Amidst all the talk about the impact of a likely reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, I thought a history lesson was in order, so I wrote one at New York:
Last week, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have codified abortion rights, died in in the Senate by a vote of 51 to 49. All 210 House Republicans and all 50 Senate Republicans voted against the legislation. This surprised no one, but it’s actually odd in several ways. While Republican elected officials are almost monolithically opposed to abortion rights, pro-choice Republican voters didn’t entirely cease to exist, and this could become a problem for the party if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the right to abortion at the end of this term.
Though polling on the issue is notoriously slippery, our best guess is that a little over a third of Republicans disagree with their party on whether to outlaw abortion (while about one-quarter of Democrats disagree with their party on the topic). These Americans have virtually no representation in Congress with the limited exceptions of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both GOP senators support some abortion rights, but they are still opposed the WHPA and are against dropping the filibuster to preserve abortion rights).
Ironically, abortion rights as we know them are, to a considerable extent, the product of Republican lawmaking at every level of government. The most obvious examples are the two Supreme Court decisions that established and reaffirmed a constitutional right to abortion. Of the seven justices who supported
Roe v.
Wade, the 1973 decision that
struck down pre-viability-abortion bans, five were appointed by Republican presidents, including the author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, and then–Chief Justice Warren Burger. All five justices who voted to confirm the constitutional right to pre-viability abortions in 1992’s
Planned Parenthood v. Casey were appointed by Republican presidents as well.
These pro-choice Republicans weren’t just rogue jurists (though their alleged perfidy has become a deep grievance in the anti-abortion movement). Today’s lock-step opposition to abortion rights among GOP elected officials took a long time to develop. Indeed, before Roe, Republicans were more likely to favor legal abortion than Democrats. In New York and Washington, two of the four states that fully legalized pre-viability abortions in 1970, Republican governors Nelson Rockefeller and Daniel Evans were at the forefront of abortion-rights efforts. They weren’t fringe figures; Rockefeller went on to become vice-president of the United States under Gerald Ford. Pre-Roe, various other Republican officials supported more modest efforts to ease abortion bans; among them was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill significantly liberalizing exceptions to an abortion ban in 1967.
The anti-abortion movement’s strength in the Republican Party grew steadily after Roe in part because of a more general ideological sorting out of the two major parties as liberals drifted into the Democratic Party and conservatives were drawn into the GOP. To put it another way, there has always been ideological polarization in American politics, but only in recent decades has it been reflected in parallel party polarization. But that doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s shift on abortion policy.
Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, Republicans began actively trying to recruit historically Democratic Roman Catholic voters. Soon thereafter, they started working to mobilize conservative Evangelical voters. This effort coincided with the Evangelicals’ conversion into strident abortion opponents, though they were generally in favor of the modest liberalization of abortion laws until the late 1970s. All these trends culminated in the adoption of a militantly anti-abortion platform plank in the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan for president. The Gipper said he regretted his earlier openness to relaxed abortion laws. Reagan’s strongest intraparty rival was George H.W. Bush, the scion of a family with a powerful multigenerational connection to Planned Parenthood. He found it expedient to renounce any support for abortion rights before launching his campaign.
Still, there remained a significant pro-choice faction among Republican elected officials until quite recently. In 1992, the year Republican Supreme Court appointees saved abortion rights in Casey, there was a healthy number of pro-choice Republicans serving in the Senate: Ted Stevens of Alaska, John Seymour of California, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. Another, John Heinz of Pennsylvania, had recently died.
Partisan polarization on abortion (which, of course, was taking place among Democrats as well) has been slow but steady, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post recently observed:
“In a 1997 study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Greg D. Adams sought to track abortion votes in Congress over time. His finding: In the Senate, there was almost no daylight between the two parties in 1973, with both parties voting for ‘pro-choice’ positions about 40 percent of the time.
“But that quickly changed.
“There was more of a difference in the House in 1973, with Republicans significantly more opposed to abortion rights than both House Democrats and senators of both parties. But there, too, the gap soon widened.
