Abortion activism has fallen on tough times in the nation’s capital and it is growing embarrassingly desperate. The U.S. House of Representatives barely passed legislation earlier this week that would have codified the now-defunct Roe v. Wade into federal law, but it’s dead on arrival in the Senate, which doesn’t have nearly the 60 votes required to advance the measure. Efforts to intimidate Supreme Court Justices continue, to no effect. Even efforts by the White House to appease demands from the abortion lobby have little or no teeth.
As the bard, William Shakespeare, once wrote, it’s all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The House voted 219-210 on July 15 to advance the abortion bill – for the second time. But the vote, along with upcoming votes on same-sex marriage and contraceptives, are not serious attempts at legislation because they have no chance of passing the Senate. And the House knows this
Rather, according to The Associated Press, they are admittedly just election-year efforts to force the representatives of both parties to go on the record on issues voters might be interested in.
Other avenues for abortion activists have also proven ineffective.
For example, a couple weeks ago protestors descended, at the urging of a pro-abortion group known as ShutDownDC, on Morton’s Steakhouse in the Washington, D.C., area where Justice Brett Kavanaugh was dining. Kavanaugh reportedly finished his meal but left through a rear door with his security detail.
What does the harassment of a justice accomplish? I think you already know the answer to that. Nada.
Strike one.
And, in response to an increasing chorus from the left to “do something,” President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order telling his federal agencies to “consider” doing all they can to protect abortion access. It will do nothing. The EO gives the appearance of doing something without actually doing anything, and manages to accomplish all that without admitting that as the nation’s chief executive, Biden can’t make law, he can only enforce it.
Strike two.
The administration is also coming under pressure from the mainstream press to declare a “public health emergency” in order to enable abortions in pro-life states where they are currently prohibited. However, even Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told The Associated Press it “didn’t seem like a great option.”
Strike three.
The left’s recent string of swings and misses at the federal level on abortion only serves to highlight that abortion was imposed on the country by unelected justices, not assented to by its citizens. What may have been a short-term, even a 50-year, win for the left, was never a recipe for long-term policy success.
That realization may be sinking in, as activists and politicians on the left are now fretting over the continued viability of same-sex marriage, another policy imposed on the country by the Supreme Court.
Historically, leftists have been used to getting their way in non-democratic fashion, by getting unelected judges to create constitutional “rights” out of “penumbras, formed by emanations” of various amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
We’ve gotten abortion, homosexual sex, and gay “marriage” that way. A hat trick.
And it worked for 50 years, until the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision exposed the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision for what it was – a blatant constitutional overreach decided in a fashion that bore no resemblance to the judicial function envisioned by the Framers.
Now that the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito has laid bare the fallacies and historical errors of Roe and its progeny, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the issue of abortion is no longer the subject of an edict from the judicial elites at 1 First Street NE in Washington, D.C.
It has been returned to the states and their voting citizens.
In other words, abortion is an issue for the democratic process, because the Constitution is silent on the subject. It’s as simple and direct as that.
And we’re already seeing a wide divergence in abortion policies across the land because of our nation’s 233-year commitment to “federalism,” the system of state sovereignty designed by the Framers as part and parcel of our constitutional Republic where the federal government was given only limited, enumerated powers. The rest, according to the 10th Amendment, were reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous Supreme Court dissent in 1932 that states were the laboratories of democracy, where “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
That constitutional ideal is completely contrary to the national abortion regime that abortion supporters want imposed on the entire country.
So abortion activists, still in denial over the constitutional course correction Dobbs gave us, are agitating, intimidating, vandalizing and threatening everyone, including pregnancy resource centers, churches, pro-life attorneys, Supreme Court justices, and even the president. And don’t forget, they’re also suing pro-life states, trying to block laws that protect preborn life.
In short, they’re doing everything possible except what the Constitution provides for, i.e., convincing their fellow citizens, and the politicians who represent them, to pass laws they want. That’s what pro-life states do. Even some pro-abortion states have done that.
But that’s not good enough for the leftist mobs who have declared their “rage” at losing the ability to impose abortion on the rest of us.
And they have the audacity to call pro-life supporters “fascists.”
As the inimitable Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Related:
US Senate to Vote on Extreme Pro-Abortion Bill Today
The Administration is Working Hard to Counter State Pro-Life Laws
U.S. Senate Refuses to Advance Radical Abortion Bill for the Second Time
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