Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Anti-abortion activists celebrate outside the Supreme Court, June 24, 2022.
The fictitious bartender and commentator Mr. Dooley, a creation of the late-19th-century satirist Finley Peter Dunne, famously wrote, “The Supreme Court follows the election returns,” meaning that even if the justices denied it, they paid attention to public opinion. Except the Roberts-Trump Court obviously doesn’t.
If the Court were paying attention, it might have noticed that an overwhelming majority of Americans support abortion rights and are appalled by gun mayhem. But that didn’t stop the Court majority from holding that New York’s gun control law violates the Second Amendment, or overturning Roe.
As a number of critics have pointed out, the Court’s ruling today does a lot more than criminalize abortion. It turns states into inquisitors, compelling women to prove that a miscarriage or stillbirth was not an abortion. It puts doctors on the defensive and makes it far harder for women to get routine care where reproductive health is concerned. It allows individual vigilantes to claim bounties for tracking down women who might have used abortion pills, and their enablers. As Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker, the closest analogy is the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act.
The criminalization of abortion also makes it more difficult to train ob/gyn residents in states where D&C procedures are illegal. These and other ramifications of the Court’s action will gradually sink in over the coming weeks, and public opinion should become even more opposed to the ruling.
If the right’s contempt for public sentiment on abortion and gun control were not enough, on Capitol Hill the drama playing out before the Select Committee displays another area where Republicans have isolated themselves from most citizens. So the future of our democracy may well turn on the question of whether ordinary non-MAGA voters have had enough.
Will the combination of these court rulings and the revelations about January 6th finally create the mass mobilization of sane Americans we’ve been waiting for, and seriously put Republican House and Senate candidates on the spot? Many campaign debates this fall will offer dialogues that boil down to something like this:
“Do you support the Supreme Court’s criminalization of abortion?”
“What about $5-a-gallon gas?”
“Do you favor banning assault weapons?”
“What about $5-a-gallon gas?”
“Do you defend Donald Trump’s actions on and leading up to January 6, 2021?”
“What about $5-a-gallon gas?”
Barack Obama wrote of the audacity of hope. I worry about the perversity of despair. Too many activists, dismayed that Joe Biden did not deliver everything on our wish list, have given in to resigned passivity. The events of this week should wake them up and motivate progressives to turn outrage into mobilization.
