HOW ROE DIED

The beginning of the end of Roe v. Wade arrived on election night in November 2008. While people like me celebrated the victory of Barack Obama as president and believed (mistakenly, as it turned out) that the country really had changed - I recall saying to friends that we had “finally won the election of 1968" - what really happened was the “movement conservative” opposition was given the reality of its worst nightmare happening; remember that the night before Obama was inaugurated, Mitch McConnell led a meeting of Republican leaders with the topic being how to make Obama a one-term president. They didn’t succeed in doing that, but they did succeed in blocking his chances of progress for six of the eight years he was in office.

The overthrow of Roe was not a one-sided operation. The mistakes made by the Obama administration from the first days after the election when they decided who would join the administration and how they would conduct themselves, led directly to the politics of the “tweens” that resulted in last week’s actions by the Supreme Court (I am not speaking merely of Roe, but of the big reveal in their four big decisions that they are coming for everything in the last 85 years of liberal/progressive jurisprudence).

The major mistake Obama made was his decision to make the worthless incompetent moron Rahm Emmanuel his Chief of Staff. Every decision Emmanuel made between inauguration day and his departure from the administration following the disaster of 2010 was step on the road to how Roe was overruled. The man could not have been a greater threat to America if he had been an undercover operative inside the administration.

One of his first disastrous decisions following the inauguration was to shut down Obama For America, the very effective grass roots organizing campaign that was responsible for the victory.

I worked as a fund-raiser during the 2008 campaign, contacting people to ask them to give $2,500, the maximum allowable. That’s a big ask. There were fun days like the one when noted director Mike Nichols’ name and phone number popped up one Sunday afternoon; I was certain I’d get an assistant who would tell me they’d pass my message on, to no avail. Nope - the Great Man answered his own phone, and was delighted to hear “I’m calling for the Obama campaign.” He was having a dinner party, and he told everyone there that they should make their donation right then. Over the next 30 minutes I furiously scribbled Famous Name after Famous Name onto a donation record and recorded their credit card numbers. I raised $125,000.

But even more cool was when I called someone whose donation history was they’d given $50. I called and asked for $2,500 for Obama, and they sat there on the phone and recalculated their personal finances, and then said “OK.” And they were all happy to be able to give money like that to the campaign, sums they’d never thought of donating before. Because they were desperate for “change we can believe in,” as they all told me.

That was how Barack Obama became America’s first Black President. I can still remember how everyone in the boiler room we worked in cheered when the victory was announced. America had finally won.

Obama’s success depended on the “Fifty State Strategy” that Governor Howard Dean had established when he took over running the Democratic National Committee. With this as the campaign guide, candidates ran for office in every congressional district in the country, something Democrats hadn’t done in a long time as they concentrated their “limited resources” on “winnable races.” The result was the congressional majority in the House and the filibuster-proof Senate majority that allowed the passage of Obamacare against the total opposition of the Republicans, not one of whom voted for it.

That was the best Democratic political campaign I ever saw in a career of political involvement that began with putting out door hangers in the neighborhood for JFK when I was 16. It was better than anything we ever did in California in the 1970s when we began the turnaround of the state from Republican to Democratic.

On Inauguration Day January 20, 2009, it appeared the country had accepted the idea that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” in Bill Clinton’s words. States had passed restrictions requiring parental consent and waiting periods for abortions. Ballot initiatives to ban abortion in South Dakota and Colorado had failed in 2008.

In May 2009, an anti-abortion extremist assassinated Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s only providers of late-term abortion, in his church, damaging the image of abortion opponents. Abortion rights groups secured health insurance coverage for birth control in Obamacare, and fended off congressional Republicans’ attempts to defund Planned Parenthood.

Chuck Donovan, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee declared the movement was “dead in the water” outside of the fight over state funding on tax credits for health insurance. Demographics were moving the country toward a more diverse majority that was presumed to lean left. Anti-abortion forces feared the re-election of Barack Obama and six more years of potential appointments to the Supreme Court.

Two weeks after the Obama Administration took office, Rahm Emmanuel fired DNC chairman Howard Dean who he hadn’t liked since 2004 when Dean ran his insurgent campaign, and shut down the Fifty State Strategy in favor of concentrating on “winnable races” as before. And a week later he shut down Obama For America, which had been planning to stay in touch with all those people who went from $50 to $2,500 donations, and keep them active supporting the administration’s work - calling their congressional representative, organizing rallies, etc. Keeping the people part of the change.

Republican strategists, however, had an eye on the states in the 2010 midterms. In The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove wrote that a group called the Republican State Leadership Committee aimed to flip 18 legislative chambers where Democrats were holding the majority by four or fewer seats. Because it was a census year, taking control of state legislatures would give Republicans power over redistricting.

Rahm’s decisions happened the same month Rove made his announcement and two months before the Tea Party Patriots held their first rallies. The Tea Party was Republican “astroturf” masquerading as the grass roots. And then there were the crowds of Obamacare opponents who came to the district meetings congressional representatives held around the country, making physical threats against the representatives, even bombing local congressional offices and Democratic campaign offices. And there were no Democrats who came to those meetings to support their representatives because there was no Obama For America to tell them why it was important for them to do it.

