Post-Roe Links And More

• “Gretchen Whitmer’s abortion fight — from the porch with her daughters” by Ruby Kramer: Governor Whitmer is my dark horse candidate for the first female Democratic president, and if you can, donate to her re-election here. And, Republicans using her account of being raped in an attack ad during her 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan was one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in American politics, and I for one will never forgive them.

• “Try Patriotism” by Noah Smith: When Republicans demonize immigrants, cut taxes for millionaires and raise them on working families, and strip away bodily autonomy from millions and millions of American women, they really have no right to be calling ANYBODY anti-American, and that’s why liberals/progressives should reclaim patriotism from them. USA USA USA USA!!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

• “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat” by Jason Zengerle: Lis Smith said a similar thing here, but basically, sensationalism sells in American politics and being reasonable and pragmatic doesn’t. The unfortunate truth is that whether or not the assumption is fair, the Democratic Party is now perceived by a growing segment of American voters as collectively espousing the furthest left position possible on many of the country’s most fraught and most divisive issues, namely crime, immigration, and gender-identity issues.

• “Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith: We’ve Seen What Will Happen Next to America’s Women” by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN): Elizabeth Warren had 2 young children when Roe was decided in 1973, and Tina Smith is only slightly younger so both of them absolutely knew the impact unwanted pregnancies had on women and girls in the day before Roe was decided. Like they write, they knew women whose educations and careers were derailed, and they knew women and girls who suffered and maybe even died from botched abortions and other physical complications. We’re now going back to a time before Roe and possibly worse due to the advent of social media, and there’s very little we can do.

• “Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief?” by Dexter Filkins:

  • Why Democrats should worry about DeSantis: He’s smart, and will benefit from having stood by his gorgeous wife when she had cancer, especially with white women, who are the only demographic group in the country that’s currently trending towards Democrats

  • Why Democrats shouldn’t worry about DeSantis: He visibly chokes under the slightest bit of pressure (See: DeSantis choking when Andrew Gillum called him a racist during their final debate). He’s also from Jacksonville and to quote my friend, nobody from Jacksonville, including her, should ever be president, which is a pity since she’d be a much better president than DeSantis.

• “Opinion: The surprising reason for Joe Biden’s low approval rating” by David Masciorta: Pair this with “Why are Progressives Mad at Biden?” It’s so true that a lot of people who are ostensibly to the left of Biden are in denial that Democrats have a 50-50 Senate with the deciding vote representing a state Trump won by 40 (Joe Manchin), and they have no leverage over him because Democrats need Manchin more than Manchin needs Democrats. Without Joe Manchin being a Democrat, Mitch McConnell would be Senate majority leader and the confirmation of Biden’s roster of progressive judges would never even be brought to a vote. There is no shortcut to Democrats winning more Senate seats to enact more progressive policies, lather rinse and repeat.

• “Is Abortion Sacred?” by Jia Tolentino: “There is a loss, I think, entailed in abortion—as there is in miscarriage, whether it occurs at eight or twelve or twenty-nine weeks. I locate this loss in the irreducible complexity of life itself, in the terrible violence and magnificence of reproduction, in the death that shimmered at the edges of my consciousness in the shattering moment that my daughter was born. This understanding might be rooted in my religious upbringing—I am sure that it is. But I wonder, now, how I would square this: that fetuses were the most precious lives in existence, and that God, in His vision, already chooses to end a quarter of them. The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting in accordance with God’s plan for them, too?”

• “Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean” by Moira Donegan: The end to this makes me cry every time I read it.