But as things turned out, people didn’t much like their established constitutional rights being revoked. The 2022 elections that followed the Supreme Court’s evisceration of reproductive rights demonstrated a clear backlash against the forced-birth agenda, with several key races turning against Republicans almost entirely on the issue of abortion, an issue which somehow galvanized the nation’s youngest voters (and most definitely a lot of their parents). Politico called it the central issue dominating 2022.
Since then, as they recover from their shellshock, Republicans everywhere have begun to stammer and blather about “exceptions” in an effort to backtrack and dissimulate on their forced-birth agenda. They proudly point to “exceptions” for the tiny 1%of abortions that are necessitated by rape, or the .5% necessitated by incest, as if these token “exceptions” should get them off the hook for what they’ve perpetrated.
But it’s too late: The damage is done. The forced-birth lobby has made it clear they won’t stop until all abortion is outlawed, everywhere, in every state. And Republicans will now face the consequences of their cynical, misogynistic experiment in social engineering every two years, until Hell itself freezes over. It’s bad enough when you pass laws to appease fanatics. But it’s even worse when you make them judges.
RELATED STORY: It is finally dawning on conservatives that abortion is dooming their party
There was never any doubt that once placed on the bench and outfitted with his imposing robe, Kacsmaryk would do everything in his power to gut reproductive rights in accordance with his religious dogma. Which is exactly why an anti-choice, anti-women, forced birther organization of hypocrites calling itself the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine” trotted down to Amarillo, Texas, to file suit attempting to invalidate the most common method that women and pregnant individuals use in this country to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They knew they really didn’t even need to make their ridiculous argument that mifepristone—a drug long considered by the medical and scientific community as “safer than Tylenol”—had somehow been mistakenly or negligently approved. They just needed a ridiculous, biased judge predisposed to go along with anything they said.
The mifepristone “ban” strategy may not succeed (states like California and Massachusetts are already stockpiling the drug, along with alternatives that will continue to allow people to terminate unwanted pregnancies) but that isn’t going to help Republicans, who now are at the point where they won’t even discuss the subject of abortion, or suddenly claim that they’re really on the side of women.
As Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo observes:
As we know from years of polling and a year of elections, abortion bans are really unpopular. But Republicans now have to deal with something beyond simple unpopularity. They have a corrupted branch of government — the federal judiciary — which they created but do not directly control, and which keeps upping the ante.
Fanatics like Kacsmaryk, with their fresh, lifetime appointments, have no incentive to relinquish their roles as “clearing houses” for the forced birth lobby which—as we have seen—keeps spinning new and novel ways to punish anyone who wants to terminate a pregnancy, or anyone who assists them. As Marshall writes, “the crooked judges Republicans spent a generation pushing into the federal judiciary keep coming up with new strategies for back-door or even front-door ways to push through new bans.” Nor is there any real likelihood that imperious, pompous didacts like Samuel Alito or his junior Trump-appointed cohorts on the Supreme Court will be any more deferential to the political travails of their party now that they’re on the cusp of achieving what they’ve all been specifically bred to accomplish.
Ultimately the people most affected by this heinous attempt at social control will make the decision whether they must bow to the religious biases of unelected, intolerant, right-wing judges and the festering think-tanks that created them. That decision will be made at the ballot box, every election year, for the foreseeable future as the horror stories mount and more and more young voters recognize the reality of the revolting situation Republicans have foisted on them through these malignant judges. As the election for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court amply demonstrated last week, this issue is not going away, and in fact hasn’t even come close to peaking in its intensity.
It shouldn’t have been this way. As the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board observed this week:
Ideally, voters shouldn’t decide what rights people should have or — more worrisome — decide what rights people shouldn’t have. The establishment of civil rights and the protection of human rights should be the work of the courts. But when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe and took away the constitutional right to abortion, it left it up to the states — and the voters of those states — to protect reproductive rights.
For decades the religious right has been salivating for a post-Roe America and elected Republicans leaped to make it happen, not by acquiescing to the will of the majority of the American public but by radically refashioning the courts to do their dirty work for them. Now, thanks to their corruption of a federal judiciary that has grown effectively out of their control, those same elected Republicans are going to be forced to bear the consequences of that decision, well into the future.
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