Say they had codified abortion rights, which never would have been as easy as you imply, how would that have changed the Christian Right’s strategy? They still would have worked tirelessly to overturn it. If not by Congress, then by the exact same Supreme Court strategy they did use. What, exactly, would that have accomplished?

And don’t make it sound like overturning Roe was a forgone conclusion. It was upheld time and again for 50 years. It took a perfect storm of bad timing, Justice deaths, and a political party willing to absolutely buck tradition and procedure.

Yeah. There is a strong human impulse to seek compromise to avoid conflict, especially among the DC chattering classes. But on the subject of abortion, there really isn't a compromise position. You either believe that the woman has the right to control her own body, or you believe that the unborn child's right to exist is more important.

There is a lot of attention paid to things like how how many weeks into the pregnancy the child is, but politically speaking there is no number of weeks you can pick that one or both sides won't try to move to towards their end.

When I was a kid I asked my dad about abortion and why they couldn't find a compromise. He said, "Politicians are frantically looking for one". That was thirty years ago. They are still looking.

I never implied it was easy... strawmanning much??? Do you know how many times the Democrats have had the majority in the house and senate and a democrat president in the white house since Jan 1973??... 5 times ... that is 10 years out of the 50 ... and if you count the senate and congress only with a republican president then that is an additional 7 more times i.e. 14 more years... so they had the numbers and ability to do it for 24 years out of the 50...


Hypotheticals that mean nothing... they did not do it... when they could have ... they never even tried in the 24 years they had power to do it.


So what... it is a lot harder to try to overturn a passed and codified law than not having the law in the first place... and saying that it would be useless to pass a law because the opposition is going to TRY to overturn it ... is claptrap and hogwash.


It would have accomplished having it as a codified law...


Another strawman... but .... Hahaha... funny... so they did not even try to pass the law because they were relying on the difficulty of overturning a SCOTUS whim and opinion... that all it needed to overturn was a majority corrupt number of unelected zealots and cult members to be installed into it by corrupt and zealot presidents elected by the minority of voters???


Had they codified it into law... the stuff you mentioned above would also have failed... the fact that they did not even bother is the reason they succeeded.

I mean, it sure sounds like you are implying it would have been easy. If they held all the cards 10 out of the last 50 years, what prevented them from codifying abortion rights?

How would it have been a lot harder? The anti-abortion Court is in place. They could have just as easily declared a previous ruling and a law unconstitutional as they could have declared just a previous ruling unconstitutional. It's not like they would have had to do each individually.

And equally as overturned by this court.

It's funny how twice you call something a strawman and then immediately make the exact argument.

What you just described has never happened before. Why would anyone expect that it would?

There was no pressing need to fix something that wasn't broken. Sure, with hindsight, it is a gaping flaw to assume that Supreme Court justices would respect precedent as Supreme Court justices have largely done for almost the entire history of the US.

What are you talking about? Why would it have failed? What would have prevented it? Even if there had been a federal law, it could not have prevented Mitch McConnel from controlling when SCOTUS nominees were voted on. It wouldn't have prevented Trump getting elected or RBG dying when she did. It definitely wouldn't have prevented anti-choice advocates from campaigning against women's rights.

It is fine to pursue compromise when the other party is also pursuing it and have not declared outright in the open that they will not compromise.

The Christian Dominionists have declared in the open with no shame whatsoever what their goals are...

Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations

So they never even try to do it because it is hard and the other party MIGHT do something against it.... wow... exactly the motto of the democrats... I agree!!!

That isn't what I said at all. You need to calm down and actually read instead of jumping to the wrong conclusion.

I've mentioned before that there's a church I drive past every day on my way to work. Shortly after I moved to this area, which was toward the end of President Obama's first term, they had a sign out front that said:

Satan likes to compromise.
God demands unconditional victory.

Exactly... and as you said... this is nothing new and has been forewarned for decades.

Watch this interview about a new book that lists the ways the SCOTUS has been stacking the decks in favor of religious zealotry for years.

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

That would depend on whether Congress would have the foresight to also cite the interstate commerce clause as an additional justification for their legislation. That makes overturning that statute way trickier because it would have justification not resting on Roe.

