Consequence: a result or effect of an action or condition

Don’t worry, folks, it’s all just hysteria.

During opening statements at the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) repeatedly dismissed concerns that Kavanaugh will play a key role in restricting women’s reproductive rights as mere “hysteria.”

Is it time to remind Ben Sasses that the root word of hysteria means “uterus”?

Also, is Ben Sasses seriously claiming that Kavanaugh will not tip the balance of the Court? Because nine is really not such a big number that he should be confused about it.

Referring to a string of protesters who were thrown out of the hearing while yelling things like, “stop the oppression of women!“, Sasse said, “People are going to pretend that Americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven’t been screaming protesters saying ‘women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades. This has been happening.”

Well, Senator Smug, that’s because when abortion is illegal or prohibitively difficult and expensive to get, then women do die as a result. However uteral that may sound to you, it’s just a fact. Pregnancy has risks, and so do illegal abortions, and so do closures of abortion clinics.

As ThinkProgress detailed, it’s likely that Kavanaugh could provide a decisive vote chipping away at reproductive rights.

We know that Kavanaugh will almost certainly kill Roe v. Wade. There are currently four votes on the Supreme Court who consistently vote against abortion rights. Kavanuagh gave a speech in 2017 criticizing Roe and praising the dissent. And he sided with the Trump administration, at least temporarily, when the administration literally held women prisoner to prevent them from having an abortion.

Kavanaugh’s record also suggests he would give the Trump administration a free hand to curtail the Affordable Care Act independently of Congress, and would be resistant to any congressional efforts to further regulate firearms.

Despite what Sasse would have you believe, those positions have consequences — the greater availability of firearms correlates with more shooting deaths, and less access to health care correlates with higher mortality rates.

Ben Sasse is just being testosteral.

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