Politics

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My uncle texted me late Monday night, concerned, asking if I had seen the incredible news just breaking about the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. He was presumably as stunned and outraged as I was, along with most of the nation. It’s this fierce emotional gut reaction that’s exactly why I pray that Mitch McConnell’s kangaroo court does what they appear ready to do: criminalize abortions in America, and take us back to the stone ages, like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

That may seem counterintuitive, so let me explain myself.

Obliterating the fundamental human rights of women will motivate far more Democrats to hit the polls in a way that other key political issues just can’t match, in what is a uniquely perilous and critical moment in the life-or-death struggle to maintain American democracy.

Our freedom to choose our own leaders is evaporating into a cloud of conspiracy, radicalism, and lies, as the American people stumble into fascism. More than half of Republican voters are convinced Donald Trump won the last election, in a measure of the depth of the crisis shaking our brittle democracy.

We won’t survive another Trump presidency. I doubt we’d survive another candidacy.

Tragically, the Republican Party has become a careening vehicle for violent authoritarianism, and antidemocratic radicalism. This movement must be stopped at the polls, and Democrats are all that stands in their way, as imperfect and squabbling as they often are.

Thus, pissed off women might just solve this problem, or at least ameliorate it temporarily.

Indeed, outraged women could conceivably come out and vote in crucial down ballot midterm races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere that will determine who controls the Senate, where Mitch McConnell and his accomplices are just counting the days until they retake the majority, and with it, power to strangle whatever’s left of Joe Biden’s stifled domestic agenda.

The larger point is simple: the McConnell-Trump SCOTUS faction currently preparing to overturn a historic law is in direct opposition to the wishes of the vast majority of the American public, who believe by a large margin that abortion is a matter that should be decided between a woman and her doctor, rather than by smarmy Washington politicians.

7 in 10 Americans believe that, to be precise, a very healthy majority.

SCOTUS’s plan to overturn Roe is a fundamentalist religious curtailing of basic rights imposed by a minority of the country on the majority of us. It’s exactly the kind of thing that can be expected in a country dominated by Republicans: unpopular policies that Americans don’t want, moralistic laws forced down their throats by hypocritical liars playing politics.

In other words, it’s a perfect preview of what’s to come if we fail to stop Republicans in the next two elections, particularly in 2024.

Perhaps angry American women, furious at being sidelined and turned into political props, and made into second class citizens by utterly corrupt Republicans, will rise up and protect the rest of us from the vile authoritarian disease that’s coursing through the Republican Party. If they lose the right to decide their own healthcare, and control their own bodies, perhaps women will at least be able to help America protect our democracy simply by showing up and voting.

It’s not inconceivable that Federalist Society Republicans get their long held wish, and find themselves bitterly regretting it, with a bloodbath at the polls.

That’s certainly my hope, at least.

Hocus pocus in SCOTUS

Overturning fifty years of settled case law and court precedent, to execute what has always been a religious moral crusade, rather than the exercise of any kind of judicial oversight, may well destroy the Supreme Court’s credibility for good. It’ll become just another partisan venue, incapable of standing for anything higher than brute force politics, in a country in desperate need of at least one fair arbiter.

It’s a moment when the Supreme Court is already struggling mightily to portray itself as a trusted nonpartisan actor, safely above the country’s increasingly grotesque political fray. Recent revelations in the form of delusional text messages between the wife of a SCOTUS Justice and Mark Meadows turned up in the House January 6 investigation, and show there’s ample reason to worry.

Texts show Ginny Thomas, rightwing activist, wife, and self described “best friend” of Justice Clarence Thomas, being intimately involved in encouraging Donald Trump’s criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, shining a glaring spotlight on the radicalization creeping via spousal backchannel into the highest court in the land.

Later, Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenting justice in an otherwise unanimous decision to compel the Trump White House to turn over documents related to January 6, including Mark Meadows cellphone, where the texts were found (along with a slew of others between Republicans and Meadows relating to their effort to overturn the election). It appeared to be a failed attempt to cover up his wife’s tracks, at least in part, and it showed why it is so deeply problematic for a Supreme Court justice to get sucked into base politics.

Motives matter, and even the appearance of impropriety is dangerous in a court that is supposed to act as an unbiased mediator on behalf of the public, concerned only with relevant facts, rather than political identity.

In any case, the court isn’t exactly seen the way Chief Justice John Roberts wishes it were: nonpartisan, fair, and safely insulated from the noxious political headwinds. Rather, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Republicans have successfully stacked the court with a slate of loyalist judges, as authoritarianism overtakes the larger Republican Party. It’s a combustible mixture, where a partisan court may be asked to do the bidding of an antidemocratic GOP, rather than the American people themselves.

The Republican Party just tried to silence millions of American voters after Trump lost the last presidential election, and very few things stood in their way. One of those things was the Supreme Court, which turned down Trump’s insane and frivolous lawsuit to nullify the results of the race based on nonexistent fraud. Presumably, his argument was so nakedly illegal, they had no choice.

Overturning Roe would only confirm America’s lingering suspicion that SCOTUS is neither neutral nor independent, turning it into just the latest branch of government to have been compromised by a radicalized Republican Party bent on power at all costs. Rather, it would be the Republican Party’s glaring mark of ownership stamped on the Supreme Court, as it imposed the GOP’s extremist agenda on the rest of us.

The stakes are high, and still rising.

As Vladimir Putin wages a cataclysmic war of aggression in Europe, the danger of authoritarian leaders should be crystal clear to all of us.

Democracy protects us, and the world, while we have it.

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