SCOTUS Strikes Down Roe, Another Victory For Extremist Right
This past Friday, Right-wing extremists managed to complete a 50-year project on the American political system. Through dogged effort and zealous belief, they have rolled back the rights of women, and in the process endangered the rights of so many more. In the intervening nearly two months, between the announcement of Roe’s death sentence, to the actual execution there has been a seeming daze, in which somehow Democratic politicians were unable to mount any meaningful response to the known calamity rushing towards our nation’s women. Yet these very same politicians inundated Americans with a flood of calls over the weekend, explaining how critical our support is, and imploring everyone to give just a little more money to the Democratic party, and vote a little bit harder come November to keep out the dreaded Republican menace. (A menace Democrats always seem so eager to work with, to this day.) On a superficial level, this is certainly good advice, one should never be voting for the rabid dogs that the Republican party politicians have become. We’ve seen the damage they can cause when given control of just one branch of government. But it is concerning, and deeply disappointing, if unsurprising, that the Democrats have taken these intervening two months to do…nothing. And now they try and fundraise? Why, exactly should we give them this money?It is not like when they have been given power they have actually acted on the mandate of the people, matching words with actions, following through on campaign promises, and safe-guarding the rights and lives of their core constituencies, and Americans at-large. No instead, the Democrats continually sound the alarm bells, but then fail to answer the call, taking no action, even when the people respond and give them the reins. It really is deeply sad. Even more so, now that we have passed the Rubicon and the worst has happened, it is almost inexplicable the lack of any support for real action among Democratic leadership. Instead of fighting for abortion rights, trying to build the case for codifying a Roe with legislation, or even just fundraising for groups focused on protecting women on the ground in reactionary states, Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer were busy back-slapping Republicans, and propping up anti-choice Henry Cuellar in the razor-thin TX race against progressive Jessica Cisneros.Joe Biden, this year, called Mitch McConnell “a man of honor”, when few individuals have been more responsible than McConnell in the dismantling of our democracy. Even now, Biden has quashed any thoughts of drastic action, because after all it is just our rights being stripped away. Roe of course is the largest headline here, although the past week has seen the evisceration of multiple of our rights, from the crumbling of the separation between church of state, to the ability for us to live in safety and security with sane gun laws. It shouldn’t surprise people that often these decisions come from seemingly hypocritical positions. If you find it “weird” that the SCOTUS can argue to expand the new (2008 Heller) right for individuals to bear arms, while stripping away women’s reproductive rights which has decades of precedent (Roe 1973), you haven’t been paying attention to the game being played. As we said at the beginning, this has been a decades long ideological, political project, which has attempted to reshape, quite successfully to all our detriment, the entire conception of the USA and how its government relates to its people. The minority party understands that it cannot win power and create the unpopular extremist world it wants, if democratic institutions remain operational. See Roe v. Wade, in which 60% of Americans clearly support a women’s right to choose, and find the actions of SCOTUS odious and upsetting. Perhaps the scariest part of this situation, is how likely our loss of rights with the overturning of Roe is just the beginning. With SCOTUS dismissing Roe’s decision based on the right to privacy and substantive due process whole swathes of liberties and civil protections are in jeopardy. A fact which Clarence Thomas has already made very clear with his warning shots around Obergefell, etc. Even this doesn’t take in the full scope of the danger, as inventive right-wing lawyers will doubtless further erode our limited privacy rights, leaving every aspect of our lives open to monitoring and monetization. What we need will take much more than the ballot box. We need a general understanding that the SCOTUS is not an impartial entity, but a key element in the reactionary political project of the Republican party. The courts are not outside the political battle, but are actively cultivated by the right to enable their extremist ideology. Once again, we need look no further here, than Clarence Thomas, his apparently seditious wife Ginni Thomas, and the January 6th coup attempt. In order to overturn this inherently reactionary, and deeply political institution, we are going to need power: economic, political, and labor power. We are going to need organizing and building of a political opposition to de-legitimize the courts decisions in the public eye, and to mount a reclamation of our captured court system. This will take more than just voting to elect progressive politicians who will fight with us, but a change in how every-day Americans think about their relation to each other, as well as their government. We have seen what complacency brings. Thinking that if we hold the majority view, or live in a “safe” state, that these crazy conservatives won’t come for us is the surest path towards losing the rest of our freedom. If we are to safeguard these rights. If we are to ensure that we do not lose a century to a Neo-Jim crow era, we are going to need to join together and build political and economic power that will last decades and bring these authoritarian powers to their knees, handing our government back to the people. So, join us each week in growing solidarity, we cannot go back! #DSOT #UPM
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