Month: May 2022

According to anti-abortion fanatics who want to ban certain forms of birth control

Republican state Rep. Brent Crane, Assistant Majority Leader for Idaho’s House of Representatives, gave a jawdropping TV interview on Friday in which he openly admitted that his caucus would consider banning certain forms of birth control, including Plan B emergency contraception and intrauterine devices (IUDs), in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Crane, who boasted that he’s passed or worked on 17 anti-abortion bills in the state legislature, told Idaho Reports that he “probably would” hear legislation banning the morning-after pill, and possibly IUDs as well. “I’m not certain where I would be on that issue,” he said of the latter method—as if the idea of birth control remaining legal in America, while you’re also criminalizing abortion, is a really difficult question.

Bret Crane is Vice President of an alarm company when he isn’t making decisions about women’s bodies. So he’s an expert.

This is the kind of people who are going to be making these decisions. Isn’t that great?

Recall that the GOP talking points after the SCOTUS leak said explicitly that it’s a BIG LIE that Republicans want to take away contraception.

Maybe they’ll let you use a condom. Maybe. If you promise not to abuse the privilege.

And lack of self-awareness award for 2022

“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like.” — Ginni Thomas’s husband Clarence.

That’s right. The husband of the woman who was texting the White House Chief of staff saying things like this says people are addicted to wanting particular outcomes.

“I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences… the whole coup and now this… we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”

Sounds like a “particular outcome” addict to me.

Especially those without one. Or bootlaces. Or boots.

Life is a team game… https://t.co/b1ZgSWLlMe

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) May 7, 2022

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Now go straight to hell

The Bible-toting white men in jackets, white shirts and ties along Wade Hampton Boulevard in Greenville, South Carolina were students from Bob Jones University. In the 1960s and early 1970s, they were not the only ones doing street evangelism.

Before Hyatt built its hotel at the corner of North Main and College St., the tag-team preachers stood on Saturdays screaming at passersby to repent or burn. When one shouted himself out, he’d sit down and the other would take over like performers at the auditorium during Monday night wrestling. The delivery was performance, if sincere.

Their world was a threatening place. Devil-occupied territory. They were patriots for Jesus fighting to retake territory. By now, readers recognize the paranoid style.

It is not surprising then that as Republicans coopted the religious right in the 1970s that the paranoid politics honed in the McCarthy era dovetailed so easily with the religious right’s natural suspicion and inate sense of persecution.

The Jones boys would approach and ask if you were a Christian. Saying yes was never enough. Wonderful, they’d say, exchanging sidelong glances. And where do you go to church? Now, it’s a game of 20 Questions: sniff out the sinner. Anyone from a church not on their approved list is against them. Alien. Enemy. Other.

When state Rep. Susan DeLemus began screaming at abortion rights protesters outside the New Hampshire State House on Thursday, the Republican lawmaker was not performing hysterical.

She did, however, borrow Oprah’s riff, pointing to individual protesters and screaming, “you’re a murderer, you’re a murderer, you’re a murderer,” etc.

Nothing quite like the tact and grace of an @NHGOP State Rep on the steps of the people's house. Say hello to @SusanDeLemus engaging peaceful protestors this morning. #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/dtEW7o6dsL

— Colin Booth (@ColinGBooth) May 5, 2022

The tag-team preachers are long gone. But an entire U.S. political party has adopted their style. The rest of us — any American not of their church — is an enemy. Alien. Enemy. Other.

The not-so-coded message is we all will be assimilated or be destroyed.

This tweet from a Republican attorney I spotted this morning carries that message forward.

This act of leaking an important opinion is terrorism against the Court and against our nation. It is far more destructive than any suicide bomber would be.

These people behind this vile act, are attacking the very foundations of the US. We must not let the terrorists win. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) May 3, 2022

Alien. Enemy. Other. Pedophiles. Terrorists. “Groomers.”

this is like pre-genocide talk https://t.co/DR74rBrs0V

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 6, 2022

Where once the right assigned Other to communists and hippies and non-whites, now they’ve branded 70 percent of the country as Other. Now go straight to hell. How soon before some hysterical Real American steps forward to usher you in?

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Baby Sloth Bears!

Four-month-old @WoodlandParkZoo sloth bear siblings, Mudhu (muh-DOO) and Lila (LEE-lah) sleep snuggled together in the spring sunshine under the protective gaze of their mom, Kushali.

