It is all too easy to internalize our opposition’s frame of reference in political debate. Our opponents flood the zone so well that we sometimes don’t notice we are fighting the battles on their turf. Thank you for not doing that. Even if the language is comfortable and familiar.
Anat Shenker-Osorio suggests against employing a frame for viewing the right to an abortion that is by now almost reflexive. Perhaps it’s worth noting. She’s seen what works before. In Ireland, for example.
In Ireland, for example, the embrace of the 3 c's: care, compassion and change, none of which was choice. This core slogan contextualizes abortion as something a desirable society has – it seizes the moral high ground. Choice emerges from a libertarian – individual frame. /2
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 4, 2022
That lbertarian frame escaped me entirely.
The base message? "La revolución de las hijas" and the pañuelos verdes, an emblem that attaches back to the white kerchiefs the Madres de la Plaza wore – to the relentless mobilization of older generations of women against the previous dictatorship. /5
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 4, 2022
And marginalizing oppo? Neon green glowing coat hangers, again same color as kerchiefs, out in all the marches. And then hanging the names of the Senators who had voted "no" the first time in the square in front on Congress. /7
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 4, 2022
If #SomeoneYouLove needs an abortion someday, wouldn’t you want them to be treated with compassion and receive the care they need? Watch and spread this message so our elected leaders know what most of us believe. pic.twitter.com/fyjUxMomlO
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The Supreme Court justices behind the “problematic” Samuel Alito draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade are in for some unwelcome scrutiny of their confirmation testimony.
Ed Walker (Masaccio at emptywheel) tweets, “People hate dissembling as much as they hate outright liars. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and the rest may feel fine about hiding their intentions, but they lied by omission in repsonse to direct questions.”
The confirmation testimony in particular of the Trump Three, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, will receive second looks. They will likely weather the blowback.
To no one’s surprise, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins is disappointed, as is Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (The Guardian):
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said, while noting that the draft opinion is not final.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowksi, who also supports abortion rights and voted in favor of Gorsuch’s and Barrett’s nominations, said the draft opinion “rocks my confidence in the court right now”.
A legal expert explains how this game is played:
“When people are nominated to the supreme court and they testify in Senate confirmation hearings, they are very careful about their language,” said Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School. “Something like ‘settled law’ actually has no concrete legal meaning. What it means is that that’s a decision from the supreme court, and I acknowledge that it exists. But it doesn’t carry any kind of significance beyond that.
Nominees are playing a legalese shell game to hide their Roe leanings. To no one’s surprise, the Senate’s confirmation process has become a joke. (Washington Post):
It is not just the increasingly predictable and evasive answers of nominees that are prodding some senators to conclude that Supreme Court hearings have become empty theater. More and more, the confirmation votes themselves seem a foregone conclusion, with senators hewing to the party line and many using their allotted time to launch political broadsides rather than seek information.
“Our confirmation process for Supreme Court justices, I think, is fairly badly broken and has become not particularly revealing or relevant about what justices will do once seated,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I listened to several justices tell us — as candidates or as nominees — that they would have respected settled precedent. I had my reasons for skepticism given their speeches to Federalist Society gatherings or their writings. But if this becomes law, it confirms that in several cases they were not being truthful.”
For anyone needing reminding, Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for — under oath — parsing the meaning of “is.”
But once confirmed, justices are there for life with no ethics rules to constrain them. Imposing any (or expanding the court) face “potentially insurmountable logistical hurdles.”
That did not stop furious Democrats this week from renewing their ideas for a far-reaching overhaul of the Supreme Court. Some argued that lifetime tenure, designed to insulate justices from political pressure, has instead become a shield to protect them from consequences.
“Maybe there needs to be term limits for court justices,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “I’ve never been somebody who’s advocated for that. But I do think it’s incredibly troubling, because these guys are supposed to be of the highest credibility and everything, and this just takes away from it.”
Restoring women’s rights in Congress, this Congress, faces similar hurdles. Again, from The Guardian:
Both Collins and Murkowski have said they support codifying Roe into law, but that proposal does not have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster. Progressives are now calling on Collins and Murkowski to support a filibuster carveout to enshrine the protections of Roe into law.
“To salvage their legacy, Collins and Murkowski must join with Democratic senators to do whatever is necessary to protect Roe in federal law,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “No meaningful action will happen without a filibuster carveout now.”
