After RGB: Fear the Future?
If you thought 2020 couldn’t get any worse, it just did.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the longtime Supreme Court justice passed away Friday evening at the age of 87 due to complications from pancreatic cancer. While we mourn the passing of a great legal mind and trendsetter for women’s rights, we also have to steel ourselves for the coming political maelstrom. It will be epic.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he plans for the Senate to vote on Ginsburg’s replacement which President Trump should name in a few days. This goes against the late justice’s dying wish that no replacement be chosen until after a new president is sworn into office next year.
McConnell blocked the nomination of Merritt Garland after the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016 stating that it was unfair to choose a new justice during an election year. Now that there is a chance for the conservatives to hold the majority in the Court, the Senator has had a change of heart.
The next few weeks are going to be uglier than anyone has witnessed in a long time. This choice will be for all the marbles. If President Trump gets to choose a nominee and the Senate confirms, the conservatives will hold the balance of the Supreme Court 6-3. Issues like abortion and the Affordable Care Act hang in the balance. This means conservatives will do what they can to ram the nomination through the Senate. If that does happen and Vice President Biden wins, expect Democrats to start looking again at expanding the Court (aka: packing the court).
There are a few wildcards in this upcoming battle. The first is the Senate itself. Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said in an interview with Alaska Public Radio mere hours before Ginsburg’s death was announced that she would not vote to confirm a nominee so close to a Presidential election. Are there other Republicans that want to refrain from voting for a nominee right now?
The other wildcard is the election itself. Today is the first day that people can start voting in many states. Will this development propel more people to vote for either candidate? How would this affect the outcome of the Senate? Would an early confirmation push the Senate towards a Democratic majority?
All this remains to be seen, but I can tell you what will happen over the next few weeks. America in 2020 is already a very divided nation. We don’t like the other person who happens to have a different political outlook. Actually, people don’t simply not like them, we hate them. Now, with both sides believing everything is on the line, things are going to get incredibly ugly. Conservatives dream of being able to ban abortion. Liberals fear the loss of marriage rights for same-sex couples. Both sides will see this as a zero-sum game and will do what they think needs to be done, civility be damned.
Antonin Scalia and Ginsburg were actually good friends even though they were on opposite sides of many an issue. In her chambers, there is a picture of the two justices riding an elephant in India. An advocate for women’s rights, she quipped the only reason she sat behind Scalia was to distribute the weight.
Even when the two would disagree on cases which they did frequently, they cared for one another. “I love him,” Ginsburg once said, “but sometimes I’d like to strangle him.”
The Court is one of the last places in Washington where people who may disagree on issues, still respect and care for each other. That sense of seeing someone you disagree with as a person, of not simply reaching across the isle, but embracing across the ideological dividing line is something that is disappearing in American life. Our nation would do well to look at Scalia and Ginsburg’s relationship and seek to emulate it.
But we won’t. We will continue to fight one another, doing whatever we can to win.
I’ve worried about the future of this nation for months. As I sit here in my office, I no longer worry about the future. Now, I fear it.
https://twitter.com/MaybeAmes/status/1307181505572212736
Seems some other folks share your concerns.Report
Well the Biden rule doesn’t apply, there’s no disagreement between the Senate and the President. Very unlikely that Trump will go off list. That leaves Nazi and/or rape allegations.
Also this answers, decisively, whether or not RBG should have stepped down while Obama was in office.Report
It’s amazing how the Biden rule _somehow_ NOW includes ‘only if the Senate and the President are different parties’. It didn’t include it the last time they were talking about it…
…and that’s because such a requirement is literally is not in anything Biden said.
It is simply not in the speech. This is literally a gibberish requirement that the right wing nonsense machine has churned out. Are we at the point where we are literally just letting the right-wing media invent words and put them in Biden’s mouth?
Watch the speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVvxGa0zhWo
The specific rationales he thinks it would be appropriate for the Senate to not take up a nomination he gives fairly clearly: ‘There is a lot of current political partisan arguing’, ‘We voted down the last few nominated justices sent, and the ones that were approved were approved with the most votes cast against them in history.’ ‘election season is underway’, and ‘these judges seem needlessly partisan, so we think the selection process is bad and needs fixing’
Those are the four rationales I spotted. Categorizing them is a bit vague, I guess, arguable some of those are the same rationale .
