Democrats Have Failed To Protect Abortion Rights

Did Democrats and progressives launch a sustained major outcry about that “stolen seat”? Nope.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it crystal clear that if elected he wanted to erase Roe: “That (end of Roe) will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting ‘pro-life’ justices on the court.” Trump even released a list of such names, prepared for him by the right-wing Federalist Society, which for decades had been nurturing a deep bench of right-wing nominees.

In response, Hillary Clinton did not prioritize the future of the court, and Democrats and progressives still didn’t warn their voters, with any sustained messaging, that Garland’s stolen seat could wind up being filled by a right-winger. (It was indeed, by Neil Gorsuch.)

Sure enough, when the 2016 exit polls were released, the damage was done: One-fifth of all voters cited the Supreme Court as the “most important” factor in their voting decision - among those folks, Trump swamped Clinton by 15 percentage points

So there you have it. Trump remade the court – and McConnell, as majority leader, muscled Amy Coney Barrett onto the bench at Trump’s eleventh hour to become a potential sixth Roe-killing or Roe-crippling vote – not just because the GOP shrewdly played the long game, but because the party of abortion rights and its allies slept for decades.

Now they seem to think that they can succeed in the 2022 congressional midterms by highlighting what the GOP has done – a typically reactive last-ditch Hail-Mary response. The bottom line is, they have failed from the bottom up, failed from the top down, and they have confirmed writer Aldous Huxley’s age-old observation that “human beings are condemned to consequences.”

And women, denied autonomy over their own bodies, are poised to pay the biggest price.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com