“Including votes in both chambers, Adams found that a 22 percentage- point gap between the two parties’ votes in 1973 expanded to nearly 65 points two decades later, after Casey was decided.”
By 2018, every pro-choice House Republican had been defeated or had retired. The rigidity of the party line on abortion was perhaps best reflected in late 2019, when a House Democrat with a record of strong support for abortion rights, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched parties. Almost instantly, Van Drew switched sides on reproductive rights and was hailed by the hard-core anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List for voting “consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.”
With the 2020 primary loss by Illinois Democratic representative Dan Lipinski, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, there’s now just one House member whose abortion stance is out of step with his party: Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who is very vulnerable to defeat in a May 24 runoff.
If the Supreme Court does fully reverse Roe in the coming weeks, making abortion a more highly salient 2022 campaign issue, the one-third of pro-choice Republican voters may take issue with their lack of congressional representation. Will the first big threat to abortion rights in nearly a half-century make them change their priorities? Or will they still care more about party loyalty and issues like inflation? Perhaps nothing will change for most of these voters. But in close races, the abandoned tradition of pro-choice Republicanism could make a comeback to the detriment of the GOP’s ambitious plans for major midterm gains.
Norm?
Norman?
Norman Rogers?
*Warning – Possible Troll Alert*
I think more people need to get off their lazy behinds and really look for a job. The Toledo Blade (Ohio) on Sundays has over 4 full pages of jobs, with more than 1 entirely in the medical field. Of course these jobs take an education and some hard work to get which many people don’t want to do. Why do so many people think they should get paid a great wage for doing nothing? Socialism didn’t work in the Soviet Union and it won’t work here. Our country was based on you get what you work for, not making others give you something you don’t deserve. I have gotten my first raise in 10 years so something must be starting to get fixed from 8 years of depression in jobs.
This just out, from Citizens for Tax Justice, an outstanding nonprofit group that has been monitoring the tax code for progressivity for decades now:
DO FAT CATS PAY LOWER TAX RATES THAN WORKERS?
A May 8 analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, released today by Citizens for Tax Justice, shows that the federal tax code has
become so skewed in favor of investors over workers that personal taxes on earnings are now two-and-a-half times greater than personal taxes on
investment income.
The analysis shows that total federal personal taxes paid on wages now average 23.4 percent, while federal personal taxes on investment income now average only 9.6 percent.
The press release is available on CTJ’s website at
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/earnpr.pdf .
The full ITEP analysis can be found at http://www.itepnet.org/earnan.pdf .
(end of CTJ communication)
Edwards in his two Americas speech worked in this theme about this Administration favoring wealth over work in its tax and other economic policies. Most Americans, based on polling results, already know that this Administration favors the wealthy in its tax policies. And that seems not (yet, anyway) to have coincided with the sort of hue and cry one would have hoped for in light of such an outrageous reality.
I liked Edwards’ frame on this. It is a relatively easy to explain values-based statement which seems to resonate better with a broader portion of the public than others I’ve seen used to get at the same point. It is harder to attack with the class warfare line and lends itself better to putting a human face on this issue.
Frank, it is possible to determine the approximate “value” of the “jobs” being created if you take a look at the full report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tl4.htm.
When you look at the numbers being offered, what you will find is that of those 288K net new “jobs”, 60.1K are in Temporary Help Services and Business Support Services (shorter version: temp jobs) and another 29.8K are in Services to Building and Dwellings (groundskeepers in other words). You will find another 36K in Accomodations and Food Services (about 80% in Food Services and Drinking Places) and another 16.8K in Ambulatory Health Care Services (home health aides in other words). So, just add up these numbers (142.7K total) to see that about 50% of the new positions are in immediately identifiable minimum wage jobs. I haven’t even teased out the other minimum wage jobs contained in the list yet but they can be identified (what percentage of Nursng and Residential Care Facilities positions aren’t minimum wage in your estimation, for example?).
I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about how sustainable Dubya’s growth projections are. Take a look at the BLS report for more detail.
