The Fall of Roe v Wade: US Politics, June 2022

Maybe the 10th Amendment should be reconsidered. It may have been and be used to justify more progressive environmental laws in CA, as well as more restrictive laws on abortion in TX and other conservative states, but it seems increasingly untenable with globalization and the internet to think that regional differences are so profound and the United States so large that we cannot agree as a nation upon fundamental values, rights, and obligations. So it seems that states' rights are just an excuse to increase partisanship and skew majority rule without truly protecting any minorities from the two major parties.

Or confess however much you don't like it that the statisticians seem to have the upper hand on you and that no individual agency (or presumption of intelligence or foresight) seems to be the best policy. Just let the mass of votes count.

There are exceptions, like marijuana legalization, but in general "states' rights" is invoked to justify something terrible.

Lucky I’m a 78 year old who’s in pretty good shape, cause if I wasn’t, I’d have hit the ground and cracked my skull .. Suppose I was a weaker 78 year old and cracked my skull and died?

'Just imagine how bad that could have been' is not a description of anything outside of Rudy's mind and what happens in his imagination is hardly grounds for a prosecution.

Suppose I was a weaker 78 year old and cracked my skull and died?

Mmmmm keep up this foreplay Rudy

- Restrain judicial review
- Expand the court
- Clinics on federal lands
- Expand education and access to Plan C
- Repeal Hyde
- Hold floor votes codifying Griswold, Obergefell, Lawrence, Loving, etc
- Vote on Escobar’s bill protecting clinics

We can do it!
We can at least TRY

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 26, 2022

“We can always least try.”

These are the magic words.

“We can AT least try.”

hoping there's just been a major spurt of energy put into the left for the midterms.
Cos Polyyannaing is always a positive innit.
Or could just lay back and go well America's a bit over innit.

Optimism is like necessary like or everything just becomes a damp funk.
With enough impetus you might eventually get equity or something. Or just outright oppressed.

afaict, the absolute best case scenario for the midterms is an exact continuation of the status quo, so idk

but sure, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will always sounded wise to me

whether you should spend that energy on national electoral politics is another q though. there's optimism and then there's repeatedly putting your faith in liars

I mean its possible they flip a couple of Senate seats which means they can do stuff without needing Manchin. obviously history dictates the Dems will get destroyed but these aren't exactly normal times

the thing about that is, the Dems need to deliver SOMETHING. pass some concrete laws protecting the right to abortion, get that fucking climate deal done, make some moves to limit the power of the Supreme Court which is now the most unpopular entity in the country. they have got to know this is the case and yet, you know the Democrats, they'll sit on their hands and fundraise and then act all shocked that young people once again didn't turn out

Like cruelty for the GOP, I'm beginning to wonder if not at least trying is the whole point of the Dems.

Better to not try, than to try and see how you failed

A non-moving apple keeps the cart happy

it is better to vote next year than it is to eat

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/49/43/3a/49433a0dbcdf092ec4f0f99940ec89f9.jpg

their utter lack of any recognizable strategy, not just on abortion rights, but on pretty much everything, is extremely demoralizing

hoping there's just been a major spurt of energy put into the left for the midterms.
Cos Polyyannaing is always a positive innit.

One wonders which of the 469 separate, local seats that will be open in November have, in the most Pollyannaish reading, candidates standing on the left.

The strategy is called Gone Till November.

Before they can do anything they need a strong Republican Party

yeah I mean at this point idk how you can say the Dems aren't complicit, they knew this was coming for months and their only response was to fundraise

love that we're having to create a 15-pronged plan to react to this because of Biden/Dem refusal to do the one much more easy thing that everybody knows needs doing. don't have quite the disposal income I had two years ago but the donation machine is firing back up (for funds in states where it is illegal/heavily restricted).

I get the anxiety of Pubs reacting by packing the court similarly or passing insanely authoritarian laws without filibuster but at some point you have to stop making decisions based on what other people might do. they're monsters. of course they're going to react. give em something to react to.

xpost think they were holding onto the naive hope that somehow the leak was going to change the outcome. ha.

they were holding onto the naive hope that somehow the leak was going to change the outcome.

"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed." - RBG

xpost think they were holding onto the naive hope that somehow the leak was going to change the outcome. ha.

