THE DOG THAT CAUGHT THE CAR

"I fear we have only awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."

It used to be that the political party whose members were most likely to support what was called “family planning” was the Republican Party. And as part of that, Republican leaders supported abortion rights. Before Roe v. Wade. Gerald Ford supported abortion rights, as did George H. W. Bush until he became the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1980. Reagan, the guy who led the ticket Bush was on, had - as governor of California - signed one of the most permissive abortion laws in the nation, in 1967. There is an argument to be made that this Republican support of “family planning” that included support for abortion began in the 1920s when Margaret Sanger and other family planning advocates began to place their argument for family planning in “eugenics,” i.e., controlling the population growth of “less desirable” populations.

In fact, up until 1980, the only Republican leader who opposed abortion was Richard Nixon, and he only “converted” in 1972 to be sure he could maximize the number of conservative Catholics who normally voted Democratic he could attract to voting for him. In fact, he shared the same view of abortion his opponent, George McGovern held, despite Tricky Dick managing one of the first really transformative acts of Republican hypocrisy to label McGovern the candidate of “Abortion, Amnesty and Acid.”

Even the Southern Baptists weren’t opposed to abortion in the early 1970s; they had a position that while life was sacred and should be protected, that had to take into consideration the possibilities of rape and incest and the health of the mother, which could result in a medical abortion being necessary. It wasn’t until Jerry Falwell came up with the “Moral Majority” in the late 70s that the Christianists became anti-abortion. Realizing that Falwell’s people were now a significant part of their voters, the Republicans adopted an anti-abortion platform plank - calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe that the party leaders knew would never happen - in 1980.

In the 40 years since, however, as the Republican Party has become more radically reactionary, their political position adopted a more radical brand of abortion politics. This week, the dog caught the car when the six Injustices that comprise the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court allowed Texas to impose the most restrictive abortion law since Roe v. Wade, effectively overturning Roe without saying so. There’s a reason why they did it that way.

In the days since, despite the Right having finally achieved their dream of finding a way to overturn Roe and abolish abortion, the performing marionettes of Conservatism Inc. have been remarkably quiet about their victory. So quiet that the silence has been noticed. There’s a reason for that.

The dog caught the car and now has no idea what to do with it. One thing they do know - like it or not - is that they have just awakened a sleeping giant.

This result has provoked outraged dismay, and not merely from women in Texas now subject to the vigilante surveillance by which the Texas Republicans found a way to get past judicial review. The outrage is national. The Republicans are about to discover what Admiral Yamamoto was talking about when he is said to have stated upon being informed of the success of his attack on Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The permission given by the Supreme Court to Texas Republicans to proceed with their scheme now clarifies the politics of the past 40 years. The majority of Americans who support Roe v Wade and abortion rights, who have looked at the Supreme Court as the institution that would prevent this event, and who therefore didn’t make voting for those who also supported abortion rights a “litmus test” as the opponents did, now realize the error of their ways.

Up until this past week, opposing abortion gave Republican politicians a highly-lucrative, no-risk political option. Their pro-life rhetoric would win the support of socially conservative voters who otherwise disliked the economic policies Republican promoted, with their only fear being a possible primary loss to a more pro-life opponent. They had no worries about a backlash should they have to promise to criminalize millions of American women to win, since the regular Republican voters looked to the courts for protection of their abortion rights. It was wink-wink nudge-nudge, you know I have to do this to take care of the “kooks.” Both the candidate and the “normal Republicans” knew the promise would never be made good. Most American voters have quietly understood for a long time that most politicians who claim to be “pro-life” are hypocrites.

That one-way option has just come to an end.. The “kooks” got tired of waiting for the politicians to deliver on their promise, and this week is the result. Now the wink-wink nudge-nudge crowd realizes that they will now have to pay the piper. Which is why the marionettes are quiet. They’re not even whistling as they walk past the graveyard.

Accountability has suddenly arrived.

Texas Republicans just elevated abortion rights to the supreme ballot issue in 2022. There is some possibility that a voting majority of Texans really does want to see Texas women’s reproductive lives controlled by random vigilantes. If that was true in 2022, it would reshape the politics of 2024.

What is far more likely is that the Texas Republicans have miscalculated. By all but completely outlawing abortion in the second-largest state, and subjecting women to an intrusive regime of supervision and control not imposed on men, they have awakened the suburban Republican women voters to the reality that their only defense is their own political action. This is in addition to the Democrats who believed the court would always side with them.

This new reality opens the way for the abortion-rights debate to be resolved. If the reaction to what the Texas Republicans have done continues to increase opposition as it is now doing, “pro-life” anti-abortion-rights politicians are about to find out what life in the cross-hairs is like. For the first time in 50 years, they will face a mobilized opposition that also regards abortion as Issue Number 1 in local, state, and national politics.

This debate over abortion has often been compared to the debate over Prohibition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the 1850s to the 1920s, most particularly in the years after the civil war when men dealing with a misunderstood PTSD from that event turned more and more to alcohol for self-medication of their demons, Americans battled passionately but inconclusively over how to regulate booze. In 1919, the prohibitionists won what appeared to be their decisive victory with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, with enforcement by the Volstead Act. For a dozen years, metropolitan America lived under rules imposed by rural America. The result was a massive growth in organized criminal behavior as bootleggers provided what the majority wanted, while the majority flouted the law. By 1932, the whole experiment utterly collapsed as Franklin Roosevelt won election with a promise to end the experiment. Prohibition had failed so dismally, so completely, both politically and socially, that even the prohibitionists surrendered. The result was national legality bounded by locally-acceptable regulation.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. Already, the “bootleggers” are organizing to turn the law on its head as pro-choice organizations and their supporters nationwide develop ways to support women in Texas getting around the law. Already, public opposition to the Prohibitionists is being activated, as several million Reddit and Tik-Tok users crashed the informer’s website set up by Texas Right to Life to start the vigilantism, with fake “tips.”

The silence of Republicans across the country is proof they understand how detested their “victory” will soon be, and not just in New York City and Los Angeles. Texas Republicans knew what the response would be in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and Fort Worth, which is why they first passed one of the most-suppressive voting laws in the country before passing their abortion law. They know how unpopular their programs and beliefs are with the general population, and they know what will happen if all qualified Texans could vote. But that voting law only makes voting difficult; it doesn’t prevent it.

The long lines and overwhelming turnout in the 2020 election despite what Republicans had done to suppress votes showed that a program of voter suppression can only go so far to protect a sufficiently-unpopular incumbent.

Republicans won a huge victory in the off-year elections of 2014, while suffering a huge defeat in 2018. The crucial difference was turnout: the 2014 election saw the lowest turnout since 1942, when Democratic complacency lost the Second New Deal; 2018 saw the highest turnout in a non-presidential year since before World War I, now that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans had seen Trump’s unexpected win in 2016. The presidential election of 2020 saw the largest turnout in more than 50 years, and the defeat of Trump.

The moral of the story is that Republicans do best when the electorate is satisfied and quiet because they do not see the Republicans as a threat. When the electorate is mobilized and angry over what they have done, Republicans get their heads handed to them.

Both the Texas Republicans and Republicans around the country have just gone “all in” on their political future in a rapidly diversifying and urbanizing country with a risky bet that cultural reaction plus voter suppression will work.

This action in Texas has already been nationalized in a matter of days. As those who thought their rights were protected become more aware of the threat posed by the Six Injustices with the decisions they will make in this next term of the court, Republicans are about to discover that their plans to return to power in 2022 have hit a speed bump, if not crashed into a concrete wall.

The sleeping giant is waking, and their terrible resolve will be seen in 14 months.

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