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The billionaire has said the tax legislation “undermines” cost-cutting efforts by his efficiency agency

Elon Musk has voiced his disappointment with US President Donald Trump’s recently passed tax and spending bill, claiming it undermines efforts to reduce the federal deficit.

The House of Representatives approved Trump’s flagship tax bill last week, aimed at avoiding a year-end tax hike while adding to the $36 trillion national debt. The bill will now proceed to the Senate.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X, recently stepped back from running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body created by Trump in his second term to implement widespread federal spending cuts, saying he will return to focusing on his business ventures.

The billionaire, who was a near-constant presence in the early weeks of Trump’s second-term, expressed rare criticism in a CBS interview.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a clip from the interview released on Tuesday before its broadcast in full on Sunday.

The tech mogul criticized the legislation, known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” for increasing the national debt and thus counteracting the objectives of DOGE, which he co-led.

“A bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both,” Musk remarked in the strongest rebuke of Trump’s policies yet.

The bill heavily backed by the president, which passed the House by a narrow margin, aims to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts and introduces additional tax reductions, while also increasing spending in areas such as defense and border security.

Critics argue that the bill disproportionately benefits the wealthy and could add trillions to the national debt over the next decade.

Musk, who has been instrumental in DOGE’s reported $175 billion in savings through agency closures and workforce reductions, expressed concern that the new bill’s provisions would negate these efforts.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it faces opposition from some Republicans concerned about its impact on the federal deficit and proposed cuts to socially important federal health insurance programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

On January 8, 2025, we answered many of your questions with an article entitled Why Are Bond Yields Rising? Since then, bond yields initially fell but have recently risen back to early January levels. Unsurprisingly, our email boxes are again filled with the same questions we got in early January.

This article presents a different perspective on the question of why bond yields are rising.  We focus on the difference between narratives and fundamentals. However, we briefly review the current situation with Treasury yields before starting.

Fundamental Bond Model

The two graphs below, updated from the January article, illustrate the strong historical correlation between ten-year bond yields and our model, which is based on inflation, inflation expectations, and economic activity. Currently, the fair value yield of the ten-year UST is 3.94%, approximately 64 basis points below the actual yield. The gap between the fair value and the bond’s yield is technically referred to as the term premium. The term 'premium' quantifies all non-model factors that impact yields. Today, the divergence can largely be explained by deficits and tariff-related inflation concerns, i.e., the current narratives.  

The following graph provides historical context for the relationship between yields and inflation. Yields jumped in 2021 and 2022 as inflation rose to a peak of 9%. Since then, inflation has fallen rapidly and is nearing the Fed’s 2% target. However, bond yields remain near their highs, trading in a wide range spanning 3.75% to 5.00%.

Day Traders, Narratives, and Fundamentals

Fundamentals, such as the price-to-earnings ratio for stocks or the term premium for bonds, are meaningless for day traders. Narratives explaining why markets rise or fall are equally worthless to day traders. Day traders focus on minute-by-minute imbalances between buyers and sellers. They devise trading tools to quantify how said imbalances may impact prices. Their work is incredibly technical. Most successful short-term traders do not care about market narratives and do zero fundamental analysis. The impact of these traders is most considerable on very short-term intraday prices.

Looking beyond the day traders, narratives often determine the short to medium-term price trends. These narratives, which can last days, weeks, months, or longer, are stories or themes that shape how traders and investors interpret and react to changes in the financial markets. They simplify complex topics into easily digestible explanations. Sometimes, market narratives accurately explain why markets are moving in one direction or the other. However, other times they prove false. Whether grounded in hard data or not, market narratives can perpetuate market trends by shaping shorter-term investor behaviors. Furthermore, as narratives gain popularity, they are amplified by the media and, more recently, social media platforms.

Moving out further, fundamental-based investors focus on hard data and facts. At its core, fundamental analysis enables investors to determine the intrinsic value of an asset or market, and therefore assess whether it is overvalued or undervalued. While fundamental analysis focuses on objective data, its interpretation can vary widely. Investors grounded in fundamentals are willing to look beyond the second-by-second trading of day traders and the narratives that move assets for weeks or months at a time. They are comfortable buying an asset at what they believe is a discount to its fair value.

Fundamentals vs Narratives

As active investors, we strike a balance between the short-term impact of narratives and the longer-term performance driven by fundamentals.

