The End of An Era: No More Roe
Online activist cites history in suggesting course to combat right-wing rulings from the US Supreme Court
Editor's Note: This is the latest in our ongoing series, “The End of An Era: No More Roe,” looking at the fallout from last Friday's Supreme Court bombshell which overturned the historic Roe v Wade decision.
Since the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court went ahead with its anticipated decision Friday to overturn about a half-century of guaranteed access to abortion services nationwide, top national Democrats have been parroting a similar line.
Five right-wing members on the high court struck down Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling which established the rights of all American women to legal abortion access and a fundamental right to privacy.
And Republican-dominated states are moving quickly now to criminalize what just last week was what legal from coast-to-coast.
The response by Democratic leaders has been uniform.
“This fall, we must elect more senators and representatives who will codify a woman’s right to choose into federal law once again, elect more state leaders to protect this right at the local level,” President Biden said, soon after the decision was handed down. “We need to restore the protections of Roe as law of the land. We need to elect officials who will do that.
“This fall, Roe is on the ballot. Personal freedoms are on the ballot. The right to privacy, liberty, equality, they’re all on the ballot,” he added.
As if almost reading from the same text, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, “This is deadly serious. But we are not going to let this pass. A woman's right to choose – reproductive freedom – is on the ballot in November. We cannot allow them to take charge so that they can institute their goal, which is to criminalize reproductive freedom, to criminalize it.”
Boil it down, and the Democratic message is, simply, “Elect more Democrats; this fall, abortion rights are on the ballot.”
Whether that strategy pays off remains to be seen with the results of the midterm elections in November.
But one activist prominent on the Internet dipped into Democratic Party history to offer a different strategy.
Specifically, activist Andrea Junker recalled President Franklin D. Roosevelt's battle with the Supreme Court nearly a century ago over the fate of his sweeping New Deal legislation, including the law which first established the federal Social Security program that millions of Americans would come to rely upon for decades now.
“Did you know? When SCOTUS said in 1937 that the Social Security Act was ‘unconstitutional’, President Roosevelt didn’t ask people to vote harder in the next election, he told the Supreme Court he’d add more justices until they backed off, which they did. — We can still do that,” Junker tweeted.
However, in reply to Junker's suggestion, another Twitter user highlighted a key difference between then and now.
“In 1937 Roosevelt had a super majority in both the House and Senate to back that up. Every positive thing that has ever passed in this country has happened when Congress had Dem super majorities. There will always be Manchins and Sinemas. We need to focus on Congress not Biden,” wrote user JZS, referring to the two corporate Democratic senators — Joe Manchin, of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona — who have stymied the agenda of other Democratic lawmakers for more than a year now.
The current Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate are razor-thin and certainly nowhere strong enough to overcome the anticipated filibusters by Republicans over any Supreme Court reform measures.
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