But Collins and Murkowski have so far given no indication that they would support such a carveout. Unless they do, the court stands ready to overturn nearly 50 years of precedent and erase the national right to abortion access, even though a clear majority of the country would oppose that decision. A CNN poll released earlier this year found that 69% of Americans are against overturning Roe, while just 30% support a reversal.
Abortion appears nowhere in the Constitution. Thus, the conservative majority feels free to dismiss access to it as a right. Although vote(s), majority, etc., appear multiple places, the word democracy appears nowhere in the Constitution either. Republicans are working across the country to deny access to that as well. Settled law or not.
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Some hardcore wingnuts lost yesterday. But that won’t stop the race to the right.
For all the talk about JD Vance, the good news is that some of the fringiest fring were turned out yesterday in Indiana and Ohio. Unfortunately, plans to harshly restrict abortion is still on the menu. Bolt magazine reports on some down ballot races last night in Indiana and Ohio:
Two Republican legislators who led recent efforts in Indiana to champion hard-right policies, including serving as the chief authors of legislation to fully ban abortion, lost their reelection bids in GOP primaries on Tuesday.
State Representatives John Jacob and Curt Nisly were among a large slate of far-right candidates running on Tuesday in Indiana, as part of a confrontation between the already-conservative GOP establishment and advocates who were angry at COVID-19 regulations and what they saw as an insufficiently aggressive approach to transforming the state into a conservative haven.
Nearly all non-incumbent candidates who ran as part of this far-right takeover effort lost as well, alongside Jacob and Nisly.
But the results do not shake hardline conservatives’ hold on the mainstream of GOP politics. The Indiana legislature, which is run by the Republican leaders who clashed with Jacob and Nisly, appears likely to adopt new anti-abortion bills in months ahead.
A similar dynamic played out in Ohio. Former Republican lawmaker John Adams, who ran for secretary of state by touting the Big Lie, the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, lost by a large margin on Tuesday to incumbent Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who pushed back against Trump in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. This was the first secretary of state election this year featuring a Big Lie candidate, though Adams never caught fire like some of his counterparts in other states.
But LaRose’s victory hardly reflects a last stand by moderate forces. He has himself ramped up talk of voter fraud over the past year, and his tenure has included numerous clashes with voting rights groups over restrictions to ballot access.
[…]
Jacob and Nisly joined forces in January 2021 as the main sponsors of House Bill 1539, which sought to ban abortion in Indiana; Jacob was already known for protesting abortion rights at the statehouse wearing red-stained medical scrubs and a partially dismembered child’s doll prior to his election in 2020. Both lawmakers lost one day after Politico reported that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Also in January 2021, in the aftermath of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, Jacob and Nisly also introduced a bill to extensively review voting machines and introduce new restrictions on how elections are run.
Jacob also has a history of staunchly discriminatory comments, including public remarks disparaging Catholics and Muslims.
While neither of Jacob and Nisly’s bills has advanced, new laws that curtail reproductive rights in Indiana could pass later this year.
The legislature’s GOP leaders have said that, if the court rules against Roe, they would likely meet in a special session to advance anti-abortion laws. Republican Governor Eric Holcomb has not said whether he will call a special session, and observers say the 2022 elections could shape what final legislation looks like. But Holcomb has signed many laws that restrict abortion during his tenure, including in 2018, 2021, and 2022.
The have also passed draconian anti-trans legislation that was vetoed by the governor. But they’re just getting started.
The founder of Hoosiers for Life, an anti-abortion group in Indiana, created the Liberty Defense PAC, with the goal of moving the Indiana legislature even further to the right. Besides demanding a quick ban on abortion, Holcomb’s COVID-19 regulations were among the group’s chief targets. The PAC endorsed 23 state House candidates it dubbed “liberty defenders;” many of whom ran against incumbent lawmakers.
This far-right slate had a very bad night on Tuesday. Twenty of its endorsed candidates lost; only two won. (The final district remains too close to call as of publication, though the “liberty” candidate leads narrowly.) Jacob and Nisly were the only incumbents on the “liberty” slate; Nisly faced a fellow lawmaker after their districts were combined due to redistricting.
Traditional conservatives also held the line further up the ballot in a key congressional election: Erin Houchin, a former lawmaker, won the Republican primary for Indiana’s deeply red Ninth Congressional District. Houchin ran as a staunch conservative, but the far-right Freedom Caucus rallied behind the candidacy of former congressmember Mike Sodrel.