But none of those rationale including, in any manner, who holds what branch of anything.
Now, you can sorta guess that _he_ is on the opposite political side than the president, and the fact he seems to be speaking for the Senate would seem to imply they are also, but…that’s not part of any rationale that he is stating.
Everything single rationale Biden gives in the speech still applies. (Including that thing about ‘most votes cast about the recently confirmed justices’! Or at least one of them.)
If anything, every rationale he gives is much, much stronger in 2020. He is _way_ exaggerating the political situation that I remember in 1992, but even so, it doesn’t come close to politics under Trump.Report
I don’t know how to use this site’s search tools or I’d quote myself.
However I pointed out the problem was President Obama was elected to flip the Court in 2012 and the Senate was elected in 2014 to stop him. Both sides can reasonably point to an election.
Biden mentions divided government 18 times in his original speech. He is VERY clearly talking about the Senate-controlled-by-the-other-team vs President.
Now he uses 55 pages to say what I could in less than one but whatever. He’s laying down the groundwork for telling the President that he’s not going to let him set a new Justice before the election. Note also he’s able to, by himself, enforce that given his role at the time.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2746910/Joe-Biden-s-1992-Senate-Speech.pdfReport
“I don’t know how to use this site’s search tools or I’d quote myself.”
Google works pretty well if you know the specific phrase you’re looking for. Confine your search to the site and look for the specific phrase; like, if you were looking for the time you said farb now the glimrod, you would type this into the search box:
site:ordinary-times.com “farb now the glimrod”Report
I don’t know how to use this site’s search tools or I’d quote myself.
One of the little known — and even littler used — features of the site is the entirely comment-oriented “State of the Discussion”. It’s available under the “Community” pull-down at the top of most pages. One of its obscure capabilities is generating a time-ordered list of all comments made by a particular person, either for a single post or across all posts.
If I’m looking for a particular comment — eg, I know DensityDuck said something interesting along the lines of X that I wanted to respond to — I think it’s easier to thumb through a list of just DensityDuck’s comments than to go through the whole nested set of comments, or to hope I remember a particular phrase that Google has already picked up.Report
Oh, is that where that went? I remember it used to be that you could click on a user’s name to get the comment archive.Report
By the time Will (very properly) made the decision 20 months or so ago to rebuild the site using an up-to-date version of WordPress and a supported theme, all of the comment archive stuff was broken anyway.
Decisions since have (also properly, IMO) been to modify the theme in pretty limited ways: adding an “in reply to…” field in most places, fixing what I still think is a bad decision by WordPress on handling the Reply link in nested comments, making <b> and <i> tags in comments functional.
I was always a fan of CK MacLeod’s “State of the Discussion” plugin so when Will asked if I could fix it and its comment archive feature to run in the new framework I jumped at it. Changes in WordPress have created a couple of oddities in it since then. When I get done moving I plan to go back and clean it up again.Report
Thank you for everything you and CK did Michael.Report
Much more credit to CK than to me. I would never have come up with the comment box that compactly provides access to so many views of things.Report
A fun bit on nonsense Senators can do: Search that document for ‘I ask unanimous consent at this point that a previous speech I have made on the Senate’s right to look at and obligation to look at the ideology of the nominees be printed in the Record.’ Everything between that and ‘I thank the Chair and thank my colleagues for their indulgence.’ is a different speech. Note this speech actually inserts other speeches and document inside of it. The [Page: ] indicators are a clue this is an inserted document.
His actual speech resumes with ‘I thank the Chair and thank my colleagues for their indulgence.’.
—
Getting into the topic at hand, this inserted speech, and the part before it, is whether or not the Senate should look at ideology. During _this part_ he talks about divided government. Whether or not the Senate has a role in filtering presidential nominees from the other part.
At that point, after he’s laid that out mostly in a previous speech, he talks about the ‘And here are three consequences of the Reagan-Bush nomination strategy that have contributed to the problem.’
During this, he’s just listing problems. Specific problems that Reagan and Bush administrations hard-right nomination process had caused, and problems with the process in general.
This has nothing to do with timing at all.
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Then we get down to ‘THE UNIQUE HISTORY OF ELECTION YEAR NOMINATIONS’, where he starts talking about the hypothetical of a nominee so close to the election.
