Kamala will bring the receipts on Dobbs

Enough with Trump's "let states decide" gaslighting

Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post

Monday morning at 8 a.m., another Trump abortion ban will take effect. As the State of Iowa joins the growing ranks of Republican-led states banning abortion at six weeks, Iowans will wake up to new realities of state-forced birth, where the government controls private medical decisions for over half the state’s population.

Kamala Harris will also wake up to a new reality. After President Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, Harris raised an historic $250 million in campaign donations in under three days, much of it from first time donors, and young voter registration surged by 700%.

Anyone missing the connection between Trump’s abortion bans and the drumbeat for Harris isn’t paying attention.  

Harris won’t let Trump/Vance flip the script on abortion

Although abortion was carefully scripted out of the headlines and speeches at the Republican National Convention, Harris will remind Americans how Trump bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, and appointed three radical justices who were willing to lie to Congress under oath-- and trash the credibility of the Supreme Court in the process-- to overturn abortion rights.  

Harris will remind voters how Trump publicly congratulated himself, bragging in writing that: 

After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone… Without me, there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing.  Thank you President TRUMP!!! (three exclamation marks, capitalization in original; “Sir” oddly missing but self- deferentially implied.)

Indeed, thank you Donald Trump, for confirming in writing that you’re responsible for  life-threatening six week abortion bans, you’re responsible for forcing women and girls to flee their home states to stay alive, you’re responsible for republicans gunning for armed menstruation police, you’re responsible for pushing frightened women to the brink of death before doctors can intervene to save them.

Very well done, Sir. Bragging about the Dobbs decision was probably the most consequential self-own you will ever make.

Why Trump/Vance efforts to “soften” state forced birth won’t work

Faced with opinion polls showing that a strong majority of Americans think Trump overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing,” Trump is now marketing a softer position on abortion, saying that rather than a national ban, it should be left up to individual states to decide. Veep candidate and antiabortion extremist JD Vance, who would criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest  because “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and who thinks “childless cat ladies” should not equally participate in democracy, now parrots Trump’s “softening,”

Letting states decide via popular vote whether women– or the government– should make private health care decisions is more gaslighting than softening. Under the 14^th Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States have been entitled to the same Equal Protection under the law since 1866, regardless of popular whim. The whole point of the 14^th amendment was to remove fundamental human rights from the vicissitudes of popular opinion, which, as MAGA illustrates, is easily manipulated.

The 14th amendment prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates. When writing Dobbs, lifelong misogynist Justice Alito wrote deceptively that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could not protect women’s medical privacy, or abortion access, because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.” 

In case you missed it, that was Alito selectively choosing to prioritize the Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process precedent to reach his desired outcome. Alito summarily rejected Roe v. Wade’s determination that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. State-forced pregnancy and state-forced birth restrict women’s liberty for— at minimum — nine months and however many days of painful labor, eighteen years of financial struggle for most single moms, and a lifetime of permanent medical changes resulting from pregnancy and childbirth.

Harris will stop the gaslighting

Helping themselves to Alito’s smug and dishonest dismissal of Equal Protection for women, Trump/Vance’s “let-each-state-decide” abortion stance subjects women’s bodies and lives to the whims of popular vote.  After owning Miss USA and similar beauty pageants for decades, it’s not surprising that Trump continues to see women’s bodies on a catwalk, subject to popular opinion and scorecards. Harris will serve it back in ways Biden never could, due to Biden’s Catholic reluctance to say the word “abortion” in public. 

Harris isn’t reluctant.  She has read, and understands, the assignment. She can communicate how abortion bans have increased maternal and infant mortality, and decreased women’s equal opportunity to earn a living. She can explain how Republicans have unconstitutionally stripped half the U.S. populationof Equal Protection under the 14^th Amendment because Trump justices said they could.

Believed to be the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic, Harris talks about abortion rights clearly, forcefully and unapologetically, and will help shape abortion into the pivotal issue in November, second only to preserving our republic from the marching threat of fascism. Harris now shoulders the burden of defending the country from two ranting, misogynistic authoritarians, a relentless rightwing propaganda machine, and deep pocket corporate donors happy to sacrifice women’s civil rights if it will lower taxes and regulations. 

In stepping away from power despite his strong conviction that he could and should serve a second term, President Biden displayed as selfless an act of sacrifice and patriotism as any president since George Washington. As heart wrenching as it was to watch his oval office address last Wednesday, women who have had it up to here with republicans’ cruel machinations under Dobbs are grateful finally to have a fierce messenger.