Interesting, no? This dynamic may explain why the mainstream Republicans seemed to panic over the Alito draft. Extremism on abortion isn’t playing.
The old guard in various states is putting up a bit of a fight and in some cases winning. Of course the old guard is hardly moderate. Before the latest round of QAnon loons, they would have been considered extremists themselves.
Here’s a short thread on Alito’s use of 17th century belief systems to back up his opinion that historical oppression of women is the precedent we must respect:
Can we talk about how problematic Alito’s logic is? Alito reaches back to the 17th c. English Common law to provide a precedent for his decision, but the 17th c. judgments he cites only made abortion a crime if it happened after the child “quickens” or moves (about 20 weeks).
This 17th-18th century understanding would mean upholding Roe, and disallowing Dobbs. So Alito then says the common law somehow must have made abortion illegal before quickening — without a shred of evidence.
Why was quickening so important? Many scholars & theologians then thought that quickening marked the possible point that the soul entered into the body of the fetus.
@CorneliaDayton writes a bit about it in her famous article on abortion in early America, “Taking the Trade.” (Popular version here)
So by claiming that he wants to return us to our 17th c. common law roots, then actually ignoring their guidelines, Alito is imposing his own standard of what constitutes life (or perhaps a conservative Catholic standard) that is not in fact any past precedent in US history.
It was not even a past precedent in the Catholic Church in the 18th c., which also held to the quickening rule. Such logic falls apart upon the barest scrutiny. It is the definition of reactionary.
*technical clarification. Quickening is the point, then as now, when a mother can begin to feel a fetus move. The term is still common in medical literature & in doctor/patient conversations.
Link to full draft. Relevant cases quoted and cited esp. pp. 16-20. Alito tries valiantly, but he just can’t square the circle.
And that’s not all. After using 17th century common law, the time of witch trials, to justify his decision, in the same breath he noted that the Constitution lacked any mention of abortion so it doesn’t apply to modern life. Imagine that.
Within a matter of months, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all.
Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” There were no women among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were no women among the hundreds of people who participated in ratifying conventions in the states. There were no women judges. There were no women legislators. At the time, women could neither hold office nor run for office, and, except in New Jersey, and then only fleetingly, women could not vote. Legally, most women did not exist as persons.
Because these facts appear to surprise Alito, abortion is likely to become a crime in at least twenty states this spring. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito wrote, in a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The draft decision, which Politico published on Monday night, would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion.
Chief Justice John Roberts, promising an investigation, has not denied its authenticity. Five Justices have reportedly voted in accordance with the draft: Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan are sure to dissent. Roberts is not likely to concur. One theory has it that whoever disclosed the draft is trying to make it more difficult if not impossible for Roberts to recruit a defector from the majority. But, of course, this remains unknown.
About as wholly speculative as the question of who leaked this decision is the history offered to support it. Alito’s opinion rests almost exclusively on a bizarre and impoverished historical analysis. “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text,” he argues, making this observation repeatedly. Roe, he writes, was “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text” and suffers from one error above all: “it held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”
Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.
Alito cites a number of eighteenth-century texts; he does not cite anything written by a woman, and not because there’s nothing available. “The laws respecting woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in 1791, “make an absurd unit of a man and his wife, and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cypher.” She is but a part of him. She herself does not exist but is instead, as Wollstonecraft wrote, a “non-entity.”
If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” As I have argued, the history test disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then. Especially important is the question of who was enfranchised at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, the nation’s second founding, since many arguments defending abortion rights (and many other rights, too) turn on the equal-protection and due-process clauses of that amendment. Here, too, Alito is baffled to discover so little about abortion and women.
Referring to the advocates for Jackson Women’s Health Organization and to amicus briefs like one signed by the American Historical Association, Alito writes, “Not only are respondents and their amici unable to show that a constitutional right to abortion was established when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but they have found no support for the existence of an abortion right that predates the latter part of the 20th century—no state constitutional provision, no statute, no judicial decision, no learned treatise.”