It is that specific situation, and _only_ that situation, where he argues the Senate should not take up the nominee at all. The supposed ‘Biden rule’.
During that, he did not, in any way, talk about divided government, or use that as a requirement or justification. Instead, he used _entirely_ the impact it would have on an election…because, again, his point was it was happening in an election year.
He even includes an example here that _didn’t_ happen under a divided government: Louis D. Brandeis, who was nominated by a Democrat and confirmed by a Democratic Senate…but he was attacked with antisemitism during the process and that hatred leaked out into the elections happening at the time.
And there’s this quote: Indeed, many pundits on both the left and the right questioned our committee’s ability to fairly process the Bork nomination–a year before the 1988 campaign–without becoming entangled in Presidential politics. While I believe this concern was misplaced, and ultimately disproved, it illustrates how fears of such politicization can undermine confidence in the confirmation process
I.e., he pointed out that people on the right _also_ thought that nominee might become entangled in politics, despite it being even farther out. (He thinks it didn’t, but Biden’s take on Bork is actually very stupid.)
Biden is talking about a specific question ‘Can nominations be handled sanely in an election year’, with a specific answer of ‘No.’ and a specific solution of ‘So the administration should refrain from making them them, and if it does not, we should ignore them’.
This a solution that he does not argue for any other thing, and isn’t dependent on any sort of government.
That’s how ‘rules’ work. If you want to pretend something is a rule, you have to read the where the _rule_ is are laid out, in the part of the speech where he is talking about the specific circumstances where the rule applies. Not other parts of the speech talking about different things.
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Then he transitions away from nominations near elections and the impact thereoftalks about other things.
He actually lays out three entirely different problems in this speech, and solution.
It’s the _first_ solution that’s the ‘Biden rule’. That is the clearly laid out ‘Biden rule’, to answer the ‘one immediate question’ as he puts it.
That problem, as laid-out, does not include a single word about ‘divided government’.
The second problem is that the Republican administrations have deliberately tried to shift the court, and, to quote: If the President consults and cooperates with the Senate or moderates his selections absent consultation, then his nominees may enjoy my support as did Justices Kennedy and Souter. But if he does not, as is the President’s right, then I will oppose his future nominees as is my right.
That’s him saying _he_ will make partisan decisions about the court, at least at some level, unless the Senate stops getting hard-right candidates.
The third problem is basically the opposite of that in that he argues that the Senate should not pre-judge nominees, should not take stances on how they will vote before process. Nor should they ask very very specific questions about single issues.
These are all three completely disconnected problem, with three completely different solutions. (The latter two are in direct opposition to each other, but whatever.)Report
“Problems” would be another way of saying “the left and the right disagree on who should be on the bench”.
So we’re supposed to think that Biden was against Team Blue putting up Garland during an election year? Do you have any quotes of him doing so? IMHO he was putting this forward to stop any Bush candidates.
I.e. it applies to a Red President while Team Blue controls the Senate.
Unless you can link some Biden quotes on him opposing Garland? That would show that he really was concerned about “the process during an election year” and not just “my team can block yours and steal a seat so we’re going to”.Report
No, in fact I think the entire concept the ‘Biden rule’ is nonsense. And I don’t think _he_ ever thought it in any sense. One entirely hypothetical speech about a topic does not an actual rule make.
Especially since, as was pointed out, he actually gave his speech much later in the cycle than Republicans decided to block Garland. A speech about hypothetical nominees on the table during the convention or general election would not have applied to a judge that was nominated in fricking _March_ anyway. I know he actually did say ‘election year’, but Biden was laying out his position _well into_ the election year.
To summarize: I don’t actually think the Biden rule is any sort of real thing, it was at best a hypothetical argument presented in entirely different times, and even if it was a rule, it wouldn’t make sense to apply to something as early as the Garland nomination.
This doesn’t change the fact that _Republicans_ claimed to believe the ‘Biden rule’ was some actual important thing, and used that to justify their behavior. They can’t just dismiss it now.
Nor can they rewrite it into requiring ‘divided government’, when the principle as stated didn’t require that, nor does it follow in any logical way…a divided government is clearly not required for a contentious nomination process, as evidenced by the _last_ nominee. And we are literally _inside_ an election, people have already started voting, so the situation is actually even worse than what Biden was hypothesizing.
