Donald Trump says he's in favor of states deciding abortion policy for themselves. Unless, that is, they're getting a lot of damaging attention for it:
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Arizona went too far after the state’s high court issued a ruling outlawing abortion.... “Arizona is definitely going to change, everybody wants that to happen,” Trump said after greeting supporters at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Does Trump think Arizona is the only state in the union with a total abortion ban? It's not. So does he also think that Alabama has gone too far? Arkansas? Kentucky? Louisiana? Missouri? Oklahoma? South Dakota? Tennessee? Texas? Will anyone ask him?
In related news, Trump also says he wouldn't sign a nationwide abortion ban if he were president. But this doesn't mean much. I think we can assume he's just lying here, as he usually does.
Republicans wouldn't need a national ban, although they'd like one to own the libs. Enforcing the letter of the Comstock Act would go a long way towards making abortion very hard to get, when red states are going to extremes like putting people in jail who assist a pregnant woman to get an abortion somewhere else. Using executive orders to make running an abortion clinic impossibly costly, complicated and risky would finish the job.
Eventually five Supreme Court justices would get tired of having to deal with appeals about abortion, and rule that life begins at conception, thus conferring constitutional protections on the fetus from day 1.
"...rule that life begins at conception,..."
I get a strong feeling that the non-sociopath Court (everyone other than Alito; Thomas is straight up pay to play) will not allow this to happen. Abortion seems to be proving itself as an issue that has the ability to overwhelm the right's built in structural political advantages. The Roberts Court is above all the judicio-political arm of corporate- authoritarian power and privilege, and will not do anything to endanger this prime directive. The backlash on Dobbs is obviously not just from the left, and I think this took them by surprise because they live in their bubble of entitlement, but they're not stupid and they know who their masters are. They won't risk further political damage from this issue.
"Eventually five Supreme Court justices would get tired of having to deal with appeals about abortion, and rule that life begins at conception, thus conferring constitutional protections on the fetus from day 1."
This, of course, doesn't end the court battles. Something like half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage: that's like millions of "fetal persons" a year. All of those would then be subject to wrongful death or murder investigations - "What exactly were you doing when the alleged miscarriage occurred? What had you done in the weeks prior? List everything under penalty of perjury" type interrogations - and surely some percentage (especially of the poor) will be determined to be prosecutable criminal offenses. (There are a lot of things you can do while pregnant that make miscarriage more likely... and the poor are most likely to not have lawyers telling them to not inadvertently confess to doing any of them.) And then all their appeals of their criminal sentences will flood the courts.
And this isn't then to mention all the impending court cases around issues of fetal consent. Is it OK for a pregnant woman to cross state lines, without the consent of her fetus, or is that human trafficking? Is it OK for a pregnant woman to get healthcare, without the consent of her fetus, or does the court need to weigh the risks to the fetus?
Overturning Roe opened a pandora's box of thorny issues wrt fetal personhood that the courts are going to regret.
" thus conferring constitutional protections on the fetus from day 1"
Not from day 1, but from day 13, when the sex happens. And no fetus is protected by a 6-week abortion ban, because the change from embryo to fetus happens around 9 weeks.
You give him too much credit if you mistakenly believe he knows what he's doing. Trump is not strategic at all; his utterances are done in service of the moment. And, as we have observed over time, he has no principles; anything he commits to is transactional.
I urge journalists to ask him a variant of the Dukakis Q: "If Melania were raped, would you seek an abortion or would you raise the child as your own?"
"You give him too much credit if you mistakenly believe he knows what he's doing. Trump is not strategic at all; his utterances are done in service of the moment. And, as we have observed over time, he has no principles; anything he commits to is transactional." an absolute truth about trump that too many people have not grasped.
Yes, this is a known quantity. The only questions are how this is turned to socio-political advantage or disadvantage.
Quite so, and in this context there seems to be a ripe opportunity to bait Trump into running own-goals, relying equally on his other major feature (besides pure in the moment transactional statements), his boundless need to be credited.