He might have consulted the records of the U.S. Senate from the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, when Jacob Howard, a Republican senator from Michigan, got into an argument with Reverdy Johnson, a Democrat from Maryland. Howard quoted James Madison, who had written that “those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them.” This got Johnson terribly worried, because the Fourteenth Amendment uses the word “person.” He wanted to know: Did Howard mean to suggest that women could be construed as persons, too?
mr. johnson: Females as well as males?
mr. howard: Mr. Madison does not say anything about females.
mr. johnson: “Persons.”
mr. howard: I believe Mr. Madison was old enough and wise enough to take it for granted that there was such a thing as the law of nature which has a certain influence even in political affairs, and that by that law women and children are not regarded as the equals of men.
Alito, shocked—shocked—to discover so little in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteeing a right to abortion, has missed the point: hardly anything in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteed women anything. Because, usually, they still weren’t persons. Nor, for that matter, were fetuses.
[…]
At the close of the opinion, Alito congratulates both himself and the Court that, with this ruling, they are enfranchising women. “Our decision . . . allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office,” he writes. “Women are not without electoral or political power.” True, women are no longer without electoral power. But they were without it for almost the entirety of the history on which Alito grounds his analysis of the Constitution and its provisions. You don’t need a leaked document to learn that.
He and his cohort are happy to selectively acknowledge progress that benefits them. But when it doesn’t they just harken back to the days of white wigs and tri-corn hats to justify their ideas. And if it is necessary, they will go all the way back to the 1600s — and mischaracterize it! — to justify their antiquated ideology.
Why are we at the mercy of such people?
Update: More on this theme
In Justice Alito’s draft opinion reversing Roe, he writes about “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment,” up until Roe in 1973. He cites, as historical authority, Sir Matthew Hale. Let me tell you about Hale & his views toward women.
The Alito draft says Hale “described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’”
Hale became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671. In his views of women, he was not a forward-thinking fellow — *even* by the abysmally low standards of his era.
(Here’s an illustration of Hale, from the National Portrait Gallery in London.)
To Hale, English gentlewomen were “the ruin of families.” Young women were a particular source of despair. They “learn to be bold,” he complained, and “talk loud.” I researched Hale while writing, with @txtianmiller, the book “Unbelievable.” The book was an extension of a story we wrote for @propublica and @MarshallProj called “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”
Hale believed that for women, it was easy to accuse a man of rape. He believed that for men, such accusations were hard to defend, even if innocent. He advised that jurors be warned — explicitly, and at length — about the threat of the false accuser. He came up with quite the list of factors for jurors to weigh. Jurors, he wrote, should consider: Is the woman claiming rape of “good fame” — or “evil fame?” Did she cry out? Try to flee? Make immediate complaint afterward? Does she stand supported by others?
Hale’s words became a standard feature of criminal trials in the U.S. As long as 300 years after Hale’s death in 1676, many an American jury would be cautioned with what courts called the “Hale Warning”: an instruction to be especially wary of false accusations of rape.
But that wasn’t Hale’s only legacy.
In 1662, at Bury St. Edmunds, Hale presided at the trial of two women accused of witchcraft. Hale instructed the jury that witches were real, saying Scripture affirmed as much. The jury convicted Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, after which Hale sentenced both women to hang. Thirty years later, Hale’s handling of this trial, preserved in written record, served as model in Salem, Massachusetts, in the infamous witch trials of 1692.
Hale is known for his legal treatises. But just as revealing is a letter he wrote to his granddaughters, dispensing individually tailored advice.
Granddaughter Mary, he wrote, needed to “govern the greatness of her spirit,” lest she become “proud, imperious and revengeful.” Granddaughter Frances could make a good housewife, Hale wrote, provided she be “kept in some awe, especially in relation to lying and deceiving. As for granddaughter Ann, Hale perceived a “soft nature,” and therefore forbade plays, ballads or melancholic books, “for they will make too deep an impression upon her mind.”This letter was 182 pages long. When it came to advice, Sir Matthew Hale was full of it.
Young women, Hale wrote, “make it their business to paint or patch their faces, to curl their locks, and to find out the newest and costliest of fashions. If they rise in the morning before ten of the clock, the morning is spent between the comb, and the glass, and the box of patches; though they know not how to make provision for it themselves, they must have choice diet provided for them…”The letter reveals a man about as cheerful as his portrait suggests.
Wrote Hale: “The whole constitution of the people of this kingdom is corrupted into debauchery, drunkenness, gluttony, whoring, gaming, profuseness, and the most foolish, sottish prodigality imaginable.”
