Let’s Talk Abortion Rights.
On day 69 the war in Ukraine fell off the top of the news pages.
The emotional outrage of the Democrats has now been redirected to the Supreme Court. This happened after Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion on constitutional protection of reproductive rights:
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
Chief Justice Roberts has confirmed the authenticity of the ‘leaked’ draft but added that it does not represent the courts final decision.
The draft is dated February 10 2022. It was likely a tactical decision by Democrats to let it ‘leak’ now.
The war to ‘weaken Russia’ is going badly for the ‘west’ and the U.S. can do little to change that. The midterm election will likely see a huge loss for the Democrats. They need an emotional issue to incentivize their voters to go to the polls. Abortion rights may do that for a certain group of voters.
But I find it unlikely that it will, over all, be of much help.
“It’s the economy, stupid” said James Carville, a strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election campaign. Prices are rising, especially for gas and food, while the housing market is suffering from upcoming higher interest rates. The U.S. will, like Europe, likely to go into a recession.
It is also obvious that the Democrats have no real interest in protecting abortion rights. They could have done so when they held the presidency, and majorities in the House and Senate. They never launched a serious attempt to put Roe vs. Wade into federal law. It always suited them better to keep the issue open and to use it during each election for fundraising and to scare their voters to the polls.
Now the Supreme Court is finally taking that ball away and leaves the issue to the states.
The Democrats can thank Barack Obama for that. When he was president he screwed up on abortion rights by not guaranteeing a liberal successor for Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wrote about the issue in September 2020 after Ginsberg had died:
In summer 2013 then President Barack Obama invited Ginsburg for a talk. It was seen as a request to her to retire. But Obama did not offer an adequate replacement for her position. The details are not know but Ginsburg rejected whoever Obama had in mind:
Referring to the political polarization in Washington and the unlikelihood that another liberal in her mold could be confirmed by the Senate, Ginsburg, the senior liberal on the nine-member bench, asked rhetorically, “So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?”
Ginsburg, in a wide-ranging 75 minute interview with Reuters in her chambers late on Thursday, also acknowledged that President Barack Obama had invited her to a private lunch last summer at the White House. It was an unusual move, she conceded….Ginsburg said on Thursday that even if she had retired, the president would have been more likely to have chosen a compromise candidate than a liberal.
The good-enough centrist nominee Obama offered as a replacement for the progressive Ginsburg was, in her judgment, not perfect enough. In consequence important Supreme Court decisions like Roe vs. Wade are now in jeopardy.
Senator Chuck Schumer, now pledges a new vote on legislation to preserve abortion rights. But the Senate is evenly split and the decisive conservative Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin, will vote against any such law.
The final Supreme Court decision will be published within the next two months.