Opinion

Anyone who has been reading my writing here at Salon over the past few months knows that I am a big proponent of using negative partisanship to win the midterm election. The Republicans are so outside the mainstream that the midterm elections may not be the rout everyone expects if Democrats get out of their defensive crouch and make the case.

My view is that the country is suffering from a mass case of PTSD, still reeling from four years of non-stop Trump-induced chaos. The natural way to register their dismay that things have not yet returned to a sense of normality is to "throw the bums out," which usually means the party in power. But the Republicans are so radical right now that people may just understand that they are not a viable alternative. But Democrats must spell it out.

The U.S. Supreme Court appears ready to launch a legal and political bombshell into the 2022 elections nationally and in Pennsylvania.

A leaked copy of a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, revealed by Politico and other news organizations, would uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and overturn the viability standard established by Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a constitutional right to abortion, and the 1992 Pennsylvania case, Planned Parenthood v Casey, which built upon it.

If a majority of Supreme Court justices follows through on its plans to outlaw abortion, then America will cross the threshold into full-blown fascism. This is controversial, so let me explain.

Any discussion of fascism quickly veers into jargon, qualifiers, and deep history, because it can cover many different movements with contradictory ideas. But there is an easy way to understand what drives fascism and how it relates to abortion.

The GOP’s coordinated tantrum about the leak of a Samuel Alito-authored draft opinion to overturn Roe should be the ultimate reminder of an essential truth about American politics in 2022.

Republicans celebrate one thing.

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation was, to me, the end of an era. From that point, the Democrats could no longer trust the US Supreme Court to back their efforts to protect and advance individual liberties.

It used to be different.

Despite glib right-wing claims to the contrary, as many legal scholars and constitutional experts were quick to point out, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft opinion ending abortion rights opens the door wide open for the reversal of decades of human rights litigation. At issue is Alito's rejection of the ninth amendment, which states that the "enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Or, in plain English: Plenty of rights are guaranteed by implication in the Constitution — such as a right to privacy — even if not explicitly delineated. Despite his alleged "originalism," however, Alito was quite clear that he feels the opposite is true: If it ain't singled out by name in the Constitution, it's not a right.

"The Constitution makes no reference to abortion," he writes in the draft opinion that was leaked to Politico. As political scientist Scott Lemieux noted, this is a "junior high school debate society" argument unworthy of anyone with a law degree, much less a Supreme Court seat. But it does open the door to repealing birth control rights, same-sex marriage, and decades worth of social progress that religious zealots like Alito deplore.

Although Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera is a Fox News talking head, he doesn’t always blindly parrot the party-line nonsense coming from his colleagues. Rivera, for example, once got into a high-decibel shouting match with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly over illegal immigration. And during a Wednesday May 4 broadcast of the Fox News program “The Five,” Rivera slammed colleague Greg Gutfeld in response to his comments on abortion.

The heated exchange between the 78-year-old Rivera and far-right commentator Gutfeld came two days after Politico reported that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a leaked majority draft opinion, laid out an argument for overturning Roe v. Wade. Gutfeld was dancing with joy over the likely demise of Roe, saying that American women should fully embrace motherhood — and Rivera countered that motherhood should be voluntarily.

As Vladimir Putin wrested Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, I wrote that although peace-loving liberal democrats must arm themselves and fight sometimes, the Crimea seizure was not such a time and that more serious threats to liberal democracy were coming from much closer to home. The 2008 financial meltdown and the accelerating pace of public massacres in American public and private spaces were only two instances of the implosion of a civic-republican culture without which a liberal democracy lies open to demagoguery, thuggery and grand theft.

Some Americans live only to fight threats from abroad, distant from our internal crises; they beat drums for war against external enemies: armchair warriors such as Leon Wieseltier and Robert Kagan line up with Kagan's brother Frederick, a professor at West Point, and with other would-be combatants — "Second Amendment people" or uniformed militarists craving what they envision as a clear, decisive defeat of democracy's enemies.

Let’s assume for now that the Supreme Court’s draft opinion, leaked Monday to Politico, won’t change between now and June. Let’s assume the court strikes down Roe. If that’s the case – I don’t see why it would not be – people will wonder what a post-Roe America will look like.

History can help.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki again was forced to explain to Fox News propagandist Peter Doocy something very simple – exactly what President Joe Biden meant earlier on Wednesday when he warned that conservatives at some point might try to ban LGBTQ kids from classrooms.

“What happens if you have a state change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children?” President Biden pondered, as a warning.

In response to the publication of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans have decided what they want to talk about: Leaks and the supposed evilness of them. The same people who support Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to overthrow democracy are all gunning for Oscars for their feigned umbrage on behalf of the integrity of our governmental institutions.

It's not a huge mystery why Republicans want to talk about this non-issue instead of the actual matter at hand, which is the nationwide GOP effort to ban abortion. It's because Republicans know full well that their actual positions on the issue aren't just indefensible, but embarrassingly so. They definitely don't want to talk about the non-logic fueling Justice Samuel Alito's nasty, incel-esque "argument" against Roe. And they mostly don't want to talk about why they hate abortion so much. When they do, they end up sounding like snarling right-wing pundit Erick Erickson.

The Supreme Court has confirmed that the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey is authentic, but, like all drafts, might change before it is final. Below are a few observations.

If the final opinion is substantially the same as the draft one, the tone is egregious and full of hubris. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the right to abortion should be protected by the Supreme Court. But the dismissive rhetoric by Justice Samuel Alito of the reasoning in both Roe and Casey is unnecessary and hateful.

I think a lot of us remember that sick feeling we felt on the morning of November 9th, 2016 when we realized that Donald Trump was going to become president. I know I had never felt that way after a disappointing election before and I've been through many in my life. But this one was different and it wasn't just because I feared for the future of the country in the hands of such a patently unqualified, unfit president. I felt that the election of such a man signaled that the nation was rapidly deteriorating into an antediluvian state in which the progress of the 20th century was rapidly unraveling.

And there was a very specific sense of doom on one particular issue.