Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a progressive icon, but she is getting old and frail. The 85-year-old recently underwent cancer surgery and was missing from service for an extended period. Despite attending an event Monday night – her first public appearance since the surgery – Justice Ginsburg has not yet returned to duty or even spoken publicly. Speculation is beginning to rise that she will have to be replaced during President Donald Trump’s first term.
...the Democratic Party is scrambling to push through new abortion state laws before the progressive window closes.
Normally, she would be replaced by a judge with bipartisan support, but after the left’s character assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has openly declared that the next Supreme Court appointment would be a staunch conservative. No more mister nice guy.
Panic
That scares the living daylights out of Democrats, who fear the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, and thereby remove the federal protection of abortion laws in the U.S.
Because of both Kavanaugh and the prospect of a near-future conservative Ginsburg-replacement, it appears that the Democratic Party is scrambling to push through new abortion state laws before the progressive window closes. Both New York and Virginia lawmakers have introduced new bills to extend abortion rights.
The timing with Ginsburg’s absence may be a coincidence because the new year is the normal period for introducing new measures. However, Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) makes it clear that the bill is motivated by fear of the Supreme Court: “Kavanaugh [and Gorsuch are] going to reverse Roe v. Wade. I have no doubt. So what do we do? Protect ourselves: Pass a state law that is a prophylactic from the federal action by passing the Reproductive Health Act.”
Pro-Life Infection
The choice of wording by Cuomo is illuminating. A prophylactic is a substance or device that protects against something – generally used in reference to vaccines and contraceptives. It is tempting to interpret him to refer to the fetus as a disease and abortion as the cure, but Cuomo is identifying the conservative pro-life morality as an infection, which is just a fancy way of saying that those hillbillies who don’t like abortion belong to Hillary Clinton’s infamous basket of deplorables.
That the Democrats are panicking can be deduced from the fact that they are introducing a bill that even pro-abortion Americans largely oppose. A recent Maris poll shows that 81% of all Americans and 66% of those who identify as pro-choice would restrict abortion to, at most, the three first months of pregnancy.
Stacking the Courts
Thus, the Democrats are trying to push through legislation that makes them look like baby killers, even to many who support the right to abort. That’s a kind of public relations blunder that they normally would not make unless they were motivated by strong fear.
The debacle does, however, reveal their mode of thinking: If they don’t have popular support for their ideas, they try to stack the courts with progressive judges that allow them to push through politics that they would never be able to legislate based on elections. With Trump at the helm, the strategy seems to have backfired, and now instead it will be the Republicans who get to stack the courts with conservative judges for a few decades.
