This Monday, an initial draft opinion written by Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court voting to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked so here’s some Q&A for you:
Please tell me there's a silver lining here. Like, have the Republicans have seriously overstepped and underestimated how much women, even conservative women, value reproductive rights? And therefore they lose so badly in the midterms that the Dems can pass a federal law?
One silver lining is that this draft leaked early which means we have another month to organize. I know a fair number of Republicans, I’ve been texting them demanding answers and they’re NOT happy that this leaked so I really don’t think this is one of them, it’s probably a liberal clerk and she (I’m assuming it’s a woman until told otherwise) basically sacrificed her entire career to buy us more time. There’s no way a man with that kind of professional trajectory would throw it all way for the women of America. It reminds me of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in that she showed more patriotism than every Republican combined.
I think there a lot of swingy moderate white women, especially in purple states with trigger abortion repeal laws (Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania), who this might sway into voting Democrat because gun-to-head, they don’t want Roe repealed. They probably regarded Roe as settled law since even as late as November 2021 during the Virginia election, people clearly didn’t believe Roe would be overturned and happily voted for a Republican trifecta. I can see this decision saving the Blue Wall governors (Gretchen Whitmer, Tony Evers, and Josh Shapiro) and possibly dragging Katie Hobbs and Stacey Abrams over the finish line in Arizona and Georgia but I don’t think there’s much hope in red states since well, the women there are just as anti-choice as the men. I hope against hope that Beto O'Rourke can win against Greg Abbott since Texas also has a trigger law in effect but that’s definitely going to be a massive uphill slog since Biden lost Texas by 600k votes and Abbott is a popular incumbent governor.
That being said, there aren’t rape and incest exceptions for a lot of those trigger laws, and there’s a reason that even Mitch McConnell and co. aren’t talking about the content of the leak but simply the leak itself. They know they’re on the losing side of criminalizing all abortion even if it goes from 65% people go from supporting abortion remaining legal in the first trimester to 70% of people wanting it illegal in the second trimester. That’s why I’m a bit more hopeful than many others that this could save some vulnerable Dems although I doubt it’ll help us keep the House. I do however think we have a 50/50 chance of keeping the Senate though, which is something.
I'm not American, is codifying something a way to make it immune to future Supreme Court decisions? Thank you.
In theory yes, it’s much harder to overturn legislation that’s made it through both houses of Congress and has been signed into law by the president and it’ll buy us some time. But, the Supreme Court could still deem that any legislation that passes as unconstitutional and I don’t put that past this Supreme Court.
I think an option is to write and put a clean first-trimester only abortion bill with the Hyde Amendment in place up to a vote, and make every single Republican go on record voting against it, even the ostensibly pro-choice Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. The current Women’s Health Protection Act has a bunch of poison pills in it, including no Hyde Amendment, that the GOP can use as an excuse to vote against it and 1st trimester abortion is overwhelmingly popular nationwide with support only going down after 12 weeks. I obviously support abortion remaining legal always since of course, nobody that’s getting an abortion at 20 weeks is doing so for fun, they’re doing it because it’s to save the life of the mother or if the fetus is dead etc. but it gives Republican talking points that we don’t have the luxury to debate the semantics. When Roe is overturned, a lot of this country will criminalize abortion from the time of conception and codifying a 12-week window, during which >90% of abortions take place, where abortion is legal buys us time (at least until the Supreme Court strikes it down, which they very well might do).
But yeah, this is why Elizabeth Warren was so upset yesterday. Women of my mother’s generation and older know what life was like before Roe was decided, and they don’t want to go back to it. Keeping abortion legal is a matter of life or death and I wish people understood that. Barbara Lee is right on the money here.
Twitter is a nightmare. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ first instinct when this all went down was deciding that the most helpful thing was to say 'uhm well the majority of white women voted Republican so this is all their fault' like ma'am women and girls' lives are at risk and you want to point fingers??? Get a grip
I really want to know who this helps.
Aside from the fact that white women are impacted by abortion access in a way men of color and trans women aren’t, I honestly have started to believe that a lot of women of color attack white women because they know attacking white men is going to get them a lot less engagement. The world just hates women and just adds “white” in front of women to make their hatred seem justified tbh. Also, a nonzero amount of the logic behind abortion bans at least in the United States is to ensure white women have MORE babies so of course they’re going to be impacted by abortion bans!
Also, I’m sorry to be blunt but racializing abortion is only going to make keeping it safe and legal less popular. If your argument is that Black and brown women are going to be more impacted by a lack of abortion access, even if it’s true, which it often is, it’s going to make the issue less popular and more polarizing. Look at what happened with COVID! When it came out that Black and Latino people were dying at higher rates, white people including the federal government stopped caring as much. America is extremely racist and misogynistic, and if we want to protect abortion access for everybody, we need to adapt our messaging.
Like sure, maybe my brand of extreme messaging is too late to save Roe but we need to be very clear that this is life or death for millions and millions of women, and stick to that messaging.
Could you (or any of your friends in Washington) write think pieces about why you love your president? The Democratic party seems to be terrible at promoting him.
This is the main issue though: Joe Biden doesn’t have a cult of personality like Obama or Trump did, and it’s a hindrance on Democrats’ ability to promote him, even when his administration does objectively good things. The Biden Administration is the most pro-union administration ever like Biden met with the Staten Island Amazon union organizer just yesterday! That’s genuinely awesome!
The admin is also blatantly out of lockstep with a lot of House and Senate Democrats; almost a dozen current Democratic senators as well as Democratic Senate candidates have openly come out against the admin’s plan to end Title 42!! Also, Democrats and their aligned advocacy groups pretending inflation was fake news for months was horrible when voters could see their grocery and gas prices going up! It’s not just Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who are annoyed with the administration either, they’re just the scapegoats and I honestly don’t know why Biden and Schumer and Ron Klain, the White House Chief of Staff, are down to just let all the activist groups aligned with the Democratic Party constantly shit on Manchin/Sinema when literally nothing, including judicial confirmations, can pass the Senate without their support.
The reality is that Biden’s been listening way too much to Klain and playing footsie with the left-wing of the party, just look at the BIF/BBB fiasco!! House Progressives never had any leverage over Manchin in the first place because they wanted Build Back Better more than he wanted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and he was always perfectly willing to tank both bills but they still held up BIF for months in an ill-fated attempt to force Manchin’s hand. And, Biden’s humoring the left-flank of his party is being noticed by Independents, who he won in 2020 but Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, and the left-wing isn’t even going to give him any credit since they’re too busy whinging that he’s not canceling all their student debt and abolishing XYZ.
For the record, I happen to like Biden a lot but I think that he would do well to hire a new chief of staff and to point-blank tell Schumer to stop holding performative votes that will never pass the Senate thanks to the filibuster (see: Women’s Health Protection Act and the million failed votes on H.R. 1). Stop forcing your marginal members to take failed votes! All Schumer is doing is making it easier for Republicans to paint Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez-Masto as party-line Democrats when they’re up for re-election during a Republican-wave year in swing states.
That all makes sense, right?