Abortion ruling would be a political earthquake

President Joe Biden said

President Joe Biden said the “MAGA crowd” is the “most radical political organization” in modern American history after a leaked draft opinion to the Supreme Court suggested the court’s conservative majority would eliminate Roe v. Wade. (Photo: Evelyn Hochstein for Reuters)

An upcoming Supreme Court ruling likely to upend Roe v. Wade is set to fundamentally change the midterm elections, adding new urgency to major races across the country and giving Democrats renewed hope that they can hold onto critical positions nationwide in an environment politics that threatens their meager majority in Congress.

If the court were to bring down Roe, it would be one of the least popular major political moves in recent memory. According to decades of public opinion polls, only a third of Americans, at most, support the overturning of the 49-year-old former woman who gives a woman the right to have an abortion.

Republicans are already scrambling to downplay the consequences of the ruling — in particular, that abortion could soon be banned in nearly half of the 50 states — while Democrats hope to highlight that fact as a way to portray Republicans as out-of-control extremists. .

“What are the next things that will be attacked?” President Joe Biden told reporters Wednesday, referring to a draft opinion of Judge Samuel Alito obtained and published by Politico. “Because this MAGA crowd is really the most radical political organization that has existed in American history – in modern American history.” (The leaked draft opinion is not final, and could change before the court issues its final decision in the coming months.)

Biden suggested that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority — which includes several justices who have insisted they see Roe as a stable law during their hearings — could soon threaten same-sex marriage and other individual liberties currently protected by a Supreme Court precedent. Other Democrats echoed those concerns.

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“The intention is clearly not to stop at the issue of reproductive choice,” said Representative Susan Wild (D-Penn), who is running for re-election in a seesaw district. What next? Contraception? Deciding how many children to have or not to have at all? Can you marry the person you love regardless of gender or color? Whether a woman can get credit in her own name? Or buy a house? Or choose getting a job? “

At the same time, if the court formally drops Roe, it is unlikely to change the usual trend of midterm elections, in which the ruling party almost always loses seats in Congress.

Only a small minority of Americans view abortion as a critical issue when voting, and record high inflation and dissatisfaction with Biden will likely play a more central role in the November contests. Republicans are shielded from some backlash by planners in key states, and by a Senate map that gives rural white voters – a key Republican constituency – a disproportionate power over American politics.

“I do not see [overturning Roe] It’s the decision point for voters in Iowa, Senator Joni Earnest (R-Iowa) said on Governor Hugh Hewitt’s radio program on Wednesday. They worry about 40-year-old high inflation, prices at the pumps, and a bad economy. That’s what worries them, so I think there might be a little light here, but not in general.”

The CNN/SSRS poll, conducted in January, showed the complexity of the issue. The survey found that only 26% of Americans would be “satisfied” or “happy” if the Supreme Court overturned Roe’s case, while 60% would be “dissatisfied” or “angry”. (For comparison purposes, polls showed that about 3 in 10 Americans supported the idea of ​​“defunding the police” in 2020.) But only 21% of Americans said a candidate for elected office should share their views on abortion rights, while 59% said they had. Just one of several factors.

Our Democratic Governor’s veto is really the only protection we have to protect the right to choose here in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (Democrat)

Other surveys indicate support for some restrictions on abortion rights. The latest Gallup poll on the question found that 32% of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstances and 13% say it should be legal in most cases, while 33% say it should be illegal in most circumstances and only 19% said it should be illegal. be illegal in all circumstances. This means that voters can seek an indefinite compromise on the issue.

Abortion rights, however, are popular with two constituencies that elect Democrats: young adults, who are nervous about Biden and whose turnout usually declines during midterm elections, and college-educated women, who are aggressively courted by Republicans.

Minnie Temarago, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said on a conference call Tuesday that the upcoming ruling should energize Democratic voters in a way that previous messages about abortion rights have not.

“This is the moment, the wake-up call, not just for core voters, but for our allies across the spectrum,” she said. “The reproductive rights and justice movements have been telling everyone for decades that this was coming, and that Roe was really ineffective in large parts of the country, and really ineffective for women of color, of people of color. It was really hard to organize around it, to be honest.”