Perhaps more importantly this would have totally cut off at the knees the last several decades of states passing restrictions intended to cripple abortion access. Any state law would be precluded by the Federal law. Aside from how it affects the eventual legal status, this would have saved women in reactionary states from decades of additional danger and pain.

Which totally changes the nature of the legal fight over abortion access in ways to numerous to mention. The forced birthers would have had zero wins during the first four decades or so and thus way less momentum.

You’re assuming a rational decision based on sound legal foundations. Hobbs referenced legal arguments from the 16th (17th?) century to rationalize the verdict. We’re past expecting logic and reason.

So the solution is to not even bother to even try to even attempt to do anything??? as per the typical democrat strategy!!!

"Don't do thing which have been proven to scientific levels of vigor to not work."

"Oh so you're saying we shouldn't do anything!"

Your first premise is not true... so your entire argument fails abysmally.

You incorrectly complained about me making straw man arguments and now you are making a straw man argument. Do you even know what a straw man argument is?

I think Suddenly's other point is the more important one. It would have prevented decades of allowing abortion rights to be chipped away and shadow banned with onerous restrictions and impossible technicalities.

To address his first, a SC overturning of Roe would have been seen as a much more drastic action, and would have had less of an impact just from the political inertia. Instead it was left hanging by a thread, and when that thread was cut, welp.

It's the internet. Literally nobody does. It's just a word that means "You made my argument look bad."

Well yeah but that's been the Right's whole strategy for decades now. Demand a compromise, then move further into crazy and demand a compromise again.

That's why the Right is radicalize itself. The crazier YOU are the crazier the "compromise" is.

Which is why the right response would have been to stop compromising ourselves years ago. We just ended up normalizing the crazy until it's literally sitting on the supreme court.

Well we (as a society) spent all our time patting ourselves on the back about how good we were at ignoring the crazy because you know if you react to crazy it wins and no I don't plan on getting over that anytime real soon.

I'm not sure how it would have done that. Any federal law would have been modified a hundred times in the last 50 years.

I think overturning Roe is already seen as a pretty damn drastic action. If Roe is overturned as not being Constitutional, why would a law codifying Roe make the right any more Constitutional?

Neato. 'Course, it's not up to us. The Democrats currently in congress still don't have the will to do what most of us here can probably agree needed to be done all those decades ago. They're still "going high." The change in rhetoric over the past month or so makes me hopeful the midterms might tip them over the line into action, but that remains to be seen.

Roe wasn't about abortion, technically. It was a ruling about privacy. A law forbidding abortion restrictions would have had its legal basis in something different, ideally an outright establishment of bodily autonomy. That's not to say a sufficiently motivated court couldn't have overturned it too, but it would have been more like the current court up and deciding to overturn greenbacks and go back to the gold standard. A different degree of crazy.

Real talk. I... begrudingly understand it for reasons of political pragmatism but making abortion about privacy instead of about... ya know abortion might have backed us into a corner a bit.

For something to be protected you have to be protecting IT not some vague philosophical concept it and countless other things fall under.

Again to be clear I do "get" it and I don't know if there was ever or even is now a better or more honest way to put it, but I think decades of so much of the abortion side being some variation on "Oh I don't care about abortion, but this is about privacy" weakened the message a little bit.

//Hope that made sense, a little hard to get across//

Oh sure. And to be fair for all of my griping about it abortion qua abortion would have been a political non-starter until perhaps 2008. Neither party was cohesive enough to take a position on abortion rights as a whole, they just couldn't make enough hay out of it to ban or protect it outright.

It relates to something I said earlier that in a lot of arguments are hard because the right answer is multiple valid answers against one central wrong answer.

"Abortion is bad"

versus

"Abortion is good for these reasons...."
"Abortion is good and I don't have to give you a reason..."
"Abortion is neutral but not any of my business"
"Abortion is 'bad' (in some not deal breaking way) but none of my business"

... gives the bad side a single voice, which is an advantage in a discussion.

And every single one of those various pro-abortion stances is valid (and those are just the ones off the top of my head and I didn't even put purely procedural things like "I hate abortion but think the law allows it" or stuff like that) and I'm not suggesting anyone who holds those stances change their mind or the message for the sake of a narrative.

I'm just saying reality is often more complicated than lies, which often gives the wrong side the advantage of a single, easier to argue stance.

