Opinion

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.

Sam Alito and his buddies may think they’re winning, but, if its any consolation, they’re on the wrong side of history and will ultimately lose.

The history of democracy moves forward, then is jerked back by reactionary forces, then moves forward again: it’s been going that way since ancient Greece.

It's fitting that, if the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade, they'd have the justice with the most incel-esque affect be the one to write the opinion. Samuel Alito has always been the conservative on the court who was least able to conceal the right-wing resentment that fuels him, glowering his way through President Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses and generally being a whiner on the level of Donald Trump. Clarence Thomas might be the most unhinged member of the court, Amy Coney Barret the most uncanny, and Brett Kavanaugh the best at spittle-flecked public meltdowns. But if I had to bet money on who is most likely to spend their nights on sleazy internet forums, whining that feminism has "ruined" women, it would 100% be on the court's creepiest member, Alito.

Late Monday night, Politico leaked a draft of the Supreme Court opinion, written by Alito, that would, without reservation, overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. (Which they are already doing.) Though heavy with legal-ese, Alito's misogyny shines through like a deplorable beacon. His contempt for the very idea that women are rights-bearing people is not hard to discern, even as he claims to hold no ill will towards them. Sewn throughout this decision is a deep, abiding belief that women simply aren't people in any meaningful sense. Women's lives, ambitions, pain, joys, and autonomy have absolutely no value he can discern. Instead, he treats women as ambulatory uteruses who have no more right to reject a pregnancy than your refrigerator has a right to reject holding your milk and eggs.

The Supreme Court is ready to strike down Roe, according to a draft opinion leaked to Politico late last night. Regarding the 1973 decision making privacy, and therefore access to abortion, a constitutional right, Justice Samuel Alito, speaking for the majority, said: “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history or traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

My initial thoughts.

The net is tightening around Jimbo. As more damning text messages, testimony and phone call records encircle the pint-sized pol from Urbana, Jim Jordan should be breaking out in a cold sweat. The 4th District U.S. congressman should be squirming in his shirt sleeves with each new revelation trickling out about his behind-the-scenes treachery leading up to and including Jan. 6.

After all, a sitting member of Congress publicly exposed as a central player in a nefarious plot to overturn a certified election should be toast, right? Someone who willfully chose loyalty to a megalomaniac over allegiance to country should be forced to slink into oblivion as a scorned turncoat, right? Jordan, we are fast learning, was deeply involved in the attempted coup to overthrow our government of the people. He conspired to cancel the 2020 votes cast by millions of his fellow Americans and reverse the outcome of a decided election for his Il Duce.

It’s time to stop normalizing and accommodating the white supremacists among us. They may be a third of America, but they’re the lost third, longing for return to a time we will never revisit.

Instead of looking forward, they’re stuck to a past that will never be revived, no matter how many elections they rig or people they terrorize or kill.

Conservatives are going all-in on attacking a Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) agency called the Disinformation Governance Board, falsely insisting President Joe Biden has created an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” that will censor everything online.

It’s their latest attack on actual truth, of course. For starters, the board’s focus is on combatting foreign disinformation, not domestic, and it would work to help protect national security. It’s also not a new endeavor, but a continuation of work done during the Trump administration, and conservatives had no issue with it then.

"There's one thing that I know for sure," declared Gene Bailey, the pastor of Eagle Mountain Church International, before a crowd of thousands recently gathered at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. "The raw truth was on Nov. 3, 2020, President Donald J. Trump won the election."

Later during the summit on the 2020 presidential election, which was broadcast live to a Facebook audience of over 300,000 followers, Hank Kunneman, the pastor of One Voice Ministries, proclaimed: "There is a payback coming!"

Just as it’s a waste of time for Republicans to refight the results of the 2020 election, it certainly does no good for anti-MAGAs to refight what happened in the previous race. Nevertheless, I wince on occasion when I contemplate how our country would’ve been far better served if the popular vote winner in 2016 had ascended to the Oval Office.

Last Wednesday was one such occasion, truly wince-worthy.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he was seen as a "populist" right-wing politician railing about free trade and immigration to push an isolationist worldview, all of which was out of step with what we knew as the modern conservative movement up to that moment. Sure there had been a rump group of paleoconservatives, like Pat Buchanan, who had staged a couple of fringe presidential campaigns in prior decades. The independent candidacy of millionaire Ross Perot had raised some of the same issues and appealed to many of the same voter concerns. But it was Trump whose TV celebrity and flamboyant personality managed to take those ideas straight into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Trump's populism was (and is) extremely shallow, however.

Global democracy is sick. In the United States, Donald Trump's supporters in the Republican Party continue to steamroll the Democrats and other pro-democracy forces. To say that the latter have for the most part been hapless, uncoordinated and paralyzed by denial is not overstating the case.

Political scientists and other experts have warned that in the wake of the Trump presidency and the coup attempt of January 2021, the country is now an "anocracy," hovering in limbo between naked authoritarianism and a slowly failing democracy.