Unless you're living in a news desert where word of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning abortion rights hasn't reached yet, likely you're either outraged or ecstatic -- depending on how you view abortion.
Me, I'm in the outraged camp.
I strongly favor a woman's right to choose what medical care she gets. That leads me to be upset at what anti-abortion zealots and their enablers in the Republican Party have wrought: the imminent doing-away of a constitutional right to an abortion that has been the law of the land since 1973, almost 50 years.
Even worse, there's good reason to believe that the Supreme Court won't stop with doing away with the constitutional right to an abortion, but could reverse other rights also, such as same-sex marriage and contraception. So says a piece in The Atlantic, "Alito's Plan to Repeal the 20th Century."
However, listening to liberal Congressional politicians speak today about how they're going to work to codify a right to an abortion in a law to be introduced soon leaves me with a bad feeling also.
After all, these are the same Democratic politicians who have been promising to pass voting rights legislation because that too deserved urgent attention. Yet nothing has happened with voting rights. Just as nothing has happened with police reform, immigration policy, and other progressive priorities.
Since there aren't 51 Democratic votes for doing away with the filibuster in the Senate, and no abortion rights bill can get 60 votes, the chance of such a bill passing is essentially zero. Which raises the question: why didn't Democrats enshrine the right to an abortion in legislation when they had the chance at a time when this was possible since 1973, assuming it ever was?
As much as I dislike today's Republican Party, I give the GOP credit for fighting tough on what it deems important. Yes, they fight dirty, but that got them a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court and gerrymandered districts all across the country that now provide them with a solid base of support.
Democrats are good at expressing outrage at Republican nastiness. They're not nearly as skilled at responding in kind to cure the ills that the GOP is inflicting on our country.
Below I've shared some tweets from my Twitter feed that I especially liked out of the many views about the Supreme Court leaked draft order that I read today. You'll see that a woman who clerked at the Court has changed her mind about who likely sent the draft order to Politico reporters.
Yesterday she thought it was a liberal law clerk or justice who wanted to raise the alarm at how five conservative justices were poised to not just restrict abortion rights but do away with them entirely by reversing the Court's previous rulings on abortion.
But now she leans toward the notion that it was a conservative law clerk or justice who sought to lock in Justice Alito's strong, even harsh, draft order, since it appears that Chief Justice Roberts may have made some progress in finding support for having abortion rights pared back, yet not eliminated entirely.
Now that will be more difficult, since any weakening of the draft order will infuriate anti-abortion activists who want abortion illegal in any state that wishes it so, and ideally in the entire country -- which could happen if Republicans get control of both the House and Senate in 2024, along with the presidency.
So any conservative justice in favor of softening Alito's language will find this more difficult to do, given that the draft order has been publicized. Anyway, we may never know who leaked it. It just won't be surprising if it turns out to be, say, one of Justice Thomas' law clerks.
Here's the tweets.
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