A number of Women’s Rights and Abortion Rights advocates have been highly critical of the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats for not having a plan ready to roll out immediately when the activist radical Republican U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and signaled to the world that same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage would be next on its “hit list” of constitutional rights that this activist radical Republican Court wants to strip away from Americans. After all, Democrats had a full month advanced warning with the unprecedented leak of the unhinged Justice Alito draft opinion.
Huffington Post reported, Democrats Want Biden To Be More Aggressive On Abortion Rights:
[S]ome progressives feel the president has been missing in action when it comes to defending abortion care and failed to lay the groundwork for a more fulsome counter-offensive once the Supreme Court’s decision came out. His speech in the wake of Roe’s demise was his first address to the nation on abortion rights, even though the onslaught of anti-choice attacks have been going on throughout his presidency.
[P]resident Joe Biden called on the Senate to weaken the filibuster to protect abortion rights on Thursday morning, a step praised by Democrats who remain worried about a rudderless response from the administration to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“I believe we have to codify Roe v. Wade into law and the way to do that is to make sure Congress votes to do that,” Biden said in Madrid after attending the NATO summit. “And if the filibuster gets in the way … we should be requiring an exception to the filibuster for this action to deal with the Supreme Court decision.”
But despite this announcement, which came after several days of Vice President Kamala Harris suggesting they would not attempt to modify the filibuster, party officials and advocates fear his administration is not doing enough to drive home a political message or craft a policy response, especially considering the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision gave the White House months to prepare.
The White House is unlikely to take steps progressives have called for to protect abortion rights, including building abortion clinics on federal land or military bases, viewing them as logistically and legally unworkable. It has long ruled out other steps, including expanding the size of the Supreme Court, and continued opposition from Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) means Democrats lack the votes to make major changes to the filibuster, even if Biden has now lent his support.
Hi @SenatorSinema why don’t you have a town hall in Arizona and explain your choice to protect an old Senate Rule instead of a woman’s right to an abortion?
You haven’t had a town hall in awhile, I will cohost one of it helps. https://t.co/zhMVnlJbZc— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) July 2, 2022
By electing more Democrats to the U.S. Senate, Americans can render this odd couple, Sens. “Manchinema,” “Mr. & Mr. Irrelevant” in the next Congress on their way out the door in 2024. “Strategery” requires voters to think long-term, like the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Sen. Mitch McConnell does. Your desire for instant gratification doesn’t cut it.
On Wednesday, 33 of the Senate’s 50 Democratic-aligned senators wrote to Biden asking him for unspecified “bold action.”
“You have the power to fight back and lead a national response to this devastating decision, so we call on you to take every step available to your Administration, across federal agencies, to help women access abortions and other reproductive health care, and to protect those who will face the harshest burdens from this devastating and extreme decision,” wrote the senators, led by Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
White House officials said the law and small congressional majorities limit what Biden can do, and so his calls to vote for Democrats in November are the best answer. White House officials have held weekly calls with leading abortion rights organizations. The White House is also playing up the threat of Republicans passing a national abortion ban if they win control of Congress.
“The President is being straight with the American people, taking major actions under executive authority as he fights this extreme decision very hard, but being clear and honest that only Congress can fix the situation,” a White House official said.
Many liberal groups want more from the president, and to focus his rhetorical support on theoretically persuadable members of Congress. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group often aligned with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), wrote in an email to its members that Biden needed to “use the bully pulpit” to pressure Sinema and two Republican senators who support abortion rights, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to vote for a filibuster carve-out.
“Now is the time for President Biden to push for Court reform and elimination of the filibuster so that Congress can do the work of the American people ― on abortion rights, democracy reform, gun safety, and legislation to save our planet from climate disaster,” the group wrote. “He must meet this moment or he will be complicit in the further erosion of our democracy.”
Sen. Warren’s “wish list” is not an action plan. All of the things she listed in her letter are already part of the Democratic Party platform and President Biden’s agenda. Democrats ran for office on this in 2020 for chrissakes.
Two prima donna Vichy Democrats who are collaborators with the enemies of democracy and are appeasing the anti-democracy Sedition Party in undermining American democracy are the problem. What are Democratic Party leaders doing to isolate and punish these appeasers of the enemies of democracy to enforce party discipline? Democratic senators are “complicit in the further erosion of our democracy.”
“Oh, we can’t do that” they would say. “They may switch parties and join the Republicans!”
