed patient documentation demanded by the Absolutely Corrupt Trump regime, HIPAA be damned. “It turns doctor-patient confidentiality into government surveillance,” said Jennifer Levi, GLAD Law’s senior director of Transgender and Queer Rights.
Republican state Attorneys General are sticking their noses into the confidential patient data of transgender minors, too. An appeals court this week overturned a lower court ruling and allowed Missouri's Attorney General to subpoena records of 1,165 patients of the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis.
On the other side of the political divide, Democratic Attorneys General from fourteen states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime to block Attorney General Bondi from seizing transgender youths' confidential patient records, charging, "The administration has explicitly threatened civil and criminal prosecution of providers of this care and launched criminal investigations into children’s hospitals."
“These threats have no basis in law. No federal law prohibits, much less criminalizes, the provision or receipt of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents,” the attorneys general argued.
Will Democrats shut down the government if Republicans slip a provision changing that into the must-pass budget bill on Tuesday? Stay tuned.
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