If you remove a foundational - and long settled - right of over half the people in America, they will notice. Who could have predicted it?
Think of just how extreme the Dobbs decision by the six conservative Justices really is. They defied medical advice, the clear will of the majority of the people in the nation, and five decades of legal precedent (despite all their false vows to uphold it) to deliver their radical ruling.
That ruling represents a historic and unprecedented removal, the first time in American history that long-settled rights have been stripped away by a Supreme Court, rather than protected or expanded and the result has been as shocking as it is predictable.
With 98% of the expected vote reporting, 59% of voters in Kansas voted “no,” on the amendment (that the constitution does protect the right to abortion), while 41% voted “yes,” (that the constitution doesn’t protect the right to abortion). https://t.co/JoWykGZiu3 pic.twitter.com/D5jefMpkw9
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) August 3, 2022
Women with ectopic pregnancies have been turned away from life-saving care, underage children who have been raped have been forced – in their trauma - to cross state lines in search of terminations for conceptions that they did not ask for or plan, and miscarrying mothers have been sent home from hospital to develop life-threatening infections that need never have occurred.
Women with severe pregnancy complications have also been left untreated because of fears of lawsuits. Emergency care is in a state of crisis and doctors often face life and career-threatening choices for trying to save a woman's life.
How is this progress? In what world would this pass for medical care? It is instead simply the absence of care. It is the disastrous path that we in Ireland took throughout the 20th century, where protecting our idea of ourselves always trumped simply protecting each other.
This crude and religiously inspired overreach sent voters surging to the polls in deep-red Kansas on August 2, to send a howl of protest right back at the far right Supreme Court and the GOP who seated them.
With its Dobbs ruling, the Supreme Court tossed the legality of abortion to the states, many of whom had outright bans already on the books. But in Kansas, voters flocked to the polls to protect the right to an abortion that is included in their state's constitution
Republicans now fancifully believe that if they focus on the bread and butter issues like the (unfortunately for them) historic new jobs market and our rapidly falling gas prices they can somehow whistle past the blunt and appalling removal of a women's right to choose in the USA. But Kansas seems to have given a resounding answer to that optimism.
All the confident talk of a red wave in the midterms has dissipated, thanks to the post-Roe fury that most observers told us would not occur.
Record low unemployment
258,000 new jobs
Falling gas prices
Veteran cancer care enacted
China competition bill passed
9/11 mastermind dead
Inflation Recovery Act nearNot a bad week. #BidenBoom #DemsDeliver
— Bill Pascrell, Jr. 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@BillPascrell) August 5, 2022
“If I were a Republican House or Senate candidate or a Republican strategist, I would be panicking right now,” Democratic strategist Jon Reinish told ABC News. “Voters are furious, and voters are mobilized. Looking at Tuesday’s extremely definitive results, I think that this scrambles a lot of conventional wisdom and calculations on the whole midterm landscape this November.”
No kidding. Republicans and the court that they worked five decades to capture have significantly overplayed their hand and the public has grasped the fact that they show no intention of stopping.
This ruling came down on the wrong side of the nation and that thunderclap you just heard from Kansas this week will be the first of many between now and November.
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