Think Progress reports on a little brouhaha going on within the House Republican caucus.
The GOP-controlled House will vote on a proposed 20-week abortion ban next Thursday — the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion throughout the United States. The legislation has passed the House for the past two years and was expected to have broad support in the 114th Congress, particularly as Republicans have set their sights on later abortions as an area where they believe they can advance their agenda.
However, the National Journal reports that a group of GOP women led by Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) have started pushing back against the legislation, expressing concerns during a closed-door meeting of House Republicans. Ellmers reportedly said she is worried that voting on the 20-week ban will alienate young female voters, urging her colleagues “to be smart about how we’re moving forward.”
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems kind of unprincipled to worry about alienating voters when you’re trying to take some kind of moral stand. Perhaps a better argument against this bill is that it is horrible policy and will be tremendously unpopular with young female voters for precisely that reason. I mean, any casual observer of Congress already knows that the typical House Republican simply doesn’t give a damn about alienating voters. If they care about getting reelected at all, they expect to do it by mobilizing their true believers.
Now, Rep. Renee Ellmers may want her colleagues to be smart about how they move forward, but either you support the 20-week ban or you don’t.
It ain’t the heat, it’s the hypocrisy.
When it’s Renee Ellmers who is cautioning the House Republican caucus “to be smart about how we’re moving forward” you have to have one of “Say Whaaa?” moments about the rest of the audience she’s addressing.
The Congress is in deeper than even our pessimism could predict.
“I have urged leadership to reconsider bringing it up next week…. We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,” Ellmers said in an interview. “The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn’t be on an issue where we know that millennials–social issues just aren’t as important [to them].”
It’s important to read Rep. Ellmers carefully here. She certainly appears to agree that the House should create another denial of poor and lower middle class womens’ agency over their bodies; after all, we know wealthier women will ALWAYS be able to maintain their rights. No, Renee just wants the woman-haters leading her conference to, I dunno, make it the twentieth thing the House votes on?
Rep. Franks’ response, that he and his fellow woman-haters get really anxious to reassert their hatred around the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, is very delightful.
Do these law-and-order-loving conservatives just say Roe v. Wade (banning abortion earlier than 24 weeks is unconstitutional) doesn’t exist? Why would it be acceptable as a federal law when it’s not acceptable for Arizona or Idaho or North Dakota or Texas or Mississippi or anywhere it’s been tried?
I imagine Ellmers puts it that way so she won’t be seen as a heretic and excommunicated or worse. Like the people in the 17th century who started using Copernican astronomy with a caveat “of course it’s not true but the math works better”. Many of them don’t believe in it but they’re scared to alienate the crazies, without whom they can’t win an election. It’s a grave they have dug themselves. They can’t die soon enough for me, but they can’t survive in the medium run.
They expect this Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade.
But Scotus did refuse to reinstate the Arizona law last year.
The House has voted to repeal the ACA 50+ times now.
Remember: Republicans aren’t concerned with governing. They are concerned with obstruction and destruction of this country for profit and power.
Once you remember that, everything else should make perfect sense.
They know that it’s nonsense but they want to placate the base. It was the same with the Volstead Act. Congress passed it expecting it to be a dead letter. Then the President appointed a true believer to enforce it, again to satisfy the WCTU.
Now, Rep. Renee Ellmers may want her colleagues to be smart about how they move forward, but either you support the 20-week ban or you don’t.
The third possibility is that Ellmers doesn’t really care whether the ban passes or fails but doesn’t want it to get in the way of the really important issues of the Republican Party: deregulation, tax cuts, private debt accumulation, etc.
Rich conservatives — that is the people who actually lead and write the checks for the Republican Party — don’t exactly care if the plantation overseer is a black lesbian Muslim whipping a straight male WASP. Or vice-versa. They’ll humor the idea that the former is an abomination that’s worth setting the world on fire to oppose and the latter is the natural order of things if they think it’ll motivate the quislings and kapos of Traditional America. But Bull Conner and Ralph Reed will get a knife in the throat and a pair of cement shoes if it means that Gordon Gekko gets an extra 5% capital gains tax cut.