Made a few edits to the charts (removed the "part two" from the first chart, changed the description on the second chart to reflect nuances in when exactly the first trimester ends).
Also, general reminder to play nice in the comments.
I’m reminded of a progressive line: “When you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression”. The pro-choice side got so used to reading their view into the constitution that returning the issue to the legislature seems like an apocalyptic threat.
I personally favor a pretty sweeping pro-choice position, but it also seems clear to me that there are strong moral arguments on both sides here. And public opinion here has been steady for a long time. And the legal argument that abortion is protected in the constitution is tenuous at best. And fighting over this issue has increased the politicization of the Supreme Court. I’m glad abortion is back in the hands of legislatures; hopefully they can find compromises most people find acceptable. Probably going to be messy though :(
The problem is that state legislatures are really bad!
1. Gerrymandering is rampant. Wisconsin is a 50/50 state, but the GOP has a near-supermajority on the state legislature due to political geography and gerrymandering.
2. In states heavily skewed toward one party, the real battles are fought in the primaries, which both make it even less representative and reduce incentive to compromise. If I lived somewhere like Idaho or Utah, I'd likely have to register as Republican in order to have a chance at a non-terrible candidate.
3. Various social trends (such as the decline of local news, reduction in ticket splitting, etc) mean that people aren't really holding state parties accountable much -- they're just being treated as reflections of the national party. If you're a Michigan Republican, what's the point in compromise if people are just going to vote based on how they feel about Congress? (Governors are a bit different.)
You could make a strong argument that the current situation for state legislatures is the number one source of political dysfunction in the country.
"...mean that people aren't really holding state parties accountable much -- they're just being treated as reflections of the national party"
One of the main factors causing this is the primary importance of national politics.
Assuming the abortion really does become a state-level issue, perhaps people will have to care more about the nuance of local/state candidates?
That's certainly the case now for me. I'm moderately pro-life, but my state is going to restrict abortion far more than I'm comfortable with.
So I'm now more inclined to vote for someone (perhaps even a Democrat, horror of horrors) that supports a more moderate position on the issue, and less likely to default to the (R).
The people prioritize this the most are going to be college-educated voters, and they don't usually live in swing districts (there are exceptions.) The barriers to figuring out what the hell is going on with state politics are terrifyingly high, and there are a lot of headwinds.
It's still about money and staying in power regardless of what level you're at. And the suburban voters both men and woman, have access: to doctors, birth control, and good insurance so they think that life as they know it, won't change much. Will they really go out and vote for their poor sisters and brothers to have control over their lives.
Many states are effectively one party systems, the party in power gets the money because the party out of power has nothing to offer businesses since they don’t control anything. Having effective control of local media helps, too.
Er, why wouldn't they? They do in California. College educated voters tend to be substantially more pro-choice than non-college voters, once you control for race.
I was referring to my uncertainty about the numbers being motivated enough to result in a big turnout for elections. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic. On the same hand, if it is seen as a broader issue over women's control and dignity, maybe it'll happen.
That’s not what happened. What happened is all our pro-life lawmakers started losing to Republicans as more states went red. Something similar happened in California. As the state went blue, the only Republicans left became increasingly crazy, because the normal Republicans were defeated in increasingly blue districts. Abortion has been a *very* rare primary point. The only two I can think of are Lipman and Cuellar, both of which were primaried for multiple reasons.
Personally, I thought the Democratic Party should have a more welcoming stance towards pro-life reps, but now that RvW is overturned, I must admit, I’m not feeling all that tolerant.
But the question is _why_ that happened. There were obviously other big factors but not running candidates or not sufficiently funding candidates definitely played a major role.
For what it's worth I've personally talked to a few very big donors who (in 2016/2017) were categorically opposed to supporting any candidates who were not strongly pro-choice in even the most red of districts.
Our argument was generally roughly: "Would you want the candidate who is pro-ACA and other D priorities but pretty quiet about his views on abortion or the R who is advocating fetal burials and all kinds of similar madness?" and the answer would generally be "We'd want to stay out of that race".
It happened because the Democratic brand became so damaged that nobody with a D next to their name could win, no matter what their positions. Just recently we lost McCaskill and Heitkamp. And it wasn’t funding. Races are swimming in money.
I think JBE is a good counterexample. He signed a horrible abortion bill.
Claire McCaskill is a clear example of someone who got squeezed out despite taking pretty Republican stances on many issues and running as far away from the Democratic party brand as she could. She got lucky in 2012 regardless. It was a good year for Democrats, and she had a terrible opponent.
This is true for statewide elections, but not state legislatures. People don’t even know who is running in those races and vote based on their opinion of the national party.
The same could be said for Republicans. In fact, it's funny as yesterday I was listening to problems kids have trying to simply "play" baseball because of their expectations raised by their parents. $300 bats...
1. Public opinion is strongly in favor of Roe and always has been.
2. A lot of times state legislatures aren’t responsive to their constituents. As an example, multiple ballot initiatives to create an independent commission for drawing districts won, and they were just… ignored.
3. States’ rights have inevitably been the bastion of repellent policies like Jim Crow. Do you think states should be able to dictate slavery, over which they fought an actual war for their right to decide? Interracial marriage? Birth control? Gay marriage? At some point these rights become so fundamental they aren’t considered fair game for state restrictions.
1) Depends how you phrase the question. As the post demonstrates, a majority of people favor more abortion restrictions than Roe permits.
2) Federal legislators might weigh in too. In any case, state legislators have more democratic legitimacy than the Supreme Court.
3) Unlike those issues, abortion has strong moral intuitions on both sides and pretty stable public opinion. If public opinion on abortion had evolved like gay marriage (or slavery!) I’d have a different view.
A sizable majority do not want RvW overturned, so I don’t see the reason to split hairs. If you had broken down support for marriage equality between support for civil unions versus full marriage, you’d also see a split.
State legislatures absolutely do not have more democratic legitimacy. They are a total mess. In many states, they are essentially a part time job, which is why you regularly see random state reps proposing bonkers policy.
Finally SCOTUS opinion on marriage equality was in front of public opinion, which is why a ton of states did not recognize it at the time. We could also break it down by state, which I suspect might demonstrate in some very red states that it is not supported by a majority. I have a hard time believing that if public opinion turned against marriage equality in ten years, that you’d be okay tossing it back to the states. Some rights are too fundamental.
I hope Democrats learned the right lesson from the "Defund the Police" narrative which is that one of the most effective political moves is attaching a terribly unpopular message to your opposition that they can't or won't shake.
"Louisiana just criminalized miscarriages. Idaho just banned contraceptives. Oklahoma is forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term. This is the world Conservatives want."
And the key is to not stop attaching the message even if they disavow it. Conservatives still talk about how Democrats want to Defund the Police, even Democrats that have explicitly said it's a terrible and in fact have voted for more funding. It was a plausible view of the left so it stuck. "Republicans want to make miscarriages a felony." Or whatever message sticks best should be an attack ad that gets used in every race in 2022, like Defund the Police was in 2020.
"Conservatives still talk about how Democrats want to Defund the Police, even Democrats that have explicitly said it's a terrible and in fact have voted for more funding"
What's the appropriate point at which this attack(or equivalent from the Democrats) should stop?
I don't know that the Democrats have done enough to disavow Defund the Police - but suppose they did more - at what point should the attack ads stop?
If we make attack ads for things the most extreme 1% of our opponents say that the other 99% explicitly say "we don't support that - here's the explicit bill we do support"... is that ok?
Charitably it pins your opposition down on having to say what they do support - and I support that as a good end in and of itself - do we at least scale back the attacks at that point once they've officially stated it in their platform?
Strategically, the appropriate point is when it is no longer an effective attack ad.
Ethically, I don't know exactly but I don't think we're anywhere close to that line. Conservatives have shown mounds of duplicitousness on this topic in particular ("Roe is settled law" - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, ACB) so the point is certainly further than a mere statement. If, for example, a majority of Republicans sign onto a bill that prevents any bans on abortion under the circumstances that a pregnancy is not viable or that the mother faces dire health consequences, I will call that line of attack a little unfair. But Republicans aren't signing or pushing for that bill in the next decade so I think it's a very fair attack. A significant amount of red states are going to do crazy things like investigate miscarriages and national Republicans won't use their power to stop it. Until they do, I think it's a "good faith" attack. Lots of conservatives really do want to do those things!
I differentiate them in my mind (perhaps incorrectly)
Bilateral Gerrymandering is pretty bad but the solution can be bipartisan (national consensus - laws - etc)
Banning "unfair" attack ads doesn't strike me as ever leading to a "better" outcome. Especially because everyone's definition of unfair will be different (see: misinformation). But I also don't know that it's actually making things worse either (see again: misinformation) - I just worry that it will.
