Until Kavanaugh was confirmed, there was not a plausible way to get 5 votes. You had Kennedy. Now there are 6 plausible votes, one extra in case Roberts pulls another Roberts.
No one mentioned any sort of cabal. All it takes is not taking advantage of opportunities. All it takes is trying things they know will fail in order to rile up their base.
Now, do I think modern Republicans are principled enough to pull this off? No. There’s now the huge rush to be the most extreme you can be. But in the past, when they were able to not say the quiet part out loud? I very much do think they would fan the flames without any intent to actually change things.
That’s kind of the point. Easy access to birth control is a liberal policy.
It would take one. What if Souter, or Kennedy, or O’Connor had turned out to be a conservative? Roe would have been overruled since 1992. If Republicans (as a group) have planned this strategy to keep dangling abortion in front of their base, all it would have taken was a simple screw up here or there. What if Bush I gets reelected and there is no Ginsburg or Breyer?
The statement is one of conspiracy and planning and too many random events happened for it to be plausible.
LGBT rights shouldn’t bother anyone for the most part. The ironically named antifa and CRT ought to.
I don’t know; I find profa a lot more bothersome. And cathode-ray tubes are SO last century.
On the other side - is there anything that Democrats are accused of dangling in front of their voters to tantalize them for $ and votes but don’t intend to actually ever deliver?
There is a real possibility that the pro-choice backlash of this will sweep the Republicans out of Congress next time around. Or not. We will see.
Although the great majority of anti-abortion people are in lock step with the GQP on most things, there are I believe a good number of them who favor gun regulations, humane treatment of immigrants, and don’t despise those with darker pigmentation than themselves. These people will be demotivated while on the other side, the pro-choice crowd is going to be greatly motivated. Overturning Roe is the last thing Republicans want to happen, they want to pay lip service to it but never deliver, sort of like balanced budgets.
Republicans are authoritarian; the abortion issue is just one way to express their authoritarianism. They’re not dangling anything; they’ve wanted to reverse Roe v Wade and have done everything in their power to make that happen. If they overrule Roe v Wade, they’ll push for a Constitutional amendment to ban abortions and do everything in their power to outlaw abortion entirely nationwide. You have to understand how the Republicans think. They want to dominate their opposition.
Many Republicans/conservatives are likely uneasy about the Texas law or oppose it outright for two reasons.
One, they have been modestly successful in undercutting abortion rights piecemeal, for instance with laws that attempt to regulate clinics that provide abortions so severely that they’re forced to close (i.e. compelling them to have equipment and training on a par with surgery centers that do far more complex and risky procedures). Overturning Roe. v. Wade or passing laws like Texas’ pose a serious risk of riling up the Democratic base so much that it costs the G.O.P. elections. Much better to slowly turn the heat up gradually under the frog’s cauldron.
The second reason is that the ploy Texas is using in an attempt to do a runaround on higher court oversight can easily be turned against Republicans. The Wall St. Journal had an editorial today critical of the Texas law. They said in part:
“For starters, the Texas statute clearly violates the Court’s Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey (1992) precedents by making abortion illegal during the first trimester without exceptions for rape or incest—and it does so in a slippery way to duck federal judicial review…”
“The law sets an awful precedent that conservatives should hate. Could California allow private citizens to sue individuals for hate speech? Or New York deputize private lawsuits against gun owners?”
A very small percentage of abortion rights opponents may have “punishing women” as a major objective. The vast majority seem sincerely misguided about protecting fetuses as human beings. Why not accept the divide for what it is, rather than making up sleazy motives to mischaracterize what the other side believes?
Mostly because the reasons they (Republicans / Trumpists/ conservatives / whatever you prefer to call them) offer for several of their other beliefs also don’t seem to logically follow.
antifa are more accuratley procom which is just as bad as what they are nominally and farcically fighting against. And you know what CRT means in the context of how Hari used it.
Some might be uneasy about it, but for most conservatives, this is their position because this checks one of the boxes on the list of conservative identifiers.
The whole point of single issue voters is that they vote entirely on a single issue. You can’t assume that people who vote Republican because they’re pro-life will automatically switch to a new issue if abortions were made illegal
People are complacent over the things they have. If abortions are made illegal, a lot of pro-life voters will stop caring about who gets elected.
Pro-choice voters, on the other hand, would be fired up. They will become much more active in voting for candidates who promise to make abortions legal again.
On a separate note, there’s the evidence of history. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. Fourteen Justices have been appointed since then; ten of them by Republicans. If the Republicans really wanted Roe to be overturned, it would have happened by now. Pro-lifers are getting played.
BWAHAHAHAHA,
Seriously CRT and Antifa are the things that keep you guys up at night? What about the threat that D&D and heavy metal might lead your precious children into Satanism, or the plot to poison the water supply with fluoride?
At least pick something that might actually affect your life, like the changes to the economy due to the fight against climate change, or the effect that immigration will have on your voting patterns. Conservatives fearing CRT makes as much sense as liberals fearing the teaching of the Austrian school of economics, except that the latter is actually being suggested as the basis of major policy.
Doesn’t keep me up at night. But they are problematic illiberal ideologies that are superficially appealing but corrosive to fundamental liberties. If I were a foreign adversary I’d make sure they were well funded.
Oh, by “CRT”, you mean “acknowledging that racism exists”. Yeah, that’s only bothersome to racists.
As for the motivations of Republican voters, it helps to remember that there aren’t two sides to the abortion debate, but at least six. Some pro-life folks vote Republican because they mistakenly believe that the Republicans are pro-life, but not very many. These are the folks who may be single-issue voters, but they consider war, capital punishment, police brutality, and abortion to all be the same issue. There are too few pro-lifers to begin with, and most of them are Democrats.
The anti-abortion faction, meanwhile, sees all those other things as irrelevant, and cares only about opposing abortion. Most of them are Republicans, but a few have looked at the evidence and realized that Democrats are actually better at preventing abortion.
The anti-choicers don’t actually care about abortion itself, except as a tool of oppression. They’d be just as happy with forcing a woman to have an abortion she didn’t want as with forcing her not to have one she does want, except that the former is politically unfeasible in the current environment. I don’t know how many rank-and-file Republicans fall into this category, but it seems to be the dominant view among Republican leadership.
Of course, members of all three of these categories are likely to call themselves “pro-life”, because that sounds better, and in the current political alignment, they’re all allied on that one issue. But they’re only allied in the same sense that the US and USSR were allied in WWII.
Assuming SCOTUS doesn’t do a 180, we’ll have a chance to test the hypothesis at the next election. Will Texas Republicans suffer at the polls now that the people got what they wanted WRT abortion restrictions? My guess is that no, they won’t, and that Texas Republicans will comfortably keep their majority in the state legislature, and that Abbott will easily beat whoever runs against him, whether it be Matthew McConaughey*, the hapless schlub who wins the Democratic nomination, or both.
Yes, the implication is that I prefer Democrats sit this one out should McConaughey decide to run.