Americans continue to wrongly blame people of Asian descent for the coronavirus, and a greater percentage are harboring distrust of their loyalties, according to a new report out this morning.
21% of U.S. adults now say Asian Americans are at least partly responsible for COVID — up from 11% in 2021.
That’s according to a study from the nonprofit Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change (LAAUNCH) and The Asian American Foundation (TAAF).
33% said they believe “Asian Americans are more loyal to their country of origin than to the United States”— up from 20% last year.
Among Asian American respondents, only 29% said they “completely agree” that they feel they belong and are accepted in the U.S., which was the lowest of all racial groups.
Meanwhile, 71% say they are discriminated against in the U.S. today.
The increase in distrust of Asian Americans is in part driven by greater use of anti-China rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, TAAF CEO and LAAUNCH co-founder Norman Chen said.
“On the surface, we thought it was COVID and Trump. Deeper down we know it’s related to the model minority myth and perpetual foreigner stereotypes. But even deeper, it really [shows] the embedded systemic racism in this country against Asian Americans.”
“From the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1800s to the internment camps of the 1940s to the murder of Vincent Chin in the 80s, this has always been a part of the fabric of the United States,” Eric Toda, who serves on the LAAUNCH board and TAAF advisory council, told Axios Today.
The pandemic drove a sustained surge in anti-Asian hate crimes as people scapegoated Asian Americans for COVID, calling it the “China virus” and “kung flu.”
Some of the most brutal acts of violence were driven by COVID-related hate, such as in Texas, where a man stabbed a Burmese American family, including their 2- and 6-year-old children, in March 2020 because he believed they were Chinese and responsible for the pandemic.
The results of today’s new study are especially troubling in light of the nationwide activism and awareness campaigns about anti-Asian hate.
Despite increased attention to the problem, Americans are more likely to scapegoat people of Asian descent than before.
While the majority of respondents in the study recognized anti-Asian violence is worsening, nearly one-third remain unaware of the crisis, according to the study.
“Politicians need to be very careful … with all this bashing of China because it directly influences how people view and treat Asian Americans in the U.S.,” Chen said.
That assumes that rightwing politicians don’t see a big advantage in demonizing Asians, just as they demonize Muslims, Latinos and African Americans when it suits their need to feed the bigoted beasts they’ve trained to hate. I see very little evidence that they have consciences about anything anymore.
this is jr majewski, who just won the gop nomination for congress in ohio last night, "rapping" his verse of "let's go brandon." i can't. (h/t @daveweigel) pic.twitter.com/NHlls51HQV
A QAnon supporter who was present at the insurrection by supporters of former President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has won a Republican primary for a competitive U.S. House seat in Cleveland, Ohio, defeating a sitting state representative and a sitting state senator in an upset victory that election forecasters say could help Democrats win the seat in the general election.
J.R. Majewski defeated state Rep. Craig Riedel and state Sen. Theresa Gavarone in the Republican primary on Tuesday. With 95% of precincts reporting, the vote stands at 35.8% for Majewski, while Riedel and Gavarone took 30.5% and 28.9%, respectively, according to the New York Times.
Majewski has a number of political liabilities.
He rose to prominence after painting a pro-Trump mural on his lawn ahead of the 2020 election, earning tweeted praise from Donald Trump before the former president was permanently banned from the social media platform over posts it said helped incite the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Majewski himself said he was at that riot, bragging on white supremacist websites about being on the Capitol grounds as the violent mob of Trump supporters attacked law enforcement and broke into the building to try to stop the transition of power from Trump to Joe Biden.
Majewski said he helped organize travel by a group of Trump supporters to Washington for the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the violent attack, claiming he spent $20,000 to help 30 “patriots” get to the nation’s capital for the event, Media Matters for America reported.
Majewski wore a QAnon t-shirt while he was being interviewed by “Fox & Friends” about the massive Trump sign he painted in his yard, and he often uses QAnon phrases in his social media posts, Media Matters reported.
I think the GOP would consider all of those things a big plus. I guess we’ll see in November if the Marjorie Taylor Green faction adds some new members.
It appears that the Republicans are a teensy bit worried about how the Supreme Court decision may affect their campaigns. Axios hilariously calls this memo “maximizing” their message:
The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm is circulating a three-page memo, obtained by Axios, laying out how candidates and lawmakers can maximize their messaging on the U.S. Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) recognizes the decision will have major implications in this fall’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race. The memo is its attempt to have its members speak to voters with a unified voice.
