It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.
What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing ‘abortion on demand’ (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.
But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.
Conservatives are finding out the hard way that abortion isn’t a 50-50 issue anymore.
…Going back to the 1990s, Gallup polling showed Americans divided roughly evenly between those who called themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Exit polls from the 1990s and 2000s showed voters who said abortion or “moral values” were most important to their vote supported Republican candidates in greater numbers.
…But those surveys were conducted when a right to an abortion was law of the land. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year ending that constitutional right has exposed Americans’ broad opposition to the strict abortion bans adopted or proposed in GOP-controlled states. And it’s revealed that public surveys on the matter probably need more nuanced questions now.
…Now, a four-point question probably best measures where Americans sit on the issue: legal in all cases, legal in most, illegal in all and illegal in most. The 2022 national exit poll used this device, finding that 29 percent of voters believed abortion should be “legal in all cases,” while another 30 percent thought it should be “legal in most cases.” That left 26 percent who thought it should be “illegal in most cases” and only 10 percent who said it should be “illegal in all cases.”
That leaves roughly six-in-10 voters supporting legal abortion in most cases — with the median voter supporting some restrictions — and just over a third who want it to be entirely or mostly illegal.
The easy win last week by Janet Protasiewicz in the election for the Wisconsin state supreme court seat is another sign of this. She won by a whopping margin of 11% in a race that was supposed to be close in a battleground state and she explicitly used her support for abortion rights in her campaign. This gives liberals a majority on that court for the first time in 15 years and provides hope that the state’s restrictions on abortion and its gerrymandering will be overturned.
The recent ruling by the Texas judge that the FDA should not have approved the use of one of the medical abortion drugs mifepristone in 2000 is another extreme overreach, since it sets the precedent that a single judge can decide that they know better about drug approval than a panel of experts of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Democrats have blasted the decision while Republican party leaders have fled for the hills to avoid commenting
Democratic lawmakers are doubling down on outrage against Friday’s ruling that threatens access to a widely used abortion medication, saying the ruling sets a “dangerous new precedent” that could harm future medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“Make no mistake, the decision could throw our country into chaos,” said the Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on a call with reporters on Saturday. “Republicans have completely eviscerated the FDA as we know it and threatened the ability of any drug on the market to avoid being prohibited.
“What could come next if some fringe radical group brings a lawsuit? Cancer drugs? Insulin? Mental health treatment?”
…Democrats on Saturday said they support the appeal that the US justice department on Friday indicated it would file, seeking a halt to Kacsmaryk’s decision. And the party is still working to get the Women’s Health Protection Act passed. The legislation, introduced late last month, seeks to protect abortions on a federal measure but lacks the Republican support needed to pass.
A Democratic senator from Washington, Patty Murray, said Democrats would “put Republicans on the record every way we can so the American people know exactly who is responsible for this chaos”.
“We will have this debate out in the public for everyone to see,” she said.
Schumer said that Republicans have likely mostly been silent on the ruling because “they’re afraid to speak out”.
“That is outrageous. They are letting the … extreme wing of their party … run the whole show,” he said. “They have an obligation to speak out or they are complicit in taking away mifepristone for tens of millions of Americans.”
Severely restricting access to abortion so that bans goes into effect before women even know they are pregnant, and the right to have one is eliminated even if a woman is raped or for incest or at risk of death or serious health dangers. I expect calls for bans on contraception to be the next target because the ultimate goal of these zealots is to limit the sexual autonomy of women by making them fearful of making their own choices of when and with whom they have sex.
Republicans have caught a tiger by the tail and cannot find a way to let go.
“… who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings,…”
Should be “who lied about their beliefs…”.
@1: Yes. Now if only the press would be as blunt on this.
Speaking of hills to die on, I think that it is well past time to allow forced birthers to frame the argument on fetal viability/heartbeat.
This just allows forced birthers to control the conversation with supporters of unrestricted abortion forever playing theocratic whack-a-mole.
The conversation must be framed on the right of women to have full control over their bodies, full stop.
Weird hill to die on but at least they’ll be dead.
I wish I had something more clever to say but I gave up hope.
But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked.
That is a succinct description of the problem. It’s a general issue when you have a “movement against ${X}” because the members of the movement don’t agree what ${X} should be replaced with, or how to fill any created power vacuum. So, if the movement makes and headway against ${X} it immediately fractures into mutually anathematizing sub-sects, because they never actually agreed on anything other than that they were against ${X}.
And then the most ruthless and determined sub-faction tends to come out on top -- in fact, if they’re properly ruthless, they’ve probably already laid plans to go all “Night of the Long Knives” on their erstwhile allies.
@Dunc: yup. Movements against ${X} are opportunities for Hitlers, Stalins, Bonapartes, Jeffersons, etc.
-- the movements create power vacuums that are filled by the worst examples of humanity.
Particularly with the modern Republican party which depends on not fixing the issues they are pushing. Crime, illegal immigration, drugs, welfare, abortion are all problems the party leaders don’t want to fix. The ability of Republicans to get elected at all depends on them pushing those issues and they realized long ago that actually fixing them would be counter productive.
Illegal immigration is an easy to understand example of this. A solution that works is well known, increase the penalties on businesses for hiring illegal immigrants. The Republican leadership will suggest anything but that. Increasing the penalties on business is unpopular with business and the Republican party base doesn’t like it when the price of basic goods starts to climb because there is less cheap labor.
Yeah. I’ve been noting for a while now that ever since Nixon, the Republicans have been basically the party of scaring people into voting for them to fix ‘problems’, but not wanting to actually fix the problems because that would make the scare tactics useless. That ramped up harder with the Moral Majority in Reagan’s time, when Abortion was chosen as the main wedge issue to provide a fig leaf over the fact that racism was the real wedge issue; it was a lot easier to frame opposition to abortion as a religious mandate.
The problem is that it’s been three generations since Nixon’s time now, and the people who knew it was all a con to get people to vote for them (and that the problems shouldn’t actually be fixed) have been outnumbered by the masses who never realized they were being conned and have bought hook line and sinker into the excuses as to why the ‘problems’ weren’t fixed, and so have now been running for office themselves and winning on a platform of throwing tantrums until they get their way and really do completely break the system.
And this is why you don’t encourage zealotry to further your own aims: the zealots will eventually outdo you at it because they recognize each other.
@ 8 JM
Illegal immigration is an easy to understand example of this.
I was under the impression that the USA took no serious action against such immigration because it needed the cheap labour. A friend of mine, when he lived in the USA, ran a demolition crew of ~30 people in Virginia, none of whom, including him, were legal residents in the USA.