By John Krull TheStatehouseFile.com INDIANAPOLIS – Maybe U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will save Republicans and conservatives from themselves again. Roberts has come to the GOP’s rescue at least once before. In 2012, when Republicans pursued an ill-advised attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act without any plan of their own to replace […]
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INDIANAPOLIS
Maybe U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will save Republicans and conservatives from themselves again.
Roberts has come to the GOP’s rescue at least once before.
In 2012, when Republicans pursued an ill-advised attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act without any plan of their own to replace it — some things don’t change — Roberts cast the deciding vote to stop them.
Thinking conservatives breathed a sigh of relief when he did so.
Those conservatives realized that stripping 20 million Americans of their health coverage — many of them in Republican-leaning states — just as those voters were ready to go to the polls might not be the best way to win an election.
At the time, many leading Republicans eviscerated Roberts.
Then congressman and now Vice President Mike Pence compared the Supreme Court decision to 9/11. Pence later apologized, but his comparison revealed the right’s growing addiction to hyperbole and apocalyptic paranoia.
Like Pence, many conservatives now see the public stage not as a place to resolve problems or ease tensions in an increasingly diverse society, but to reclaim the holy land from the infidels. For them, every day is another chance to stand at the edge of Armageddon and battle for the Lord.
Now comes the decision by Alabama’s state government to adopt a new law restricting women’s reproductive rights in unprecedented ways. This new law is so severe it elevates even the rights of rapists over those of the women who have been impregnated against their will. It is so repressive that even a staunch social conservative and anti-abortion activist such as the Rev. Pat Robertson has labeled it “too extreme.”
It is, but that’s part of the point.
Spurred on by President Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election and the willingness of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, to throw aside time- and tradition-honored legislative precedents to ramrod conservative judicial nominees through the process, rightwing lawmakers in several states have sprinted to pass draconian abortion laws.
Alabama was just the first to cross the line.
The point of this foolhardy footrace has been to create a new challenge to Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that has been in place for nearly half a century.
The anti-abortion true believers know that they are not likely to have another shot as good as this one to roll back the clock. The demographic tides in this country are not moving in their direction and gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts can hold back the crashing waves for only so long.
If they’re going to strip women of the control of their own bodies, now is the time to do it.
The question they don’t seem to have asked themselves is: What happens if they succeed?
Most independent polls show that a strong — perhaps even overwhelming majority — of Americans support reproductive rights. They are troubled by late-term abortions and they wish abortions were less common than they are now, but they want them to be both legal and safe.
Moreover, most polls also show that questions of personal autonomy are a prime issue — and maybe even the prime issue — for young Americans. These voters don’t want government to tell them whom they can marry, when or whether they should have children or how they should live.
All this likely will come as news to the crusaders intent on attacking reproductive rights. That’s one of the effects of gerrymandering. Because they encounter only people who agree with them, the ideologues rigged legislative districts put in office always are surprised to find that some, often many and sometimes most people disagree with them.
They’re like children wearing earmuffs while walking on railroad tracks. Their early-warning system that the train is coming is when it hits them.
That’s what’s likely to happen here.
When Pat Robertson warns that the movement is courting disaster, he’s also pleading for the Supreme Court to come to the rescue.
That means, once again, it’s time for John Roberts to save Republicans and conservatives from themselves.