I think you have misunderstood the concept of what is going on here.
Everyone _except the elected Democrats in the Senate_ understand what is going on. We understand the Republican stole a seat, and now are trying to take another.
We are pointing out that their nonsensical ‘Biden rule’, and the nonsensical exception to the ‘Biden rule’ is utter bullshit, so that that elected Democratic officials start goddamn playing hardball.
I am not trying to convince _you_ of anything. I am complaining about the goddamn newspapers pretending this is some real thing so the utter fucking nitwits that are the Democratic Senators don’t slowly nod their head, spit out their chewing tobacco, and say ‘Well, thems the rules, that’s how it works under the Biden rule, I guess it can’t be helped’.
And I would like the Republicans Senators to be somewhat nervous about what is a blatant power grab, and called out for it by the utterly useless media, instead of pretending there is some rule being followed.
Because otherwise, there is no goddamn end to this. At this point, the Republican Senate has realized they can literally just refuse to confirm _anyone_ under a Democratic president.Report
“Problems” would be another way of saying “the left and the right disagree on who should be on the bench”.
This a solution that he does not argue for any other thing, and isn’t dependent on any sort of government.
So we’re supposed to think that Biden was against Team Blue putting up Garland during an election year? Do you have any quotes of him doing so? IMHO he was putting this forward to stop any Bush candidates.
I.e. it applies to a Red President while Team Blue controls the Senate.
Unless you can link some Biden quotes on him opposing Garland?
Your team made five false rape allegations and still pretends to believe them. Even attempting to pretend that putting Supremes on the court isn’t ugly politics is nonsensical.Report
I think everyone realizes that in the current political environment, all Trump has to do to win in a landslide is nominate Biden for the Supreme Court. Then Democrats will rush out with 147 rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment allegations against Biden, and that will be that. They’ve been pointedly ignoring such women up till now, but if there’s a Trump Supreme Court seat in play, it’s game on. 🙂Report
Trump will put up a woman and Team Blue will smear her up good… and maybe cost them some women’s votes because they’re ripping apart a woman for naked political gain. Or they won’t because she’s a woman.
That sounds like a fine choice to force onto Team Blue.
Team Blue loves identity politics… except those rules can be messy and used against them.Report
The Democrats have to try to pick off enough Republicans to sustain a filibuster. A tit for tat for Merrick Garland is the only hope of a path back to a rebalance. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell should permanently have their faces on toilet paper for leading the Senate to this.Report
There is no filibuster any more (Reid got rid of it).
They need to outright defeat RBG’s replacement. 3 Republicans voting against won’t do it, they need 4… and that’s IF “won’t vote” means “vote against”.
If “won’t vote” means “won’t vote”, then the Dems need 7 Republicans.Report
Wrong. McConnel changed the vote to end debate on SCOTUS nominations/appointments to simple majority, Reid did it for all other judicial nominations.Report
The reason the ACA and Roe v. Wade “hang in the balance” is due more to those laws not having followed the time-honored truism of Law follows Politics follows Culture. The ACA debate was cut short in far too much of the public mind of how something so sweeping should be handled, and Roe created law out of whole cloth without the much needed public debate. Thus, they are still up in the air, no matter how much the proponents want them to be settled.
As far as Cocaine Mitch and the nomination of SCOTUS appointees in the runup to an election goes, the truth is politics is a dog from hell. The law trumps verbiage.
Every day is a lesson in civics.Report
This is actually incorrect, although I know the religious right has decided to pretend otherwise.
Roe v. Wade still has somewhere between a 70%-80% popularity. And basically has the entire time it’s existed.
Weirdly, about 40% of people favor outlawing abortion, which means…somehow 10%-20% think Roe v. Wade should stand, but…abortion should be illegal? There is a _hell_ a lot of weirdness in polling about abortion-related issues, you can basically prove almost any position with it. People are nonsensical.
But when asked explicitly about the Roe v. Wade ruling, it has never been underwater in popularity. It has always been a popular decision, usually at minimum a solid 2/3rd of respondents wanting it to stand.
That is a super weird claim.
