Observations of the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Ruling

Well, the damage is done for another Supreme Court calendar year, finishing up with a ruling on corporations refusing to provide healthcare coverage to employees with regards to birth control medication and devices...  while I'm not a legal scholar, I've been a witness to history and American politics long enough to understand a few things:

1) The ruling clearly puts the religious beliefs of an owner over that of the employees: rather than try to find a spot between which the owner's beliefs won't conflict with the employees, the Court took a side... which hurts more people (workers and their families) more than it would have hurt the owners.

2) Justice Alito's contention that the ruling specifically affects birth control makes it clear the decision was about abortion and not religious liberty (despite what the fundamentalists think, those issues ARE separate).  The ruling didn't bring into consideration other religious arguments against various medical treatments - for example, some churches object to blood transfusions and others might object to psychiatric meds - which means the Justices were only concerned for the one that mattered to them: the religious argument against abortion.  It didn't help that all five Justices ruling FOR Hobby Lobby are practicing Catholics, whose church decrees that birth control is equal to abortion (there's a sixth Justice who is Catholic, but Sotomayor is female, which brings us to the next point).

3) The ruling was passed due to five Justices all of whom - Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, and Thomas - were not only Catholics but also all male.  The sixth male Breyer sided with the dissent, which was where the three sitting female Justices all argued against the ruling.

3a) Not to mention that the five Justices in favor are all Republican party appointees, with the four dissenters all Democratic.

If you were a Republican operative working on any outreach programs to young unmarried women (and even married women) who are in dire need of healthcare coverage to pay for medications like birth control (some of the meds are useful outside of birth control, such as reducing risks of ovarian cysts/cancer), all of a sudden you're going to find it VERY hard to find any women with any fondness for the GOP.  The Republicans were already having problems getting young women to support the party, now it's going to get worse...

4) While the Far Right and Pro-Fetus crowd may be celebrating the ruling, it needs to be said it is easier to rally your voters around a grievance than anything else.  Meaning the motivation is now all on the Democratic side of the midterms this year.

Now the Republicans will crow that this ruling hurts dreaded ObamaCare, and that may get the Far Right base out and voting this November.  But now the Democrats have motivation by pointing out to women voters that they need to get out the vote to keep Democrats in control of the Senate this 2014: It's the Senate that approves Supreme Court Justices after all, and the sitting Justices aren't getting any younger.  If Ginsberg - eldest of the left-leaning Justices - dies or retires with a GOP-held Senate (who will press for a Far Right candidate no matter what even with Obama making the nominations), that's a vulnerable vacancy that could secure a solid block for conservative rulings for a long time.  Or if any other conservative Justices dies or retires while the Democrats control the Senate with Obama making the nominations, that could well shift the balance of power in the Court away from the current 5-vote conservative side.

Either way, if women feel threatened by a conservative Supreme Court - and I'm willing to argue a lot of them will be, not just over abortion and access to healthcare but also employment and salary equality, access to education, access to voting (!) - they have a lot of motivation now to vote Democratic for Senate seats this 2014... and to vote Democratic for the Presidency (hi, Hillary!) in 2016.

This is still the key point: despite whatever the Supreme Court rules, it's still up to voters to put into political power in the White House and the Senate (as well as the House in Congress) those elected leaders who will pass the laws and enforce the laws that the Supreme Court rules upon.  It's up to the President and the Senate to put Justices onto the Court bench when the time comes.  It's up to the people - us - to vote the right people into office who will make damn sure the Court is made up of Justices who will follow the law rather than their own biases.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT WOMEN, AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

P.S. point 5) This is still a slippery slope where "religious liberty" is going to get pursued in other fields of debate, such as education, social services, what have you.  Relying on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 to make this ruling is going to open up the possibility that questionable law can be argued for other ways the religious extremists can get around the restrictions and limits based on the Separation of Church and State.  This can get scary.

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Part Two of Today's Post: Why I Think the GOP Is Going Overboard to Pass Anti-Abortion Laws

Actually, there's a good number of reasons.  For starters, banning abortion has been a top ticket item for the Republicans ever since Roe V. Wade became a campaign issue.  It's just never been a Top 10 issue for voters overall (most voters have as their top issues Jobs, Jobs, Better Wages for Jobs, Better Education, Education That Leads to Jobs, and Not Having Anybody Pay For Anything Anymore).

The second reason there's been a recent surge in the anti-abortion legislation has been that Tea Party "revolution" the Far Right kicked up in response to Obama's 2008 win.  While the Tea Party supposedly formed over libertarian issues such as opposing government-controlled health care reform, in practice the Far Right that benefited from Tea Party support has been pushing a harsh socio-religious agenda and ignoring economic issues outside of massive tax cuts to corporations.

But what got me quizzical is "why now?"  Why are the Republicans - at least at the state level - going batshit crazy trying to get restrictive legislation that would essentially block any abortion, and doing so in such heavy-handed ways?

It's not that the courts are suddenly more pro-fetus than ever before.  Wisconsin's anti-abortion legislation just got held up by the courts already, and there's a certain guarantee that the Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina anti-abortion laws (North Carolina's lege hid their anti-abortion bill in a motorcycle safety bill!) will get blocked by the courts as well.

