Martin Niemöller got it wrong
“First they came for the socialists,” etc. Per the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller “sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements” in the 1920s and early 1930s. But once Hitler came to power and began interfering with the church, he became a critic. Niemöller spent WWII in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. He wrote “First they came for…” after the war.
Niemöller got it wrong. He was a man, after all.
First they come for the women.
First it was the Dobbs decision revoking half a century of women’s right to bodily autonomy. We’re throwing the abortion question back to the states, the court said. Let them decide.
Then came a string of ballot measures and laws passed protecting women’s rights. Ohio Republicans immediately declared the voters’ will was not binding on their gerrymandered legislative majority. They would revoke state courts’ jurisdiction over cases brought under the new constitutional amendment protecting reproductive rights.
Texas passed its highly restrictive abortion law while assuring the public that exceptions were built in to protect women’s lives. Then AG Ken Paxton, backed up by the state’s Supreme Court, proved that the exceptions were a sham.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a case involving an 1864 law still on the books:
At stake in the case is the future of that Civl War-era law, which criminalized abortion by making it a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performs or helps a woman obtain one. The law — which was codified again in 1901, and once again in 1913, after Arizona became a state — includes an exception to save the woman’s life.
A more recent law from March 2022 snapped into effect weeks after Roe was overturned banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law makes exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest.
Simmering in the background was the Texas case challenging women’s access to pharmaceutical abortion. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write:
The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to consider a challenge to access to mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion, teeing up the most important dispute over reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade’s reversal in June of 2022. Based on the narrow scope of the issue the court ultimately agreed to hear, there is good reason to believe that a majority of justices will quash the case by deciding that the plaintiffs had no business suing in the first place. Such a decision, which will come down months before the 2024 election, will probably be hailed as proof of the high court’s sober moderation. It will, in reality, prove no such thing. Rather, that outcome would leave the smoking wreckage of abortion access post-Dobbs intact, while pushing off, for now, its most unhinged expansion by a court below. More dramatically, such a move would leave open the possibility that a future Republican president could ban abortion nationwide without enacting a single new law by exploiting the puritanical Comstock Act of 1873. If, while protecting access to medication abortion, SCOTUS opts to keep this loaded gun on the table, then the legality of abortion in all 50 states will very much be on the ballot next year.
Jessica Valenti writes at her Abortion, Every Day substack:
What’s most important to know is that SCOTUS will not be looking at the original challenge to FDA approval of the drug. Instead, they’ll review the 2016 and 2021 changes to restrictions around mifepristone, and whether or not the Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine (the anti-abortion group who brought the lawsuit) has standing.
In short, the legality of mifepristone shouldn’t be at risk, but access and availability of the medication is. It’s a reduced scope than what the anti-abortion movement was hoping for, and as Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork, it represents “a best-case scenario for abortion rights supporters.”
Still, the restrictions they’re reviewing are meaningful ones—like tele-health access, the ability to receive abortion medication in the mail, and how far into pregnancy you can take the pills. (Right now it’s 10 weeks, these restrictions could put it at 7 weeks.)
“They’re ready to be cruel. They’re watching themselves be cruel,” Valenti told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday night. “They just don’t care.”
Niemöller got it wrong. First they come for the women.
And the extremists’ autocratic bent is about more than abortion.
“Government governs best that governs least,” conservatives intoned solemnly for decades. Until they gerrymandered themselves into legislative seats resistant to democracy. Now Republicans in control of state capitols are engaged on a war on blue cities. And universities. And women.
Republicans tolerated democracy so long as they felt it gave them a route to power and a smidgen of legitimacy. And now? They’ve abandoned democracy. A large swath of their party wants to elect Donald Trump again, a man whose rhetoric now echoes Hitler and Mussolini and who admires the world’s autocrats.
Remember the Russkies? Republicans spent the Cold War decades as the staunchest anti-Russia hawks. President Ronald Reagan, among the staunchest of them. And now? They want to be like them. They’re taking advice from Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban on abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s Russia.
We have a Holocaust Museum. Perhaps it’s time for a Hypocrisy Museum.
It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! We’re glad you came.