9/22/20
With the chance to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer of women’s rights, mere weeks before a presidential election, the Republicans are putting their backs into one more try. Four years ago, they used their Senate majority to preserve a 5-to-4 conservative advantage on the court by blocking President Barack Obama’s pick in the final year of his second term. Now they spy the chance to grab a 6-to-3 margin. One of three things could come of this. Cooler heads might prevail — but what’s the chance of that these days? The other two alternatives both bristle with disaster for the GOP. The GOP might actually spear its whale, by creating a majority of justices willing to undo the reproductive autonomy that has been affirmed and reaffirmed in earlier court opinions. The number of new supporters this would win for the Republican Party is approximately zero. “Overturning Roe v. Wade,” as the campaign shorthand goes, would compromise the rights of every woman with a zygote in her body. By the same life-at-conception logic, a number of contraceptive methods could potentially be banned, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill. Never in U.S. history has there been a comparable rollback of officially recognized rights.
While gaining zero voters, the GOP stands to lose millions of them. Generations of women — and the men who love them — have factored reproductive freedoms into their world views. When Roe v. Wade was ]decided in 1973, six of the court’s nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Five of the six were in favor. How did the GOP keep its grip on the abortion issue despite this history? By denouncing those justices as the wrong kind of Republicans and pledging to find more reliable ones. Over time, the party has replaced the supposedly squishy justices with rock-ribbed conservatives approved by Federalist Society gatekeepers. If six such stalwarts should fail to deliver the long-promised repeal, it will be obvious that abortion rights are here to stay and Republican rhetoric to the contrary is baloney. The GOP cupboard would then be entirely bare. The party of fiscal discipline has become the party of trillion-dollar deficits. The party of free trade has become the party of Trump tariffs. The party of limited government has become the party of executive orders. When the hollowness of its antiabortion rhetoric is confirmed, the Republican Party will stand for nothing, on a platform they don’t even bother to write. There’s an old saying: When you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. A suitable epitaph for the party of McConnell in the age of Trump.