I notice you're beginning with the assumption it's only the pro-abortion side that has to justify itself. Maybe that's what ought to be addressed first.

No. more that that anti-abortion side really can't. Yank out the core "It makes da baby jeesuz cry" thing and anti-abortion sentiment would be very rare and in the margins socially and for all practical purpose non-existent politically.

The... for lack of a better term meta-debate over the need for justification and what the justification is if needed does seem to be one the pro-abortion side has more often.

And again this isn't a bad thing in and off itself. That's just what happens when one side is full of smart, caring people but who all have their own lives and volition and experiences and therefore look at something from multiple ways that are at the very worst "wrong within normal and sane parameters" and the other side is a cult being told what to think by a small core group of madmen.

The above argument is so disconnected from reality that all one can do is laugh. Like it isn't just one thing, it's the whole thing. The benefits of posting in a forum of believers, I suppose.

Yes person who called women "split tails" your opinion on their bodily integrity deserves a seat at the grown up table.

Thank you for demonstrating my point.

This is incredibly funny. I keep watching people regurgitate this as a serious talking point, seemingly out of ignorance of context. That expression has gotten a whole lot more miles out of others around here, than it has me. Of course, there are some active promoters of the legend. :D

I assume it would be in bad faith. Just that at this point their political allies still have to worry about maintaining at least a pretense of respect for the law and that's a problem.

They'd face more pushback from their own interests if they tried to make the sort of restrictions on the commerce clause that they would need to invalidate that law. It would be far more immediately politically dangerous grounds than just opening the door to totally wipe out the right to privacy.

It would also be pretty awkward for them to turn around and uphold a federal ban based on those same grounds.

They could do it, of course, but it would look 10x worse and have a lot more potential downside in that it would be more likely to provoke a response that would endanger their present dominant role in US politics.

Really? Seems to me the compromise has been there all along:

Be or become a rich, white Republican and you can have all the body autonomy you’d like.

Yeah it seems like for compromise to be on the table the other side has to arguing from a position of honesty, and that includes not breaking their own rules.

When Republicans stop getting their mistresses' abortions, we can talk.

YOU called women 'split tails' and then claimed women you know "like it". You continued to defend your use of it and today called a woman a 'hag' which you since deleted.
But your lack of taking "personal responsibility" for the words you use, which you so tout when it comes to women and pregnancy, is duly noted.

The cut-off, if you're going to have one should be at least 24 weeks. That's the point where the foetus has a reasonable chance of long term survival on delivery. Better yet is 26 weeks, where (with significant medical help) the foetus has a reasonable chance of survival with no significant physical or mental problems arising from early birth.

Well... let's have a look...


👆 That is called strawmanning...



👆Thanks for admitting the strawmanning...



👆The above is an apologetic for why they did not codify it into law... and the essence of it is that ... what would have been the point if the other side was going to overturn it anyway...


Yes it is ... read the posts...



👆 the above is my response to the posts doing apologetic for why the democrats never even bothered to try to pass RIGHTS TO CHOOSE one's own life trajectory and bodily autonomy.

No strawmanning... it is a response to the apologetics.

Given the current ethos of the USA, science and scientific facts are an anathema... and given that most of the "law makers" (on all sides of the isles) are avowed and averred and practicing religionists and with even many ZEALOTS... they are never going to let pesky facts of science deter them from advocating for their irrationalities.

I think there's a point there, though I think it's still a bit tenuous. If the Democrats had succeeded in passing a bill, then every challenge to the bill would likely be sent to the SC, and if the SC in its previous form judged in favor of the bill, it would add a little more precedent, especially if Roe V. Wade were referenced. It's a risk still, and of course nothing stops a bad court from ignoring precedent anyway, but I suspect it could have helped cement the principle into established law.

Uh-huh. Look at all the parts you didn’t cherry-pick in highlights that are exactly arguing what you called a straw man.

^ that is the problem. Precedent and established law means exactly nothing in the face of this SCOTUS. Any law would have been flipped every time a single party ran the government. Before this court, codifying bodily autonomy would have been redundant and, thus, not a priority in light of all the other things that it takes to run a country.

There are only two possible solutions: a constitutional amendment or anti-choice politicians getting voted out en masse because of their anti-choice policy.