The Democratic Party, including its presidents over decades, have not taken seriously enough the threat to abortion rights. It’s not that these politicians didn’t officially support the correct thing: Barack Obama opposed the Hyde Amendment but also described the “tradition, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care.” Again, this is not about Barack Obama any more than it is about Hillary Clinton (who offered one of the most powerful public explications of abortion as healthcare of any Democrat during her debate against Donald Trump and who is said to have devised the regressive “safe, legal, and rare” framework in the 1990s that cast abortion as a regrettably necessary evil, not a cornerstone of comprehensive healthcare) or about Bernie Sanders (who has remained a staunch opponent of Hyde or any abortion restriction throughout his career and has argued that voters could get past their differences on guns and abortion and find common economic ground, as if abortion is not itself an economic issue).
It’s about a Democratic Party that has, before and since Roe, included lots of politicians who believe in abortion rights and access but simply do not prioritize it, who have argued that their party should be more, and not less, open to those who actively oppose abortion if they are otherwise progressive on economic issues, as if those stances are compatible (they are not).
Democratic leadership chose not to fight vocally the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, or Amy Coney Barrett as being an assault on legal abortion, even though the president who nominated them had directly promised anti-abortion groups “another two or perhaps three justices” who would “automatically, in my opinion” overturn Roe. This was right out there, for everyone on the broadly defined left to see, hear, and fight tooth and nail against. But again, and again those at the top of the party signaled that it was not a fight worth having and have remained quiet even as Republicans cast the ones who were fighting as deranged. During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse lectured on how there have “been screaming protesters saying, ‘Women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades.” Sasse was correct. There have been those protesters, and they have been treated as hysterics, not just by Sasse himself, but by the party that should have been letting their intensity guide them.
Make no mistake: Those protesters have been correct, for all the years and all the hearings. Yet Democrats have permitted an inaccurate, dishonest right-wing framework
This was error and dereliction, repeated over decades and amplified by the press. The lies told by a right wing, and by a press corps eager to repeat them, were easily disprovable: everyone knew where Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett stood and what they were put on the court to do, and yet we had to watch some bizarre performance during their confirmation hearings of pretending that they cared enough about precedent to let Roe stand. Supreme Court justices, appointed by presidents who won fewer votes than their opponents, dared this week to entertain the argument that a functional democratic process would surely protect the abortion rights of those who wanted them, should abortion go back to the states. They just sat there, with their ill-gotten seats, pretending that democracy was an intact remedy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opin...ata suggests 1,this week on the fate of Roe v.
