About This Series
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP held hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the fifth of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
This series, once again, is about lies. Today’s subject is abortion, but it will not, and cannot, be about the rights of a fetus versus a woman’s right to choose.
I have my unshakable opinion: that personal reproductive rights cannot be legislated away. But it is no mystery why much of the country believes life begins at conception, or with a fetal heartbeat, or with postpartum viability or with some other threshold of life — and that, therefore, in their view, to end such life is murder.
Either viewpoint can be argued with eloquence, or at least passion. Neither argument can be proven scientifically or morally. Each hews to its own logic. But, in the end, these are competing opinions, competing values, competing articles of faith. The question of choice is itself a choice.
And yet, the abortion issue is and has for decades been the province of Republican hypocrisy and perjury on a breathtaking scale — the apotheosis of which came one year ago, when in Dobbs v. Jackson the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and now permits states to criminalize most abortions. This was a shock, but not a surprise. For years, Republican presidents have been stacking the courts with anti-abortion jurists: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts. They were appointed one by one toward an eventual majority, building in strength like a judicial paramilitary unit, until their numbers were sufficient, the opportunity present and the enemy in sight.
For decades, the most contentious issue at the heart of every Senate confirmation hearing was Roe v. Wade, because the whole world knew who was there to protect the historic precedent and who to dismantle it. In its zeal to undo the perceived liberal overreach of more progressive Warren, Burger and Rehnquist courts, Roberts’ commandos had already scorched the judicial earth with the Hobby Lobby decision, which permitted discrimination under supposed religious principle; District of Columbia v. Heller, which interpreted the 2nd amendment to permit any individual to own firearms; and the absolutely bonkers Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission decision, which found that money is a form of political speech and therefore free to flood the political marketplace with almost no limitation, corrupting an already corrupt campaign finance system by at least an order of magnitude.
Still the abortion question has been paramount for a half century, and, as such, a litmus test for all nominees to the court. The problem is (wink wink, nudge nudge), there cannot ethically be any litmus test; justices aren’t permitted to prejudge any case, or even to consider hypotheticals. The result is a continual spectacle of confirmation hearings in which Judiciary Committee members ask tortured questions the answers to which they already know, and nominees provide even more tortured answers so as not to confess the obvious reality known to all.
This process is sometimes called “a dance,” or “Kabuki theater,” or cat-and-mouse. A better term would be “ritualized evasion,” which is a particularly pernicious form of what is called “lying.” Where Roe was concerned, each of the conservative nominees was asked about the elephant in the room, and each, in various ways, said, “Elephant? What elephant? I don’t see an elephant.”
During Barrett’s 2020 confirmation hearings, she was asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.): “So the question comes, what happens? Will this justice support a law that has substantial precedent now? Would you commit yourself on whether you would or would not?”
Barrett’s answer: “Senator, what I will commit is that I will obey all the rules of stare decisis.” Her reference was to the Supreme Court’s historically extreme respect for and deference to precedent. In the case of abortion, that means not only the then 47-year-old Roe decision, but also the 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which affirmed Roe and made the right to abortion more explicit than Roe’s arcane dependence on the right to privacy. That’s a lot of stare decisis. But when the time came, Barrett’s commitment proved to be an empty one.
In 2017, nominee Neil Gorsuch got this question from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): “Can you tell me whether Roe was decided correctly?” Gorsuch gave essentially the same answer as eventually would Barrett: “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.” Agreed. A good judge would. Gorsuch did not.
In 2005, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) asked nominee John Roberts to clarify his previous judicial remarks on the status of Roe. “In your confirmation hearing for circuit court, your testimony read to this effect, and it has been widely quoted: ‘Roe is the settled law of the land.’ Do you mean settled for you, settled only for your capacity as a circuit judge or settled beyond that?”
To which Roberts replied: “It's settled as a precedent of the court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. And those principles, applied in the Casey case, explain when cases should be revisited and when they should not. And it is settled as a precedent of the court, yes.” Last year, Roberts did vote nominally to uphold Roe, but he sided with the majority to uphold the Alabama anti-abortion law.
In 1991, Clarence Thomas was asked for his position by the late Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio). Thomas first expressed his empathy for the plight of women who were forced into the tragic reality of back-alley abortions, but then demurred on further comment: “I think it would undermine my ability to sit in an impartial way on an important case like that.” If you blinked, you could have considered that a candid answer, at least in the sense that it didn’t resort to misrepresenting his respect for judicial precedent. No, he did not do that. He simply misrepresented his conscience – unless he had a sudden epiphany a few years later when he declared Roe “grievously wrong.” So called “partial-birth abortions” are a non-existential procedure invoked as a scare tactic by the right. Thomas confirmation testimony was an abortion of his declared impartiality, and all too real.