Laws allowing abortion, and contraceptives which was tied into the same debate, had been debated for about decades, and about ten years earlier states had started passing model laws allowing abortions. By 1973, abortion was legal in 20 states. (And before you respond ‘many of those only allowed it for the woman’s health, go look up what that really meant…it included emotional health…and states passing those laws knew that.)
If you want an actual analogy to where abortion was at the time of Roe. v. Wade, it’s Marijuana legalization. That’s really the analogy.
Or, say, gay marriage at the same time at roughly…um…2010?
That is exactly where the culture and politics, were in 1973. This was the height of second-wave feminism.
Now, this wasn’t where the _politicians_ were, but, then again, they were also still defending the Vietnam War, so I don’t know that they particularly had their pulse on the nation.
The fact that the Republican party then deliberately created the religious right and single issues about that, and been very loud about it since then, doesn’t mean it wasn’t ‘following culture’.Report
The GOP clearly wants the benefit for opposing abortion for the 20% of the country that wants to but doesn’t want to take the blame from the people who don’t.
Sooner or later they’ll get the power to REALLY outlaw abortion and then they’ll have to live with their choices.
My expectation is they hand it back to the states and we’ll spend 50 years proving that people won’t follow those laws, or the GOP learns those laws really are unpopular, or technology will come up with a better solution.
However there’s a strong argument that ROE would be a great law but is a poor judgement. It seems to be a total ass pull and related to the judges’ feelings and not any logical principles. That’s one of the big differences between it and gay marriage or even marijuana. I mean, what is the Constitutional Difference between the first trimester and the 2nd trimester?Report
Yes. Abortion would be a victimless crime…and I know a lot of pro-life people will take issue with that description, but it would be a crime where _everyone walks away satisfied_, so, yes, it is victimless in the sense of ‘how the law will have to be enforced’. Like other victimless crimes, basically the only place the law can catch people is as they try to connect to each other.
There already are underground networks ready to spring into action. Extremely well thought-out networks. People willing to break the law.
I know this because people actually volunteer on Twitter to help with this, and are often told to shut the hell up, and if they want to help people like that, don’t say it in public like that. Just…ask around.
Look, literally everyone knows how to get pot, right? All of us could figure out, in our friend’s group, who knows how to get pot. If we had money, we could, in a few days, turn it into pot somehow.
Yeah, that’s how abortion is going to work. You talk to someone, they talk to someone they know, that person checks you out and makes a call, you pay some money, and suddenly you’re sitting in the back of a van going…somewhere. A place where an abortion will happen.
(Some of you will notice the obvious danger with that…but…yeah, outlawing abortions will result in some dead women. Some by accident, some…not.)
What does the post-Trump GOP looks like anyway? Is it a functional political party?
We know how to cut abortions to almost nothing, just do what the Nordic and some other European countries do: Provide comprehensive contraceptives and sex ed, and make sure that the health care cost during both pregnancy and birth is covered.
We just don’t want to do that.Report
“Roe v. Wade still has somewhere between a 70%-80% popularity. And basically has the entire time it’s existed.”
Seventy to eight percent popularity? Wow! Should be no trouble to get an actual law passed about it, then.
Oh, we don’t need to get a law passed because there was a court case and it was found that the founding documents of the country implied that a law already existed? Sounds great! Oh no, turns out that reasoning also gave us Citizens United, and Kelo, and Burwell. Maybe we shouldn’t have normalized the idea that matters of morality ought to be decided by five-out-of-nine dudes who have life appointments by the President of the United States.Report
Once again, you have just assumed my position, and in fact assumed one that is diametrically opposed to the position I hold, which is actually that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision, at least in the politically repercussions. (And sorta dumb legally too, in that, if we have a right to privacy in medical things, it’s _really hard_ to see how any drug laws can be justified.)
Keep assuming shit about what I think, it’s so much fun for me.Report
“Americans’ overall stance on abortion has been stable in recent years, with the 48% calling themselves “pro-choice” and 46% “pro-life” similar to the close division on this measure observed most years since 2010.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/313094/americans-abortion-views-steady-past-year.aspx
I don’t know where you pulled 70-80% from, but not only are you wrong on the numbers, you are wrong on the politics. And even if you were right about those numbers, at what point does it go from “a woman’s right” to “murder”? Has that been decided? Did we have a vote on it? Is there a clock on that? Maybe some conditions?
