This is the future Republicans want

It’s just great that the Supreme Court is about to give creepy misogynists like this much broader access to the state’s coercive authority:

The Missouri state health director, Dr. Randall Williams, testified at a state hearing Tuesday that he kept a spreadsheet to track the menstrual periods of women who visited Planned Parenthood.

Williams said the spreadsheet was made at his request by the state’s main investigator to identify patients who had undergone failed abortions.

The revelation came on the second day of an administrative commission hearing that will help decide whether Planned Parenthood can keep its license to perform abortions. 

One of the recurring themes of Richard White’s superb The Republic For Which It Stands is that state and local government during the Gilded Age generally combined failing to provide benefits or even basic protection to the groups who most needed it with being incredibly intrusive on a day-to-day basis because of how much arbitrary levies by local authorities were relied on to raise revenues. Another way in which Republicans want to make that era reality again.

…I elaborate a little on this point on the Twitter dot com website.