Gov. Asa Hutchinson Won’t Sign a Law Banning Women From Traveling Out-of-State for Abortions or Support Trump in 2024: He ‘Disqualified Himself’ on Jan. 6
In a wide-ranging interview on Friday’s episode of CBS Mornings, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) defended his state’s trigger law banning most abortions, said he would not sign a law banning women from traveling to other states for abortions, explained some of the increased funding Arkansas had directed for pregnancy centers and health coverage, and reaffirmed that he will not support former President Donald Trump if he runs for re-election in 2024.
Arkansas’ trigger law, which came into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, bans most abortions, with the only exception being if the mother’s life is at risk. At least 20 states have now banned most abortions or are expected to enact bans soon.
Hutchinson signed the Arkansas abortion law in 2019, and was asked about what his state was doing to help expand assistance for young mothers and families.
Arkansas had taken the Medicaid expansion to provide “health coverage for the working poor,” the governor said, and the legislature had designated an additional $1,000,000 to pregnancy centers.
His state had about 3,000 abortions last year, and with the new law that Dobbs allowed to take effect “a significant number of those will be reduced.”
” Some of those moms will put their child up for adoption,” said Hutchinson,” so we’re going to have to increase our adoption services. Others will go out of state, which I think will be a small minority, but there’ll be many that will carry that child to term and to keep that child. And so we want to make sure that we have the wraparound services for that mom, both during the pregnancy, but also afterwards. So we’re looking at as to how we can beef that up.”
Hutchinson said he had directed the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services to “come up with more funding for each of those needs that we see as a result of this.”
At least two state senators were considering submitting bills to ban women from traveling out of state to get an abortion, and Hutchinson was asked if he would sign such a law.
“I would not,” he bluntly replied, calling such a law “a violation of interstate commerce” and said that while Arkansas had “made its decision” how it wanted to handle this issue, “other states might look at it differently.”
CBS’ Nate Burleson then brought up the hearings being held by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which he described as revealing “more details about January 6th and Trump’s role in the violence that the nation witnessed that day.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) had called Trump a “domestic threat we have never seen before,” and Burleson asked the governor if he agreed. “Do you believe that he is a danger to this nation?”
Hutchinson agreed that it was “a threat to our democracy” and “a threat to our institutions of government” when Trump was challenging the lawful transfer of power, “and that’s not the behavior we want to see in a responsible president.”
“I would not be supporting him for 2024,” he added. “He acted irresponsibly during that time [Jan. 6]. He was a risk to the nation. Absolutely.”
After a short discussion about Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony on Tuesday, Gayle King followed up and asked the governor about his own plans for 2024.
Hutchinson reiterated that Trump “has disqualified himself, in my judgment, from his actions on January 6 and leading up to that, and so we have to go in a different direction for our country, for my party.”
He acknowledged he was considering his own White House bid in 2024, and sought to “be a voice for common sense conservatism” and hoped that would resonate. Hutchinson was not yet ready to make an announcement that he was definitely running, and said he would make a decision after the 2022 midterm elections.
Watch the video above, via CBS.