“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.
The document includes sample language for anti-abortion ads.
“Sarah Republican,” making an ad against “John Democrat,” should say, “Here’s my view — I am pro-life, but, in reality, forget about the political labels, all of us are in favor of life.”
An NRSC official told Axios the memo is “based on national polling and focus groups the NRSC has conducted across the country over the last few months.
It sounds like somebody is trying to soft pedal their views in light of the fact that 70% of the public is against them.
Democrats have a different approach:
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Nora Keefe told Axios: “Senate Republicans’ candidates have spent months campaigning on overturning Roe v. Wade — and now this election will determine whether the GOP is able to put in place new, cruel and punishing restrictions.”
”No memo can change the fact that Republicans are grossly out of step with the voters that will decide the 2022 election, and it will lead their campaigns to defeat.”
I don’t know that it will lead to their defeat. But it’s clear the Republicans don’t think it’s going to help them. Let’s hope the Democrats are deft enough to remind people exactly what Republicans did to ensure this result.
I think a lot of us remember that sick feeling we felt on the morning of November 9th, 2016 when we realized that Donald Trump was going to become president. I know I had never felt that way after a disappointing election before and I’ve been through many in my life. But this one was different and it wasn’t just because I feared for the future of the country in the hands of such a patently unqualified, unfit president. I felt that the election of such a man signaled that the nation was rapidly deteriorating into an antediluvian state in which the progress of the 20th century was rapidly unraveling.
And there was a very specific sense of doom on one particular issue.
Since Mitch McConnell had unethically held open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia it was clear that they would replace him with another right-winger and that the Republicans would almost certainly have a chance to fulfill their promise to curtail women’s rights. The day Donald Trump was elected was the day women in America lost the right to control their own bodies in every state. It just took until now for the right cases — and a couple more Federalist Society recommendations for backup — to finalize the loss.Advertisement:
The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion of the pending Supreme Court case Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization was surprising but the opinion itself was not, however emotionally jarring it was to read. As with so much else these last six years, the U.S is poised, once again, to abandon its status as an advanced democracy. The New York Times reported, “since 2000, 31 countries, many just as pious as Mexico, have expanded access to abortion, only three have rolled it back: Nicaragua, Poland and the United States.”
I think the satire site DPRK News Service on Twitter said it best, however:
Progressive jurisprudence of Samuel Alito brings United States in line with Poland, Saudi Arabia, Transylvania, and similar beacons of classical liberalism. pic.twitter.com/4tUu8nrVpl
It’s just one more example of our vaunted exceptionalism. The American right-wing’s moral preening about the unborn combined with its fetish for gun violence and resistance to guaranteed health care makes the U.S. a very special place indeed.
It’s very telling that the reaction to the news that the Supreme Court is poised to deliver the Holy Grail hasn’t resulted in dancing in the streets by the usual suspects. I would have thought Republican voters would run out of their houses cheering and crying with joy at the news as the pundits on Fox and Newsmax high-fived each other and passed out cigars. But instead of celebrating their sweet victory, they are obsessed with the leak as if the “integrity of the court” is more important that the fact that they have finally achieved their most precious goal.
Apparently, they have mixed feelings about their latest triumph. Why else would they care if the ending of what they term a “holocaust” is announced in May or June? Could it be that they know that the vast majority of Americans are opposed to this and it may not redound to their political benefit? Is that why Trump told Fox News that he doubts a decision in the case will have a “tremendous effect” on November’s midterm elections?
Almost everything about the Republican Party’s embrace of anti-abortion zealotry has been nothing more than a cynical tactic to co-opt the large conservative Evangelical Christian bloc of voters and I’m not sure they were prepared to actually deliver. Like many people, I suspect they thought the court would whittle away at Roe v. Wade in bites small enough to keep Democrats from mobilizing but enough to keep their anti-abortion faction agitated and engaged. The Supreme Court overturning Roe may complicate the GOP’s immediate plans to win the midterms, sabotage the Biden administration and then “win” the trifecta in 2024.
This statement from anti-abortion zealot and Nevada GOP Senate candidate Adam Laxalt illustrates the problem for some of them:
This is really something from @AdamLaxalt, celebrating the Roe news but saying abortion rights are "settled law" in NV.
