Earlier this week, conservative blog “The Confluence” reposted their favorite lie, that with Alito, there are now 5 votes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. This is patently false, as anyone who cares enough to invest even five minutes worth of investigation could tell you.
PUMAs love to leverage this lie, to convince susceptible swing voters that it’s okay to vote for theo-cons like Palin, because the damage to Roe’s already been done. Thankfully, they’ll never have the chance to vote for her again. But it’s worth noting, just to correct a blatant and knowing lie, that there are certainly not five votes to overturn Roe.
Indeed, if there were, it’d already be gone. The Court had the chance to overturn Roe in Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007. There, five Justices voted to limit the right to a specific late term abortion procedure (erroneously, I think); four would have preserved a stronger right to choose; and only two would have overruled Roe outright.
This was Justice Kennedy’s chance to flip and strike down Roe if he wanted to, but instead he himself authored an (admittedly flawed) opinion that explicitly preserved the right to choose. Indeed, Kennedy has voted many times previously to preserve Roe, once when its continuing survival was most in doubt. There may be anywhere between two and four votes to overturn Roe outright. But with Obama in office, that’s all there will ever be.
Note, too, that Obama will have at least one, and likely three chances to appoint justices to the Supreme Court. If any of the three likely replacements were in the hands of a conservative President, the dreaded anti-Roe majority would in fact become a reality. Make no mistake — with their support for Palin, the PUMAs would have killed Roe, Riverdaughter’s dishonest attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance notwithstanding.
You know, I once attended a lecture given by a former professor of mine who made a case that having Roe overturned would actually be a good thing, as it would galvanize the electorate and candidates to actually do something to increase access to abortions for once, instead of continuing to waste time on losing delaying actions against measure after measure limiting abortion’s availability to an ever-shrinking pool of middle-class-and-wealthier adult women. I don’t think most of the audience was very receptive to the idea, but I thought it made sense. Ultimately, abortion’s doomed unless we get Pattonesque about making sure every woman can have one her way, right away, and I can’t think of anything more likely to get people serious about sticking up for abortion than having Roe overturned.
All that said… nothing I’ve seen in their comments here or in the few of their you-linked-to articles I actually bothered to read gives me cause to believe PUMAs are thinking along those lines.
Posted by Steve | July 7, 2009, 7:10 pm