― Doop Snogg (Neanderthal), Monday, June 27, 2022

When I leak, the outcome changes.

what we need is our own Q

pic.twitter.com/FtnT1FCrUg

— thedistantdrummer (@thedistantdrums) June 27, 2022

Per Neanderthal, I don’t really have the disposable income to donate the way I once could (circa 2015-2019).

Postcards To Voters it is again, then

just ugh -- are they really going to go after Affirmative Action?

I mean, they've been going after affirmative action for decades. All that's left is demolishing the facade.

wasn't their just a challenge to affirmative action where someone sued Harvard?

xp - sure - it's just, so many people are on edge, and something that major that reinforces white supremacy (esp. during the summer), and shit will pop off like with George Floyd

fucking pissing me off that Clarence is just telegraphing which cases he wants to have sent back up through SCOTUS. even if his colleagues don't all go along with him, I'd rather it be a lot harder for people to know exactly what the dude is going to rule, even if it only slows things down a trickle.

he isn't telegraphing them, he's hired a plane to spell them out in the sky

Honestly, the Democrats in DC are ... a bit of a horribly formed joke, shall we say ... and local/regional political organization and leadership is where there is hope ... idk ... when shit pops off in cities, you often end up with relatively progressive mayors et al siding with cops and you get movement in-fighting, so to speak

I can't believe I am actually saying positive things about Gavin Newsom (it's a SF 2000 thing) but ...

So the very sober adults who assured us in the pages of the Post and Times et al that Amy C-B, Neil, and Bart are actually intellectual giants and very good boys and girls and love precedent have been p quiet? Or are they working on their columns about how actually Roe being overturned doesn’t mean what you think it does and here’s why

Megan McArdle pumped out a “well akshually the US is still more liberal than Europe on abortion” take just so a thousand people could explain how that was a goddamned lie and she could ignore them and continue to cash checks.

I have basically come to ignore those people the same way I do Malcolm Gladwell --

I mean, I was oblivious to the fact that anyone with intellectual respectability even said that

mike pence is just...amazing. i never imagined that i could think of him as anything other than a terrible, horrible, vicious person hiding inside the most boring public-facing personality that has ever existed. but then, watching these january 6 hearings, for once, you start to see some sort of person in there who you can empathize with, who considers the wellbeing of other people. i'm not sure in what other context pence would have been capable of not being a cowardly dick, but it turns out on jan 6 he managed to temporarily grow a spine and he did his fucking job.

but the weight of that, the beginnings of an empathetic personality emerging inside of him -- it was too much. he had to exterminate it

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, former vice president Mike Pence says abortion should be banned nationwide and is planning behind the scenes to focus on the issue in the coming weeks, according to advisers.

Former president Donald Trump, in contrast, fears the ruling could hurt the GOP’s election chances, his advisers said, even as he hailed the ruling as “victory for life” at a Saturday rally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/27/abortion-2024-presidential-candidates/

take the words "planning behind the scenes to focus on the issue", which are just....a complete joke. it really is something i would say as a joke, to indicate that i'm not doing jack shit and everyone knows it. yet mike pence can somehow take this complete joke, this thing that might not cause a lol but might prompt a small internal "hah!", and instead uses it to try to step on the accelerator pedal of being the most misogynistic fucker who has ever called his spouse "mother", and good fucking lord that's a lengthy and terrible list

what a piece of shit he is. i now believe that my original instincts were true - when he did the bare fucking minimum on jan 6, he did it on accident. he must have thought he was in on the plan to be a fucking turd, and only later realized that he had accidentally done a good thing. he's been living in this agony ever since, hence his plans to focus

“It’s been a large part of his career,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, who is currently advising him. “This is who he’s always been.”

Believe him!

Let's bow our heads to shitty political writing too ("is planning behind the scenes to focus on the issue").

mike pence ruins everything

it's also really, really funny that anyone thinks of him as a potential 2024 candidate

his ears will have retracted inside his head by then

I absolutely bet that the guy is a closet case, tbqh

No closet big enough. And he'd insist Mom join him.

i never imagined that i could think of him as anything other than a terrible, horrible, vicious person hiding inside the most boring public-facing personality that has ever existed. but then, watching these january 6 hearings, for once, you start to see some sort of person in there who you can empathize with

One more reason to never watch a minute of the 1/6 hearings.

I can't believe I am actually saying positive things about Gavin Newsom

maybe there should be presidents for different part of the country? i.e. President (West/Pacific), President (Deep South), President (Moribund Rust Belt), etc.