The biggest scammer in the bunch was Samuel Alito in 2006. He was asked by Specter to explain his 1985 post-Roe legal opinion that the Constitution does not provide a right to abortion. Alito, his trousers aflame, responded that the statement was made in his role as a Justice Department lawyer in the defiantly anti-abortion Reagan Administration.
Alito: “Today if the issue were to come before me, if I am fortunate enough to be confirmed and the issue were to come before me, the first question would be the question that we've been discussing, and that's the issue of stare decisis … And if the analysis were to get beyond that point, then I would approach the question with an open mind, and I would listen to the arguments that were made.”
Specter: “So you would approach it with an open mind notwithstanding your 1985 statement?”
Alito: “Absolutely, senator. That was a statement that I made at a prior period of time when I was performing a different role, and as I said yesterday, when someone becomes a judge, you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”
Uh-huh. Tempered by 16 years as an associate justice of the high court, Alito finally let be known the feelings he brazenly hid from the Senate Judiciary Committee when he answered Specter’s question. “Roe,” he wrote in the majority’s opinion on Dobbs, “was egregiously wrong from the start.” Lying-ass motherfucker.
The consequence, wrote Molly Jong-Fast with a single significant detail that stands for the overarching horror of Dobbs: “In Alabama, the doctor who tries to perform an abortion on a 12-year-old girl made pregnant by incest will get more jail time than the family member who impregnated her.”
The Sanctity of Life
When the court overturned Roe with Dobbs, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana immediately issued a press release:
This historic ruling for life is a day to celebrate, and after we celebrate this victory, pro-life Americans across the country will continue our work in legislative bodies to encourage a culture that protects life.
Alabama Governor (and self-described “Christian woman”) Kay Ivey might have cheered the hardest: “As I noted when I signed the Alabama Human Life Protection Act, every life is precious and a sacred gift from God.” That statement echoed her remarks from 2019, when she signed the very piece of legislation referenced by Jong-Fast: “The Legislature has spoken. It underscores the sanctity of life the people of Alabama value so highly.”
So much sanctity … or sanctimony. In signing Montana’s anti-abortion law, Gov. Greg Gianforte proclaimed: “You know me and you know how dedicated I am to the cause of life. Like you, I firmly believe that all life is precious and needs to be protected.”
Just as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did in 2021 while signing Texas’s draconian
“fetal heartbeat” law that prohibited abortion after 6 weeks: “Our creator,” he said, “endowed us with the right to life.”
What he meant was “endowed us sometimes.” Apart from legalized abortion, the sanctity of life, and the welfare of children, are not a priority of the conservative Christian moms and dads who govern Republican states. The statistics speak for themselves.
– Infant Mortality. For the year 2020, the most recent for which statistics are available, the Centers for Disease Control lists rates of infant mortality per 1,000 live births. Eleven of the 12 worst results were in red states, as were 14 of 19 in the next worst group. By contrast, 11 of the 13 states with the lowest incidence of infant death were blue.
– Child Care. When in late 2021 Democrats floated a $60 billion/year plan to offer child-care subsidies for 9 in 10 families as part of their Build Back Better proposal — so that poor and middle-class parents wouldn’t have to choose between financial stability and the daily care of their children — the plan was opposed by 100% of Senate Republicans (and, fatally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-Big Coal). Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the plan a “toddler takeover.” The GOP’s budget proposal provides for $6.2 billion for child care assistance — enough to cover 1 in 9 families. The Democrats came back this winter with the Child Care for Every Community Act — which, in the ensuing four months, has budged not an inch in either house of Congress.
– Education. In its 2020 party platform, the Republican Party said the country should spend less on public education for our children. “The United States spends an average of more than $12,000 per pupil per year in public schools, for a total of more than $620 billion … Of that amount, federal spending amounted to more than $57 billion. Clearly, if money were the solution, our schools would be problem-free. More money alone does not necessarily equal better performance … . In sum … enormous amounts of money are being spent for K-12 public education with overall results that do not justify that spending level.” Well, you gotta give them this: they put their not-enough money where their not-enough heart is. Of the 25 states spending the least in childrens’ education, 20 are red. Eight of the top 10 in spending are blue. Red states fall 1.5 percentage points below the national average for high school completion rate (84.2% vs. 85.7%), and 3.3 percentage points below the national average for college degree attainment (25.1% vs. 28.4%). The outcomes are unsurprising. Red states are below the national average in both high-school graduation and college degrees. According to Time Magazine: “All of the top 15 most college-educated states—and only 3 of the bottom 15—are blue.”