In honor of #GiveBIG, enjoy this footage of Kushali and her cubs napping in springtime bliss!

In the wild, sloth bears live in forested grasslands, where they use their superior sense of smell to find ant and termite colonies beneath the ground. Once found, they wield their three-inch long claws to break them open before slurping up the delicious insects with the powerful suction force of their mouths.

Your GiveBIG gift helps create habitats that engage all of these natural behaviors—from digging, to slurping, to climbing on Woodland Park Zoo’ss newly updated tree structure, so that mom, Kushali, can teach her cubs everything they need to know to be a well-rounded member of the sloth bear community.

I’d like a nap myself.

They’ve already prosecuted women for failing to be proper “hosts” for their fetus

This piece from Mother Jones spells out the details:

On a humid morning in early October, Brittney Poolaw sat in an Oklahoma courtroom waiting on a verdict. Instead of the jail uniform she’d donned over the past 18 months, she wore a yellow and white blouse. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their decision: Poolaw was guilty of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years behind bars.

But Poolaw, a 20-year-old and a member of the Wichita Tribe, had not driven recklessly or shot a gun. She’d had a miscarriage.

Poolaw will not be the last woman sent to prison for accidentally losing a pregnancy. Indeed, if the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade is in fact its final opinion on the matter, cases like Poolaw’s will likely become more common.

That’s because, as Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says: “Not only did Roe vs. Wade establish that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, it also rejected the idea that fetuses are people under the Constitution.” The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is steeped in language that paints fetuses—no matter what stage of development—as people. And when we lend credence to the idea of fetal personhood, it creates “a situation in which, when there is perceived harm to a fetus, it can be a victim of a crime. You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus,” Sussman says.

The connection between fetal personhood and prosecutions of pregnant people is well-established. While Oklahoma’s manslaughter and murder laws have a provision preventing pregnant people from being prosecuted “for causing the death of the unborn child,” there’s an exception for cases where “the mother has committed a crime that caused the death.” NAPW has identified more than 70 pregnancy-related prosecutions in Oklahoma since 2007, when it started counting cases in the state. Most have been related to illegal drug use, including the first conviction under the law: a 31-year-old woman charged with murder in 2007 after using meth and having a stillbirth.

Such prosecutions are becoming more common nationwide. Between 1973 and 2005, NAPW identified 413 cases in which a person was punished for allegedly harming the health of their fetus, including self-inducing an abortion. But in the last 15 years, the organization identified 1,254 cases—and that’s almost certainly an undercount. The majority of cases involve low income women and women of color: According to NAPW’s pre-2005 data, 71 percent of the women couldn’t afford lawyers and, of the 368 women for whom information on race was available, 59 percent were women of color.

Poolaw, then about 15 weeks pregnant, was at home in January 2020 when she realized something was wrong and called an ambulance. On the ride to Comanche County Hospital, she told an EMT, without providing details, that she had previously used methamphetamine. She was never drug tested, and, after she miscarried, left the hospital without incident. But her admission that she’d used drugs must have set off alarm bells. A medical examiner tested the fetus and found traces of meth in its liver and brain.

Still, prosecutors were never able to prove that the drug had ended the pregnancy. In fact, the medical examiner testified at Poolaw’s trial that he had noticed another compelling possible cause: congenital abnormalities in the developing fetus. 

She showed up at a hospital bleeding from a miscarriage and was sentenced to four years in prison. If you don’t think that’s something to worry about in the new post-Roe world I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. There is a desire among many people to punish women who are not being proper hosts for their fetus.

It’s going to become a lot more prevalent:

There’s another reason this Supreme Court decision could lead to more miscarriage prosecutions: Self-induced abortions and miscarriages—which occur in one in four pregnancies—can look identical. If someone shows up at the hospital and says they’re having a miscarriage, doctors might suspect there is more going on. In other words, pregnancies that don’t result in birth become suspect in places where abortion is outlawed.

That might sound extreme, but consider El Salvador, where abortion is completely banned. More than 140 people, mostly impoverished women living in rural regions, have been incarcerated for illegal abortions—many of whom insist they merely miscarried. In Poland, where a court last year imposed a country-wide, near-total ban on abortion, a new bill proposes requiring doctors to report all pregnancies and miscarriages to a registry controlled and monitored by the government, raising fears it will heighten scrutiny of and prosecutions over pregnancies that don’t end in birth.