The potential for erosion on the margins in the key Swing States where small percentage shifts may make all the difference seems quite decent.
however that "Dukakis question" is fairly useless - what purpose? He will lie in some facile manner and the only audience this will really care is the already Trump antis. No one seems to ascribe to Trump personal morality, even the MAGA.
Provoking and trapping him relative to State claims and inducing doubt-and-fear amongst the proverbial Swing State Soccer mum profile is rather better - the highlighting of the shiftiness and relative to threat to their own selves - not his open hypocrisy in Trump's own life.
His ego and indiscipline is the opportunity
They won't do this because it would prompt an outcry of "liberal bias!!!" from their advertisers.
Dukakis? Who might that be? Ancient history. Besides, that was in a presidential debate. Besides besides, that was OK because he was a Democrat, and he was running against St. Ronald.
The response would be "you're a nasty person, aren't you?" as Trump refuses to answer it and eventually the reporter stops asking. The US doesn't have many reporters willing to doggedly ask the same question over and over again until it is properly answered, as we see every time a presidential "debate" is aired on TV.
The question also assumes Trump cares if Melania is raped. There is zero evidence that he loved any of his wives, in the sense that most people think of "love." There is zero evidence Trump cares about anyone on the face of the earth, and certainly not more so than caring about himself first and foremost. I could easily envision that - if Melania really was raped - he would just dump her, like he would a car that got wrecked or a rag he was done jerking off into. Damaged/used goods.
I'd put money on Arizona is now in play and a threat to him winning. Any state that's not in play is just fine with him.
Should have add in the end:
"Of course, if Trump wins he will terminate democracy and will do what he feels like, so all of this is really just noise".
Trump says that you have to bring back the decision to the states, but Arizona is too extreme and one should fix this, also Florida, Texas, hum...
He hoped that with this position he could wash his hands of the debacle that the GOP caused. But they cannot run away from it, they own it 100%
"I think we can assume he's just lying here, as he usually does."
Lying, like a hammer, is a tool. You can use it to protect something of value, or you can use it hit someone over the head.
The question is not whether someone is lying or telling the truth, the question is what interest is being served. One person can express their selfishness, and another person can express their selflessness by lying or telling the truth.
To me, it's clear that President Biden is serving the long-term interest of the whole country, and that his predecessor has no problem doing anything, including telling the truth, if it happens to serve his personal short-term self-interest.
Translation: Before trying to understand anything, start by understanding what interest is being served. It's not that hard. For example, Biden can't help anyone unless his first priority is thoughtfully taking care of himself, and his predecessor cares about the abortion issue to the extent that his reflexive response makes him feel better right now.
Only one of those states is purple.
I think the real question is: if Melania was raped, would Don Jr. ever be held accountable?
Texas and Florida have exemptions in their bans for rape and incest and carve-outs for IVF. The Arizona law only has an exemption to save the woman's life. So the Arizona ban is harsher.
Also Arizona voters are much more likely to successfully pass their ballot initiative because the threshold is only 50% (versus 60% in Florida). So if the Republicans don't soften the ban by then, it's highly likely voters will fix it themselves.
Also AZ is a swing state with the potential to actually go blue this November. TX and FL have near zero chance of going blue in Trump's lifetime. So AZ matters more for abortion politics than TX or FL.
This is the same reason why nobody cares what ID or ND or WV or AL* is doing on abortion... they're all solidly Republican, and nobody in the media lives/visits/retires/golfs/etc in any of them, so none of them matter on the national stage, even if they start executing women for seeking abortions.
*AL only got attention because it was the first to ban IVF for a while. The novelty of this freaked out media in bluer parts of the country, cause they didn't see it coming. (Lots of smart people did, but the media doesn't select for smarts, it selects for attractive stenographers.) But after a while, everybody forgot about AL again, because it's a Place That Doesn't Matter To Important People.