The aca and Dodd-Frank and pretty much the entire Obama years were being served a shit sandwich and having to pretend it was delicious. For our trouble of taking the health policy ideas from the Heritage institute, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney we got death panels and a kind of absurd obstructionism.
I think Summer 09 created a view, that I’m not sure is incorrect that it’s pointless to try to split the difference because anything substantial will unleash hell no matter how much you give.
You must be too young to remember what insurance was before the ACA. A nightmare of exemptions and exceptions that allowed insurers to cover basically nothing and get away with it. Today the vast majority of people with healthcare coverage can be confident in an out of pocket maximum and act accordingly, and decent coverage is vastly more available to the working poor than previously.
Progressive posturing aside, the US is today vastly closer to any of the major “universal” systems out there, aside from Britain’s, than it was before 2009. It’s additionally sorted out some, even many, of the cost diseases that plagued us before the ACA.
Again, sound and fury signifying nothing from progressives on this topic. A narrative devoid of pesky facts that get in the way of the moralizing.
I think what Andrew is referring to is all the efforts Democrats made to make the ACA a bipartisan piece of legislation by bringing in Republican ideas and inviting them to help write parts of it, only to have the entire GOP caucus vote against it. A lot of (especially young) progressives still look at the ACA as a failure because they compare it to their ideal and blame Democrats' attempts at compromise for the lack of single-payer or whatever.
I agree with you and John from FL that the ACA was a dramatic improvement on the status quo and I would add that part of the reason it has proved resilient is because Democrats wrote much of it hand-in-glove with the insurance industry (i.e., something that progressives also complain about) so they don't lobby for its repeal. Like, compromise was probably a good thing with the ACA, even though in the end the Democrats were compromising with themselves.
Also, it was popular enough that the Republicans tried to get rid of it when they had a majority and couldn't quite manage. A significantly more progressive version might not have survived.
This is the person who said he's sick of 1 step forward and 10 steps back the other week, so I'm not confident in his grasp of the nuances.
Anyway, from "ACA" to "universal healthcare with effective cost controls" lies a single, if terribly wide-ranging, step: "Mandated unified rate-setting".
Suddenly the price discrimination and the dense thicket of bullshit which sustains it fades away, and in its place there's a vast surplus of cash formerly spent on rent-seeking bullshit which can instead be spent on doctors, nurses, and facilities.
So I'm fairly confident that we'll get the job done sooner or later, if only state-by-state.
While the ACA and Dodd-Frank are probably bad examples, since they ultimately became legislation that, though imperfect, is a net good, the pervasive attitude that the ACA was a big failure didn't exactly help drive Democrats to the polls to counter the subsequent "death panels are coming for you and the economy sucks" red wave. But I think you are exactly right about Schumer's calculus here.
The GOP as Lucy-with-the-football meme is just a reflection of the discipline of a party that is more homogeneous; the leader says "don't vote for this thing, we are going to run against it in 2010" and the caucus does exactly that. In Schumer's case, he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. Sure, Collins and Murkowski will pretend they can't support Schumer's bill because it goes too far, but in the end they'll rationalize a vote with their caucus because the GOP is going to run on (taking away) abortion rights and say "see, putting up with Trump was totally worth it for the judges!"
There is no half-loaf to be won here. The entire GOP caucus plus some anti-choice Democrats are going to vote against any federal law enshrining abortion rights; doing otherwise right before/after Roe falls is political suicide. Schumer may as well throw a bone to the progressives instead of catching flak from his right and his left when the bill fails.
If you look at what happened with BBB, that ended up being the actual dynamic. The left wing complained about it, but in the end was willing to keep compromising.
Another example is the Stupak amendment about abortion and the ACA, which included abortion restrictions.
I was just getting ready to reply to a comment on another site how Democrats badly need to adopt a "I'm willing to accept less because I want to win the issue" approach on climate change as well. Accepting less is still better for the climate than having Republicans in charge and getting nothing.
Yes, but reducing the incentives for net emissions of CO2 is not a straightforward more/less issue. If we were talking about the level of a net tax on CO2 and methane emissions, yes. But it is possible to be "green" in counterproductive ways if they are not guided by a "shadow price" of the net CO2 they prevent.
“ When people are scared to lose, they make smart decisions.”
Here’s a mail bag question perhaps, but what are you seeing that I’m not that indicates the educated, urban-to-suburban base of the Democratic Party is the least bit “scared to lose”?
I have seen every indication that most of these people regard politics as a virtue-signaling luxury, not a meaningful attempt to govern. It’s not a vocation, nor even a pastime, but simple a casual hobby.
I fail to see anyway in which abortion limits will change that. These are people who can currently afford to pop across a state line to deal with any pesky issues and will be able to take a “weekend trip” to Ireland, Canada, or Britain as needed in the future.
Nothing that falls into the realm of “bread and butter politics” scares professional class Americans anymore, they have sufficient resources to avoid all consequences. That’s one of the fundamental problems we face in politics and I see no possibility of changing it.
Here’s a mail bag question perhaps, but what are you seeing that I’m not that indicates the educated, urban-to-suburban base of the Democratic Party is the least bit “scared to lose”?
I think Matt is basically referring to the fact that this court ruling, 2022, and 2024 are going to be hideous to Dems (moreso than anything since the Reagan adventures) and that we'll have to learn our lesson in some context.
The party is no longer driven mainly by professional politicians, nor by people with meaningful convictions and the will to pursue them by hook or by crook, or even by genuine idealists/liberal patriots committed to achieving some sort of improvement.
It is being directed by and for the benefit of the professional classes and their "intellectual leading lights", and what those two groups want is wildly divorced from the effective practice of politics: the former wants to feel good about themselves, the latter mostly to grift their way to a comfortable living. These people are, in the main, cosplaying at having convictions and ideals for social cachet.
As such, they don't *care* whether what they do, say, or donate to actually improves the chances of enacting their stated policy planks, so long as it sounds good within their heavily bubbled peer group. And they themselves are totally divorced from the material considerations that ostensibly drive those policy preferences, so there is no urgency to actually fixing anything. In fact, "Wouldn't paying for public housing cost me what's left of my SALT deduction? Nah, let's just chant 'No one should profit off housing!' instead."
It's quite literally post-scarcity politics, and it's a complete fucking dead end. I will believe these people can shape up and be serious about the practice of politics and the exercise of power when they show signs of doing it.
In the meantime, I regard it as a far more likely outcome that the GOP will one day start making good on its populist promises, and am much more concerned about the contours of what that looks like when they're so divorced from all the expert communities needed to craft effective policy.
I was talking to some friends about Musk and Twitter and the Babylon Bee's tweet came up. I agreed it was transphobic and they shouldn't have done it, but I asked if banning would actually make things better or improve the culture war problems and I heard "they don't want to improve it".
And that may be true... but I was more concerned that the attitude suggested my friends didn't seem to want to improve it.
I hope I misunderstood, but my current interpretation is consistent with your comment.
But Republicans are moving in exactly the opposite direction, away from deficit reduction, immigration reform and freer trade, policing reform, carbon taxation, things that can benefit "everyone" in order to keep and hold power to reduce the tax liabilities of the rich.
That has been the GOP platform almost uninterrupted since Nixon was tossed out!
The modern GOP is shifting to be closer to the party of Nixonian populism than anything since has been. We'll see if that shift translates from rhetoric to policy over the coming two decades or not, but it's very clear to me that the Democrats have no viable path back to being the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson. Probably not even to being the party of Obama, FFS. The incentives of the individuals who make up the party and those who tell it what it should think are too misaligned for that to happen. Popularism isn't popular and it's not going to happen.
As for the Republicans... American political parties come to believe the things they say on a 20-30 year timeline, which is how the GOP went from what it was in 1990, when the elite was cosplaying some of today's bullshit, to what it is today. The thing is, it's now cosplaying at being the party of the little guy. I'm laying money that that will become true in more than words within 30 years.
What I don't care to guess is whether they can do so effectively. There are a lot of examples of the "party of the little guy" driving things right into the ground, far more than there are of things like the New Deal.
Hi! I'm an educated Democratic voter, and I am *absolutely* scared to lose. I'm not just virtue signaling.
Among other things, I'm scared of climate change - not so much for myself, but for my six-year-old son. He'll have to deal with the fallout from this as he's growing up.
The issue is that if the rest of the Democrats' educated voting base were as scared as we were, they'd be making the compromises (both policy and rhetoric) to prevent it from happening.
They aren't. Insofar as I can tell, they've become even more intransigent on various topics since Biden won office, and our actual elected officials are being, in the main, spineless idiots caving to their loudest and most extreme constituents.