If you think that can’t happen in the United States, consider this: In 2019, during a hearing as part of an investigation that threatened to close Missouri’s lone abortion clinic, the head of the state’s department of health testified the office had created a spreadsheet tracking Planned Parenthood abortion patients’ menstrual periods using state medical records. The purpose: To investigate “failed” abortions—people who had gone in for an abortion but were still pregnant and not getting their period—in an attempt to prove that abortion complications are common (they aren’t). And since the leaked Supreme Court draft, Louisiana has taken the lead in saying what’s coming next, via a bill saying people who get abortions can be charged with homicide.

“There’s no medical way to tell the difference between a miscarriage and a medication abortion. And so the difference between whether someone gets reported isn’t anything medical,” says Rafa Kidvai, who directss the legal defense fund at the reproductive justice group If/When/How. “And that’s obviously about race, about Blackness, about indigeneity, or anyone that feels suspicious.”

“It’s so disheartening to see someone being persecuted and prosecuted over something that is a result of systematic oppression and colonization,” says Camie Jae Goldhammer, a doula and member of North Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and the founder of Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services. “Since first contact, the bodies of Indigenous women have been policed,” whether that was through genocide or the removal of children through the boarding school system. “Indigenous women have always been expendable.”

Few states have taken steps to protect against pregnancy-related prosecutions. In California, in late 2021, more than 40 organizations formed the California Future of Abortion Council with the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom to take on the task of providing policy recommendations to further his goal of forging a “Reproductive Freedom State” for a post Roe era. In January, the state’s attorney general acted on one proposal from the council, directing local law enforcement to stop prosecuting people for their pregnancy losses. Colorado and Illinois have also recently taken steps to protect pregnant people from prosecutions, and more states my soon follow in light of Roe‘s rollback.

“Laws that explicitly prohibit criminalization on the basis of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes are critical,” says Sussman. “Without the protections enshrined in Roe, there will be little preventing prosecutors from criminalizing pregnancy in states without such protections.”

In January, the Oklahoma Court of Appeals dismissed manslaughter charges lodged against a woman in a similar situation to Poolaw, finding that the prosecutor could not establish that the mother’s methamphetamine use was a substantial factor in her pregnancy loss—however, Comanche County has appealed. Poolaw must make a decision about whether she wants to appeal her case to the same court. If she does, and the court orders another trial, she risks being reconvicted and resentenced, potentially facing the maximum manslaughter sentence: life in prison.

It seems to me that this needs to be step one, perhaps on the federal level if possible. Let the Republicans vote against laws designed to prevent the prosecution of women for their pregnancy losses. After all, they claim not to want to punish women. Make them put it in writing.

The current radical court didn’t have to happen

We all know that Mitch McConnell stole two Supreme Court seats and it’s likely that Kavanaugh was confirmed because the FBI didn’t do its job But Michael Tomasky traces the radicalization of the court back much further and it presents a very interesting counterfactual. He says it was the resignation of Thurgood Marshall in 1991, a time before the Court became so blatantly partisan, that did it:

[George H.W.] Bush replaced Marshall with Clarence Thomas. Thomas shifted the court’s balance dramatically. On the day Marshall retired, the court had seven justices appointed by Republicans and only two by Democrats, but such were things in those days that that fact did not give conservatives a 7–2 edge. Far from it. The court was much more of an ideological hodgepodge in those days. From right to center to left, you had: Antonin Scalia (appointed by Reagan), William Rehnquist (Nixon), Anthony Kennedy (Reagan), Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan), Byron White (Kennedy), David Souter (Bush), John Paul Stevens (Ford), Thurgood Marshall (Johnson), and Harry Blackmun (Nixon). You can call that a 5–4 conservative majority if you wish, and it was definitely considered such, because Reagan’s appointees moved the court to the right of where it had been previously. But by the lamentable standards we’ve come to know, it was still center-right. White was a centrist. Kennedy and O’Connor weren’t yet as iconoclastic as they would become, but they weren’t as hard right as Scalia and Rehnquist. Souter started out somewhat more conservative, but later he became a pretty reliable liberal.

Thomas, though, changed the whole dynamic. Now the court had three hard-core rightists. The wind was truly in the Federalist Society’s sails, and the existence of a hard-right majority began to come into focus as a thing to worry about.