Exactly. If Trump's sole goal is to win in order to get himself out of legal hot water by hook or by crook, then Arizona just became a huge problem for him.
A prescient NYT op-ed from Yale scholar Jack Balkin, in 2003:
Thanks for the link-- very sharp analysis, and its contention that Roe was the central tentpole that allowed the gop to organize as a political force is being underlined before our eyes.
And I'd say his other point, that the courts were doing a political service by taking a seriously divisive moral/religious question out of day-to-day politics, is being pretty well validated now as well, but it's one of those deals where that role ended up destroying SCOTUS as well as potentially the gop-- it made capturing the court the only way for the fanatics to get what they wanted. They've had the motivation of monomania and unlimited money behind them, and now, helped by other rulings and unpredictable events, they've won.
I hope for two big things out of this. One is the destruction of the current gop, which looks like it's starting. The other is that the pressure of all this, plus trials, money troubles, etc, coming to a focus on trump will drive him so completely batty that by the fall, when it's too late to un-nominate him, he'll fall apart completely in full public view where it'll be completely undeniable. (I mean like babbling incoherently and throwing his clothes off and other seriously weird shit, which he's never far from.) I don't normally wish ill on anyone, but trump has put himself in a unique category, and that would be his best actual service to the nation.
As for most of the other R politicians, well, except for the coup plotters they can go slinking back into their private lives and leave the governing to people who care, and something like normal life with normal courts and institutions will have a chance to resume.
This R decision back in the Saint Ronald days to gin up, stoke, and organize itself around such a potentially violence-inducing cultural/religious issue has been one of the most disastrous experiments in political opportunism in any nation's history.
Wow. Right on the every count. Abortion is, in fact, destroying the modern Republican Party.
The media will not ask these questions because it would require 5 seconds of creative thought. They have already duly chronicled his "pivot" to a "moderate" position on abortion. It was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune already.
News people can be dimwits. Maybe the man of 10,000 lies is now telling the truth? But it won't matter. Women and men who vote for freedom of choice know the score, and true believers like the Mike Pencers know a betrayal when they see one. Trump and the Republicans are screwed.
There's no steady paycheck in pointing out Very Important People's errors. Trust me: I learned this lesson fresh out of grad school. The other VIPs quickly circle the wagons to protect the idiots in their ranks from criticism from The Lower Classes Who Didn't Even Go To An Ivy, and soon you'll be transferred/demoted/asked to leave/fired. After a few generations of this dynamic, you're left with a media and support staff to VIPs that just dutifully reports to the public everything that they were told by the VIPs, no matter how obviously flawed or ridiculously illogical it is. There's a reason why jobs in Communications have increased and jobs in Journalism have shrunken.
Apropos of nothing, we recently traveled to Tejas for the eclipse. (Overcast all day.) I brought my US Passport, in case there was any trouble leaving.
On Sunday I happened to be walking by a TV in a lobby and saw the big headline, "TRUMP TO UNVEIL HIS ABORTION POSITION" or something similar.
Like, he ran for President. Twice. He served as President for four years. He appointed three SCOTUS justices who voted to overturn Roe. If we all don't know his abortion position by now, news outlets haven't been doing their jobs.
(Of course we do know. Personally, he doesn't give a rats ass, but he's willing to go along with the Republican line, more or less, even if he occasionally pretends he doesn't because it's inconvenient to him.)
Probably the headline should have said “Trump to unveil his NEW abortion position”. The advantage would be they could just keep it up permanently:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-many-abortion-positions-timeline-rcna146601
How does one strip mall support two wig stores?
EDIT: Didn't realize the banner photo changes on refresh. This is what it was when I said that: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/blog_oc_header_tattoos-1.jpg
Probably in the same way that 2+ car dealerships can exist side-by-side in many towns and cities. People are willing to travel long distances to them, because they're quite rare (just spitballing here, but I'd guess 99% of all strip malls have zero wig stores) and most customers only have to visit them a few times in their lifetime. Over time, some retailers eventually realized it's helpful to customers to be able to see all their options in 1 long distance journey, rather than have multiple long distance journeys all over the metropolis to weigh all their options, and so wig stores/car dealerships started co-locating together. (You can see this dynamic everywhere once you start looking for "businesses that need to exist somewhere but customers only need them infrequently." For example, coin dealers and antique shops also tend to locate in proximity to each other once a town gets big enough to support more than just 1.)