No, it is nothing like Marijuana or gay marriage. The resistance comes from a strong plurality of voters thinking it is murder, no different than holding a pillow over your 6mo’s face. It has nothing to do with some sort of attempt to keep women down, as I have heard from some people.
Until the left gets its head around that idea and deals with the opposition as it truly stands, it is always going to be losing ground on this, as it won’t craft an argument that takes its opposition into account.
You are making the fundamental mistake that I have seen many on the left make regarding this issue, that it is just a minority who wants it.Report
You just wandered right my _entire_ third paragraph, didn’t you? You linked to a poll that didn’t ask about Roe v. Wade.
Here’s a poll that actually does ask: http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_PBS-NewsHour_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables-on-Abortion_1906051428_FINAL.pdf#page=3
It’s page 9. It actually looks even worse for the anti side than what I said when broken out: A grand total of 13% of adults want to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Although a further 26% want to ‘Keep Roe v. Wade but add more restrictions’, whatever that is supposed to mean. I will accept the idea that some of those people, if not given that specific choice, would instead have picked to overturn Roe v. Wade. Let’s say half of them. That would put support for overturning it at 26%.
Like I said.
Also check page 27, where explicitly 19% of adults would vote to elect a candidate who would appoint judges to overturn Roe. vs. Wade, and another 16% would vote for them with reservations. That’s a grand total of 35%, and we’re not sure about some of that.
The amount of people who actually specifically want to overturn Roe v. Wade is somewhere around 20%. There’s another 10% or so people who sorta maybe want to do it, or don’t care if it happens…and if you want to argue that 10% is actually 15%, whatever.
This level of support, 70%-80%, for Roe v. Wade has actually been fairly constant, although it sometimes go down during the elections it becomes an issue, to around 60%-70% total…and then regains support immediately after the election.
Literally no ground has been lost.
What has actually happened is that the pro-life side has spent decades confusing people about procedures, and laws, and all sorts of things, to the point it is incredibly easy to find ‘pro-life people’ nonsensically demanding that the law take a position that is _laxer_ than what is currently allowed, and think they are arguing for a stricter law. (And vis versa, although to a smaller extent.)
Or just making it into an identity issue. Please flip to page 10 there, where 18% of ‘pro-life’ people want to ‘decriminalize’ abortion and another 14% are unsure. The ‘pro-choice’ side also confused, although only about halfway as much. Hmmm.
And then for fun, go and trying to square what’s on page 10 with page 4.
60% of adults on page 10 said they want to ‘Decriminalize abortion and make the laws less strict’. Meanwhile, only 47% of adults on page 4 are say ‘abortion should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman’ or harsher (With 9% taking the absurd line that it shouldn’t even be allowed to save the pregnant person’s life!)
Do…people think abortion laws don’t _currently_ allow that?
Except, wait, page 19 breaks out that 9% question of ‘allowed to save the life’: Please tell me if you support or oppose a law that allows abortion at any time during pregnancy if it is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman? And _11%_ answered that positively. At least 2% literally changed their answer to that during the poll itself! What is this madness?
Polling on this topic is, at this point, utter nonsense, because people are so completely misinformed and answer every question in random knee-jerk ways. It’s especially nonsensical when you poll on ‘Should laws be different?’ (Because people do not know the law) or ‘pro-life’ vs. ‘pro-choice’ (Because those have become mere identity labels instead of positions.) or ‘when human life begins’ (A symbolic idea.)
Page 18 has a fun one that just shows people have no idea what they are talking about, or possibly just don’t know what an important term means: 36% oppose a law that allows abortion at any time during pregnancy if there is no viability outside the womb, and another 11% aren’t sure.
If that was a _serious_ position, that would be insane. But it’s not, it’s people cobbling together random bits of misinformation to come to the utterly nonsensical polling conclusion that they want people to have to carry fetuses without, for example, brains to full term so they can die at birth. They do not want that (I hope!), they just do not know anything.
That’s 45% of people!
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In conclusion, Roe v. Wade is actually still very popular. Supported by somewhere around three quarters of the population, just as it always has been. That’s what people say to _that specific question_.
What the hell that actually _means_, what society thinks Roe v. Wade does, is anyone’s guess.Report
And there are lots of people who say some gun ownership is fine, but that we need to repeal the 2nd amendment.