At the time of Marshall’s retirement, some observers wondered why he didn’t just wait for the next presidential election, just a year away. He acknowledged that he gave the matter a little thought, but his health was declining; he felt isolated after the retirement of his colleague William Brennan; and in those days, as I said, the process just wasn’t the war it has since become.

So why am I going into all this? You will see directly.

If Marshall hadn’t retired, he of course would have been replaced when he died. And he died on … January 24, 1993. In other words, the fourth full day of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton would obviously have replaced Marshall with perhaps not a raging liberal tiger but certainly someone who was basically pro-choice, pro–civil rights, pro–campaign finance regulation, pro-environment, and so on. All those conservative 5–4 decisions over the last 30 years—on women’s rights, voting rights, campaign finance, unions, religion, so much else—might have been liberal 5–4 decisions. And there would have been no such thing, this week, as Politico’s leak of the decade, because (assuming the mythical Clinton appointee stayed alive until now) there would not be five votes to overturn Roe.

So that, my friends, was an incredibly fateful moment. That, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire in 2013 or 2014, when there was a Democratic president and Senate. We love RBG, but she was wrong to hold on so long. It cost liberalism dearly. If Marshall had waited and Ginsburg had not, we’d have a solid liberal court majority today.

Instead, of course, we are embarking on a new era of Supreme Court radicalism. As you’ve surely already read or heard, the grim logic of the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that leaked to Politico this week, if it stands, means that everything is on the table. Because if they can strip away a half-century-old precedent on the grounds that a half-century isn’t long enough for a right to prove its worth and durability, which Alito essentially argued, then there are a lot of things they can strip away.

Samuel Alito says, no, this decision overturning Roe is narrow, concerning the specific urgent matter of fetal life, rather than, say, a married couple’s privacy or one’s religious beliefs. Amy Coney Barrett, at her confirmation hearing, made the distinction between mere precedent and “super-precedent,” the latter being long-held precedent that isn’t controversial anymore, citing Brown v. Board. OK, so maybe they won’t strike down Brown (although the schools have resegregated to a depressing extent, thanks to the Roberts court). But Obergefell, upholding gay marriage? Alas, I’d be quite surprised if these justices don’t overturn that one day, provided they find the right vehicle. And don’t limit your imagination to the so-called social issues. They want to dismantle the administrative state, meaning, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency couldn’t even write environmental regulations. They (or some of them; whether it’s five is unclear) want to undo one-person, one-vote, which would allow state legislatures to draw districts however they wanted. They want essentially no campaign finance laws, meaning that in theory, the Kochs, Mercers, and a handful of others could buy Congress.

We are entering a period of very radical Supreme Court jurisprudence. It could have been different. But … it isn’t.

No, it isn’t. Trump and McConnell did this and their legacy is secure for a very long time to come.

It’s time to tell our stories

I love this piece by Jonathan Schwarz:

ANYONE FOLLOWING THE news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.

This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.

At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”

That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former students of helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.

That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; and Donald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.

We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.

At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teachers “groomed” me.

IT BEGAN WITH Mr. Larson*, my elementary school’s librarian. We all knew he was gay — not because he ever said anything about it, but because we could also figure out which teachers were straight. It was there in suburban Maryland, more than 40 years ago, that Mr. Larson groomed me to like reading.

On one of my first days at school, my class went to the library. Mr. Larson smiled widely at us and said we were always welcome to check out one or more books. This is probably the classic opening gambit for adults who want to groom you to read.

Every week that went by, Mr. Larson skillfully, subtly moved the process forward. If he learned you had enjoyed reading a book, he would recommend other books you might like. He would tell you there were libraries outside of school, ones run by a cabal of adults like himself, with an even greater selection of books. He would casually drop into conversation that you could get a library card from these libraries, for free.

Before long I was reading constantly. Even worse, it didn’t end with books. At one point Mr. Larson took me and other students to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in what can only be described as a mass grooming event. This happened on the weekend and wasn’t an official school activity. He was grooming us on his own time! He wanted us, he said openly, to become interested in history and even learn from it.

That says everything about the kind of man Mr. Larson was. There was simply no end to his dreadful commitment to “encourage children to be curious” and “think for themselves.”

I have had to accept that I may never escape the effects of Mr. Larson’s grooming. Indeed, I realize that it has made me vulnerable to further grooming — and by gay men in particular. For instance, Stephen Sondheim remotely groomed me to enjoy musical theater. Sondheim has even made me believe musicals can be astonishingly complex art that elucidate the most elusiveaspects of human existence. It’s terrible.

