Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks to the press, July 26, 2022, at the Capitol in Washington.
As Kansas goes, so goes Nebraska.
Yesterday, Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, released a statement condemning the state’s legislators—the overwhelming majority of whom are Republicans—for refusing to convene a special session of the state’s unicameral legislature to make abortion illegal after 12 weeks. The support of one-third of the 99-seat legislature is required to convene such a session, and in a letter to the governor, the Speaker said that only 30 legislators—three short of the number needed—wanted to reconvene to diminish the options available to pregnant Nebraskans.
What could those other 69 legislators have been thinking? In the case of the Democrats, they simply opposed the proposed legislation. In the case of the remaining Republicans, they were probably aware of what voters in the state immediately to their south—Kansas—had signaled in that state’s primary last week: that they wanted to keep intact the state’s constitutional guarantee of abortion rights, by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin.
The split among Nebraska’s Republican legislators reveals the two emerging camps of Republicans going into November’s midterm elections: the misogynistic and the terrified.
I’m not claiming that misogyny is limited to just one cluster of Republicans; I merely mean that for one group, it clearly transcends all other considerations. Such is the case in Indiana, where last week, the Republican-controlled legislature and the Republican governor enacted a ban on abortion beginning at conception, with no apparent concern, thanks to the miracle of gerrymandered districts, that statewide, Indiana voters have shown no support for such a ban (a consideration Gov. Eric Holcomb dismissed at his own risk).
But the other group of Republicans appears inclined to overlook its misogyny in favor of an even nearer and dearer concern: political survival. After women and young voters of both parties flocked to the polls in rock-ribbed Republican Kansas to oppose the reduction or abolition of their right to choice, a number of prominent Republicans have remained strategically mum when the question of rewriting abortion laws has been raised. The list includes the two likeliest Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump (who has no interest in the subject whatsoever, as it doesn’t pertain directly to him) and Ron DeSantis (who has to win a decisive victory in November’s gubernatorial election in full knowledge that pushing for a stronger ban can only turn off many potential supporters). It also includes Mitch McConnell, whose quest to become majority leader again knows no bounds, but whose Republican candidates must run statewide rather than in exquisitely gerrymandered districts where anti-choice majorities may actually exist.
To be sure, the Republican candidates who must win currently Democratic Senate seats or hold their own if McConnell is to reclaim his sovereign power are a flawed lot quite apart from their anti-choice vulnerabilities. (Herschel Walker? Blake Masters? J.D. Vance? Dr. Oz? Ron Johnson? Jeesh.) But the revolt against the flat-out revocation of Roe will hurt them all, as it will likely hurt nearly every Republican on November’s ballot.
And whose fault is that? The credit clearly goes to the man who kept Merrick Garland off the Court and pushed Amy Coney Barrett onto it, thereby enabling the justices he inflicted on the nation to override Chief Justice John Roberts’s attempt to scale back Roe without igniting an explosive backlash at the polls.
If, come January, you’re still the minority leader, Mitch, you got no one to blame but yourself.
