There is a recurring argument that pops up again and again when abortion is being debated: “Republicans dangle Roe and abortion in front of their voters as a carrot but can’t actually feed them the carrot (ban abortion) because that would get rid of their incentive and they’d lose their donations and votes.”
This argument, IMHO, is flawed for two reasons.
Abortion is only one out of a long, long list of grievances that pro-life conservatives have. If they got what they wanted abortion-wise (abortion banned,) they’d still have dozens of other things keeping them revved up - religious stuff, critical race theory, LGBT, Antifa, illegal immigrants, feminism, etc. Their political engine certainly won’t sputter out just because abortion is banned.
Even if the battle on abortion were “won” - that is, abortion banned nationwide - abortion still remains a strong motivator for pro-lifers, just in a different way. The situation simply shifts - instead of being “We need to ban abortion,” it becomes, “We need to keep abortion banned.” After all, liberals and pro-choicers aren’t going to lie down and call it a day; they’re going to try to revive and re-institute abortion access in America. And as long as they do so, Republicans can still rally their base for donations and votes by saying, “The baby murderers are trying to bring back baby murder!”
You’re quite right - it’s one of a long list of topics Republicans use to inspire outrage and fear in their target audiences. They want people to vote for them to “stop baby murder” in the same way that they want people to vote for them to “stop them for coming for your guns” or “stop illegal immigrants from swarming across our borders” or “stop god-fearing Christians from being persecuted” or “stop Antifa from burning down our cities” etc etc. It’s one of a number of ways in which they foment irrational hatred of Democrats/liberals/the left to keep their support up.
So I’m not convinced “They can’t be doing this thing because here are a number of other ways in which they’re doing the exact same thing” is a compelling argument.
Why would they give up the successful Plan A they have now just because they also have a Plan B? Plan A is working.
How is it irrational? Democrats/liberals/the left really do support legal abortion, don’t they? It’s not like ‘Defund the Police’, which most of the prominent Democrats have said they don’t support.
Why aren’t Republicans around the country crowing and celebrating the Texas law? It’s so weird that national Republicans and their media shills are mostly silent about one of the biggest advances in “pro-life” legislation in years.
The hatred is what is irrational. And deliberately calculated to be so.
If it were rational, Republican voters might start to notice that Republican policies don’t actually reduce abortions - in fact, abortion rates have tended to fall much faster under Democrats - but instead are designed merely to punish women for having sex while letting Republicans feel smug and self-righteous about it.
I’ll give you the second one, keeping abortion banned would be a motivator, though that would weaken over time as the ban becomes the standard law of the land, however I feel the first one is essential (the ban much be the primary issue) because it allows their voting block to overlook any and all evil that their political leaders do unquestioningly and accept anything they say at face value, even justifying the evil they know is wrong, even accepting that the evil is actually good .
Abortion is a litmus test for many on the pro life side. Abortion is mass slaughter of perhaps 1/4 of our people. It is to them a great atrocity that justified anything and everything that opposes it. Supporting abortion bans not only gets people elected, it get them a free pass on anything they do. Sexual harassment, support abortion band, just deny it and move on - it doesn’t matter to your voting block, support right to abort, and you will have to leave office in disgrace as your voting block will look at that and judge your fitness for office by it.
Additionally: Banning abortion would mean more children, which means we don’t need immigration as much as we are now ‘growing our own people’, instead of importing them. Thus the need to accept immigrants will go down naturally as these extra ‘made in USA’ children grow up and take their place in the work force. There will be little need to support immigration and it will naturally lose support. The 2 issues are intrinsically linked, though with a generational timelag.
Of course the GOP would like to have something to replace Roe v. Wade with if the time comes. They’ve spent the last decade floating new outrages to see what sticks: CRT is the most recent one, Antifa was the one before that. But there are no GOP issues that live at the same intersection of moral outrage and religious virtue signaling as the abortion fight. The only redder meat that American conservatism ever had was the fear of slavery ending.
It’s much easier to get people worked up about fighting the system than it is to keep things the same. “Fight to maintain the status quo!” has never been an exciting battle cry. And getting people worked (and heading to the polls) up is the only thing the GOP establishment cares about. They certainly don’t give a shit about any babies but the wealthy living ones.
I have no doubt that they’ll admirably shift if Roe gets overturned, but they don’t currently have anything that hits the same notes. They’ll have to cobble together a medley of B-side greatest hits instead.