This is incredibly difficult in the stock market, as stocks can stay well above or below their intrinsic value for years. Thus, stock narratives tend to result in longer-lasting trends than bond market narratives.

To better appreciate this, consider the first graph below, which shows the correlation between the CAPE10 for the S&P 500 and the one-year returns following each monthly valuation. The chart encompasses 75 years of data. As we highlight, we can expect a one-year performance range of approximately plus or minus 20% at current valuations. Moreover, with an R-squared of .0277, we have no confidence in that forecast. 

The following graph shows that fundamentals are much more predictive of returns over 10-year periods. According to this model, the current expectations for the S&P 500's annualized ten-year return range from -0.50% to +3.50%. Not only is the range of expectations tight, but we are much more confident, as evidenced by the R-squared of 0.4033.

If you are a buy-and-hold long-term investor, the paltry expected returns that stocks offer over the next ten years should provide caution. However, the first graph informs active traders that the sequence of the annual returns, which comprises the ten-year total return, is difficult to predict. Narrative and sentiment will determine that sequence.

In the bond market, narratives also considerably impact yields, but they don’t tend to last nearly as long. This is due to the interconnectedness between yields and economic activity. Higher interest rates provide less incentive to invest or consume. Thus, as we have repeatedly seen throughout history, periods of above-trend interest rates have been associated with slow or negative economic growth, and vice versa.

Feeding The Narratives

Narratives typically need a steady diet of supporting news to sustain themselves. To feed the beast, so to speak, the market exaggerates some news and downplays other news. 

The recent round of Treasury auctions is a perfect example of how the current bond bearish narrative shapes the way news is reported.

The 20-Year Doom Auction

The bearish narratives were in overdrive after the Moody’s credit downgrade and the larger-than-expected “Big Beautiful” government spending bill. But narratives always need to be fed. The bearish bond narrative ate on May 21, 2025, with a Treasury 20-year auction deemed “terrible” and “horrible” by some pundits. Some interpreted the auction as an obvious sign that the Treasury was struggling to fund itself.

Might those views be a bit of an exaggeration?

Some fear-mongers pointed out the “large” auction tail. The tail is the difference between the auction yield and the yield before the auction. A large tail can mean insufficient demand for the auctioned bonds. As the graph below shows, the recent red tail is not that abnormal. Moreover, the size of the tail is volatile in both directions. This is partly because the 20-year bond is not as widely regarded as a market benchmark as other maturities.

Also, indirect buyers were allotted 82% of the auction bonds. These are primarily central banks. So, foreign demand was strong despite the anti-dollar narrative claiming that central banks are selling US Treasuries in size?

Indeed, the auction could have been better, but the media exaggerated the outcome to feed the bearish bond narrative.

The Unseen 10-Year Auction

Two weeks before the “horrendous” 20-year auction, a very good 10-year auction was met with little fanfare.

For context, the 10-year Treasury is more closely followed than the 20-year and significantly more heavily traded. Importantly, it is a key economic rate, meaning it has a substantially greater financial impact than the 20-year yield. Lastly, bear in mind the 10-year auction was $42 billion, compared to the relatively small $16 billion 20-year auction.

Despite being much larger than the 20-year bond, the 10-year auction was met with strong demand, as seen in the graph below. Primary dealers (direct bidders), the backstop for Treasury auctions, account for the third-lowest allotment since at least 2008 at 8.9%. This signifies that demand from other sources was robust.

Second, there were bids for 2.6x as many bonds as were being auctioned. The average of the last six auctions was 2.4x. Furthermore, the ratio was at the high end of the range of the last ten-plus years.

On May 6th, despite the outstanding 10-year auction, bonds eked out a small gain. The meh 20-year auction and the bearish narratives it fed pushed prices significantly lower. Furthermore, the fear emanating from the 20-year auction sent shockwaves to the stock market, which, as circled below, fell rapidly following the announcement of the auction results.

Debunking The Deficit Narrative

We believe the hefty term premium is primarily a function of the deficit narratives spreading through the bond market.

History has shown that government spending is often unproductive. Almost all economists agree that the US government has a negative multiplier on its debt. This means that each dollar of government spending reduces long-term economic growth. Therefore, higher deficits lead to lower growth and lower inflation. While the market worries about the sheer size of bond issuance required to meet the government’s funding needs, it overlooks the potential negative impact on economic growth and inflation. One side of the story feeds the narrative, the other doesn’t.