ALERT: John Zogby has placed an article on his website in which he predicts, based on current polling numbers and history, that John Kerry will win the election. His arguments are quite similar to those espoused on this website…
Where are all these new jobs? I am highly educated and skilled, and I’ve been out of work for a year. It’s been ages since I’ve even had an interview.
Is there any way to tell if the new jobs are actually lower paying sector jobs? I smell a rat.
The problem with the Repub/CNBC line about how the economy is improving is that it is based on aggregate statistics. As the public rightly perceives, things aren’t getting be4tter for ordinary people. The tax cuts, while nice sounding in the aggregate, went mostly to 1-2% of the population. New jobs, ok, but no one is saying how much they pay. If they are at Wal-Mart, it isn’t good enough. Corporate profits may be up, but they aren’t being spread around. The public understands that gasoline is going up, interest rates are going up, inflation is going up, wages aren’t going up, and good jobs are still disappearing. As someone upthread said, Bush’s economic policies are succeeding, but the result is bad for 98% of the population.
In my field, information technology, over 900K jobs have been lost since 2001, and since January, 15K have been added.
This is supposed to cheer people up?
Democrats need to understand that, on the economy, Bush has not “failed.” He’s succeeded in what he is trying to do. The only problem is that what he is trying to do, is only really good for about 1% of the population. Bush is trying to shape an economy in which there are tremendous productivity gains, but no wage gains, and guess what we’ve got? Duh!
Perhaps voteres are waking up to the fact that we have embraced an economic policy with the moral equivalence of throwing a huge drunken party complete with booze, dancing girls, and a rented ballroom, then charging it all to our children. . .
Well, probably not.
The most important changes for an optimistic economy are wage growth, control over health care and insurance costs, and secure retirements. Allowing these to be dictated by employers like Bush seems content on doing will only drive more pessimism and insecurity and doubt. The party that wins public support for the economy must raise the federal minimum wage, especially for full time workers, and keep it indexed to price inflation. Sen. Kennedy made this important proposal that should be tacked onto any bill that Republicans use to eviscerate the middle class! Middle class and working class workers can’t pay their bills and mortgages and health care costs, let alone save for retirement of Bush’s ludicrous Health Savings Accounts. Bush is incredibly out of touch and REFUSES to see the error of his ways. Why do Republicans seem to only care about GDP growth, not stagnant wages? about newly unemployed numbers, not those out of work for years and years? Kerry is the only one who understands and aims to help average Americans.
No amount of priveledge can take away the fact that Kerry has the best ideas! And no amount of cowboy antics and acting chumy with voters can take away the fact that Bush’s policies have emasculated most workers who don’t earn, say, $100,000 a year and have only helped the superrich!
The jobs numbers aren’t good according to BushCo’s econ team. An average of 306,00 jobs/month, thanks to tax cuts. At least they outpace population growth again though.
It’ll go away eventually. It lags, of course. I don’t think there’s any doubt at this point that the economy, and particularly the job situation, will be considerably better by this time next year. I used to be afraid that it would improve quickly enough to help Bush, but I’m nearly positive that there’s not enough time at this point. Thank god.
I suspect that SSJPabs is correct about a time lag. Especially given the competing news this week.
I think the key indicator of the economy for most people is “when do I expect my next raise, and how big will it be?” And right now, I now a _lot_ of people for whom that indicator is very negative. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I talk to (including, unfortunately, my own employees) is clear that there will be no raises this year, and unless things change radically, next years’ are likely to be small, too.
This contrasts very, very clearly with memories of the second half of the nineties, where raises (and even bonuses, remember those?) were regular and decently-sized, if not better.
From my reading, no matter what the numbers, the one major thing this recovery has not produced, and doesn’t seem likely to produce, is any real wage growth any time soon.
So for most people, the recovery is not real on a personal level. Everyone is happy that there isn’t any inflation (unless you’re trying to buy a first house), but there certainly isn’t any sense of hope that things are getting any better.
Well I suppose it took a lot of time for the lack of jobs to really impact the public perception on economics, it might take a while for that to be too.
I’m too close to these things, too informed. I honestly admit that I have little in common with the average public in reactions to these numbers.