– Gun Deaths. In May of 2022, immediately following the Uvalde school-shooting massacre, the New York Times polled Republican senators about stricter gun-control legislation. This was like polling children about criminalizing ice cream. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) answered with the talking point Republicans have been using for years in their cultish devotion to the 2nd Amendment: “I’m willing to say that I’m very sorry it happened. But guns are not the problem, OK? People are the problem. That’s where it starts — and we’ve had guns forever. And we’re going to continue to have guns.” Guns don’t kill people; people kill people! (With guns.) And the people getting shot to death disproportionately live in states where the cult is strongest. Of the highest 15 per capita death tolls by gunshot, 13 are red states. Of the 15 lowest per capita death tolls, 13 are blue states. The pattern holds for gunshot deaths of children and teenagers. In the year 2017, 12 of the 15 most lethal states for child victims were red, and 9 of the 15 safest were blue.
– Capital Punishment. Of the states performing executions of convicts since 1976, the top 15 are red. Red states, in fact, were responsible for 1,473 of 1,569 of these deaths. In the past 10 years, they performed 236 of 249 — 94.7% — (4% were done by the United States government).
– Climate. What is more in need of defense than all human life on a burning planet? Yet for decades, the Republican Party has been in denial about the destruction of Earth’s atmosphere due to the greenhouse gasses emitted by our fossil-fuel burning industrialized civilization. But even as the proof of human-influenced climate change mounted — to the point that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.has declared Code Red for human survival — the GOP continues to deny, ignore and ridicule history’s most dire threat to human life. Amid wildfires, droughts, catastrophic storms, melting ice, rising sea level and rising temperatures, it has fought for more oil drilling, fought against carbon targets, declared the climate threat a liberal hoax and, most recently, blocked the Green New Deal, which U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) declared to be “tantamount to genocide.”
After pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord (to zero condemnation in his own party) sociopath moron Donald Trump tweeted:
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
– Covid 19. This, like the GOP’s historic climate denial, shows that Republican officials and faithful not only fail their own “sanctity of life” standard, they cause widespread death by refuting science and clinging to populist “ideals.” In climate, the false idol is “energy independence.” In Covid, it is “personal freedom.” In this perverse worldview, public health measures to save the lives of the population constitute tyranny. Just weeks ago, conservative Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch derided Covid restrictions as one of “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
Yes. Absolutely. Because the one thing that trumps personal freedoms is a public-health emergency.
If the question is Republican respect for life — versus, say, power or truth or ideology or political advantage — the ultimate proof lies in the party’s mindless, heartless, partisan zeal when it comes to protecting the lives of fellow citizens amid a historic and deadly global pandemic. Between Republican governors and rightwing Covid deniers, the pandemic was a mass murder-suicide. This from ABC News in March 2022:
Over the span of the last 10 months, in the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates … there was an average of 153 COVID-19-related deaths per 100,000 residents.
In contrast, during the same time period, in the 10 states and jurisdictions with the highest vaccination rates, which all voted for Biden, there was an average of about 82.2 related deaths per 100,000 residents. In all 10 states, about 75% of residents had been fully vaccinated.
For the country at large, polling from KFF in February 2022 showed 56% of Republicans were vaccinated, compared to 70% of Independents, and 92% of Democrats. Predictably, then, the Covid death rate was 38% higher in red states.
Why the gap? First, Republican governors boycotted mask mandates and attacked the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci as partisan and conflicted. Secondly, their constituents — groomed for decades into distrusting government science and expertise — were gullible beyond belief. A November 2021 study published in the National Institute of Medicine’s National Library of Medicine, found:
Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe anti-vaccine misinformation. This reflected a growing skepticism among conservatives toward the scientific community in general, in part due to the rise of right-wing populist messages that pit “ordinary people” against “corrupt elites.” This distrust of experts was associated with the rejection of scientific messages about vaccines. Populist rhetoric may have primed anti-intellectual considerations that made public health messages less impactful among conservatives … Politicization has undoubtedly contributed to hesitancy toward uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The lethal upshot: 100 million U.S. Covid infections and 1.1 million deaths. According to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, that is half the death toll we'd have endured without the many public safety measures. Which implies 100s of thousands of mindless deaths in places where those measures were forsaken, because they’d been perversely tarred as unnecessary and/or tyranny and/or dangerous in themselves.
What is most striking about the Republican Covid hysteria is not the science denial and ignorance and snake oil (hydroxychloroquine, horse dewormer, Trump’s magical bleach therapy), it’s the unfettered, unreconstructed, unhinged hypocrisy.
Social distancing, masks, vaccines — all were attacked as unacceptable government intrusions. And the slogan, incredibly, was “My body, my choice!”
Which, of course, is the same slogan used for decades in support of abortion rights. It beggars imagination. And etches into history the awesome power of the shameless lie.