To help quantify the economic impact of large deficits, we share the graphic below from Rising National Debt Will Cause Significant Economic Damage by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, May 2025.

The graphic below from the report shows that by 2070, the debt-to-GDP ratio may surpass 200%. Assuming that proves correct, which is a big assumption, it would still be below Japan’s current ratio of 265%. Moreover, Japan’s economic growth has slowed to a crawl. Their GDP is the same today as it was in 2018. Further consider that its population is shrinking, and the yen is not the world's reserve currency. Japanese 10- and 30-year yields are 1.60% and 3.10%. S&P and Moody’s rate them a notch below the US at A+ and A1, respectively.

Summary

We are active investors, which entails walking the fine line between narratives and fundamentals. Whether we agree with the prevailing narratives or not, we must comply with them, as they can significantly impact prices. However, we must also recognize and seize opportunities when we believe the narrative has stretched the price too far from its fundamentals.

 Such is the dilemma we face today with bond yields. If we are correct that the bond market is overreacting to deficits, we may see a sharp drop in yields. However, if the current narrative persists, current yield levels or even higher yields may persist.

Our deficit has been growing for decades. We believe this is a critical reason economic and productivity growth has weakened for over 40 years. We have little doubt that if this continues, it will someday become highly problematic. However, that day is not today!

The post Narratives vs. Fundamentals: Battle In The Bond Market appeared first on RIA.

A reader of our Daily Commentary asked how we measure corporate credit spreads in light of the Moody's downgrade of the USA credit rating. Specifically, "Without having a AAA benchmark to calculate the credit spread of corporate bonds against, what other measure can help me assessing stress in the corporate bond market." First its important to note that two of the three major credit rating firms already had the US credit rating at AA before Moody's downgrade. Second, regardless of the downgrade almost all investors still consider US Treasury securities as risk free. Therefore credit spreads versus Treasuries remain a viable stick to measure credit conditions for corporations.

However, if you think otherwise about the USA being risk-free there are other ways of assessing potential stress in the corporate credit market. In addition to measuring spreads to Treasuries, most corporate bond traders also focus on intra-rating spreads. For example, our graph below shows the yield spread between AA rated corporate bonds and junk-rated B corporate bonds. As it shows, the spread between B and AA widened briefly in April as the tariffs were announced. Since then the spread has reverted back toward its lows. Simply, upon assessing the credit spreads whether using US Treasuries or higher rated corporate bonds, corporate junk spreads show no stress.

What To Watch Today

Earnings

Economy

Market Trading Update

Yesterday, we stated that the market was overbought heading into last week and that a pullback was likely. We have previously noted that there was a lot of support building at the 200-DMA, where the 100 and 20-DMA had now converged. Unsurprisingly, news over the weekend that Trump was postponing tariffs on the EU sent stocks roaring higher, confirming an initial positive test of support. While the rally was indeed bullish, with buyers showing up across the entire market complex, last week's sell-off did little to reduce the short-term overbought conditions of the market.

This afternoon, we will get earnings from Nvidia (NVDA), the last of the "Magnificent 7" stocks, signaling the end of Q1 earnings season. The options market is expecting a 7.5% swing in the share price depending on how Nvidia reports. As shown, Nvidia has a reasonably high bar to hurdle in revenue and earnings growth. However, the recent downturn in the stock market has reduced expectations somewhat. The question will be whether it was enough.

Lastly, as we move into June, we will lose support of earnings announcements and, most importantly, corporate share repurchases. As that buyer fades from the market until the end of July, the market may struggle somewhat, particularly with economic data still showing signs of weakness.

The bottom line is that we remain somewhat cautious about the market and are holding higher levels of cash despite Monday's rally. Once we reverse the current overbought conditions to some degree we will begin adding back to equity exposure accordingly.

Industrials Are The Hot Sector

As the graphic below from SimpleVisor shows, Industrials now have the highest relative analysis score of all the sectors versus the S&P 500. Despite a slump in inbound port traffic and slowing in the rail and trucking industry, most other sub-sectors within industrials are trading well. The second graphic, showing the ten largest stocks in the XLI ETF, highlights that aerospace companies are leading the way. Positive earnings and relatively good news on the tariff front for their specific industries are helping those companies outperform the market. The only company of the ten that is oversold versus the market is Union Pacific, a railroad freight company.