And Mr. Larson was just one of the relentless groomers at my school. There was also Ms. Vanderwaal, who groomed me in not just one but two ways. First, she used to zip through the long linoleum halls of the school on roller skates, grooming me to believe it was acceptable for teachers to be jubilant free spirits rather than harried drones. Second, she groomed me to have good penmanship, both cursive and regular. Fortunately, the latter is one kind of grooming that no longer affects me. It’s taken me years of effort, but if you met me, you’d never guess any teachers groomed me to have legible handwriting.

Then there was Ms. Schultz, who showed up at work pregnant, grooming us to think it was OK for teachers to engage in sexual intercourse. Had she received permission from the proper ecclesiastical authority? Her silence on this issue told us all we needed to know.

But I’ve saved the worst for last: Ms. Burns. Since I’d already been primed by Mr. Larson to like reading, it was the easiest thing in the world for Ms. Burns to groom me to enjoy writing. The pleasure she took in this was positively satanic. She especially encouraged me to compose “funny” essays about politics — and indeed, I still have some of them, reminding me when and how I fell from innocence. Looking back on it now, I see not just the price I’ve personally paid for Ms. Burns’s grooming, but also the immense suffering it has brought to others.

I wish I could say I was the only one, but exactly the same thing is happening to kids across our nation every day. Multiply my experience by a million, 10 million, 100 million — only then can you understand the toll that public elementary school teachers are taking on our children.

* I’ve changed the names of all my teachers, so no one can stop them from continuing their nefarious efforts to get children to love learning.

I too was groomed into learning by my teachers. I remember Mrs Smith, my teacher in elementary school who indoctrinated me into radical leftism when she cried announcing the assassination of President Kennedy. In high school I spent hours and hours with my drama teacher who was … gay. He didn’t succeed in “turning me” but he did expand my mind, open me up to literature and give me confidence. I’ve never fully recovered from the experience.

“CIVILity is in you.” TFW civility is so fetishized, it elides how the Civil War killed 600,000 people in a roiling conflict that is arguably and violently ongoing to this day pic.twitter.com/KwrKSgiHfp

— ☀️dr thrasher is recovering from the totality🌘 (@thrasherxy) May 6, 2022

Jamelle Bouie points out how Lincoln took a strong moral position while also being a pragmatic politican:

Also, and i will scream this until i lose my voice, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech WAS NOT ABOUT CIVILITY

if anything this was a speech about heightening the contradictions

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

There is a reason why the planter elite lost their minds when this guy got elected. he routinely said stuff like this: “To meet and overthrow the power of [slave power], is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.”

lincoln spent his early years on the national stage essentially warning that the united states was in the grip of a conspiracy to extend slavery across the entire nation & that americans had a duty to reject those institutions (like the supreme court) that would try to advance it

lincoln was not a saint but one thing you can say is he was a vociferous opponent of slavery with a deep-seated hatred of the institution. you can’t really understand his political trajectory without this basic fact in mind.

lincoln was anti-slavery — meaning he supported a politics aimed at ending slavery — but, at least before the war, was not an abolitionist, meaning he did not support the immediate end of slavery with no compensation.

and lincoln was sincerely anti-slavery. you see that in his rhetoric and you see it in the fact that he rejected the 11th-hour compromises to preserve the union by enshrining federal protection of slavery into the constitution.

Originally tweeted by b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) on May 6, 2022.

Lincoln also understood that he was dealing with a radical faction that was unappeasable and he spoke openly and directly about it in public. That to me is the fundamental understanding that Democrats today don’t have (or are willing to accept) about the Republican Party.

And it’s long past time

Anyone who has been reading my writing here at Salon over the past few months knows that I am a big proponent of using negative partisanship to win the midterm election. The Republicans are so outside the mainstream that the midterm elections may not be the rout everyone expects if Democrats get out of their defensive crouch and make the case.

My view is that the country is suffering from a mass case of PTSD, still reeling from four years of non-stop Trump-induced chaos. The natural way to register their dismay that things have not yet returned to a sense of normality is to “throw the bums out,” which usually means the party in power. But the Republicans are so radical right now that people may just understand that they are not a viable alternative and Democrats must spell it out. 