Sure, state-level Republicans make moves against abortion. Which, as often as not, get overturned by the Supreme Court (which has had a Republican-nominated majority for a very long time now). On the federal level, though, Republicans have never done anything whatsoever about abortion. Given the choice of passing the strongest anti-abortion legislation in the nation’s history or giving a symbolic “fuck you” to a Democrat, they chose the latter unanimously. At the national level, the only thing that matters is helping the rich, and opposing abortion doesn’t do that, so they don’t care.
I agree with your second point, but as for your first, abortion is in a class of its own when it comes to motivating issues. Opposition to abortion is the very epitome of single issue voting. If you truly believe that abortion is murder then not other issue of combination of issues out weighs it. I have heard numerous voters say that they don’t like Trump or any of the other things that party stands for, but they voted for Trump and Republican candidates because of their opposition to abortion.
Speaking for myself, I have to say that I am uneasy about abortion. I am pro-choice but with misgivings. On the other hand, I have no misgivings whatever on LGBT rights, antifa, CRT, and all those other bugaboos of the right. I just cannot see them getting as enthusiastic about those other things as about abortion, kind of mirror-imaging me. I think the argument that the GOP doesn’t want to “win” on abortion has merit.
I think the argument largely makes sense, but I’d change it a little. It’s not that achieving an abortion ban would lose them the support/money/whatever of the diehard pro-lifers. It’s that achieving an abortion ban would lose them the support of others.
A full no-exceptions abortion ban is fairly politically unpopular. Overturning Roe will lead to some complicated political calculations for Republicans. For years they’ve been able to promise the moon to the pro-life wing and know that, well, they couldn’t really deliver it. But, critically, they could blame their failures on “undemocratic courts”. But what if they now actually can deliver it?
Well, they start to lose the moderates, unless they make some kind of reasonable compromise legislation. But if they make a reasonable compromise, then maybe they get primaried from the right, and the more extreme candidate has a harder time actually winning elections. There’s plenty of examples of very-right political candidates losing elections when they make really dumb public statements on abortion.
Accomplishing the short-term goals of the pro-life wing could easily result in a reduction in power for the GOP. Not because the pro-life wing will be less dedicated, but because once that’s accomplished, the rest of the coalition gets harder to manage.
This is speculation on my part, but a genuinely held belief. It’s irrational because many of those rank and file Republican voters, in their heart of hearts, don’t really care about saving the lives of 10 or 12 week old fetuses. What they really care about is punishing women who have sex outside of a traditional marriage.
Be that as it may (and I don’t agree, but let’s say it is) - a ban on abortion wouldn’t make the pro-life flame dim at all. The narrative would still remain, only shifted. Instead of “we need to punish women for having illicit sex,” it would become “We need to keep punishing them for illicit sex - the prochoicers are trying to stop the punishment.” So the enthusiasm would still be there, undiminished.
How does this cabal work anyways? A 40 year old conspiracy between the Republican presidents, members of the Senate, and Supreme Court nominees to make sure that there are always 5 votes for Roe?
If you are talking about the current batch of loons, yes, they are against anything Q tells them to be against.
If you are talking about long time prolife voters (I was one) this is THE issue. It is the thing that determined my every vote. If you got it wrong in terms of abortion, I wasn’t voting for you.
When Justice Roberts was added to the Supreme Court, there were a few opportunities for Roe to be altered. NOTHING was done.
I was snapped to some awareness of other things in 2016. Donald Trump made me realize that I had nothing in common with the current Republican party. I dropped out of the party then.
In 2020, being mindful that prolife included more than the preborn, I had to take a hard look at who was protecting life, and human rights. (Because abortion is a taking human rights away from the weakest and most vulnerable) I had to vote Blue. I also realized that the Republicans never intended to do anything about abortion.
I have come to the conclusion that the way to reduce abortion is to make other choices easier and better. Beginning with education and reliable birth control.
With the stuff going on in Texas, I am not “crowing.” I am horrified. This is not about ending abortion. It’s the Republican flexing against the poor and disenfranchised. I have never supported criminalizing abortion. What we are seeing in Texas is more of the dismantling of our democracy.
Which opportunities were those? As is repeated in these threads, courts only rule on issues presented to them. AFAIK, nobody has argued to the Roberts Court that Roe/Casey should be overruled before the Dobbs case it is hearing next term.
Also Roberts and Kavanaugh have almost always prefaced their rulings with something to the effect of “under the standard of Roe/Casey, which no party has asked us to overrule, we find…” nearly begging a Dobbs case to come along.