You’re an optimist. Another Trump term would sort it out. Very few would have the resources/connections to shield themselves effectively from the consequences of that. Less dramatically, exacerbated stagflation may start biting the professional classes in a less dramatic and more prosaic but by no means pleasant or negligible manner even before then.
I'm well aware that we need to sort out climate change before it bites us all on the ass, and our healthcare system is still something of a shambles, but I am so very sick of this progressive line that we were all seriously harmed by the first Trump term.
The Republicans aren't actually on the verge of turning the country into a police state or destroying its economy.
They suck in a variety of ways, but almost all of them are more in the nature of "We'll make the current situation a wee bit worse to line our backers' pockets a wee bit more", not "let's reintroduce debt peonage for poor people".
And since "the current situation" is by and large very genial to the professional classes, who also own large chunks of stock in the companies benefitting from GOP rent-seeking, most of them just don't have an interest in "standing up" a la progressive fantasies.
One can argue that under Trump we skated close to disaster several times but nothing *truly* terrible happened. (Unlike, say, Bush's decision to wage war with Iraq.)
That said, I sure wouldn't want to throw the dice on a second Trump term. You can only get lucky so many times.
But that's just it... how much did Bush's Iraq War decision punish the professional classes? Hell, how much did the financial crisis truly punish the ranks of the professional classes after just a few years?
I used the phrase "post-scarcity politics" because I genuinely think we're at the point where the American professional classes, making $150k per household or more, are now thoroughly divorced from most of the material concerns that have historically driven politics as we know it.
Hell, the same is true of me, and likely of many of the folks here.
The big difference is that a lot of us read enough history to understand how fragile everything really is. Certainly my politics are not animated by my short-term financial interests, but by the need to shore up the whole system and ensure it serves a broad slice of the citizenry well, before there are enough folks outside looking in to overturn it entirely or external factors burn it to the ground (literally).
But good luck convincing most of the upper-middle class that the world of ever-rising property values, second homes, huge degree and networking wage premiums, and a poor-but-vaguely-provided-for-and-pliant working class is anything but permanent.
Two points: 1. most of the electorate of both parties, including at the primaries stage, is making short of 150k (and I also think the insulated class you are thinking of is making way above that figure, but that's besides the point) 2. Thanks for this clarificaiton. With this I agree. Many are living perhaps with a delusion of a post-historical reality, but it's just that, a delusion. History and politics can have seriours, terrifying, consequences for all of us, no one is safe, certainly not the 99.9% which would very much be effected by a 1930s level economic depression, a WWIII or a devolvement of the US into Hungaria-style authoritarian regime. All of which are plausible scenarios at this point (not necessarily all at once), especially under a Trump admin with GOP trifecta.
As regards point 1... yes, but a goodly part of that "under 150k" electorate is young people who do not yet make that money but expect to someday, and moreover those folks and their parents are absolutely setting the broader "cultural" backdrop against which the Democrats operate.
Their weight within the party is entirely out of proportion to their numbers, all the moreso because the GOP no longer *has* much of an "ideas" demographic. Their high-SES demographics are mostly those of "mommy and daddy left me a fuckton of money" and "I built a hands-on business". The gentry, not the professionals and creatives. That basically means that they don't/can't take the lead on setting the cultural narrative, but that they are more in line with the electorate, which broadly doesn't like change.
On point 2... "making $150k per household or more, are now thoroughly divorced from most of the material concerns that have historically driven politics as we know it."
This sentence was meant to highlight sentiment, not objective reality, so yes, agreed in full.
But they are. Have you not seen Jan 6th? Are you not hearing the committee‘s findings? Trump very seriously attempted to ignore the elections and stay in the White House. Would it have been business as usual if he succeeded ? Yes, he failed, but only because specific people thwarted him, all of whom won’t be around next time round. Trump and many around him and behind him (e.g. Peter Thiel) seriously and explicitly do not believe in democracy. Why do intelligent people refuse to listen to their adversaries explicit words, promises and past actions ? It’s like Europe being surprised by Putin.
What about that would have prevented people of my economic means from nipping off to Canada for an abortion as needed, or seeking reproductive care in Europe for a few months in a dangerous pregnancy? What about that would have crippled my standard of living and punched me in the pocketbook?
If "loot makes the boys get up and shoot", then "bills drive voters to the polls". Ideals and genuine beliefs are a niche pastime at best by comparison.
Can even quite wealthy people with actual jobs nevertheless 'seek reproductive care in Europe for a few months' as if it ain't no thing?
The flippant dismissal of the idea that anyone in the middle class might be inconvenienced by draconian restrictions is not just politically counter-productive but not true on the merits either.
Where have you been the last two years? Trump's administration entirely mishandled testing and travel restrictions at the outset of the pandemic, so that we had to experience much more severe NPIs, and then fumbled the message on vaccines so that they are *still* controversial.
I don't want Trump in office, because I don't want SARS 2026.
(In case you're wondering why I blame Trump and not the public health establishment or Biden: the primary ways in which public health establishment failed us this past pandemic have involved failing to consider the tradeoffs between medical benefits (which they are familiar with quantifying) and non-medical benefits (which they are not). That is precisely the sort of situation in which strong political leadership is useful! And once Trump had poisoned the well of media commentary by polarizing the pandemic, Biden can't really "unpoison" it.)
Progressives need to be more clear when they are supporting minorities/low income people -- issues that DO require someone other that the super rich to give up something, design it carefully so as the cost is as small as possible, and campaign for it on those grounds -- and things that benefit "everyone" although maybe low income people more than others.
Very sane and sensible newsletter. Hews closely to both public opinion, and to the actual law in almost all Western countries. Yet this view has almost no supporters among US politicians and opinion makers. So weird and sad.
I suspect this view has the support of the majority of US politicians and opinion makers. But they are too scared of their respective extremists to state that fact.
Witness the doxxing and subsequent protesting happening at the homes of Supreme Court Justices to see why they are scared.
Cf. Voting rights debate, immigration debate and recently even the trans debate. in none of those debates do the polar extremes currently dominating American discourse find much resonance in saner parts of the west that lacking the same politicized polarized drives, have smarter more nuanced positions that would be skewered by both sides in contemporary USA
It has a lot of support with a lot of politicians, including the vast majority of blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats. Those just aren't the people beating the drums about it, because it's not in their interest to increase the salience of the issue.
"(t)he loss of Roe should serve as a powerful reminder to the college-educated liberals who control the commanding heights of Democratic Party politics that losing elections is really bad."
I've said it before, I'll say it again, but the fact that "the commanding heights of Democratic Party politics" are controlled by people who don't understand that *winning elections is their actual and only job* is stupefying...
College educated liberals are in a position where they (OK, fine, we) are fighting on behalf of disadvantaged people, but ourselves are pretty well off. This can make it hard to develop a permission structure for pragmatism. Moreover, the members of the marginalized groups you have social or para-social relationships with (newspaper columnists, book authors, etc), are ideological and unrepresentative of the broader group in ways that can be tricky to catch on to.
So if you state that Planned Parenthood should be fine with Tim Ryan supporting the Hyde Amendment, you’ll often get criticism that by taking this stance, you’re failing poor women, whom the Hyde Amendment disproportionately affects. Since the entire reason you support Planned Parenthood is to help such people, this has a lot of sting. The criticism might come from people that are themselves members of the marginalized groups in question, which lends them real moral authority.
In the age of social media, polarization by education, and so on, this kind of critique becomes ever more acute. Due to our own comparatively privileged positions, it can be hard to push back against such criticism. Even if leadership is able to take the heat and rebut it, donors might start getting cold feet.
I think most of the people involved are genuinely trying to do their best, and it’s just a tough row to hoe. The best antidote is a combination of engaging in good faith, and empiricism. Point out actual voting patterns among marginalized people, point to polling data, and so on.
Thank you, I truly appreciate the appeal to empathy.
At the same time, though, I admit that I'm somewhat skeptical of a mindset that enables one to view one's self as an advocate for a marginalized group while making significant, perhaps unfounded, quite possibly simplistic and condescending, assumptions about that group. I'm even more skeptical of the utility of most of the advocacy groups themselves (I know a bit about the one in your example based on a friend's almost literally unbelieveable experience working there).
That said, I love your antidote. Is this something you've been able to deploy IRL in some context? Do you work in the political/policy world?
My advocacy is for YIMBYism, and I think it that the nature of it forces you out of the mindset a lot. Housing shortages hurt working class people the most, but this is obviously not a working-class ideology (we talk about white NIMBYs, but YIMBYs are pretty melanin-deficient ourselves.) An easy example is the distinction between "what women think and believe" versus "what feminists think and believe". Imagine the stereotypical women's studies major going to Africa to spread the good news about overturning the global patriarchy.