I’ve got news for you, Poindexter, these two are already voting with the enemies of democracy on your major agenda items, so they are effectively Republicans now. Even worse, the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell, finds it more useful to him to have these two disloyal Democrats sabotaging the Democratic Party from the inside to make Democrats look weak and ineffectual (the old “Dems divided” meme that the lazy feckless media loves to parrot). He prefers it that way. And if he wins, he gets two more feckless senators in his camp. It’s a win-win for the devil.
If this was a military unit, these two Vichy Democrats would be looking at a blanket party in the Senate cloakroom. But no, Senate rules of decorum and congeniality must take precedence for Senators. Like their “precious,” the antiquated Jim Crow era Senate filibuster rule.
Paul Waldman of the Washington Post writes, Don’t get mad at ‘weak’ Democrats. Instead, get organized. (excerpt):
[Progressive Democrats in Congress] are exasperated with the White House for not having a more aggressive response. The party’s base doesn’t see their elected representatives “fighting,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). “We can’t just tell people, ‘Well, just vote — vote your problems away.’ Because they’re looking at us and saying, ‘Well, we already voted for you.’ ”
As for President Biden, he and the White House appear more focused on what they can’t do than what they will do. So the frustration and anger are perfectly justified.
But now liberals and progressives have to ask themselves: What are we going to do with our anger?
There’s a lot they can do. But the worst response — one that is common in some quarters of the left — is to say that because congressional Democrats are feckless and weak, there’s no point in voting for them.
This is a moment when the left has to look at the success the right just achieved, and learn some lessons from it.
Here’s the first lesson: You know who never stopped voting? Those antiabortion activists who are now celebrating, and planning new legislation to make abortion illegal nationally, to ruthlessly punish any woman (or girl) who tries to get one, and anyone who helps her.
That’s not because they had faith in Republican officeholders. They didn’t. They knew they had to push them and prod them and threaten them. And a lot of the time, those politicians held their movement at arm’s length. Until Donald Trump, a succession of Republican presidents refused to appear in person at the annual March for Life in Washington, because they worried about the optics of seeming too close to the antiabortion cause.
Nor did Republican politicians push for national abortion restrictions in Congress, no matter how much activists might have wanted them to. They were neither absolutist nor particularly aggressive on the issue, leaving it mostly to Republican-run states to perform the kind of misogynistic legislative savagery so many on the right thirsted for.
Yet the antiabortion base never stopped voting. These activists and voters knew it was the minimum they had to do — absolutely necessary, but not nearly sufficient.
Which is why the broader strategy they employed was comprehensive and multipronged. They organized at the grass-roots level, creating generation after generation of activists. They never stopped making their case to anyone who would listen, trying to win new adherents to their cause.
They also put an extraordinary amount of attention on the courts and the law, much more than liberals did. They invested time and money developing novel legal arguments to restrict abortion rights. They launched wave after wave of lawsuits. Perhaps most important, they created a legal pipeline, coordinated by the Federalist Society, that identified and elevated conservative lawyers to the judiciary — lawyers whose opposition to abortion rights was guaranteed.
In the process, they convinced the entire GOP of something Democrats should have known all along: that nothing was more important than capturing the courts. That’s why, when the moment came for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to steal a Supreme Court seat, nearly every Republican stood behind him, even alleged “moderates.”
It’s because of all this that Republicans achieved this extraordinary victory even though they never succeeded in persuading the public to agree with them. While they would certainly like to have most Americans on their side, their strategy was constructed such that it isn’t actually necessary.
Liberals have to learn from this history. When you lose, you have to ask why and how it happened. And if you’re angry at weak Democrats, figure out how to make them stronger. If a Democrat says, “Give us two more Senate seats and we can pass a bill codifying abortion rights nationally,” they’re not wrong — so make them do it.
To repeat, voting is the absolute minimum liberals have to do, and they absolutely must. Not only that, a huge number of races up and down the ballot bear directly on abortion rights: governors, attorneys general, state representatives, prosecutors, judges, county councils, referendums — almost too many to mention.
So yes, you have to keep voting if you want to restore abortion rights. And if you don’t think Democratic leaders are getting the job done? Just remember, it’s not up to them alone. It’s up to you, too.
Waldman’s colleague Jennifer Rubin adds, Abortion activists are wrong to criticize Biden. Here’s why.
Democrats never fail to amaze me with their ability to turn on allies. Too many are indulging in this habit in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights.
