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Democrats: The Ukraine War Is Over. Let’s Talk Abortion Rights.
On day 69 the war in Ukraine fell off the top of the news pages.
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The emotional outrage of the Democrats has now been redirected to the Supreme Court. This happened after Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion on constitutional protection of reproductive rights:
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
Chief Justice Roberts has confirmed the authenticity of the 'leaked' draft but added that it does not represent the courts final decision.
The draft is dated February 10 2022. It was likely a tactical decision by Democrats to let it 'leak' now.
The war to 'weaken Russia' is going badly for the 'west' and the U.S. can do little to change that. The midterm election will likely see a huge loss for the Democrats. They need an emotional issue to incentivize their voters to go to the polls. Abortion rights may do that for a certain group of voters.
But I find it unlikely that it will, over all, be of much help.
"It's the economy, stupid" said James Carville, a strategist for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential election campaign. Prices are rising, especially for gas and food, while the housing market is suffering from upcoming higher interest rates. The U.S. will, like Europe, likely to go into a recession.
It is also obvious that the Democrats have no real interest in protecting abortion rights. They could have done so when they held the presidency, and majorities in the House and Senate. They never launched a serious attempt to put Roe vs. Wade into federal law. It always suited them better to keep the issue open and to use it during each election for fundraising and to scare their voters to the polls.
Now the Supreme Court is finally taking that ball away and leaves the issue to the states.
The Democrats can thank Barack Obama for that. When he was president he screwed up on abortion rights by not guaranteeing a liberal successor for Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wrote about the issue in September 2020 after Ginsberg had died:
In summer 2013 then President Barack Obama invited Ginsburg for a talk. It was seen as a request to her to retire. But Obama did not offer an adequate replacement for her position. The details are not know but Ginsburg rejected whoever Obama had in mind:
Referring to the political polarization in Washington and the unlikelihood that another liberal in her mold could be confirmed by the Senate, Ginsburg, the senior liberal on the nine-member bench, asked rhetorically, “So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?”
Ginsburg, in a wide-ranging 75 minute interview with Reuters in her chambers late on Thursday, also acknowledged that President Barack Obama had invited her to a private lunch last summer at the White House. It was an unusual move, she conceded.
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Ginsburg said on Thursday that even if she had retired, the president would have been more likely to have chosen a compromise candidate than a liberal.
The good-enough centrist nominee Obama offered as a replacement for the progressive Ginsburg was, in her judgment, not perfect enough. In consequence important Supreme Court decisions like Roe vs. Wade are now in jeopardy.
Senator Chuck Schumer, now pledges a new vote on legislation to preserve abortion rights. But the Senate is evenly split and the decisive conservative Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin, will vote against any such law.
The final Supreme Court decision will be published within the next two months.
Any poster who attempts to frame their argument on this topic for “We’re all here for the same reason! The Evil Empire!” and doesn’t go further to explain that the reason for being of the Evil Empire is to monopolize and expand extractive private finance capitalistic interests and to preserve access to “new” (to them) sources of wealth for a small minority of mostly Western white men (or families) isn’t telling you the whole truth. I’m not in the mood to discuss the specifics of how having a permanent underclass too poor to have time to learn what’s really being done in their name is one key to perpetuating the system that manifests in empire. It should be self-evident.
What I will say is that b is correct about Obama and the Democrats more broadly. At the presidential level they started selling out with Carter. They formed a decent, half-assed opposition (to the primacy of capital/corporate/patriarchal/religious right) at the local, state, judicial and legislative levels until Clinton, at which point it was left to a few judges and state representatives to even do a good job pretending they care about the working class and how the arch-right religious minority and law enforcement/carceral state are used to permanently repress them.
I’ll reach back to the first paragraph with an excerpt from the foreword of Jerry Mander’s (such a strange name given it’s pronounced “gerrymander”) book, “The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System”.
QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Jerry, do you mean my grand- father’s furniture store is killing the world? Is he one of those capi- talists? It’s a nice shop. He’s been there forty years, giving work to eight employees, and he pays a nice wage. With benefits. It doesn’t seem bad to me.
JERRY: No, stores like that are really not the problem. We need to make distinctions when we talk about capitalism. The word covers too many different things. One distinction is this: Size mat- ters! Small-scale local or family businesses, or community enterprises that make some money, pay salaries, send kids to college, and save a little, are not the problem, and never have been. But let’s say your granddad had somehow made gigantic profits from his store forty years ago, so he decided to partner with another store owner and invest in big real estate, converting small farms and open lands into shopping malls. And let’s say they started franchising shopping centers around the world, and were borrow- ing from big banks to do it, and then started buying banks, and buying other companies doing unrelated stuff, like shipping or mining or biotech farming, and then started getting their financ- ing from Goldman Sachs. Then they “went public” and were listed on the New York Stock Exchange as SHOP AMERICA! and they became friends with congressmen, spent 10 percent of their business income lobbying in Washington to overturn zoning, dump- ing, and other environmental laws that were getting in their way. eir eye on export trade subsidies, and maybe some military contracts, and were desperate to keep their stock prices high and to keep their taxes down.
Well, then, you’d have to say your grandfather would be operating in a different world, with different values and drives, than he does now. At the beginning, it was all about furniture for local families and businesses, not the primary needs of nonstop capital expansion, growth, stock values, and distributions. That’s the “capitalism” I worry about. That’s what’s consuming the world. Now it’s all about growth, not furniture, not sufficiency, not community welfare. It’s wealth, constantly seeking more wealth, to better seek still more wealth. That local store and those global businesses really shouldn’t share the same name. They are different creatures.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | May 3 2022 18:50 utc | 58
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