I think a lot of progressives intuitively know this deep down and are open to the argument, but just struggle to articulate it -- but they can be convinced if you show them the numbers and the articles. It's critically important to establish credibility on the matter, and to speak to persuade, rather than win. If you're someone making a lot of "LOL, pronouns" jokes, then you'll be justifiably tuned out.
(This comes from, of all experience, my experience in the New Atheist movement.)
In practice, my experience is that most dedicated feminists are actually pretty about other countries. Avoiding "Neocolonialism" can be used as a justification for focusing on material issues, rather than ideological approaches.
this is convincing, but maybe a simpler way to put it: values issues (by comparison to bread and butter issues) seem hard to compromise on--for both right and left? every fight ends up being not about whether you want more or less of something but what kind of person you are? which is why maybe conservatives are not at all going to slow down when Roe is overturned. They want 110% of the loaf, too.
I find this analysis much more persuasive than the accusations of virtue signaling and self-interested careerism which are more common on the board.
Just as with the populist reactionary movement, you are better served by taking progressives at their word when they tell you what they believe and care about, than constructing elaborate sociological frameworks that turn them into zombified puppets manipulated by false consciousness.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those guys, and I used to work in the federal policy world! Maybe all olds, at a certain point, come to find the world, including a niche of it they knew very well at one time, incomprehensible. But I don't even understand what the game is now!
For a long time, I thought that people in politics now cared only about winning elections, and not at all about governing. If even winning elections is off the table, though, what the hell is the point? Virtue signalling and fuel for the fire of self-righteousness? Does that actually feel good to people?
No, I get that that is what drives this view. I just don't understand how it can be satisfying *in any way whatsoever* if you care one iota about what the actual policy is.
When you work in electoral politics and you keep losing elections, your takeaway should be "I failed." I literally Do Not Understand a mindset that makes this OK as long as losing makes you feel good about yourself.
"Eliminating Roe endangers abortion rights gravely, but also means the American people will be more exposed to extremist pro-life activist demands"
I'll make the bold prediction that repealing Roe will break the logjam and eventually leads to the pro-choice position becoming more popular, and then legal, over a decade plus time span. Red states are going to go absolutely nuts here- prosecuting women who've had abortions, brutally investigating miscarriages, in some cases prosecuting miscarriages (!), going full War on Drugs looking for mailed abortion pills, and also maybe prosecuting Americans outside of their states who 'facilitated' an abortion. The steady drumbeat of total insanity is going to wear American public opinion down. My read on the opinion polls is that many people are conflicted and don't have ironclad views either way. And let's be honest- the mass media is still a huge advantage that the left has. A decade of insane overreach, plus red state politicians saying absolutely nuts things, is going to be what it takes to finally swing public opinion.
In fact, I think Republican elites are more fired up about abortion than the median Republican voter. Even today, in 2022. Those polls don't capture preference intensity. I think a lot of people who vote R but aren't evangelicals hold surprisingly nuanced opinions on the topic
It'll be Prohibition all over again. Decades of political warfare that culminated in the prohibitionists finally catching the garbage truck they'd been chasing and organizing for all these years.....and being completely discredited.
I think this piece undermines its own thesis in some important ways. The first part totally misunderstands what the draft opinion is doing almost to the point I wonder if Matt read it. This would be an axe to the concept of substantive due process which back before liberals became 'progressives' was a really forward looking concept worth defending. These throw away lines against judicial review are also poorly conceived. If the Supreme Court can never say a piece of legislation went too far or violates the constitution what exactly is it for? Are there any limits on what a legislature or executive can do? If there's no judicial review, who stops it?
Now, that being said, Roe and Casey really do make America an outlier in the West. I don't think that by itself is bad. There are a number of areas where we are outliers with respect to individual liberties and that's mostly a good thing. But if you want to win on a position that keeps abortion legal you have to be ready to defend where you would draw the line and why, which is what this piece totally fails to do!
To me it's very telling that one would be hard pressed to find a doctor to perform a truly elective abortion on an apparently healthy pregnancy past the around the 16 week point. That says to me what most doctors and most people, including pro choice people, intuitively know, which is that there is a threshold beyond which abortion takes on an ethical dimension it does not have in earlier weeks. In practice when it happens after that it is typically because of some kind of medical crisis in a pregnancy the woman intended to take to term.
The great news of course is that drawing a line around those points is both where the population is and would keep the vast, vast majority of abortion legal. Why not just defend that policy on its merits? It's probably what we're going to have to get used to doing and there's no reason to treat it like some weird, mushy, unprincipled compromise, which this essay does, even as it tries to defend it.
If you're asking why liberals can't just agree to ban late-term abortions with a life/health exception, I had a conversation about this with someone on Twitter, and his response was basically that right-wingers would interpret the life/health exception narrowly and in bad faith, so he was not willing to compromise unrestricted abortion at all stages of gestation. https://twitter.com/tinioril/status/1522756080866152450
As Matt points out but doesn't dwell on, health exceptions are sometimes construed to include mental health, which no doubt makes a lot of people queasy.
Ok, but that's the opposite of what we're talking about. It explains why *pro-lifers* might feel unwilling to occupy the middle ground of public opinion, not why pro-choicers might.
Oops, I guess I should respond to the point *you* were trying to make! 😂
To that person, I would say write the damn bill then and include all the exceptions and checks and balances you need to feel comfortable. But the whole "the other side won't play fair so I won't play at all" is turning out to be a sure-fire way to lose.
Yeah. Also, the best way to avoid having those bad interpretations is to win elections, and the best way to maximize your odds of winning elections is to take reasonable positions that the voters agree with. So it's kind of self-defeating.
1) The Supreme Court would still do normal court stuff of interpreting laws in ambiguous cases. They would just lose the power to overturn laws.
2) The legislature would be responsible for judging whether laws follow the Constitution. In practice, that means the legislature can do whatever it wants.
This is the way it works in the UK, and it seems fine.
Agreed. This is exactly what it sounds like when progressives scream about abolishing the electoral college.
Like, sure, the electoral college is a dumb institution that wouldn't exist in an ideal world. But unfortunately it is real, and you're never going to get the massive amount of suppprt needed to abolish it. So you need to find ways to work within it rather than screaming at it or pretending that it doesn't exist.
I'm very skeptical of the long term feasibility of the interstate compact. Would California actually give its electoral votes to a Republican who won the national popular vote but only got 40% of the vote in California? Under the interstate compact, every time a Republican wins the popular vote they will probably win 40+ states and 400+ electoral votes. I don't see progressive legislatures standing for that for long.
As a Californian, I would be queasy if that were to happen. However, it's written into the law and it's *supposed* to happen when the NPV goes into effect.
Imagine California trying to back out of the pact after election day with a new law that ex post facto cancels its commitment to vote for the national popular winner. Just a tad bit of chaos and constitutional crises there.
I think what everyone wants is a system where every time anyone wins the popular vote they win 50 states and 538 electoral votes. The point of the compact is that no one will actually care about the electoral votes any more, even though they will still technically exist. (Just like how no one actually cares about how many faithless electors there have been in most of the past elections.)
Sure but it's also understanding what these doctrines do. It's far from clear to me that we'd be a more liberal society if the federal courts were never able to draw any constitutional lines on that which can pass the average state legislature.
It worked *only* in the UK due to their exceptional democratic traditions and customs , which the US has clearly demonstrated to lack. Most democracies lack such strong consensus and deeply ingrained culture and need legal-institutional safeguards. The founding fathers of US wisely understood this. And btw I believe recently even the UK adopted a Supreme Court model of sorts.
Finally, need I remind you the it is only thanks to the idependent judiciary that trump failed to steal the elections and democracy was saved last January (and indeed, repeatedly throughout his presidency as some of his most terrible policies were stopped repeatedly)? Without judicial review the constitution is meaningless. Saying the courts shouldn’t have the power to declare laws unconstitutional is *the same* as saying US should have no constitution and no bill of rights.
Meh. EU countries are limited by EU court of human rights for instance. Many countries have ultimate parliamentary sovereignty only as a theoretical “nuclear option” rarely if ever used. In fact US has such “nuclear option” in the form of court packing, require a simple majority in congress (!) to enact at any moment, in addition to the formal ultimate popular sovereignty enacted in the ability to amend to constitution (rightly difficult to do as a feature not a bug).
As Richard Gadsen notes, EU governments are free to ignore the EU Court of Human Rights, it has no real power. Anyways, constitutional courts there are just not striking down laws broadly left and right. The US is kind of unique in this regard. I don't find your other arguments persuasive, Republicans would simply pack the court right back once they return to power- doesn't seem like much of a solution. According to political scientists the US has the hardest-to-amend constitution of any democracy. There's 160 democracies on Earth, so that's quite a statement!
