I live in NH, and like RP on the front page, I asked Senator Shaheen the filibuster and codifying Roe question after the leak. I got a vanilla answer about supporting a woman’s right to choose.
Just to keep you up-to-date, I’ve yet to hear from Senator Jeanne Shaheen if, in addition to confirming she’ll vote to enact a federal law making abortion accessible and available to all women, she’ll also answer my other question as to whether she’ll vote to change the filibuster, if not eliminate it entirely, so the Senate can proceed with a bill for such a law.
I’ve called her office in Manchester, NH twice (once last week and once the week before) to remind her office that Senator Shaheen still has to answered this question. Each time, the person with whom I spoke immediately found a record of my question(s) and assured me she would bring to Senator Shaheen’s attention that I’ve asked again for an answer to my question regarding the filibuster issue.
Just after I wrote the post below I got a new email form Joe Biden. No, Joe and I aren’t that close. I mean “Joe Biden”, the guy who spends most of his time sending fundraising emails. It seems they are creeping up to something more specific (emphasis added).
In bleak times amid onslaughts from the right there’s a tendency for many Americans on the liberal or leftward side of the political spectrum to attack the Democratic party. Certainly the Democratic party merits lots of criticism. But we should be clear on the particular roots of this reflex. When you feel angry and outraged you want to attack someone. The right doesn’t care about your attacks or your rage or your fears. Indeed, in our trolling era they relish them, laugh at the them, taunt you with them. The party that at least broadly lines up with your views, on the other hand, cares a lot. So it’s a much more appealing target.
I say this because it is a toxic tendency that we are all vulnerable to but should try to overcome. And I raise it here as preface to what I hope will be viewed as constructive criticism. Hopefully it is constructive because time is of the essence.
A new CBS News poll shows Americans see the Court decision overturning Roe as a “step backward” rather than a “step forward” by a 21 point margin. 59% of Americans disapprove of the decision. 67% of women disapprove of the decision. Almost exactly the proportion of Americans who disapprove of the decision, support overruling it with a new federal law. That’s 58%. This is a YouGov poll and these results are if anything more favorable for the anti-Roe side than most. But it still shows a decision that is overwhelmingly unpopular. 50% of Democrats say they are more likely to vote because of the decision, 28% for indies and 20% for GOPs.
There’s little question that this lopsided reaction can turn a lot of close races. But there’s no way to do that without putting a clear post-election action on the table for voters.
Sens. Warren and Smith have an op-ed in the Times today in which they say at the bottom of a lengthy and quite good article …
Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January.
Great. But for any of this to happen you are going to need at least a few senators to get the ball rolling. And getting the ball rolling means making a clear bumper sticker-like pledge and goading colleagues to sign on. It has to be at the top of the article not at the bottom of a laundry list at the end.
Agree with what you just wrote. But don’t separate what the Court has done on guns and Roe—and what’s surely coming on affirmative action in the cases already granted for next term and what Justice Thomas is foreshadowing on other constitutional rights—from the Court’s decisions on federal agency authority. And the long series of rulings whittling away at individuals’ ability to obtain relief in court when injured by violations of the Constitution and federal law—rights don’t mean much when there is no remedy for violations.
The modern conservative judicial movement always had abortion and the reversal of Roe v Wade as its central empowering goal. Many intellectuals and activists had different political and goals. But those often esoteric and complex goals were never what powered the politics and the appointments. That was always abortion. When white evangelicals made their pact with the scofflaw libertine Trump, it wasn’t about “takings” or delegation or “originalism.” It was about abortion. So today represents a victory for the conservative judicial movement, later embodied in The Federalist Society, that was five decades in the making.
There are many observers who despise the results but yet still grant the legwork. There was a liberal Court that made all sorts of liberal decisions, the story goes. Conservatives didn’t like that. So they got organized and changed it. Liberals did it first and then conservatives did it.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) on Sunday shrugged off the dire consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade by repeatedly touting that states decide on citizens’ access to abortion.
The attorney who reportedly suggested that “‘wild’ chaos” would prompt Supreme Court justices to be more likely to intervene in the 2020 election has spoken exclusively with TPM about his representation of the Trump campaign during its efforts to overturn the election.