Bush’s Brain seemed pretty desperate to pretend that the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade wasn’t going to have much impact on the midterm elections during a panel segment on this weekend’s Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace noted that the issue of abortion has been more mobilizing for the right, but that may very well change if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, and asked Rove what the political impact might be.
Rove cited the recent governor’s race in Virginia and a Texas governor’s race in 2014, and used both to claim that we don’t know what the impact will be, but his fellow Fox contributor Jennifer Griffin rightly noted that this decision, which is likely to come in June, just months prior to the midterms, will absolutely have an impact with all of the states that have abortion bans on the books that will immediately be enacted if Roe is overturned:
GRIFFIN: I think there is one very important number that I saw. 21 states have abortion bans on the books. If Roe was overturned or weakened, those bans, abortion bans, will affect 65 million women and three of those states are states, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, that were decided by single digits in 2016 at 2020.
I think this is the one issue that could motivate the Democratic base and I think that it actually will be a shot of adrenaline for the Democratic Party going into midterms.
Wallace asked Griffin how this might impact swing voters, such as suburban women, and as Griffin told Wallace, 60 percent of them are pro-choice, so it may indeed be a motivating factor for them as well.
Rove responded by trying to conflate support for abortion restrictions with support for a total ban on abortion, and pushed the old canard that Democrats are out there advocating for completely unrestricted abortions right up until the moment a child is born, and even Chris Wallace had to correct him and remind him that this is not what we’re talking about here.
WALLACE: I completely agree with you with that, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Because what we’re talking about is the possibility that the Supreme Court might say there is no protection, constitutional protection for women—it’s a it’s a state-by-state issue—at all, that there’s no constitutional right at any point.
After Rove again lamely attempted to pretend this will only hurt people on a state level, and not the national level, and again conflate support for late term abortions with a total ban on abortion, Griffin again corrected him saying it’s a shot of adrenaline for the Democrats, and there will be talk of expanding the court.
And, as Kathryn Brightbill reminded everyone on Twitter, this isn’t the end game with these people.
Roe isn’t the end game. Lawrence and Obergefell aren’t even the endgame. Griswold and the entire concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy is the endgame. And then they’ll ban birth control once Griswold is gone. They’ve been telling you this for decades.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
It wasn’t hyperbole when people tried to tell you that conservatives wanted a government small enough to fit in your bedroom. That’s what throwing the right to privacy out the window gives them.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
After the right to privacy goes, they’re going to revisit Bob Jones v. United States and find a religious freedom right to segregation on the taxpayer dime. And then they’re going to go after the civil rights cases. They’ve told you that openly for years.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
Go look up why conservatives hate the widely expanded reading of the commerce clause. They have made no secret of the fact that they have an issue with it because the commerce clause was used to force integration.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
They’ve been teaching kids in Christian schools for the last half century that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided because they relied on psychological research to determine that there’s no such thing as separate but equal.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
Y’all are out here freaking out about Roe and have no idea that they’re already ten steps ahead of you and have been for decades.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
And yes, Bob Jones v. United States is as good as gone as soon as they find the right test case. It’s a pre-RFRA decision, and Michael Farris has repeatedly told everyone that he wrote RFRA to enshrine a religious freedom right to discriminate into federal law.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
Don’t even get me started on how Michael Farris was telling homeschoolers his entire plan for RFRA in the pages of HSLDA’s Court Report, even as he successfully sold a bunch of liberal advocacy orgs on the idea that it was only about Native American rights to smoke peyote.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
Something that those orgs only figured out years later when Michael Farris puppet Mike Pence pushed through a state level version of RFRA in Indiana, and Farris went on cable news bragging that he’d always intended it to legalize religiously motivated discrimination.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
None of this is going to happen overnight, but they haven’t exactly made the legal strategy a secret, and people spent so many years underestimating them as the lunatic fringe that they let it get to the point that Roe is seriously in doubt.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
I’ve written variations on this thread multiple times since 2016, sigh. Michael Farris isn’t a good lawyer, but he’s a good strategist, and he’s been able to play this long game since the ’80s because nobody cares enough about homeschool kids to notice what he was doing at HSLDA.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
To spell this out even clearer, this is not a “slippery slope” argument I’m making. I’m talking about a specific legal strategy that the religious right has planned out and is in the process of litigating, with stated goals of overturning Griswold and the civil rights cases.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
They’re using the same legal strategy that was used to great effect by civil rights lawyers from Charles Hamilton Houston to the present, of building precedents in smaller cases and issues so that it’s not as big of a leap when they take the big landmark cases to SCOTUS.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
This is not inevitable, but it will be if people continue to remain in denial of the fact that the religious right has a specific legal strategy that they’re following with stated goals far beyond Roe. If you don’t fight back now, one day you’ll wake up and Griswold will be gone.
— Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ (@KEBrightbill) December 5, 2021
Good luck hoping women never wake up to the reality of what’s been done to them.