The problem with this is that either you have a position that US law overrides state law, in which case you don't have a federation any more, or the Supreme Court has the right to say in which cases the proper legislature is the federal one and in which cases it is the state one. This is not a UK concern (not being a federation), but the German Supreme Court works exactly like this.
It's certainly possible to maintain a hierarchy between federal and state laws that can be enforced by the courts, but to stop judicial review of laws against the constitution. In that case, a state law could make abortion illegal unless that would go against a federal law. Or you could have a different mechanism.
But the division of powers between the federal and the state level is a different question from whether the judiciary or the legislative branch has the last word in interpreting the individual rights in the constitution. The US was an outlier on this for a very long time (although I think that's changed post-WWII).
Absolutely, the question of individual rights is resolved in many different ways, from the British way, which used to be "entirely up to the legislature" and is now "the Court should try to interpret any ambiguities in the law so it's compatible with human rights, but if it can't, then it upholds the law and makes a declaration of incompatibility which is supposed to embarrass the legislature into changing it", to the Canadian way where the legislature has to expressly overide human rights (ie, you can breach them, but only if the Bill says so), to the American way where laws can be struck down, which is pretty common - e.g. both Germany and France have the same principle.
One note, though: in Europe, Supreme Courts are usually the only court that can strike down legislation; if a lower court believes that the constitutionality of a law is in doubt, then it has to suspend the case and refer to the Supreme Court, which then decides and sends the case back to the lower court to rule on the facts of the specific case. This avoids many of the difficulties of the US system where the District and Circuit Courts make constitutional decisions that have to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
"if a lower court believes that the constitutionality of a law is in doubt, then it has to suspend the case and refer to the Supreme Court, which then decides and sends the case back to the lower court to rule on the facts of the specific case"
But doesn't the sheer workload of doing that overwhelm the Supreme Court here? Just seems like that's a ton of cases every single year
Once the law is struck down, that's the end of that law - and remember it only refers if it thinks the law is invalid.
Also there are just many fewer legislatures (17 in Germany, 1 in France)
Finally, you don't get lots of cases, either the law is valid or not, if it's struck down, then that's the end of that law; the legislature can hack out bits and repass it without being in breach of the law.
Imagine if the US courts looked at a law and said "the Murder Act makes cruel and unusual punishment possible, Murder Act is therefore stricken". The legislature would then pass a new Murder Act that would (presumably) be constitutional.
(note that they will generally rule that a law that replaces a stricken one can be retrospective)
The result is that either the law is OK or not. You don't get "did this police officer exceed his 5th Amendment powers in this case", but "does this law permit police officers to do so, if so, the legislature must write a new law that doesn't".
Also, the conventions of legislation under a civil law regime are that it has to have many more specifics, rather than laying down principles that the court must work out.
Except that much of the art of appeal is to argue why particular facts cause a new interpretation on the application of a law. Ruling on such interpretations can be the same thing as overruling the legislation. It's far easier to claim "The Founders wanted us to use the way-back machine" because they knew that they could craft a document, like the Bible, that would never have to admit, or force their successors to engage in the oh- so-exhausting work to deal with changes in the world, or culture.
"If the Supreme Court can never say a piece of legislation went too far or violates the constitution what exactly is it for? Are there any limits on what a legislature or executive can do? If there's no judicial review, who stops it?"
Many or most developed countries actually don't place the judiciary above the legislature- America is fairly unique here. Britain doesn't really have judicial review, the Netherlands explicitly outlaws it in its constitution! In most countries, the legislature can overrule the judiciary and that's the end of it. Take a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
This is true, but the process under which that works varies a lot. Generally, the court can say "you're breaching individual rights" and then the legislature has to do something - though it can say "yes, we are, and we know it, and we don't care". Canada's "notwithstanding" clause, for instance.
But even in countries where that isn't true, judicial review is much more constrained. For instance, they generally just strike down a specific law (rather than creating a broad interpretation); often it's only the Supreme Court that can do it (a lesser court has to enforce an unconstitutional law, or refer the case to the Supreme Court for review - this is true in both Germany and France, for example).
Of course, there is the European Court of Human Rights for many countries - but that doesn't have enforcement powers, it just can pass a case saying "you have breached human rights" and then the state can do something or not at its discretion.
Great essay. Quick anecdote: my first child died at 9mo of a rare genetic cancer. We tested our next 3 pregnancies and fortunately all clear. But otherwise we would have had to have a 15 week plus abortion, because impossible to get earlier test results for this. The mutation was an early infancy, absolutely certain death sentence. point being we need legal late abortion not just to protect mothers health.
I didn't find any, the specific Gallup polling I used to make those charts only asks about specific scenarios in the first and third trimesters, not the second.
One of the things it's been interesting to see over the last ~10 years is how ineffective Planned Parenthood, in particular, has been as the judicial and political landscapes have shifted. To the point where many activists I know have entirely given up on them and there's lots of activist energy around abortion funds and pills-by-mail instead. I think this is basically right and that there's significant opportunity for popular stances there. It's one thing to say you can't practice this type of medicine in a red state, totally another to criminalize folks taking a weekend away in New England or California for personal reasons.
One point that's kind of obvious but that a lot of observers across the spectrum nevertheless forget is that when it comes to public policy, the debate about abortion is about criminalization. For abortion to be legal, you don't actually need a law that says it's legal. You just need an absence of laws addressing the topic. It isn't like, say, gay marriage, which requires an affirmative act of the government to exist.
Pro-choice liberals in reddish states really ought to shape their rhetoric around this. The standard line that pro-choicers tend to emphasize when they try to mollify moderate religious conservatives is John Kerry's "I agree with my church's position on abortion but I don't believe the government should impose that view on the whole country." That's ok, but it's a bit bloodless and they could do much better than that. Instead, say "Abortion is wrong, but I don't support throwing women and doctors into jail for having abortions. That's a bad solution. Instead, I support spending a lot more money on programs to help pregnant women, so that more of them will decide voluntarily not to have abortions."
I'm a moderately pro-life conservative in an extremely red state, and this is my hope as well.
Now that we pretty much have our way on abortion, we can stop posturing for the national political battles on the subject, and will have to grapple with the actual effects of our preferred policies.
Which will hopefully focus on implementing state-level policies that reduce abortion from the demand side of things. (E.g. having more support for pregnant women and mothers, and maybe even subsidize contraceptives)
One reason the Democratic party should really try to get any sort of national abortion protection Bill passed, however limited, is to get the Supreme Court to overturn it and set a precedent that it's a state matter.
I like to idly speculate whether the Supreme Court would strike down a Democratic-passed codification of Roe/Casey on Commerce Clause grounds and uphold a Republican-passed national ban on abortions on Commerce Clause grounds.
The Fourteenth explicitly authorizes Congress to legislate to enforce it. If Congress regulates abortion as an exercise of the Fourteenth, it will be very difficult for SCOTUS to overrule it without destroying it's remaining credibility.
See, I think SCOTUS does care about consistency and that people who think all the Republican appointees do is play Calvinball are making the mistaking of thinking legal reporters like Mark Joseph Stern, Dahlia Lithwick, etc. are actually accurately describing the cases they "report" on.
Neither view seems to line up entirely with the evidence, to be frank, and that's partly because the make-up of SCOTUS changed dramatically in the last 5 years. Originally I was with you; Kennedy and Roberts, while essentially believing that the Constitution was written by and for the benefit of the "higher orders", were at least going to pay it and the centuries of precedent that gradually made it less elitist some attention.
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas have no such scruples.
The evidence suggests that going forward they're going to do literally whatever the fuck they can get Kavanaugh, who is on most issues the closest thing they've got to a swing vote now, to sign on with, especially after January 2023.
Occasionally it'll be Barrett in that position.
What that actually means beyond Roe, I don't think anyone has really worked out just yet, but rolling back most of the last hundred years of professionalization of the bureaucracy, the steady advance of regulation over economic life, etc... all seem to be vaguely plausible in a way they were not in 2016.
That might just mean that the US bifurcates into "states where the government acts like a first-world nation" and "states where it doesn't" with the Federal government rolled back to defense and foreign affairs.
Which is likely what would have happened in the absence of the World Wars and the New Deal anyway, so let's just call that the broad sweep of history and see where it leads.
The idea that Roberts/Kennedy act as reliable, consistent legal thinkers on the court is just kind of a laughably poor understanding. Roberts especially is more of a politician than a Justice at this point. The most ruthlessly consistent Justice is easily Gorsuch.
Of course, but Roberts and Kennedy are/were scared of what would come of obviously and blatantly attempting to roll back the entire Constitution to the state of play in 1800. That tempered the way they acted.
Gorsuch might be internally consistent, but he's consistently bughouse nuts by any modern conception.
