The ghost of Roe v. Wade is haunting the Republican Party
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| The Supreme Court in a dark scary cloud represents the political and electoral fallout of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. |
Introduction
Halloween is over at least a year, but what's not over is the ghostly revenge of Roe v. Wade. If you're a Republican, you know exactly what that means, and you're gonna hate it.
Some paranormal experts say one of the reasons ghosts haunt is revenge, and ghosts haunt to avenge their own deaths, and sometimes they're successful at tracking down their murderers, and when they do, it will be very unpleasant for the murderer. In the case of Roe v. Wade, its spirit did not cross over to the afterlife, it stayed in the mortal world to seek vengeance, and boy, is that ghost a nasty vengeful one?
The pissed-off ghost of Roe is haunting its murderers
The Republican Party
The overturning of Roe v. Wade had a strong impact when Republicans and conservatives had expected, there were actually Republicans who knew deep-down that overturning Roe could backfire on the party so severely, and these Republicans were right.
For 50-years, the Republican Party targeted Roe v. Wade to win the votes of conservative Evangelical Christian voters of the south, the midwest, and generally rural areas of the United States. Occassional Republican victories have always been attributed to Evangelical voters. Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 along with Republican control of the U.S. Senate, and that made the difference in judicial appointments, which requires Senate consent.
The haunting of the 2022 midterm elections
In the United States, the Presidency is up for election per four years, and Congress is up for election per two years. Any election of Congress held between presidential elections is called "a midterm election" because they're held during a presidential term. Traditionally, midterm elections are usually won by the Presidents' critics, called the opposition party. The two major parties are the Democratic Party (since 1828) and the Republican Party (since 1856), and the two parties have influenced the U.S. political system since the American Civil War (1861-1865).
The historic friendliness of midterm elections for the major party that does not control the White House, and the worsening of the political climate for the Democratic President Joseph R. Biden Jr via the rise of gas prices and prices overall and an uptick in crime have cratered Biden's approval ratings and severely fractured his Democratic coalition. The 2022 state of the country have made the midterms so winnable for Republicans that they almost can't do literally anything to screw up, at least that's what Republicans mistakenly thought.
The January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was a last ditch effort by radical Republicans to invalidate Biden's electoral victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election by launching a pressure protest to convince Congress to not officiate Biden as the President in waiting, the protest grew out of control and they violently besieged the doors of Congress to murder politicians, destroy Biden's electoral certificates from the states he won, and force Congress to throw out the results. Ultimately the riot went nowhere, the National Gaurd intervened, and Biden was officiated President by Congress anyway.
Since the January 6 attack, the Republicans were widely seen as "extremists" and the party had did significantly little to nothing to improve their image, they were just not so interested in doing so, so in the primary elections for the 2022 midterms, former President Donald Trump handpicked candidates who agrees with him that the 2020 election was stolen and they held extremist views.
But then, under the noses of the American public, an abortion case aiming to torpedo Roe slithered into the Supreme Court as a result of state-by-state legal battles of state abortion bans that couldn't be really enforced because of Roe but they were passed strategically to provoke lawsuits that can make it to a Supreme Court that is becoming conservative because of Trump's judicial picks, the case is called Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and it received oral arguments in December 2021. Someone leaked a draft of the liniment Supreme Court opinion that will overturn Roe, and this provoked a public backlash, but enables the pro-choice side to know what to expect. June 24, 2022, Roe exhailed air for the last and final time.
Republican states moved quickly to ban abortions and those state laws that banned abortion before Roe was overturned could now legally take affect, those laws were called "trigger laws", abortion appointments were abruptly canceled in states where abortion is now banned, and healthcare operations associated with a woman's reproductive system, such as miscarriage care, were greatly disrupted.
Republicans openly the fall of Roe, and downplayed the seriousness of the post-Roe issue of abortion, believing Americans will ultimately vote their pocketbooks in the very end. But then, election day.
RED WAVE! RED TSAUMI! RED WASHOUT! BIDEN'S PRESIDENCY IS OVER! Republicans and the media yelled and shouted confidently before the polls closed.
But then, when the last ballot was counted: red ripple, red drizzle, only a little red raindrop. The Republicans underperformed expectations and history to a miserable extent, Democrats not only held the Senate but picked up a seat. Republicans did win back the House of Representatives, but even there, the Republicans aren't even doing that so well, they gained the house with a much smaller than the historical average of House seats that the opposition party usually gains against the President's party in midterm elections, making matters worse, a narrow majority in the House of Representatives for a deeply fractured party would make the Republicans' sole brought spot in the 2022 midterms into a pyrrhic victory. In state elections, Democrats gained a net two governorships and flipped five state legislative chambers. And then, referendums on abortion: referendums to support abortion rights easily passed while referendums to weaken abortion rights took a resounding torpedo.