This is astonishing not because he is trying to have it both ways but because he is trying to erase his history on abortion, as AG and as failed gov candidate. https://t.co/GmB1sW5qdP
One of the most cunning aspects of the decades-long anti-abortion political strategy has been to argue that they are morally outraged by what they call the wanton murder of babies while in the same breath blithely insisting that they are fine with a bunch of faceless state politicians and courts doing whatever they want if Roe was overturned. It makes little sense but I’ve rarely seen anyone challenge them on it.
The Alito draft relies on this “states’ rights” argument as well, which is really rich considering that he contemptuously compares Roe to Plessy vs Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow on the basis of the same states’ rights doctrine. Adam Serwer in the Atlantic explains:
In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that Louisiana’s segregation law, as far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, “reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.” Alito has now applied this same logic to abortion—but not just abortion—arguing that in the future, courts should defer to state legislatures “even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance.”
I do think it’s fair to assume that Alito will not object if a future Congress and president pass a total ban on abortion, as the Washington Post reported was already being plotted by “pro-life” movement activists and their GOP allies. But in the meantime, Alito’s “states’ rights” logic, which served its purpose well until 50 years ago, will likely be put to good use by this radical Supreme Court majority to roll back much of the progress of the second half of the 20th century and the first 20 years of the 21st. Despite his protestations that this argument only applies to abortion, it’s pretty clear that the driving forces behind this movement will not be satisfied with that. Almost certainly, marriage equality and contraception are at the top of their agenda.
Some have even bigger ambitions:
Peter Brimelow, a former National Review editor who now runs the racist website VDARE, celebrated the Roe news by posting on the alt social media site Gab: "Next stop Brown vs. Board!" pic.twitter.com/nYpfErOaVI
The New York Times just reported over the weekend that VDARE’s Peter Brimelow was recently on the Fox News organization chart reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch.
Until they can get their nationwide ban, the anti-abortion zealots will be hard at work in the states. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion politics, there are already 23 states with restrictions waiting to be enacted the minute the decision comes down. There are “trigger laws,” in Mississippi, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming instantly limiting or banning abortions, most without any exceptions for rape or incest. Nine states have pre-Roe laws that were never repealed.
And they are already feverishly writing new laws to prevent women from accessing the abortion pill through the mail and from travelling to other states to obtain abortions, which they will now feel free to criminalize. CNN reports that Missouri, for instance, is contemplating a bill that would expand its already draconian abortion law to “abortions obtained out of state by Missouri residents and in other circumstances, including in cases where ‘sexual intercourse occurred within this state and the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse.'” How do they expect to know such information?
That’s where we’re going with this, folks, right into the bedroom. Justice Samuel Alito has written an opinion designed to destroy the right to privacy so that he and his compatriots can metaphorically pull up a chair at the end of your bed and decide what you are allowed to do and with whom. It won’t end with abortion. It’s never just been about abortion.
In response to the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe, Sen. Joe Manchin said, “The filibuster is the only protection we have of democracy right now.” It sure as hell isn’t Joe Manchin.
As much as I’d like to see Democrats pull the Women’s Health Protection Act out of their hats this summer, that’s a serious long shot. Manchin would rather defend the filibuster than women’s rights. “[S]upposedly pro-choice Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski” also oppose touching the filibuster rule, explains John Nichols of The Nation. The bill has already failed in the Senate in February:
So Democrats must do something they haven’t been very good at in recent years: prioritize statehouse elections. That does not mean that the party should abandon the fight for control of Congress. But it does mean that if the party is serious about protecting reproductive rights and a host of other rights that are now threatened, electing pro-choice governors, state attorneys general, and state legislators will become essential.
This is not just about the 21 states across the country that have retained pre-Roe bans on abortion rights or that have passed so-called “trigger laws” to implement a ban if the court acts. This is about all the states where Republican governors with legislative majorities could eliminate existing protections and further threaten reproductive rights.
Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Jessica Post offered a clear-eyed assessment that leaders of her party, and pro-choice activists nationwide, need to recognize. Acknowledging that “Americans will soon be living in a post-Roe world,” Post said, “This should be a tough lesson for Democrats—our policy-making power in Washington is limited and the fight to protect abortion rights will now lie in state legislatures.”
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