As you note, this argument has been made from both sides. I’ll briefly present the other one.
Overturning Roe and giving abortion back to the states would eliminate abortions as a federal issue. Keeping abortions as a federal issue allows Republicans to use it in congressional and presidential elections.
People are much more strongly motivated by something they want than something they already have. Republicans now get strong support from pro-life voters because of Roe. The support Democrats get from pro-choice voters is much weaker, again because of Roe. Overturn Roe and this situation flips; the pro-choice voter bloc for Democrats will be fired up and become much stronger while the pro-life voter bloc for Republicans will be sated and become much weaker.
The core of the pro-life bloc are single issue voters. Abortions are their button issue. The Republicans know they can’t count on these votes if that issue is taken off the board.
I’ll add one additional note. Roe was decided almost fifty years ago. Sixteen Supreme Court justices have been appointed since then and twelve of them were appointed by Republicans. If the Republicans really wanted a court that would overturn Roe, they would have had it decades ago.
However I will give you this; the modern Republican party consists of a small cadre of leaders who are manipulating a large group of followers. The interests of the leaders is generally not the same as the interests of the followers. The leaders usually keep the followers under control by lying to them and keeping them distracted by made-up issues. But every once in a while, the followers get too riled up and the leaders lose control. The followers then do something stupid, like elect Donald Trump, and that often hurts the Republican party.
That said, I don’t think that will happen here. The Republican leaders understand the importance of the Supreme Court in their plans and make sure they don’t let the followers get involved in the process of appointing justices.
My understanding is that the proposed law doesn’t infringe on Second Amendment rights, as the ones who would be sued are the manufacturers, distributors and sellers, not the owners.
There’s nothing shaky about it. The decision was very clear. A lot of people may disagree with the decision but there’s no rational ground for arguing that the Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to make such a decision. It’s like the President vetoing a bill or issuing a pardon; you might disagree with his decision but you can’t argue that it didn’t count.
Even as the Supreme Court signals that’s exactly what they’re going to do? And the legal experts all agree that it is likely to fall, either in its entirety or have it severely limited to the point of being useless? Which “conservative” Justices are you expecting to save it?
If they do this, it becomes the issue to run on in 2022. There is no way the Democrats wouldn’t promise to pass a federal law. That’s actually the one upside to all of this: the majority of the country supports abortion. The question is whether that will matter with all the gerrymandering and vote suppression.
It’s utterly bizarre to continue believing in a Republican conspiracy to never actually do anything about abortion. That’s been the whole reason for appointing all these judges. They didn’t do it before because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to.
And, yes, “precedent” is shaky since all it requires is that 5 people disagree with it. A “rational basis” just means “Can they come up with a rationalization for their predetermined decision?” And all the verbal arguments suggest they very well can.
You’re telling me it’s bizarre to believe that something that’s been happening for fifty years is happening? I don’t think I’m the one who’s out of touch here.
Gun control is weakening as an issue for Democrats anyway, because so many Democrats have purchased guns in the past few years.
The number of Americans who favor stricter gun laws has dropped from 60% in 2019 to 53% today. Most of that decline came from Democrats, where support for gun control increases has dropped from 86% to 80%.
In the meantime, Californians are responding to idiotic progressive DA’s and their pro-violence policies by arming up:
Handgun sales were up 65% in 2020 over 2019, and 2021 looks to be even bigger.
The longer violence runs out of control in the big Democratic cities, the more Democrats living in them are going to buy guns. And that will degrade the support for gun control even more. ‘Defund the police’ should have been called ‘Arm the people’, because that’s the effect it had.
Can you provide some cites for violence running out of control in big Democratic cities? I’m pretty sure violent crime is down in big cities from, say, 5 or 10 years ago, but if you have a cite that shows otherwise, I’m happy to look at it.
You beat me to posting this question. Everything I’ve looked at shows that violent crime across the country has been decreasing for the past 30 years.
And in one example given in the article posted by @Sam_Stone, the reason for purchasing a firearm was because the cops were supposedly aligned with the Proud Boys, not because of an uptick in violence.
I think the biggest flaw in the argument is also strongly featured here. “Republicans” are not a monolithic coherent group. Like any political coalition, there are internal factions that wax and wane in power. The pro-life contingent has been strongly focused on the Supreme Court for decades and is increasingly one of the only coherent policy-focused factions in the Republican party (the other one is gun rights people). The newly ascended Federalist Society SC Justices who firmly believe that Roe is bad law and that abortion is morally repugnant are not going to sit idly by out of some vague adherence to an untested general election strategy.
Thinking that because Roe hasn’t been overturned yet it never will be strikes me as just the inductive fallacy. Republicans today are quite different than they were 50 years ago, and the failure of a group with that label to act 50 or 40 years ago doesn’t tell us very much about what the group with that label will do today.
On the subject of the OP, I think that both Texas’ and CA’s (propose) law are awful and a further perversion of the legal system towards effectively extrajudicial “the process is the punishment”.
In 2016, I was floored when many of my Democratic friends said they were contemplating purchasing a firearm for protection. I know some Democrats who had a few firearms, but these were folks who were staunchly against the ownership of handguns and thought it was silly that anyone might need a firearm as we could just call the police. Other than being rattled by Trump’s election, I didn’t think much of it likening such talk to those who say they’re going to move out of the country if so-and-so is elected.
But I really do wonder. How many of those Democrats who purchased firearms in 2020 were the same ones saying “defund the police” and but a few years ago would have told me a firearm for protection was unnecessary because I could just dial 911.
Wrong inference. Californians are responding to subliterate inbreds who buy guns to fuel their Rambo fantasies. If dead schoolkids aren’t enough to stem the sociopathic tide, we might as well take necessary precautions.
It is not just as if you are on the outside looking in; you are also trying to project your own image inside.
People buying guns just for protection aren’t going to instantly be the same kind of gun nut as a committed 2nd Amendment “freedom fighter/patriot”. And if they didn’t think they actually needed the guns, I’d guess that the vast majority of them would be happy to give them up or put them in the back of the closet and never look at them again.
I don’t see how you feel this is a flaw in my argument. You seem to me to be repeating a point I made in support of my position.
I agree the Republican party base is not a monolith. There are people who loyally support the party for a variety of different reasons and these reasons often do not overlap. I noted this when I said that the people who vote Republican because of their anti-abortion beliefs would not necessarily vote Republican for other reasons. There are many people who vote Republican for only one reason; the Republican party’s stated opposition to abortion.
These are people who want to see Roe overturned. The Republican party promises to overturn Roe. So these people vote for Republicans.
Let’s say these people vote for Republicans in 2022. And the Republicans actually follow through and overturn Roe in 2023. Who are these people going to vote for in 2024? They wanted one thing and they got it. They no longer need to vote for somebody to give it to them. Some of them might keep voting for Republicans. But some might switch to the Democrats. Some might move back and forth between the two parties. Some might join some third party or just stop voting. But the Republicans are definitely going to lose some portion of those voters.
So why should they? The Republicans can promise to overturn Roe in 2022 and get pro-life voters to vote for them in 2022. Or the Republicans can promise to overturn Roe in 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028, 2030, 2032, … and get pro-life voters to vote for them in all of those elections. Which one do you think the Republicans will see more advantage in?
The leaders of the Republican party understand you dangle the carrot on a stick out in front of the horse; you don’t feed it to him.