Exit polls showed abortion was a competitive than expected number two issue that drove voters to the polls after pre-election polls showed abortion being less than competitive in issues people cared about. The economy was number one on voters' minds because of inflation, which was still enough to cost the Democrats the House, but abortion being number two on voters' minds sabotaged the Republicans' efforts to win back the Senate, it even cost the Republicans a seat in Pennslyvania, where abortion actually beats the economy as issue number one on voters' minds. The Republican candidates who lost critical races were pro-life and won on the back of Donald Trump's endorsement, this provoked Republicans to throw Donald Trump under the bus as part of their blame game for Republicans underperforming in the 2022 midterms. Trump ultimately blamed abortion as a reason for Republicans' underwhelming showing in the midterms, even though Trump himself played a decisive role in Roe v. Wade's death.
Republicans were embarrassed, shocked, disappointed, and frustrated that they did not get the midterm election that they wanted.
Roe haunts the 2023 off-year elections
It's no secret to anyone that the ghost of Roe truly manifested its haunting of the Republican Party in the 2023 off-year elections. The Republican government of Ohio literally tried EVERYTHING in their power to quell an abortion rights referendum in the state, knowing a pro-life victory is clearly not going to happen, the Ohio Republicans tried to fight back by trying to increase the popular support threshold to make it much harder for the November referendum to pass, by asking voters to approve another referendum to increase the threshold in a usually not-so-politically busy month of August, but that a great disaster when voters turned out and torpedoed down that threshold rule change, leaving that 50.1% popular vote threshold in place. In November 2023, the Ohio Republicans' worst fears were realized, Ohio voters stood up for abortion rights in Ohio in a painful diss at them.
Democrats dominated special elections throughout 2023, they won by bigger margins and lost narrowly in both Democratic and Republican areas. Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor because of abortion, Virginia swept Democrats back into unified control of the state legislature because of abortion, in which Virginia's Republican governor Glenn Youngkin's pitch for a 15-week abortion ban being a top priority for a Republican trifecta in Richmond blowing up in his face.
The Supreme Court of the United States
A haunted Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States is not free from the vengeful ghost of Roe.
Before Roe's fate was considered by the Supreme Court, the court enjoyed universal legitimacy from the American public, the last institution of the U.S. federal government that isn't tanked by the poison of partisan politics that has tarnished the Presidency and Congress. But the realization that the Supreme Court will strike down Roe has opened an aching wound that has stung the White House and Congress.
The deeply unpopular decision by the Supreme Court to get rid of a national right to an abortion and the chaos that immediately ensued has made the Supreme Court for the first time in its history extremely vulnerable to de-legitimization.
The conservative movement believed mistakenly that the Supreme Court is the ultimate shield from politicization by the left of their conservative agenda, in fact, it's unelected and the Justices rule for life. But the overturning of Roe exposed it all, the monarchism of the conservative movement, the political ties that the conservative Justices have, all point to the very reason why Roe was overturned.
The conservative majority in the Supreme Court is now seeing the ultimate cost of their 50-year mission of overturning Roe, the question about their ethics and the way the rules work on the Supreme Court, they were called upon to resign, be impeached, and other forms of punishment.
To quiet universal criticism, they set up ethics rules. But the question is, is it too little, too late?
The Supreme Court, we do know, shall never recover from the overturning of Roe. A great liberal justice, the notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would be rolling in her grave.
The future of the Pro-Life Movement
The pro-life movement was successful in their 50-year mission to undo Roe, and they did so by exploiting the arrogance of the pro-choice side, but that success has backfired. The overturning of Roe gave the pro-choice movement a renewed purpose and they're only getting started and they're succeeding, too well. That is a problem for the pro-life movement because not only they wanted Roe overturned, but they also want a Pro-Life America where abortion does not exist literally anywhere in any of the 50 states and 5 territories.
That last dream is highly unlikely to come true, and the pro-life movement internally is starting to realize this. The Republican Party is now a party divided on how to handle abortion, this presents a big problem for the pro-life movement because it represents a losing of influence over the Republican Party that they believed they had, and that makes a nationwide abortion ban increasingly unlikely. This forces the pro-life movement to fight abortion entirely on their own, and even that's not even working too well for them. Few states have total abortion bans, some of which will likely be struck down by state courts and ballot referendums, and the Supreme Court will not want to take up another abortion case ever again.
It is safe to say that the future of the pro-life movement is pretty bleak, while the future of the pro-choice movement maybe bleak as well, having to fight for another 50 years for a national right to abortion once again, they're chances of at least getting abortion in a significant majority of states and maybe getting a liberal majority in the Supreme Court that will not hesitate to res-instate Roe is also a fight worth fighting for.
If the national right to an abortion is restored once again, then the pro-life movement's 50 years of opposition to Roe would all for nothing and unlike the Roe era, the era in which federal abortion rights has resurrected from the grave will see a more weaker pro-life movement with only narrow influence over political interests and public opinion, and their existence as a movement will be in question.
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