The result of Rahm’s genius decision to only work on “winnable races” was that on Election Night in November 2010, control of state houses across the country flipped from Democratic to Republican. Democrats had controlled 27 state legislatures going in and ended up with 16; Republicans started with 14 and ended up controlling 25. Republicans not only swept the South, killing off the last of the “Southern Democrats,” they clobbered Democratic strongholds in the Midwest; in the end they won more seats nationwide than either party had managed to do in 40 years, since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater.. For an expenditure of only $30 million, Roves group helped Republicans win 680 seats, more than the Democrats had won in the post-Watergate election of 1974. By the time the votes had been counted, the GOP held their biggest margin in Congress since 1932, before FDR defeated Hoover

And Rove was right - all those newly-Republican state legislatures were now responsible for congressional redistricting, and state legislature redistricting, with the new census.

Welcome to the past 12 years of Republican control of State and Local Politics, with the current total being they now control 30 “red” and “purple” states.

Thank you very much Rahm. You fucked up America worse than your scumbag brother Ari has managed to fuck up Hollywood.

Thank you very much, Mr. Obama, for putting this fucking moron in charge of anything more important than deciding whether to order Chinese takeout for lunch.

There was a time, between 1972-1987, the 15 years after Roe, when Republicans were as likely as Democrats to support an absolute right to legal abortion; sometimes even more so. But 2010 swept in a different kind of Republican, the Tea Party supporters. A new “conservatism” was locked in that has only grown more powerful.

The Tea Party candidates campaigned on “fiscal discipline,” promising indifference to social issues, though polls found that 60 percent of Tea Party supporters thought abortion should be illegal, and about half identified as part of the Religious Right. Once in office, they found it difficult to cut state budgets.

But a well-established network was waiting with model anti-abortion laws.

In legislative sessions beginning in January 2011, Republican-controlled states passed a record 92 restrictions on abortion: three times the previous high, set in 2005. By the first month of the second terms in 2013, after redistricting had locked in overwhelming Republican control on the state level, 205 anti-abortion laws were passed across the country, more than in the entire previous decade.

Many of the bills copied model legislation from anti-abortion groups such as Americans United for Life or the National Right to Life Committee that had stalled in committee in previous years. Now they were gliding through two Republican-controlled chambers to the governor’s pen. Charmaine Yoest, then president of Americans United for Life, proclaimed in December 2013 when the sessions were over, that 70 of the laws - the restrictions on obtaining abortion pills, the prohibitions on insurance coverage of abortion, elimination of public funding for Planned Parenthood., the ultrasounds, counseling from anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and waiting periods like South Dakota’s which went from 24 hours to 72 hours, while six states mandated parental notification for abortions be notarized and North Carolina requiring women to receive counseling that abortion could damage their ability to get pregnant and cause lasting mental health consequences - were taken from the group’s model legislation. Beth Shipp, then political director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, admitted they had suffered their worst defeats since Roe was first announced.

After 2010, the anti-abortion movement - which had before 2008 been considered defeated - went from strength to strength in the new red wave. Debates in state legislatures pointed toward the polarization that would divide the country over the coronavirus pandemic and the presidential election 10 years later - the result of gerrymandered control and party-line votes, with the two sides increasingly operating under a different definition of the facts. And as legislatures continued to layer restrictions upon restrictions, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, proclaimed in January 2021 that “Roe is not settled law.”

The result of the Democratic failure that started in 2010 led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe on Friday, even though polls show that a vast majority of Americans support it, and that most now believe abortion is morally acceptable. Alito’s decision lamented that Roe had “sparked a national controversy that has embittered our popular culture for a half century.”

No. That controversy started in state houses, in 2010, after the Democrats were defeated by an opposition that took their 2008 playbook and ran their own “50-state strategy.”

Back in 1985, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. Wrote a memo advising the Reagan administration to enter an amicus brief seeking to uphold abortion restrictions in Pennsylvania. While he believed the department ultimately had to push to overturn Roe v. Wade, he wrote that a “frontal assault” on the decision’s holding on viability risked the Supreme Court “summarily rejecting” an outright ban. Instead, he argued, abortion opponents had to make the case that more incremental laws were “eminently reasonable and legitimate,” and the DOJ would file briefs in support of these laws when they were challenged in court.

The other side of the argument was to assault abortion directly. By the end of 2011, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma had followed Nebraska’s lead to ban abortion before viability, prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks on the assertion the fetus could then feel pain.

In March 2011, the new Republican supermajority in the Arizona Legislature passed the first bill banning abortion when the woman’s decision was based on the sex or race of the fetus, a move to portray abortion providers as sexist, racist and supporters of eugenics, naming it the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. The law punished providers, making violations a felony. Within two years, five other states had copied it, and North Dakota started a trend of bans on abortion based on diagnoses of Down syndrome and other genetic abnormalities.

By early 2012, more than half of women of childbearing age lived in states hostile to abortion rights, 15 million more than 10 years before.

Polls at the time showed that more than half of Americans thought abortion should be legal if a child would be born with a life-threatening illness or “mentally disabled,” or when the mother’s mental health was endangered. A majority did not support blocking federal funding for abortions. And three-quarters thought there should be an exception to save the life of the mother even in the last three months of pregnancy. In 2011, Mississippi voters rejected a ballot initiative on “fetal personhood” that would have declared that life begins at conception.

But increasingly, Republicans identified as “pro-life” and Democrats as “pro-choice.” Support for abortion rights, which once depended largely on education and economic status now depended mostly on party affiliation.

And while Republicans and anti-abortion forces worked in concert to turn the states to their advantage, Democrats all but gave up on local elections. NARAL had cut its number of state affiliates nearly in half between 1991 and 2011. By 2016, one analysis found not a single Republican state legislator willing to identify as “pro-choice.”

Overturning Roe was the result of the ideological evolution of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Something missed by Democrats. Something missed by Rahm Emmanuel. And by his boss.

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