And, here's the thing that gets me, it's not like the Republicans ever really pushed this hard against abortion when they really had the opportunities to do so.  I mean, look at the states that had a Republican-controlled legislature for the last two or three decades.  Outside of the occasional attempt to restrict funding and access - and taking on partial-birth abortions as a method sure to turn off even pro-abortion supporters - I don't recall any of those states making a major push before 2011.  I live here in Florida, where the Republicans have basically been in control since Jeb Bush was governor in 1998 onward: I don't recall any major anti-abortion fights (and still haven't, probably because of other reasons I'll get into later).  Texas has been pretty much all-GOP since Dubya was governor in 1994... until this year, not a peep.

The thing I figured out, pretty much around 2006, was that while the Republican Party talked tough on the abortion issue, they really didn't want to vote it out of existence.  Partly because it would get rid of their most fanatical voting base: the pro-fetus voters are almost uniformly single-issue voters, and uniformly GOP.  Get rid of that as a rallying issue and you'll see the support wither.  But also because if the Republicans did make a major push against abortion, it would not only rile up and unite the Far Left voters (who've been for the most part disorganized compared to their Far Right numbers) but also alienate the more moderate voters who normally wouldn't care.

It's one of the paradoxes of being human: we're against something unless we gotta be for it.  Most Americans would consider themselves pro-life in that they don't want to see a fetus get aborted: most would never consider it, they'd want to raise the child or see it raised by an adoptive family.  However, most Americans also know that there are cases - rape especially, also the health of the mother - where abortion is an honest option.  (This is why the Far Right tries to dismiss rape as an issue nowadays, they're trying to degrade rape as an exception.)  If the GOP went after abortion access even in cases of rape, incest and saving the life of the mother, there would have been a huge cry from voters who'd otherwise not even think of abortion and those voters would have switched to more pro-choice candidates.

I'd thought this was the real reason why, when the Republicans had all three branches of the federal government - Dubya in the White House, control of the House and for the most part the Senate, 5-4 control of the Supreme Court - they barely ever looked at abortion as an issue.  They went after partial birth in 2003, but then... nada.  Cricket chirp noises.

But now, ever since 2010 when the Far Right used Tea Party outrage to retake the U.S. House and a good number of state governments, there's been a massive push.

Part of it is due to Reason Two I gave earlier: the Tea Party movement brought into power elected officials who were far more wingnut than previous officials, and more likely to push the agenda in spite of the electoral hazards.  But this doesn't explain all the normally standard-issue Republicans suddenly backing these pushes (and fear of getting primaried out isn't that high a reason: there's too many seats involved and even Norquist doesn't have that kind of reach).  This is where Reason Three comes into play: the underlying fear by the GOP at both the state and federal level that their party is running out of time.

Look again to Texas.  Like I noted earlier, Texas has been GOP for decades, they've been socially conservative on a lot of issues for far longer.  But the population has been trending further Hispanic, (and not even due to illegals, simple birth rates are what's happening) enough that even the massive gerrymandering efforts to hinder Hispanic voter responsiveness won't protect Republican incumbents.  And Hispanics, despite being conservative on some issues, tend to vote for Democrats because they agree with Dems on health care and education. (the shift in Hispanic population is one of the reasons California's gone Blue State).  The painful thing: Hispanics may be prominently pro-life, but they still vote Democrat because health care and education and immigration are bigger concerns.  Texas may not shift to Democratic control by 2014 (or even by 2016), but sooner rather than later the Democrats will have solid control of Texas at a national, state and maybe even local levels.  Texas has an even better chance of going Purple (like Florida and Pennsylvania) this 2014, which still hurts the wingnut agenda.

The other states like Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina are under threat of losing Republican control as well (I'd throw in Florida, but for some reason we're not pursuing a heavy pro-fetus agenda in this state.  I think the heavy Hispanic population is already a deterrent), less due to Hispanic voters and more due to the GOP voting base - angry elderly white guys - dying off and getting replaced by Millennial voters who are more left-leaning on a lot of issues than even previous generations at their age.  Those states are not as solidly pro-Republican as the party would admit: North Carolina in particular is showing major signs of buyers' remorse letting the wingnuts take control, and the next election cycle might see a major purge (unless the voter ID laws they're bound to push effectively cut off voter turnout).  Walker might skip running for Wisconsin governor for the excuse of focusing on 2016 and the White House (conveniently avoiding the embarrassment of likely losing re-election in 2014).

It's this reason - the Republican Party as it knows itself is doomed by basic demographics and the march of time - that I think the Far Right has gone overboard this year pushing their pro-fetus, kill-Planned-Parenthood, fuck-women's-health agendas.  They may not get another chance like this again.  Even though this may accelerate the Republicans' loss of control by alienating more voters than ever before, they'll do it.  They have the wingnut will to do it now: and they only have two more election cycles (2014 and 2016) to do anything about it before the population really does turn against them.

For what it's worth: just don't vote Republican, okay?  Please?  Thanks.

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