Look, the majority of us know it’s an evil decision by the Supreme Court. In terms of rolling back rights and creating a separate legal environment for people based on who they are as opposed to what they do, it’s right up there with Plessy v. Ferguson. As terrible as it was, I’m not certain that that case had the same broad, revanchist implications as this one. Even without the knock-on effects, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is an absolute mess if the non-party affiliated lawyers’ reactions are anything to go by.
Hey, Democrats Trying To Fund-Raise Off Of This!
So, the Nancy Pelosi campaign wasted approximately zero time in trying to raise money off the outrage at this…um…outrageous decision:
Great! I’d love to donate to politicians who are actually going to do something about this. But…some of y’all have been in Congress for 35 years now. What have you done to enshrine Roe in law? What legislation have you supported, what have you sacrificed to make sure that it passed? I want to see your record on this subject.
And I want a plan. I want to know what action you’re going to take to right this wrong. I don’t want to hear “I’ll fight!” or anything that isn’t specific and measurable. Without that? You’re part of the problem and you need to get out of the way.
But They Lied During Their Confirmation Hearings!!!!
Yeah, the Trump appointees all lied about their views on Roe. If Kavanaugh lied about what “boofing” meant, you thought he was going to be honest about Roe? We all knew it at the time. Susan Collins knew it. There’s zero chance of repercussions. Sorry.
Samuel Alito Is A Coward and a Liar
Here’s what Alito said about the potential domino effects of overturning Roe:
“Finally, the dissent suggests that our decision calls into question Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell. But we have stated unequivocally that ‘[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.’ We have also explained why that is so: rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life.'”
There’s a lot in the decision that is head-scratchingly wrong, but this is the most egregious bit. First of all, it is pretty obvious that contraception does, in fact, involve ‘potential life’ so he’s done us the favor of invalidating his entire premise.
More to the point though, let’s be honest here: If he believes that Roe was so wrongly-decided that there was a need to overturn 50 years of settled law, then there’s no defending other decisions based on Roe unless your entire goal was to make abortion illegal no matter what legal reasoning you had to create and what other consequences might ensure from that reasoning.
This is reminiscent of Bush v. Gore, a decision that the majority knew was so specious that they went out of their way to state that it shouldn’t be used as precedent. Alito knows damned well that he has just knocked the foundation out from other a host of other rights; he just doesn’t want to own it.
At least Clarence Thomas, the one openly-corrupt justice on the bench, had the courage to own what they were doing in his solo concurrance. He knew what the decision meant, and he embraced it. I can’t really give him any credit for the enthusiasm with which he listed the rights which could be swept away, but at least he was honest about what the court had just done.
You Have No Idea About How Much Time And Effort Overturning Roe Took
I don’t mean to depress you, but this has been over 50 years in the works. My parents, both Goldwater Republicans, saw what happened when they tried to swing for the fences with a hard-core radical conservative in the general election. Goldwater got 52 electoral votes, taking his home state of Arizona and the deep South.
They learned from this defeat. You cannot start at the top, especially if you’re a radical wing of a minority party. You make like Drake and you organize locally; you take the school boards and the city councils. You take the county offices. And then? You start changing the rules to ensure that your minority movement has an outsized voice. You gerrymander. You suppress voting in areas where you’re weak. You work your way up to the state houses. You re-make the voting maps. Then, and only then, do you start dreaming of national offices.
Reagan was the child of the 1964 presidential election, and he was just the start. There was a lot of hard, unsexy work at nigh-invisible levels to get to the point where a Reagan was a viable candidate. If history is any guide, you don’t, you can’t start with electing Bernie Sanders. Bernie would do better than Goldwater, but he doesn’t get into triple-digits in the electoral college.
That’s not to say that this particular issue cannot be reversed quickly. The avenues to do so range from “unlikely” to “are you fucking kidding me?”, but they do exist. However, the long-term goal of a progressive government that assures civil rights, human rights is not going to happen in one presidential election.
A Quick Note On “The Media”
Y’all…the media has always leaned conservative. I’m old enough to remember when Lee Atwater openly admitted that his complaints about the “liberal media” were just him “working the ref.” I’m old enough to remain mainstream coverage of unions, which was universally negative. Coverage of wars and of policing is universally positive.
“How can this be? Most media personalities are liberal?” They are! But, most media outlets are owned by either billionaires or huge companies, and neither of those categories is known as a hotbed of socialism. It turns out that the owners and their proxies in management have a great deal more influence over what gets covered, and how it’s covered, than the reporters do.
Thanks For Reading This Far
I’m pretty depressed about this. Everyone has seen this coming for years and nothing of substance has been done to avoid it.
I live in the belly of the beast: Texas. There were fireworks going off last night and this is not, by our standards, a conservative town. The state attorney general Ken Paxton (who, fun fact, is under indictment on felony securities fraud charges) declared that June 24th would be a state holiday, something I’m pretty sure the AG can’t do. It’s Texas, though, so the rule of law went out the window some time ago.
I hope some of this is interesting to you, that there was something in here that wasn’t covered elsewhere.
-RK