That said, the only thing that poll shows is that there is zero consensus about the current state of abortion in the country. Why? Because we don’t actually have a working set of laws that debated this shit. Even you are admitting (“what is this madness”) that people are all over the map with it. As I showed above in a more recent poll, 45 percent fall on either side of the abortion debate, roughly. And that number has been constant over the last two decades. Now, as your poll shows, what that means, in reality, is quite different. And shows the need for a working set of laws that are debated as part of the national conversation as to what should be legal and when. Which is what I said we need. So, thank you for confirming what I said.Report
What does that mean, “a working set of laws that debated this shit”?
When Georgia passes a law regulating abortion clinics, is that a “working law” or not?
If a House and Senate were to pass a law saying “No abortion clinic shall be restricted in any manner” would that be a “working law”?Report
Actually, yes, it would.
But, alas.Report
Is there a difference between a “law” and a “working law”?
What does the modifier “working” mean in this context?Report
A law that doesn’t contradict itself.
A law that survives constitutional challenges.Report
Funny how the underlying laws in Roe V. Wade survived constitutional challenges and yet you don’t see that as sufficient.Report
And no thanks to you for assuming I disagreed with you in any points but the actual places I said I disagreed with?
I don’t disagree that Roe v. Wade being on the books has had very bad results, politically. Did I say I liked Roe v. Wade? Did I in any manner imply it?
The correction I was making that is that _before_ Roe v. Wade we actually did have a robust abortion debate in this country, one that the direction that had basically been decided.
Abortion rights hadn’t finished happening yet, but they was seen as basically the same as _every other feminist demand_.
For example, it was an even chance whether women in a state would get the right to an abortion or the right to _a bank account_. The bank account thing, incidentally, was decided by the Supreme Court two years after this.
That was the state of ‘what is going in abortion’ at the time of Roe v. Wade. It was not a giant independent issue, and to the extent it was an issue, it was part and parcel of every other piece of women’s rights that were evolving and being created at the time.
There was a debate, it…happened and was lost.
_After_ Roe v. Wade, the Republican party build the religious right to make it into a religious issue and managed to halt the social progress fairly successfully.
Which is, again, a bad thing, and I feel Roe. v. Wade is actually a problem there, especially as it has result in a boatload of conservative judges who _haven’t_ done anything about that but have done a great deal of damage to other things.Report
There are a handful of people out there who make distinctions between first-trimester abortion and third-trimester abortion.
There are a handful of people out there who refuse to make distinctions between first-trimester abortion and third-trimester abortion.
For my part, I find it unseemly that I am not allowed to see that an act have moral content or implications without immediately being asked to pass a law about it.Report
Oh, don’t assume my position is the current situation is ideal.
If you want how I really feel, I am actually not comfortable allowing abortions as late as we allow them, except for health concerns.
But I am _also_ not comfortable adding any restrictions on time to a country where politicians have shown they will make the process as long and complicated as possible, where many people have a difficult time managing to fit in the _current_ time restriction.
If I could write the laws, I also would require all hospitals to do them, including them under emergency rooms laws (As, in, they can no more put you out on the street with a pregnancy you do not want than a broken leg, as both of those can kill you if left untreated medically.), and I’d require insurance to cover them, and literally none of the bogus laws around them intended to make them harder.
I’d first make sure, both legally and just as important, practically (because they can be gotten pretty much anywhere healthcare can), it could be just a few hours between discovery of pregnancy and abortion.
And _that_ point, we can address the problem that the moment of ‘vitality’ is a rather late point for this, and it really should be done earlier, and I think somewhere around 20 weeks is a more reasonable cutoff. (Except for health issues.)
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OTOH, I’m not even sure we’d need to make a _law_ about this. This entire idea that people are choosing to get late-ish abortions is pro-life propaganda. What is happening is that it is _so hard_ for many people to get abortions that they keep getting delayed. People who get ‘optional’ abortions usually _decided_ to get them as soon as they figured out they were pregnant. (As opposed to the people who get abortions because of their own health issues and/or serious fetal problems.)