If you want the entire Constitution ridden down in flames because of how hard it is to amend, getting Gorsuch-like people on the Supreme Court is a great way to do it, because there's going to come a day when power flows from the barrel of a gun if there is no legal way to leave the 19th century.
Conservative justices veto progressive legislation because progressive legislation tends to do an end around of state lawmakers or the Constitution. Like it or not, the Constitution has always given wide leeway for States to make their own rules. Progressives sometimes like that and sometimes they don’t. But they don’t take a principled stance on the system.
One of the problems has been that most of these decisions were written by the squishiest justice in the majority, which tends to result in some pretty squishy reasoning.
Casey is a mess, but it's a mess because it's an opinion that had to get Souter and Kennedy and O'Connor to sign on to it. And that's the rare case where there was a concur/dissent (two, actually, one Stevens and one Blackmun). Most of the others (Lawrence, Obergefell, etc) are majority opinions written by Kennedy and the liberal justices weren't able to write the clear reasoning that I think Ginsburg or Sotomayor or Kagan could have laid out for those decisions.
One difference on the other side is that right-wing decisions are often written by the squishiest justice (usually Roberts or Kennedy), but that side of the court is much more prepared to let Thomas or Alito or Scalia write a concurrence that often lays out a much better legal (if inferior political) case for the decision.
Not quite sure why there aren't equivalent concurrences on the left, but I wonder sometimes if Kennedy would only agree if they promised not to make a concurrence, where he didn't make the same demand when he voted with the right.
We often hear that the problem with Roe was that it was "poorly reasoned" or written (e.g., focused on due process rather than equal protection). For these cases with very high public valence, does this matter at all? I mean, great for classes in Con Law, but should any of the rest of us care?
I suspect the really only relevant sentence in the Alito draft decision is "Roe and Casey are hereby overturned." The rest is noise.
Yes, you should care because if SCOTUS hands down decisions based on shoddy reasoning, it makes a mockery of the rule of law. An opinion based on nonsense basically boils down to, "We're ruling this way because we want to, it doesn't have to make any sense." If people on the left want to complain about the tyranny of unelected judges, well, that's exactly what that sort of decision is.
I think that comes down to whether you think that the Supreme Court is purely an exercise of power and a matter of who the justices are, or whether you think it is a court that rules on the basis of law and legal reasoning.
It's fascinating -- and no doubt completely coincidental -- how legal reasoning and interpretation on the basis of law line up with partisan leanings and the party identification of the President that nominated a particular justice. At least on the biggest, most controversial issues.
Yes, but are you sure the causality doesn't run the other way? Definitionally, a good argument is one that is hard to argue against. If the Supreme Court justices make a really good argument for their decision, then
* it's hard for a think tank to argue it should get overturned, which means
* it's hard for a politician to find material for speeches calling for the decision's reversal, which means
* it's hard to build a political movement against the decision, which means
* the decision isn't going to be one of "the biggest, most controversial issues."
It matters a lot as far as setting the terms of engagement. How you protect abortion rights and the kinds of arguments that matter are very different when it's about constitutional interpretation rather than the democratic process. However, it is also very fair to say that much of the problem with Roe being trash law doesn't actually have to do with the issue at hand so much as it's institutional and jurisprudential impacts.
The language in these decisions clearly have knock-on effects. Thus, "undue burden" and protecting women's health in Casey led to tons of laws in red states that bent over backwards to prove that outlawing abortions was done on behalf of women, and that forcing abortion clinics to adopt policies that would basically put them out of business (doctors' admitting privileges, super-wide corridors) were not an undue burden because think of the women.
Right, but the reason Roe/Casey are a shitshow isn't really in the outcomes/standards the court settles on. The court has developed all sorts of wonky balancing tests and language over the years in all sorts of areas. The shitshow is in determining if and where there's any basis for the court to create a standard to begin with. Roe's foundation is vague, undersupported, in tension with other precedent, and generally emblematic of a style of jurisprudence where judges are basically free to invent rights where they see fit to produce the policy outcomes they, or the public, prefer.
The problem with the Roe line of cases is that it all hangs on Lochner but they overturned Lochner so they had to go through ridiculous cartwheels to duck the fact that they were writing law based on what they already said was bad precedent.
Hillary would have gotten 50k more votes with this position in the states she needed them and won. But she refused to back Roe and insisted on an expansive abortion policy. She rejected safe, legal and rare. She lost.
Personally, 20-22 weeks is the right number. Families should have the right to consider abortion in the case of fetal abnormalities. That’s a tough decision and one families may not agree on and a week is what 15 weeks gives you.
I am also in the "squishy middle" on this issue and find it somewhat infuriating how apparently every journalist in existence is on one of the two edges.
Made a few edits to the charts (removed the "part two" from the first chart, changed the description on the second chart to reflect nuances in when exactly the first trimester ends).
Also, general reminder to play nice in the comments.
Schumer: “we are not looking to compromise”
The Baileys: 😞😞
We are literally starving to death here, so it is unthinkable that we would accept 3/4 of a loaf.
This is for a symbolic vote. The loaf is never coming out of the oven, so the degree of starvation is the same,
Schumer doesn't call the Baileys anymore he calls the Bernie Bros and kisses their asses so they won't primary him.
I’m reminded of a progressive line: “When you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression”. The pro-choice side got so used to reading their view into the constitution that returning the issue to the legislature seems like an apocalyptic threat.
I personally favor a pretty sweeping pro-choice position, but it also seems clear to me that there are strong moral arguments on both sides here. And public opinion here has been steady for a long time. And the legal argument that abortion is protected in the constitution is tenuous at best. And fighting over this issue has increased the politicization of the Supreme Court. I’m glad abortion is back in the hands of legislatures; hopefully they can find compromises most people find acceptable. Probably going to be messy though :(
The problem is that state legislatures are really bad!
1. Gerrymandering is rampant. Wisconsin is a 50/50 state, but the GOP has a near-supermajority on the state legislature due to political geography and gerrymandering.
2. In states heavily skewed toward one party, the real battles are fought in the primaries, which both make it even less representative and reduce incentive to compromise. If I lived somewhere like Idaho or Utah, I'd likely have to register as Republican in order to have a chance at a non-terrible candidate.
3. Various social trends (such as the decline of local news, reduction in ticket splitting, etc) mean that people aren't really holding state parties accountable much -- they're just being treated as reflections of the national party. If you're a Michigan Republican, what's the point in compromise if people are just going to vote based on how they feel about Congress? (Governors are a bit different.)
You could make a strong argument that the current situation for state legislatures is the number one source of political dysfunction in the country.
"...mean that people aren't really holding state parties accountable much -- they're just being treated as reflections of the national party"
One of the main factors causing this is the primary importance of national politics.
Assuming the abortion really does become a state-level issue, perhaps people will have to care more about the nuance of local/state candidates?
That's certainly the case now for me. I'm moderately pro-life, but my state is going to restrict abortion far more than I'm comfortable with.
So I'm now more inclined to vote for someone (perhaps even a Democrat, horror of horrors) that supports a more moderate position on the issue, and less likely to default to the (R).
I don't really see that happening.
The people prioritize this the most are going to be college-educated voters, and they don't usually live in swing districts (there are exceptions.) The barriers to figuring out what the hell is going on with state politics are terrifyingly high, and there are a lot of headwinds.
Swing districts tend to be very suburban, and consequently have their fair share or more of the college-educated
It's still about money and staying in power regardless of what level you're at. And the suburban voters both men and woman, have access: to doctors, birth control, and good insurance so they think that life as they know it, won't change much. Will they really go out and vote for their poor sisters and brothers to have control over their lives.
Many states are effectively one party systems, the party in power gets the money because the party out of power has nothing to offer businesses since they don’t control anything. Having effective control of local media helps, too.
Er, why wouldn't they? They do in California. College educated voters tend to be substantially more pro-choice than non-college voters, once you control for race.
I was referring to my uncertainty about the numbers being motivated enough to result in a big turnout for elections. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic. On the same hand, if it is seen as a broader issue over women's control and dignity, maybe it'll happen.
That’s not what happened. What happened is all our pro-life lawmakers started losing to Republicans as more states went red. Something similar happened in California. As the state went blue, the only Republicans left became increasingly crazy, because the normal Republicans were defeated in increasingly blue districts. Abortion has been a *very* rare primary point. The only two I can think of are Lipman and Cuellar, both of which were primaried for multiple reasons.
Personally, I thought the Democratic Party should have a more welcoming stance towards pro-life reps, but now that RvW is overturned, I must admit, I’m not feeling all that tolerant.
But the question is _why_ that happened. There were obviously other big factors but not running candidates or not sufficiently funding candidates definitely played a major role.
For what it's worth I've personally talked to a few very big donors who (in 2016/2017) were categorically opposed to supporting any candidates who were not strongly pro-choice in even the most red of districts.
