Republicans and Right Wing Judges Refuse to Quit Abortion Bans

Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans oppose Republican efforts to ban abortion.  Likewise, the majority of Americans disapprove of the ruling by an extremist Texas judge banning abortion medication nationwide.   Yet Republicans in state houses across the country - and in Congress - continue to flout the will of the majority of the citizens and pass legislation and hand down rulings that inflict far right evangelical/Christofascist religious beliefs on all.  The 2022 mid-term results and the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race indicate that long term, this is going to be a losing strategy.  The problem for the Republican Party is that religious extremists have been so empowered within the party and hold so much power in primary elections that no one dares to defy them and they are a faction that cannot be reasoned with.  Their goal of a nationwide abortion ban either through Congress or on a state by state basis will remain relentless - for these folks the end justifies the means whether it means lying, trampling on the rights of others, or deliberately harming others.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's self-created problem which I for one hope brings down the GOP.  Another piece in the Washington Post looks at the damage being done by right wing extremist judges.  Here are excerpts from Salon:

If you are following the issue of abortion right now you almost surely have a headache. There is just so much happening all over the country that it's very hard to wrap your head around what's going on and how to fight it. This was the predictable outcome of overruling Roe v. Wade to "send it back to the states" because it was always part of the anti-abortion movement strategy. Instead of fighting on one front at the national level, pro-choice advocates would be forced to fight on many different fronts in many different ways while at the same time battling back one attempt after another in the federal courts to degrade the right in the states where it is legal. The final goal remains a national ban even if they have to get it done incrementally.

This was always obvious by the fact that while they always piously proclaimed that abortion is murder while at the same time insisting that they merely wanted to return the issue to the states, as if it was fine with them if some states decided to keep it legal. What they really wanted to do was disperse the resources and energy and wear down the opposition.

Even Donald Trump is having trouble negotiating the issue with his most devoted followers. According to Rolling Stone, he's been meeting with evangelical leaders and trying to convince them that abortion is a loser and they need to change their approach. He tells them they must stop talking about bans and start emphasizing "exceptions" instead because otherwise Democrats will paint him as an "extremist." And when he's asked about how he plans to advocate for their cause in the future, he resorts to bragging about his past accomplishments . . . . His supporters were not amused. One wondered if Trump was "going to try to make us swallow getting next to nothing in return for our support?"

Apparently, Trump's telling anyone who will listen that the Republicans are "getting killed" on abortion, which is true, and Republicans in Washington are freaking out, as Rolling Stone reports: In recent weeks, numerous emergency meetings — focused on abortion-related messaging and the potential for compromises — have been held by conservatives in nonprofit organizations, on Capitol Hill, and in elite Republican and evangelical circles, multiple sources familiar with the situation attest.

Trump seems to think that if the anti-abortion zealots will just agree to allow some exceptions for rape and incest (and maybe the health of the mother) that the whole thing will calm down and everyone can go back to the way it was.

First of all, even if the anti-abortion zealots were to agree, the genie is out of the bottle. Roe was overturned and the battle for women's autonomy isn't going to magically disappear because they agree to allow for an exception for rape and incest, which until fairly recently was supported by most pro-lifers. The right to abortion is supported by a large majority of Americans and that majority is growing. Gallup polls from last May show support for abortion in all or most cases at 85%, higher than when polling began in 1975 (76%).

Unfortunately, those numbers are not going to deter the anti-choice movement and the institutions that support it, including the churches that wield massive influence on the Republican Party. 

And there are activist right wing members of the judiciary ready to step in, as we've seen with the Texas judge who banned one of the medical abortion drugs . . . . . they've also put the FDA's ability to regulate all drugs at the mercy of a full variety of zealots who seek to interfere in all Americans' private medical decisions.

And then there are the activists: . . . . . Lila Rose believes the GOP's national policy should be a total ban with no exceptions and she holds Trump responsible for going wobbly on the issue.

Meanwhile, the pragmatists in the party seem to be drifting toward some kind of 15 week "compromise" but they need look no further than Ron DeSantis who had already signed one into law yet felt compelled to push for the more draconian 6 week ban under pressure from the right as he tries to gain traction in the GOP primary. There is no reason to believe that he will be able to finesse this any better than Trump will.

They brought this on themselves. For decades they encouraged and enabled a religious right extremist faction in their party to seize power (even tacitly encouraging anti-abortion terrorism) secure in the knowledge that they would be thwarted in their goals by Roe v. Wade. They allowed them to demagogue the issue as murder, genocide and even a holocaust apparently thinking that it was all just politics. Now this has become inconvenient and these people are being asked to stand down. Apparently, they didn't know that "sending it to the states" was just the anti-abortion movement's strategy and they never meant a word of it. The GOP is stuck with a political albatross around its neck and it's choking on it. 

Here are excerpts from the Post:

U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s widely panned ruling blocking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval more than 20 years ago of an effective and safe medication, mifepristone, used both for medical abortions and to treat miscarriages, is another in a string of decisions from right-wing judges that may well boomerang on the MAGA movement. The decisions have revealed its true reactionary face.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion (which the Justice Department appealed on Monday and moved to stay) displays the three telltale characteristics of Trump-appointed judges’ opinions: Contempt for the law, sleight of hand on the facts and partisan language more appropriate to a MAGA rally than a courtroom.

Kacsmaryk’s logic would essentially abolish the standing requirement for lawsuits against drug approvals by creating a special exception out of thin air. That is not the law.”

Moreover, the judge’s reliance on the 1873 “anti-vice” Comstock Act smacks of utter desperation to find any rationale for his desired result. . . . . Comstock was largely invalidated by the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling also makes factual assertions that are “scientifically baseless and infused with hostility to abortion,” constitutional scholar Kate Shaw writes in a New York Times op-ed, “including that the FDA failed to consider ‘the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.’”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lambasted the decision as “inflammatory” and “brazenly” substituting “the court’s judgment for that of trained professionals.”

Given that Kacsmaryk’s decision has heaped fuel onto the conflagration caused by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republicans might want to ponder: Is the right-wing judiciary as a whole a threat to the MAGA movement’s viability?

It is one thing to gin up the base on invented threats from critical race theory or the “great replacement theory.” But when the MAGA movement’s judges begin to inflict radically unpopular edicts on those outside the right-wing audience, that risks sparking a counter-response: a determined, broad-based movement insistent that the United States not turn the clock back on decades of social progress.

Radical judges who would impose their will on modern America make themselves a target for a movement that pushes back on the courts’ decisions and on the courts themselves. No wonder that there are rising calls for expanding the Supreme Court as well as lower courts (to dilute right-wing judges’ power); limiting Supreme Court terms; and stripping jurisdiction from the Supreme Court. Support for progressive state judicial candidates who vow to act as a counterweight to right-wing judicial imperialism is almost inevitable.