The outrage is not that the White House is doing too little to rectify the forced-birth crowd’s barbaric assault on women, as some on the left contend. The real issue is the barbaric assault itself.
The complaints on the left center on two issues: The first is the filibuster in the Senate, which some argue President Biden should be opposing more aggressively. But Biden has no ability to change this political reality. If Democrats want to break the filibuster, they must elect more Democrats to the Senate.
The second has to do with whether the administration can use federal lands or public facilities in states where abortion is illegal to provide the services. Some Democrats are frustrated that the White House hasn’t embraced this.
But the idea is not as easy as it sounds. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement last week that “federal agencies may continue to provide reproductive health services to the extent authorized by federal law,” but that only pertains to government doctors (e.g., military doctors) and only to the extent permitted under the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding of abortions except in cases of rape, incest or that threaten the life of the mother. This does not allow treatment for the public at large or allow such doctors to perform abortions beyond the Hyde Amendment. Even if a federal government doctor on a federal property were to provide abortion services covered by the Hyde Amendment, the state might still try to go after the doctor’s medical license. (This would then raise an interesting Supremacy Clause, the outcome of which would be uncertain.)
The chilling effect from this means that there would not be doctors rushing in to fill the void.
Speaking on use of federal employees to provide abortion services, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday that “we understand the proposal is well intentioned, but here’s the thing: It could actually put women and providers at risk.” She stressed that “in states where abortion is now illegal, women and providers who are not federal employees … could be potentially be prosecuted.” She added that “there’s actually dangerous ramifications to doing this.”
Rather than set up women and doctors for possible prosecution, the administration can take more feasible measures — and it already is.
First, the administration is trying to guarantee access to medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions. Garland stated that “the FDA has approved the use of the medication Mifepristone. States may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” But this only covers state laws that seek to outlaw the medication on safety grounds. It does not protect women from a ban on abortions of any kind.
This approach also raises a licensing problem for doctors. As the New York Times reports, “One complication is that doctors are licensed at the state level, and practicing medicine without a license in another state is a crime, although it can be difficult to decide where a doctor consulting virtually with an out-of-state patient is ‘practicing.’ ”
Second, the Justice Department is seeking to protect the right of women to travel to other states to seek abortions. Garland specified that “under bedrock constitutional principles [the right to travel is a part of the “liberty” of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment], women who reside in states that have banned access to comprehensive reproductive care must remain free to seek that care in states where it is legal. Moreover, under fundamental First Amendment principles, individuals must remain free to inform and counsel each other about the reproductive care that is available in other states.” That could also open one avenue, albeit one not practical for many poor women or minors.
The truth is the federal government’s options currently are very constrained. This battle must be waged in Congress, state legislatures, state courts and in public referenda. Some on the left will take issue with the suggestion that they must “vote harder”; in reality, their marching orders are to organize with the same effectiveness as forced-birth advocates.
There are battles up and down the ballot that can affect the issue: from district attorneys and sheriffs to state lawmakers and governors to the House and Senate. If Democrats succeed, they can codify Roe v. Wade and other privacy rights into law and even reform the Supreme Court, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is attempting to do.
In fact, Democrats are numerically close. If Democrats believe (as I do) that this is a motivating issue for millions of Americans, they should run on a “women’s lives are on the ballot” message. Use that momentum to hold the House and add a couple Democratic senators in the midterms.
One way to energize the fight to preserve abortion access is to characterize it as a fight for other rights at risk of being overturned, such as contraception or gay marriage. The fight to defend Americans’ privacy cannot be won going issue by issue. Instead, there must be a coalition to stand against the Christian nationalist movement to return the country to the 19th century.
Progressive groups that are inviting their base to start fighting with the White House only impair this effort. There is plenty of work ahead, and the forced-birth crowd must face a united front.
Let the Republicans divide themselves between the White Christian Naionalist MAGA/QAnon Sedition wing of the party and the old guard conservative Republicans who are horrified by thse people.
Democrats need to be unified – no more circular firing squad – and focused on increasing Democatic majorities in the House and Senate, governorships, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and state legislative chambers. This will require increased voter turnout as we saw in 2020 in order to overcome the GQP gerrymandering advantage in 2022.
The historical Democratic midterm voter drop-off has to be relegated to the ash heap of history this year if you want to save American democracy. It’s all on the line this year. There is no “wait until next year.”
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