Our argument was generally roughly: "Would you want the candidate who is pro-ACA and other D priorities but pretty quiet about his views on abortion or the R who is advocating fetal burials and all kinds of similar madness?" and the answer would generally be "We'd want to stay out of that race".
It happened because the Democratic brand became so damaged that nobody with a D next to their name could win, no matter what their positions. Just recently we lost McCaskill and Heitkamp. And it wasn’t funding. Races are swimming in money.
I think JBE is a good counterexample. He signed a horrible abortion bill.
Claire McCaskill is a clear example of someone who got squeezed out despite taking pretty Republican stances on many issues and running as far away from the Democratic party brand as she could. She got lucky in 2012 regardless. It was a good year for Democrats, and she had a terrible opponent.
This is true for statewide elections, but not state legislatures. People don’t even know who is running in those races and vote based on their opinion of the national party.
The same could be said for Republicans. In fact, it's funny as yesterday I was listening to problems kids have trying to simply "play" baseball because of their expectations raised by their parents. $300 bats...
Florida's "restrictions on social media companies that don't own theme parks" bill comes to mind.
I think they’re going to change that to include the ones that do own theme parks, now that they’ve declared jihad against Disney.
I was riffing on your joke.
1. Public opinion is strongly in favor of Roe and always has been.
2. A lot of times state legislatures aren’t responsive to their constituents. As an example, multiple ballot initiatives to create an independent commission for drawing districts won, and they were just… ignored.
3. States’ rights have inevitably been the bastion of repellent policies like Jim Crow. Do you think states should be able to dictate slavery, over which they fought an actual war for their right to decide? Interracial marriage? Birth control? Gay marriage? At some point these rights become so fundamental they aren’t considered fair game for state restrictions.
1) Depends how you phrase the question. As the post demonstrates, a majority of people favor more abortion restrictions than Roe permits.
2) Federal legislators might weigh in too. In any case, state legislators have more democratic legitimacy than the Supreme Court.
3) Unlike those issues, abortion has strong moral intuitions on both sides and pretty stable public opinion. If public opinion on abortion had evolved like gay marriage (or slavery!) I’d have a different view.
A sizable majority do not want RvW overturned, so I don’t see the reason to split hairs. If you had broken down support for marriage equality between support for civil unions versus full marriage, you’d also see a split.
State legislatures absolutely do not have more democratic legitimacy. They are a total mess. In many states, they are essentially a part time job, which is why you regularly see random state reps proposing bonkers policy.
Finally SCOTUS opinion on marriage equality was in front of public opinion, which is why a ton of states did not recognize it at the time. We could also break it down by state, which I suspect might demonstrate in some very red states that it is not supported by a majority. I have a hard time believing that if public opinion turned against marriage equality in ten years, that you’d be okay tossing it back to the states. Some rights are too fundamental.
State legislatures have more legitimacy because they align more closely with the voters of their states. Often much more.
There are many states where a majority or plurality want abortion to be illegal:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/views-about-abortion/by/state/
I hope Democrats learned the right lesson from the "Defund the Police" narrative which is that one of the most effective political moves is attaching a terribly unpopular message to your opposition that they can't or won't shake.
"Louisiana just criminalized miscarriages. Idaho just banned contraceptives. Oklahoma is forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term. This is the world Conservatives want."
And the key is to not stop attaching the message even if they disavow it. Conservatives still talk about how Democrats want to Defund the Police, even Democrats that have explicitly said it's a terrible and in fact have voted for more funding. It was a plausible view of the left so it stuck. "Republicans want to make miscarriages a felony." Or whatever message sticks best should be an attack ad that gets used in every race in 2022, like Defund the Police was in 2020.
Upvote Luke's comment one hundred times.
"Conservatives still talk about how Democrats want to Defund the Police, even Democrats that have explicitly said it's a terrible and in fact have voted for more funding"
What's the appropriate point at which this attack(or equivalent from the Democrats) should stop?
I don't know that the Democrats have done enough to disavow Defund the Police - but suppose they did more - at what point should the attack ads stop?
If we make attack ads for things the most extreme 1% of our opponents say that the other 99% explicitly say "we don't support that - here's the explicit bill we do support"... is that ok?
Charitably it pins your opposition down on having to say what they do support - and I support that as a good end in and of itself - do we at least scale back the attacks at that point once they've officially stated it in their platform?
Strategically, the appropriate point is when it is no longer an effective attack ad.
Ethically, I don't know exactly but I don't think we're anywhere close to that line. Conservatives have shown mounds of duplicitousness on this topic in particular ("Roe is settled law" - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, ACB) so the point is certainly further than a mere statement. If, for example, a majority of Republicans sign onto a bill that prevents any bans on abortion under the circumstances that a pregnancy is not viable or that the mother faces dire health consequences, I will call that line of attack a little unfair. But Republicans aren't signing or pushing for that bill in the next decade so I think it's a very fair attack. A significant amount of red states are going to do crazy things like investigate miscarriages and national Republicans won't use their power to stop it. Until they do, I think it's a "good faith" attack. Lots of conservatives really do want to do those things!
This to me falls under the same umbrella of gerrymandering in that it's a bad thing to do, but to not do it is unilateral disarmament.
So: You don't stop until it stops being effective. Because they won't stop until it stops being effective. The high ground wins you nothing.
I differentiate them in my mind (perhaps incorrectly)
Bilateral Gerrymandering is pretty bad but the solution can be bipartisan (national consensus - laws - etc)
Banning "unfair" attack ads doesn't strike me as ever leading to a "better" outcome. Especially because everyone's definition of unfair will be different (see: misinformation). But I also don't know that it's actually making things worse either (see again: misinformation) - I just worry that it will.
What's the last good example of the left saying "I'm willing to accept less because I want to win the issue?"
Seems like there is no amount of losing that will teach them this lesson.
If you assume Schumer's only goal is to avoid a primary challenge from AOC, then everything he does makes sense.
The deadline for a primary challenge passed a few weeks ago. So it's no longer a good explanation.
Well, hopefully that brings him back from the brink, but his mindset may have permanently changed.
I think he needs to step down. He’s acting like a regular senator in a deep blue state, not a leader of a fractious caucus.
The aca and Dodd-Frank and pretty much the entire Obama years were being served a shit sandwich and having to pretend it was delicious. For our trouble of taking the health policy ideas from the Heritage institute, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney we got death panels and a kind of absurd obstructionism.
I think Summer 09 created a view, that I’m not sure is incorrect that it’s pointless to try to split the difference because anything substantial will unleash hell no matter how much you give.
You must be too young to remember what insurance was before the ACA. A nightmare of exemptions and exceptions that allowed insurers to cover basically nothing and get away with it. Today the vast majority of people with healthcare coverage can be confident in an out of pocket maximum and act accordingly, and decent coverage is vastly more available to the working poor than previously.
Progressive posturing aside, the US is today vastly closer to any of the major “universal” systems out there, aside from Britain’s, than it was before 2009. It’s additionally sorted out some, even many, of the cost diseases that plagued us before the ACA.
Again, sound and fury signifying nothing from progressives on this topic. A narrative devoid of pesky facts that get in the way of the moralizing.
I think what Andrew is referring to is all the efforts Democrats made to make the ACA a bipartisan piece of legislation by bringing in Republican ideas and inviting them to help write parts of it, only to have the entire GOP caucus vote against it. A lot of (especially young) progressives still look at the ACA as a failure because they compare it to their ideal and blame Democrats' attempts at compromise for the lack of single-payer or whatever.
I agree with you and John from FL that the ACA was a dramatic improvement on the status quo and I would add that part of the reason it has proved resilient is because Democrats wrote much of it hand-in-glove with the insurance industry (i.e., something that progressives also complain about) so they don't lobby for its repeal. Like, compromise was probably a good thing with the ACA, even though in the end the Democrats were compromising with themselves.
Also, it was popular enough that the Republicans tried to get rid of it when they had a majority and couldn't quite manage. A significantly more progressive version might not have survived.
This is the person who said he's sick of 1 step forward and 10 steps back the other week, so I'm not confident in his grasp of the nuances.
Anyway, from "ACA" to "universal healthcare with effective cost controls" lies a single, if terribly wide-ranging, step: "Mandated unified rate-setting".
Suddenly the price discrimination and the dense thicket of bullshit which sustains it fades away, and in its place there's a vast surplus of cash formerly spent on rent-seeking bullshit which can instead be spent on doctors, nurses, and facilities.
So I'm fairly confident that we'll get the job done sooner or later, if only state-by-state.
Both those bills passed. And they both implemented changes that were beneficial.
