Guest post: There was a school of Savvy Punditry
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Portents.
I think that for a long time, pro-choice advocates were regarded as the boy who cried wolf. “You keep saying that Roe will be overturned, but it never is, and all these abortion laws mostly get struck down by the courts and the abortion clinics survive the ones that aren’t anyways. I’m not pro-life, but I’m gonna vote GOP because [taxes etc.]”
And indeed for a long time, there was a school of Savvy Punditry that insisted that Republicans didn’t want Roe overturned anyway, and that’s why it would never happen. (My take is that the first part of that was largely true — there were definitely a lot of GOP strategists who liked having the issue to rally voters but didn’t care about it and certainly didn’t want to deal with a post-Roe backlash — but the second part was wrong because when you appoint and confirm anti-choice justices, they don’t care that you had your fingers crossed when you did it.)
Anyway, all those voters who are pro-choice but didn’t vote on it because they took Roe for granted have now had a rude awakening. And having seen Republicans pass all sorts of draconian laws and abortion clinics shut down, they’re not likely to buy the new focus-group-tested GOP spin that they just want “reasonable restrictions” on “late-term abortions” and certainly don’t want bans no why would you say that such a crazy thought never mind what our party platform says and what most of our elected officials said up until two months ago.
It’s not a great consolation for losing Roe, of course. But at least there’s some consequences.
A friend of mine was saying at the time Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed that Roe would not fall. She ate her words later.
“Funny” thing. I held that view for about a decade, back in the 90s, because it was pretty evident at the time that the issue was more important to the GOP than actual success. Remember the late-term abortion bill, and Clinton’s veto? If Gingrich had been serious about passing the first federal legislation attacking the right to abortion, he would’ve called Clinton’s bluff and passed a version of the bill that simply made exceptions for the health of the mother, instead of “physical health”. Such a bill would’ve been more likely to withstand SCOTUS scrutiny, too. But he opted instead to let Clinton veto the bill as written, so that it could be used to drive the voters to the polls.
Where this went off-course, as you say, Screechy Monkey, was in appointing anti-abortion judges. We now know, of course, that this was part of an actual pact between the Religious Right and the Billionaire contingent of the GOP. The Christofascists would support the Republicans on things like government regulation, taxation and welfare, and in exchange, the GOP would nominate the Right’s preferred candidates to the bench. I’d call it a Devil’s Bargain, but honestly, it’s more like a Devils’ Bargain–horns and brimstone on both sides of the table.
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I listened to an interview on NPR not long ago with a GOP state legislator from one of the shithole states, where he flat-out admitted that he and other “moderate” Republican reps had blithely been voting for things like No-Roe Trigger Laws because it was viewed as an entirely symbolic gesture meant to rally support from the Religious Right, and then when the trigger got pulled, they had no plan to actually deal with the consequences, and now because they have that lunatic fringe that views women dying of pregnancy complications as a superior option to abortion, so they can’t even retroactively insert what he would consider ‘reasonable exceptions’.
And I don’t think I’ve ever been more incensed. It’s one thing to have a horrid position and support it; that’s been part of politics for ages. And so has been making speeches and promises you aren’t really planning on living up to. But this admission of grotesque incompetence in the basic function of how laws work is new, and it’s infuriating. It’s a failure to realize that writing and passing laws is a bit like safe gun ownership–always assume the weapon is loaded. But the GOP has so deeply abandoned the idea of actually trying to govern that it never occurred to them to write the laws intelligently–hell, the law being so extreme it wouldn’t survive a court challenge was almost the point, in and of itself.
Freddie deBoer (oh he of the inimitable output) has a fresh piece about this very issue, where he points out that even deeply-sincere “pro-life” women get abortions when being pregnant is inconvenient for them. I found it quite interesting.
Freemage, I think the GOP thought they could control the religious right when they tempted them into their tent. They would be content with bones being thrown them in the form of limitations on abortion and a lot of militant rhetoric. That was foolish. Controlling the religious right is like riding a nuclear weapon. And yeah, Devils’ bargain (by the way, it thrills me to see someone who understands the difference between Devil’s and Devils’),
Der Durchwanderer, there used to be a site called something like The Only Good Abortion is My Abortion that gave a lot of examples of anti-choicers having abortions – sometimes at the same abortion clinic they were picketing the day before.
Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’ has a really compelling dive into how the abortion issue has transformed the Republican party and so effectively pulled working class votes away from the Democrats. The startling thing is that the book was published in 2004, the same process has metastasized for another 20 years.
iknklast@4:
And, if I recall correctly, sometimes the day after as well….
Yeah, I remember some cases like that on that site.