The political quake feeling from the ruling is likely to be most acute at the state level, as the ruling would give state and local officials enormous power over a right long protected by federal law. Democrats, in particular, believe a ruling to impeach Roe could help incumbent governors, governor candidates and others vying for statewide positions in swing states blue, including Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maine and Minnesota.

“The tug of war will continue on the political side of things,” said Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D). It will happen at the federal level and obviously at the state level as well. This will surely push the vast majority of people who still support this constitutional right to the polls. At least that’s what I think.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D), for example, has already begun petitioning the state Supreme Court to declare abortion rights protected by Michigan’s constitution. (Currently, the state has a ban on abortion on books dating back to the 1930s.)

“No matter what happens in D.C., I will fight like hell to provide access to safe, legal abortion in Michigan,” Whitmer said in a video message posted to Twitter.

Several swing states — including Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania — have Republican-controlled legislatures that would almost certainly pass strict abortion bans if given the opportunity. This now allows Democrats in those states to portray themselves as the last line of defense.

“The veto of our Democratic governor is really the only protection we have to protect the right to choose here in Pennsylvania,” Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania, said in a call with reporters Tuesday.

For the federal races, the near certainty of a divided government in 2023 means that any comprehensive abortion rights legislation is impossible in the short term. But it will likely be a major issue in the Senate and House of Representatives contests. Democrats particularly hoped the case would provide a boost to Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada), who is generally considered the most vulnerable incumbent in the Senate.

A banner opposed to Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt is seen outside a federal courtroom during a demonstration in Reno, Nevada, this week. (Photo: Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images via Getty Images)

A banner opposed to Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt is seen outside a federal courtroom during a demonstration in Reno, Nevada, this week. (Photo: Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images via Getty Images)

Nevada voters are among the strongest supporters of abortion rights in the country. A state poll conducted last year showed that 65% described themselves as “pro-choice,” and the state constitution protects the right to abortion for up to 24 weeks. But Ford said the prospect of a federal ban would continue to fan the flames of Nevadan.

“They’re trying to lull Nevadan residents into a false sense of complacency,” Ford said. “We will not rest on our laurels.”

The reaction of Cortez Masto’s opponent, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, also shows how the Republican Party is hiding from the fallout from one of conservative politics’ biggest victories in decades. Laxalt’s statement hailed the leaked decision as a “historic victory for the sanctity of life,” but stressed that abortion rights in Nevada are “a stable law.”

Laxalt’s statement is emblematic of the Republican Party’s strategy on the issue – an attempt to play down the impact of what could be a seismic victory in politics for the right. Former President Donald Trump, who remains the party’s de facto leader, issued multiple statements repeating his lies about the 2020 election on Tuesday. But he made no comments on the impending decision to drop Roe, which is only possible because of the three judges he appointed.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) tried to keep the focus on the question of who leaked the ruling, instructing him at the Republican Senate convention to do the same. The Republican Senate National Committee, in a memo published by Axios, asked Republicans to become “sympathetic, and build consensus on abortion policy.”

The memo claims that “Joe Biden and Democrats have extreme and radical views on abortion that are outside the mainstream for most Americans,” highlighting Democrats’ support for abortion rights of late. The memo instructs Republican candidates to insist that they do not want to jail doctors — even though many of the GOP’s anti-abortion laws set to go into effect will do just that.

It is difficult to predict the final impact of the upcoming ruling. For decades, a large majority of voters supported abortion rights. However, Democratic pollster Molly Murphy said it was hard to tell how Roe’s coup against Wade might affect the political landscape, because it’s uncharted territory — and voters simply didn’t believe it would.

Murphy, president of Impact Research, said at the EMILY’s List conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “This huge credibility gap has always been an issue in terms of being able to fully publicize what we know is the fire in the stomachs of not just female voters – male voters are caring about this all over the country.”

“The hardest thing to do is ask people to imagine an assumption they don’t think would exist,” she said. “I wish I had the answer.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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