Which means that, if the ‘fetal pain’ theory is to be believed, pro-lifers are causing a hell of a lot of pain by delaying abortions months. Then again, if the pro-life movement actually cared about what it pretended to care about, it wouldn’t be full of people who oppose birth control and sex ed.
But in my ideal world, we could make sure people who want an abortion could get one almost instantly, and then _see_ if people are just sorta…goofing off for months instead of getting one, and if that is so, make them get them earlier.Report
Right, because the 13 months of committee hearings, Senate debate, White House summits and nattering nayboobs commentary on every channel imaginable (including here) wasn’t enough time to deal with every conceivable issue that could come up from a Democratic president offering an olive branch to Republicans by taking a concept for a republican think tank and Republican-led Massachusetts and making it palatable for Democrats, only to see Republicans vote it down as means to making him a one term president (in which they failed).
yep, we needed more time to make sure the Republicans would weaponize their own ideas in service of their agenda. Got it.Report
The most direct method of stopping the bill, the election of a Republican senator by said Massachusettes to stop it, necessitated it being rammed together by the procedural gimmick of reconciliation.
There wasn’t a need for more time, there was a need to kill it with fire.
And you might think harder about that olive branch. An idea floated by a think tank that was soundly rejected by the followers of that ideology is no olive branch. As I have mentioned many times, it was pretty soundly rejected by the people of both sides and only gained positive numbers when the next president stripped away parts of it. It cost Obama the house, he lost his grip on the Senate, and the rest is history.
I mean seriously, you gotta stop telling yourselves stories like this. It only shows your hubris.
A Hubris that was clobbered by Nemesis.Report
The hilarity of the “rushed through rammed down our throats” stuff is that they have had now ten years, a full decade, to come up with their own health care plan to compete with Obamacare.
And what have they produced after ten years of conversations among themselves, aided by the most powerful and prestigious thinkers in the conservative world?
A staffer for Thom Tillis saying, “If you can’t afford healthcare, you shouldn’t get it.”
So yeah. They need more time. Maybe in 2030, the Republicans will present a healthcare plan that isn’t a joke.Report
Seriously, when was the last time a GOP tax cut was passed with a 60 Senate vote super majority and House majority, then reconciled and then signed by the US President? HW Bush’s era? Reagan?Report
I, personally, have presented plans on this website. There are most certainly conservative plans that would work to make HC a lot cheaper, sooner or later we’ll enact them because the alternative is the break the bank.
That doesn’t change that to propose them right now is political poison because most people don’t want to face the fact that people, including themselves, will die.
We don’t have anything like a consensus on what to do because ANY plan is going to run into the whole “death” thing.
Which doesn’t change that Obamacare also didn’t have a consensus behind it and isn’t doing much if anything to reduce costs.Report
See, the one silver lining of the McConnell era is we don’t need to waste time with these sort of “truisms “.
There is only what you can do, and what you can’t do. And we either get 51 votes or we don’t.Report
Yup, fear indeed. 2020 is really hitting at every one of our structural fractures and weak points. In the short term there is no way this isn’t gong to suck. Maybe there could be some medium term gain if legislatures legislated more but there are forces fighting against that of course. The biggest, and one the current supremes will fight against, is trying prevent restrictions on voting. Give the R’s a new justice but nuke partisan gerrymandering and bring back a strong VRA and maybe this could work out. With the supremes under a cloud, one party actively fudging voting, current gerrymandering and some states fighting peoples voting that leaves few options for democracy to function.Report
It’s fraught indeed. But it’s fraught for both sides. I wonder if Mitch would force the nominee through if he knew it’d cost him his majority. He has a lot of vulnerable Senators who would likely really prefer to not have to weigh in on this matter. Senator Murkowski would need three other Republican Senators to feel the same way for Mitch to be unable to push a nominee through. The dynamics are quite interesting and fraught for all those Senators and that’s without even considering what they choose to do during the lame duck session.Report
I find it easier to think these Senators would just refuse to vote rather than vote against their team. If so, make that a total of seven Senators.Report
As I noted on the other RBG thread, I fully believe he will happily trade his Senate Majority for a solidly conservative SCOTUS, since he has been exceptionally good at getting ultra conservative judges appointed at all levels below SCOTUS. This has been a GOP goal for 4 decades now. He’s not going to cast aside his chance to do so based on iffy electoral math.Report
You may well be correct.Report