Even before this week, I believed there was ample material for going on the offensive against Republican extremism. From Trump’s obsession with the Big Lie to the January 6th insurrection to the ongoing assault on democracy in the states to four years of Republican anarchy starting with Muslim bans, family separations and building that stupid wall, culminating in the tragically inept handling of the global pandemic and consequential economic fallout. That’s the mess Democrats are having to clean up. I think if people are reminded of these things instead of a bunch of defensive arguments telling them they should be feeling better than they do, the people might just aim their discontent where it belongs.

If Roe is overturned next month as expected, the Democratic Party will no longer be able to have it both ways.

Right now, the question is whether or not voters fully understand how dangerous the situation really is. They feel it but it’s unclear if they can see it.

There is some hope that the January 6th hearings next month will bring the assault on democracy into focus although even that is a little abstract for a lot of people. What happened this week may shake up the dynamic. The leaked Supreme Court draft of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is not abstract in the least. It will directly affect the lives of millions of women and their families and the political ramifications could be profound.

Polling has shown for decades that Roe v. Wade is supported by a huge majority of Americans and despite relentless activism, even terrorism, the anti-abortion activists have never managed to budge that large majority. Most people in this country believe that such a complex, intimate, personal decision can only be justly and compassionately made by the individual, not politicians and judges declaring a sweeping one-size-fits-all edict. And even though the anti-abortion zealots lie through their teeth by saying that abortion rights advocates demand an “unlimited right to abortion up until the moment of birth,” the vast majority accept Roe’s balancing test which tied the state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy. It balanced the interests of the pregnant woman with the state by saying that during the first trimester governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second they could require reasonable health regulations and during the third, abortions could be prohibited except in cases where it was required to save the life of the mother. Most people think this was a reasonable compromise and support the decision.

Democrats have never run on this, apparently because they felt this was a settled issue which meant they could play around with it on the edges to possibly attract a few anti-choice votes without really putting much of anything on the line. They acted skittish about it and it carried over into policy. From the Hyde Amendment banning government assistance for abortion to the egregious political malpractice that led to the showdowns over abortion coverage in the Affordable Care Act, they have never put any muscle into defending this right that majorities clearly support. If anything they have used abortion as a bargaining chip, giving the impression that it is an expendable issue they can give to the other side without consequence.

Those days are over. This is now a vital and potent political issue for the Democrats and they cannot shirk their duty. The Republicans are clearly spooked by this decision and are not at all confident that it’s not going to seriously hurt their chances in the fall. Their clumsy attempts to misdirect the revelation to the leak shows how much they are off their game. They quickly released a set of talking points in which they attempted to soften the rhetoric and pretend that Republicans all over the country are working night and day to force pregnant women to give birth against their will regardless of the circumstances. They advise their members to outright lie about everything. Axios featured these excerpts from their memo:

“Be the compassionate, consensus-builder on abortion policy. … While people have many different views on abortion policy, Americans are compassionate people who want to welcome every new baby into the world,” it says.

“Expose the Democrats for the extreme views they hold,” the document says, arguing, “Joe Biden and the Democrats have extreme and radical views on abortion that are outside of the mainstream of most Americans.”

“Forcefully refute Democrat lies regarding GOP positions on abortion and women’s health care,” it adds, saying Republicans do not want to take away contraception, mammograms and female health care or throw doctors and women in jail.

They even suggest that candidates say:

I am pro-life, but this isn’t about political labels. I believe all Americans want us to welcome every child into the world with open arms. But if you disagree with me, my door’s always open. I’m always willing to listen.

Their door has certainly been open for the anti-abortion terrorists who perpetrated violence against abortion clinics and doctors over the past four decades. And they’ve been all ears for the activists who are demanding they remove rape and incest exceptions from their platforms and pass draconian laws that treat abortion as felony homicide for both the providers and the patients. They’ve been very compassionate toward the prosecutors who have jailed women for having miscarriages and attempting suicide while pregnant. And yes, they do welcome every child with open arms until the moment it is born — at which point they completely lose interest.

That people who have endorsed all that can, in the same breath, accuse Democrats of extremism is one of their most audacious moves. They literally have no shame.

If Roe is overturned next month as expected, the Democratic Party will no longer be able to have it both ways. One hopes that Democratic candidates everywhere will see that this is no longer a debatable issue and seize upon the opportunity to illustrate to the American people just how radical these Republicans have become. They simply have to wage the fight now whether they want to or not. 

Salon