Roe v. Wade is effectively a walking corpse who will soon be put down, which is fitting because thousands and thousands of women every year will join Roe in the Great Beyond. Our Sunday Long Read this week is the apropos tale of the nearly 50-year crusade to kill Roe by forced-birth revenants documented by the Washington Post.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still remembers the shock he felt when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He also recalls what happened next.
“The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” McConnell said in an interview this past week, remembering his reaction that night as he watched results from a basement office at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He soon called Donald McGahn, campaign counsel to the president-elect, who was slated to become the top White House lawyer.
A week later, Leonard Leo, the head of the conservative Federalist Society and a McConnell ally, was sitting with the president-elect and his advisers in Trump Tower in New York with a list of six potential conservative nominees alphabetically typed onto a piece of personalized stationery, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.
As incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, came in and out of the room, Leo laid out a road map for Trump on the federal court system, potentially transforming the foundational understanding of rights in America.
It was a moment antiabortion activists had been working toward for decades: The highest reaches of Republican power finally focused, in unison, on achieving the once implausible goal of revisiting the jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s, including Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
The leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion on abortion this past week showed that a majority of the court is now poised to do just that, with three of the five potential votes for overturning Roe coming from justices recommended by Leo, appointed by Trump and confirmed under the leadership of McConnell.
For the activists who have fought against enormous odds to elevate the issues of abortion and judicial selection, the sudden turnabout is nearly as shocking as Trump’s election was for McConnell. Interviews with more than two dozen movement leaders, Republican officials and operatives describe a half-century journey that began to settle only over the last decade, as the politics of abortion finally polarized itself as a partisan issue and emerged as a top-tier Republican priority.
“I think even until earlier this week most pro-life leaders were holding their breath,” said Charles Donovan, a former Reagan White House aide, who began working as legislative director for National Right to Life in the late 1970s. “I do think it’s pretty stunning.”
Abortion rights advocates have also been stunned by the transformation, accusing Republicans of hijacking the courts for partisan and unpopular ends.
“This is exactly what we feared was coming,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, a network of abortion clinics. “Republicans just do this and all the gloves are off.”
With almost no change in national public opinion over the past five decades, and as a majority of Americans remain opposed to overturning Roe, the movement succeeded by mobilizing a determined minority of Americans and adopting the protest tactics and sometimes the language of the left. They transformed religious interpretations of prenatal life, embraced medical advancements that gave new understanding of the fetus and helped to build an academic legal movement in the Ivy League universities that railed against the evolution of American jurisprudence.
Most importantly, they nurtured a generation of political and legal leaders who saw in the setbacks of the 1970s to 1990s a defining cause. As a young man in the 1970s, McConnell, 80, had worked with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, an avowed opponent of Roe, in the Justice Department. A photograph of the two men from that time still hangs in McConnell’s office.
“If I was looking at ways to have an impact on the country that I thought would be good and positive, this would be the way to do it,” McConnell said in the interview this past week at his office on Capitol Hill.
“Majorities change. Taxes go up. Taxes go down,” he continued. “If you prefer America right of center, which I do, and you’re looking around at what you can do to have the longest possible impact on the kind of America you want, it seems to me you look at the courts.”
The loss was sealed by the 2016 election, and for those of you reading who didn't vote for Hillary or worse, voted for Trump, behold the consequences of your actions.
Now the first is to preserve what rights we have left before those are stripped as well. History tells us that's going to be a grueling, ugly fight. When I said time and time over the last five years that we will be dealing with the aftermath of the Trump regime for the rest of my lifetime, this is only the beginning of what I warned was coming.
Should Trump or someone like him win and get control of Congress in 2024, it will take the rest of your children's lifetimes, maybe your grandchildren's lifetimes that we'll have to try to wrest back women's bodily autonomy from these assholes. If a Republican is able to trade in Alito and Thomas for younger models like Barrett and Gorsuch, it will take generations to fix this mess. The damage will be incalculable, and that's just on the civil rights side.
Imagine what these monsters will do in the years ahead on climate change, worker safety, clean air and water, and everything else. We've got to give Biden 53 or more senators and keep the House just to have a shot at this. We can do it.
We have to.
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