The Stealth Bear Market

Is this a “stealth” bear market? Of course, you may be asking yourself what I mean by that.

Historically, bear markets have tended to be pretty evident, as highlighted in the chart below. These bear markets are often more protracted affairs that lead to investors developing profoundly negative sentiment towards markets. This article will use a weekly moving average crossover to identify “corrections” and “bear markets.” While our definition may not “jive” with the mainstream narrative, the reasoning will be evident momentarily.

When the short-term moving average crosses below the long-term, a “sell signal” occurs. That trigger suggests that investors should reduce equity risk in portfolios. When that signal reverses, investors should increase equity risk. Since 1995, the weekly indicator has only given three “false” signals. However, those signals were quickly reversed as the bull market continued, doing little harm to investors’ total returns. The signals warned investors of critical downturns to reduce equity exposure and avoid more significant capital destruction.

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The post Assessing Credit Spreads After The USA Downgrade appeared first on RIA.

For better and for worse, the progressive conception of executive power has become almost definitive for the presidency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We judge presidents by their grand actions, their command of politics, and how they shape opinion with rhetoric and gestures. They tell us they feel our pain as we boldly move forward together to claim the unruly future. President Trump has even suggested that our children’s Christmas presents are part of his prerogative. For all this, the American people welcome strident presidents, only turning on them under certain conditions, which are themselves notable. The rulemaking authority that has accumulated in the executive branch in generous transfers of power by Congress since Woodrow Wilson’s groundbreaking progressive presidency now makes it more formidable than it has ever been. 

All of this is happening, with only the vaguest of directions from Congress, the branch of government that the Constitution easily accords the widest berth of powers. We seem destined to live out the folly that Publius warned about when he defined tyranny in The Federalist as the combination of legislative, executive, and judicial power in one set of hands. 

Progressive constitutionalism finds its objectives in egalitarian social and economic change, aggressive regulation of business, a vast bureaucratic sector, and, most importantly, an executive who leads the people to accept the changes foisted on them in the name of progress. This unbalanced form of government breaks down under the weight of menacing events, emergencies, or forecasts that lead Americans of any belief to look to the federal government for direction and competence. 

One does not need to revisit the drastic consequences that ensued from COVID-19 policies to be reminded of the failures and mistakes of the progressive constitutional framework that issued them. The flawed public health regime changed the direction of the nation’s politics. Who now speaks with admiration of masking, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates? Authority and confidence have been stripped from the federal health bureaucracy, the public companies that constitute “Big Pharma,” and the politicians who supported drastic COVID-19 health measures. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw reactive policies, backed by “science” and rationalism. Rather than progress, science, and competent administration in a crisis, we saw a government collaborate with social media companies to censor, through fear, just criticism of its policies by leading scientists and medical academics. What is strikingly clear upon reflection on those policies is how rooted they were in the progressive constitutional framework and its ethos. Consider which branch of government imposed the business and school shutdowns, the limited permissions given to “essential jobs,” the vaccine mandates, the seemingly absurd regimen of handwashing, social distancing, and masking, and the closures even of public parks and open spaces. These policies were imposed on civil society by executives, governors, mayors, county administrators, and other executive branch officials. 

One of the most critical aspects of the old Constitution that progressives rejected, apart from federalism, the separation of powers, and the notion of any limits on government, was congressional deliberation. Congress was parochial, tied to the numerous regional ideas, prejudices, and interests of each part of the country, thus preventing a new national ideology from emerging. Deliberation at the congressional level did not yield the truth, but rather a thousand unfounded, petty notions. Only the president could outshine them as the only truly national elected representative, according to early twentieth-century progressives. 

But deliberation is how representative bodies take opinions, sentiments, rumors, and murmurs from the public and transform them into an acceptable form of public policy that can be approved by the represented citizens, precisely because they can see some measure of themselves in the result. In this crucial instance, to cite one prominent source of discomfort, many did not understand why their children were not in school, given that the disease, by virtually every measure, posed minimal risk to children. While governors or state secretaries of education had mandated such closures, no one with public authority spoke up for those who dissented. 