There is a name for this phenomenon in urban spatial economics, but I can't recall it.
In the small town where I live, for many years there were only two locally-owned non-chain pizza restaurants -- next to each other on Main St.
A better series of questions:
- "Would you sign or veto a federal bill allowing abortion nationwide for rape or incest or to protect the life of the mother?"
- "Would you sign or veto a bill repealing the Comstock Act?"
- "Would you sign or veto a bill protecting women, and those that help them, go out of state for an abortion?"
- "Would you sign or veto a bill allowing abortions at VA medical facilities?"
- "Would you sign or veto a bill protecting a woman's ability to purchase and use contraceptions that disrupt implantation (i.e. an abortion in some people's eyes)?"
He's already shown to be in favor of abortions in some cases (e.g. tearing down Roe) so asking him about a federal ban (or protection) is silly (or lazy or safe.) He'd likely even duck these - but having the question out there would be helpful IMO.
He'll just refuse to answer them or outright lie, the same way he refused to answer any detailed questions during covid or made up lies about it, and then attack the reporter as being "nasty" or whatever, making the reporter the center of the story instead of the issue of abortion.
The most important issue facing the country, Gallup poll:
Immigration 28%
The economy/Inflation 25%
The government/Poor leadership 19%
-----------------------------------------------------------
Poverty/Homelessness 6%
Unifying the country 4%
Crime 3%
Elections/Democracy 3%
Racism/Race relations 3%
Ethics/Family decline 3%
Foreign relations 3%
Abortion 3%
Healthcare 2%
Education 2%
Judicial system/Courts 2%
War in the Middle East 2%
Environment/Climate change 2%
Guns/Gun control 1%
Russia 1%
Advancement of technology 1%
The media 1%
The last few presidential elections were decided by well less than 1% of the vote in several states. So if all the 3% who care about Abortion as their top issue vote for candidates to restore it... that could decide the election. (Would be more helpful to know if the 3% here rank Abortion so high because they're pro- or anti-. I'm assuming most are pro- since the only thing that's keeping abortion in the news right now are efforts to get rid of it, not expand it.)
Also, those surveys are just that, surveys. They don't ask "are you voting on this issue?" and in fact they treat all adults alike in weighing their preferences. But come November, the only adults' opinions that will matter on any of them are the ones who show up to vote. The others might really care about the issue they specified... but if they don't actually vote on it, they might as well have answered Nothing/I Have No Concerns to Gallup.
a) Americans just don’t vote issues or policies, for the most part. Many don’t even know their preferred party’s stance on issues: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/12/30/republicans-dont-know-anything-about-their-party
b) Several of these bits of ‘data’ are just respondents’ ways of declaring for their tribal allegiance. No way are 28% of Americans negatively affected by immigration, but the apparent nominee of their party tells them it’s a huge problem, so they have to say so, too.
The Biden campaign, the DNC, and all the dark money PACs supporting Biden (or against Orange Jesus), needs to hang the dismantling of Row V Wade around Il Duce's fucking neck (like a noose, metaphorically). He nominated the 3 right wing, Christian Nationalists SCOTUS judges specifically to shit can abortion, and he cheered them on when it happened. He can't be allowed to bull shit his way out of taking the blame.
Trump would sign a national abortion ban if it was presented to him.
Unless ... Putin told him not to.
As as Congress is in session during the ten days after passing abortion legislation, the law goes in effect even without his signature. So, he doesn’t have to sign it.
He doesn't need to do much of anything to ban abortions.
All he needs to do is interpret the Comstock Act as making most abortions impossible most everywhere.