How many states or localities featured debates in their legislatures or city councils where representatives had to weigh the adverse consequences of comprehensively shutting down public, private, commercial, and educational institutions of society against the spread of COVID? The lack of debate in representative bodies meant that those who rightly could point to data showing that the disease’s most severe effects were limited to the elderly, the obese, and those with compromised immune systems could not be heard. Those arguments clearly pointed to more lenient public health restrictions in jurisdictions that were heavy-handed in their approach. When contrasting arguments cannot be responsibly made and assessed, another form of public discourse is born. And so, it was. 

Government by executive cannot, by its very design, engage in public deliberation. The excellences of executive power are decisiveness, unity, and speed, among others. But these qualities cannot eradicate the ill effects of flawed policies, which do not adequately address the specific set of problems. A more dangerous effect of this type of governance is that the executive level cannot properly receive, measure, and formulate ideas provided by the public in the construction of policy. That’s what legislatures do. 

All of this has accustomed us to public power and the diminution of civil society. The crucial theoretical position of progressive constitutionalism is the concentration of policymaking authority in the executive branch of government, so that the executive can represent the entire nation and lead it to new heights of consciousness and change. This position intrinsically mocks the founders’ constitutionalism as incompetent, even naïve in its belief that power should be divided and separated to ensure that multiple branches and levels of government compete and jostle to ultimately contribute to the formation of policy. 

Much of Congress’s authority has already been delegated to the executive branch to make policy under such conditions. As economist, historian, and social policy expert Thomas Sowell has warned us, progressives have long labored under the belief that their “anointed” vision is the path to progress. History has also taught us that power, cronyism, influence-seeking, and coercion are inevitable destination points when formidable constitutional institutions do not, or cannot, limit power. The COVID-19 pandemic is but one example of the government’s flexing its power, notably, by pushing a vaccine on many Americans who didn’t want it. 

Today, this discussion brings us to the dominant ethos of the Trump administration, which seeks to govern the country with a heavy hand. Has the Trump administration fallen prey to the vices of progressive presidential power? Many of its chief policymakers seem to labor under the major premise that we are in an “emergency” situation, caused by progressive policies that have waged war against the American people. Add to that the minor premise that Congress itself is moribund. The administration seems to operate under the premise that we are stuck in the deep channel of progressive constitutionalism. Those who believe in these premises conclude that any attempt to change the shape of this country must come from presidential leadership alone. Government by executive is the only real possibility for saving our nation and bringing it back to what the founders intended. It’s a position that is hard to disagree with. 

At the same time, new-right and post–liberal theorists are attempting to distance the American right from its long-held position that the administrative state should be reduced in power. Their ideas now seem to be charting the course for the Trump administration. For example, as many readers of Public Discourse will recognize, Patrick Deneen, a critic of the American founding’s natural rights philosophy, advocates in his recent book Regime Change that the power of government should be used to forge the few and the many into one class. The new position, one that many of us are watching to see if the Trump administration adopts, consists in using the administrative state’s powers to build an ethos in government that could redirect American society in a more culturally traditional and left-of-center economic direction. The government shouldn’t be smaller, but instead deployed for the many, for the working class, who it is presumed welcome this shift in federal rulemaking toward a more active government and managed economy in pursuit of traditional social norms.  

But if that palpable desire exists in working-class constituencies, it seems the policies to meet that concern should be formulated in the legislature rather than the executive branch. The rush to implement them through the administrative state might overlook the more complex reality, which is that many of these voters crossed over to the GOP because they sought economic growth. It’s interesting to note that much of what Republican voters continue to tell pollsters today is that, while they voted Republican, they don’t necessarily support the Trump administration’s policies regarding, for instance, tariffs, industrial and family policies, and now price controls. This same arm of government can punish enemies and reward friends, a principle that is at play in certain respects in the Trump administration. Senator Vance periodically expressed support for this position. Again, one is hard-pressed not to sympathize with this situation.  

Two distinctions are needed here. The Trump administration is correct in its efforts to reshape and reclaim presidential authority over the administrative state. We have not seen a Republican president even attempt to stem and reorient the administrative state’s powers in the manner that Trump is doing.  

The Trump administration’s executive orders prohibiting the use of affirmative action, DEI, and disparate impact practices inside the federal government, along with the order on transgenderism, should receive similar plaudits from members of the reality-based community that wants to restore the dignity of the human person to proper prominence in the law. The advanced decay that is occurring in certain institutions of society, which the executive branch regulates through the administrative state, validates the use of executive power in new, more aggressive directions for a Republican president. Higher education, whose institutions have been led by the modern left for decades, now features students and faculty engaging in vile rhetoric and protests against Israel, Jewish students, and their own country. That much of this is happening at so-called elite universities, which have legal and ethical responsibilities to this country, demands a forceful government response. 

The Trump administration’s suspension, if not elimination, of federal grants to these universities is needed. This attempt to change the culture of higher education away from rewarding and coddling terrorist sympathizers and anti-Semitic, anti-American students and faculty must be done for the sake of the nation’s broader culture. 

Yet, we must also keep in mind another distinction—one that the Trump administration has already learned from the sharply limited success of DOGE’s retrenchment efforts and its inability to eliminate the Department of Education without congressional authorization. The executive branch does not exclusively run the country, as it rightly governs one part of the government. Moreover, it should not seek to exercise power as if the separation of powers means the separation of any branch from being able to exercise its constitutionally appointed powers in the fulfillment of its duties when those conflict with administration priorities. In its insistence in federal court that it can deport anyone on American soil, even an American citizen, the administration has come perilously close to this position already with the federal judiciary. This undermines the Trump administration in the eyes of courts at a time when it will need their respect and judgment in the many battles it faces. 

Today, aspects of what is happening in the Trump administration bring us back to how executive branch officials managed their power during the COVID pandemic. They too operated under what were believed to be emergency conditions, where nothing could be spared when addressing the crisis. This led to unlawful dispensations regarding student loans, rent moratoria, vaccine mandates, antiracist economic programs, and coercion of corporations regarding speech and business practices, among other notable developments. COVID itself seemed to confirm to progressives that nothing limited their power and their ideas for transforming the country on various fronts. Look at the results.

We should recover the unwritten premise of the founders’ constitutionalism: when man and power are joined without constraints that limit the use of government authority, the result is a mess. Humans are inherently flawed but also oriented to the good. Constitutional authority is premised on channeling and checking public officials’ power. Believing in visions of the anointed, from whomever they supposedly issue, is a fool’s errand. We seem destined to relearn this lesson again and again.   

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

The Missouri Supreme Court today issued a ruling that could reinstate the state’s abortion safety standards — previously blocked by a lower court—by requiring the case to be reevaluated under a stricter legal standard.

The decision effectively blocked abortions in Misosuri, with no abortion businesses able to meet the basic standards, and babies will be protected for now.

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The Court’s decision ordered Judge Jerri Zhang of the 16th Circuit to vacate her earlier rulings from December 2024 and February 2025, which had allowed abortions to temporarily resume in the state following the passage of Amendment 3. The Missouri Supreme Court found that Judge Zhang had applied the incorrect legal standard and emphasized that challenges to duly enacted state laws must demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits.

“This is a significant moment for women and children in Missouri,” said Brian Westbrook, Executive Director of Coalition Life, a sidewalk counseling and pregnancy center organization committed to protecting life. “We are grateful the Missouri Supreme Court has recognized the importance of applying rigorous legal scrutiny before allowing our life-saving laws to be suspended.”

The case before the court sheds light on how Amendment 3 may open the door to dangerous procedures and eliminate protections for the most vulnerable. Without legal clarity, women could be subjected to unsafe conditions, and the lives of preborn children could be ended without oversight or limits.

“The lower court’s ruling not only threatened the preborn but also left abortion facilities functionally unregulated,” Westbrook added. “Women deserve better than unlicensed facilities rushing to provide abortions under a constitutional cloud. Today’s decision is a step back toward safety, accountability, and a culture that values every human life.”

The original lawsuit was filed by Planned Parenthood affiliates after voters narrowly approved Amendment 3, which enshrined a so-called right to “reproductive freedom” in the state constitution. However, today’s ruling means any preliminary injunction must now meet the higher legal threshold established by federal precedent, including proving the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their case.

Westbrook concluded, “This is not the end of the legal battle, but it is a critical victory for every pro-life Missourian. Coalition Life will continue to advocate for the most defenseless on the sidewalk and through our pregnancy center as we serve these women and preborn children most affected by this decision.”

The post Missouri Supreme Court Blocks Abortions, Babies Will be Protected for Now appeared first on LifeNews.com.