While the ACA and Dodd-Frank are probably bad examples, since they ultimately became legislation that, though imperfect, is a net good, the pervasive attitude that the ACA was a big failure didn't exactly help drive Democrats to the polls to counter the subsequent "death panels are coming for you and the economy sucks" red wave. But I think you are exactly right about Schumer's calculus here.
The GOP as Lucy-with-the-football meme is just a reflection of the discipline of a party that is more homogeneous; the leader says "don't vote for this thing, we are going to run against it in 2010" and the caucus does exactly that. In Schumer's case, he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. Sure, Collins and Murkowski will pretend they can't support Schumer's bill because it goes too far, but in the end they'll rationalize a vote with their caucus because the GOP is going to run on (taking away) abortion rights and say "see, putting up with Trump was totally worth it for the judges!"
There is no half-loaf to be won here. The entire GOP caucus plus some anti-choice Democrats are going to vote against any federal law enshrining abortion rights; doing otherwise right before/after Roe falls is political suicide. Schumer may as well throw a bone to the progressives instead of catching flak from his right and his left when the bill fails.
This is going to get confusing.
The infrastructure bill last year?
If you look at what happened with BBB, that ended up being the actual dynamic. The left wing complained about it, but in the end was willing to keep compromising.
Another example is the Stupak amendment about abortion and the ACA, which included abortion restrictions.
I was just getting ready to reply to a comment on another site how Democrats badly need to adopt a "I'm willing to accept less because I want to win the issue" approach on climate change as well. Accepting less is still better for the climate than having Republicans in charge and getting nothing.
Yes, but reducing the incentives for net emissions of CO2 is not a straightforward more/less issue. If we were talking about the level of a net tax on CO2 and methane emissions, yes. But it is possible to be "green" in counterproductive ways if they are not guided by a "shadow price" of the net CO2 they prevent.
Biden's presidency.
“ When people are scared to lose, they make smart decisions.”
Here’s a mail bag question perhaps, but what are you seeing that I’m not that indicates the educated, urban-to-suburban base of the Democratic Party is the least bit “scared to lose”?
I have seen every indication that most of these people regard politics as a virtue-signaling luxury, not a meaningful attempt to govern. It’s not a vocation, nor even a pastime, but simple a casual hobby.
I fail to see anyway in which abortion limits will change that. These are people who can currently afford to pop across a state line to deal with any pesky issues and will be able to take a “weekend trip” to Ireland, Canada, or Britain as needed in the future.
Nothing that falls into the realm of “bread and butter politics” scares professional class Americans anymore, they have sufficient resources to avoid all consequences. That’s one of the fundamental problems we face in politics and I see no possibility of changing it.
Very weird world if/when Ireland has more liberal abortion laws than the US…
Sometimes having a state-imposed religion can mask how much the people really hate that state-imposed religion.
Many have said that's why the US is much more religious.
Give it another decade. The US will have a federal ban, the Irish will allow abortion out to 16 weeks.
Here’s a mail bag question perhaps, but what are you seeing that I’m not that indicates the educated, urban-to-suburban base of the Democratic Party is the least bit “scared to lose”?
Scared to lose the SALT deduction
I think Matt is basically referring to the fact that this court ruling, 2022, and 2024 are going to be hideous to Dems (moreso than anything since the Reagan adventures) and that we'll have to learn our lesson in some context.
Will we, though?
The party is no longer driven mainly by professional politicians, nor by people with meaningful convictions and the will to pursue them by hook or by crook, or even by genuine idealists/liberal patriots committed to achieving some sort of improvement.
It is being directed by and for the benefit of the professional classes and their "intellectual leading lights", and what those two groups want is wildly divorced from the effective practice of politics: the former wants to feel good about themselves, the latter mostly to grift their way to a comfortable living. These people are, in the main, cosplaying at having convictions and ideals for social cachet.
As such, they don't *care* whether what they do, say, or donate to actually improves the chances of enacting their stated policy planks, so long as it sounds good within their heavily bubbled peer group. And they themselves are totally divorced from the material considerations that ostensibly drive those policy preferences, so there is no urgency to actually fixing anything. In fact, "Wouldn't paying for public housing cost me what's left of my SALT deduction? Nah, let's just chant 'No one should profit off housing!' instead."
It's quite literally post-scarcity politics, and it's a complete fucking dead end. I will believe these people can shape up and be serious about the practice of politics and the exercise of power when they show signs of doing it.
In the meantime, I regard it as a far more likely outcome that the GOP will one day start making good on its populist promises, and am much more concerned about the contours of what that looks like when they're so divorced from all the expert communities needed to craft effective policy.
"... wants to feel good about themselves"
I was talking to some friends about Musk and Twitter and the Babylon Bee's tweet came up. I agreed it was transphobic and they shouldn't have done it, but I asked if banning would actually make things better or improve the culture war problems and I heard "they don't want to improve it".
And that may be true... but I was more concerned that the attitude suggested my friends didn't seem to want to improve it.
I hope I misunderstood, but my current interpretation is consistent with your comment.
But Republicans are moving in exactly the opposite direction, away from deficit reduction, immigration reform and freer trade, policing reform, carbon taxation, things that can benefit "everyone" in order to keep and hold power to reduce the tax liabilities of the rich.
That has been the GOP platform almost uninterrupted since Nixon was tossed out!
The modern GOP is shifting to be closer to the party of Nixonian populism than anything since has been. We'll see if that shift translates from rhetoric to policy over the coming two decades or not, but it's very clear to me that the Democrats have no viable path back to being the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson. Probably not even to being the party of Obama, FFS. The incentives of the individuals who make up the party and those who tell it what it should think are too misaligned for that to happen. Popularism isn't popular and it's not going to happen.
As for the Republicans... American political parties come to believe the things they say on a 20-30 year timeline, which is how the GOP went from what it was in 1990, when the elite was cosplaying some of today's bullshit, to what it is today. The thing is, it's now cosplaying at being the party of the little guy. I'm laying money that that will become true in more than words within 30 years.
What I don't care to guess is whether they can do so effectively. There are a lot of examples of the "party of the little guy" driving things right into the ground, far more than there are of things like the New Deal.
Hi! I'm an educated Democratic voter, and I am *absolutely* scared to lose. I'm not just virtue signaling.
Among other things, I'm scared of climate change - not so much for myself, but for my six-year-old son. He'll have to deal with the fallout from this as he's growing up.
(n = 1, I know.)
I think most of this commentariat fits that bill.
The issue is that if the rest of the Democrats' educated voting base were as scared as we were, they'd be making the compromises (both policy and rhetoric) to prevent it from happening.
They aren't. Insofar as I can tell, they've become even more intransigent on various topics since Biden won office, and our actual elected officials are being, in the main, spineless idiots caving to their loudest and most extreme constituents.
Scared enough to favor a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions? :)
Yes and yes!
Scared enough to support bulldozing endangered habitats if they are needed for big electricity transmission lines or solar panel farms?
You’re an optimist. Another Trump term would sort it out. Very few would have the resources/connections to shield themselves effectively from the consequences of that. Less dramatically, exacerbated stagflation may start biting the professional classes in a less dramatic and more prosaic but by no means pleasant or negligible manner even before then.
What consequences?
I'm well aware that we need to sort out climate change before it bites us all on the ass, and our healthcare system is still something of a shambles, but I am so very sick of this progressive line that we were all seriously harmed by the first Trump term.
The Republicans aren't actually on the verge of turning the country into a police state or destroying its economy.
They suck in a variety of ways, but almost all of them are more in the nature of "We'll make the current situation a wee bit worse to line our backers' pockets a wee bit more", not "let's reintroduce debt peonage for poor people".
And since "the current situation" is by and large very genial to the professional classes, who also own large chunks of stock in the companies benefitting from GOP rent-seeking, most of them just don't have an interest in "standing up" a la progressive fantasies.
One can argue that under Trump we skated close to disaster several times but nothing *truly* terrible happened. (Unlike, say, Bush's decision to wage war with Iraq.)
That said, I sure wouldn't want to throw the dice on a second Trump term. You can only get lucky so many times.
But that's just it... how much did Bush's Iraq War decision punish the professional classes? Hell, how much did the financial crisis truly punish the ranks of the professional classes after just a few years?
I used the phrase "post-scarcity politics" because I genuinely think we're at the point where the American professional classes, making $150k per household or more, are now thoroughly divorced from most of the material concerns that have historically driven politics as we know it.
Hell, the same is true of me, and likely of many of the folks here.
The big difference is that a lot of us read enough history to understand how fragile everything really is. Certainly my politics are not animated by my short-term financial interests, but by the need to shore up the whole system and ensure it serves a broad slice of the citizenry well, before there are enough folks outside looking in to overturn it entirely or external factors burn it to the ground (literally).
But good luck convincing most of the upper-middle class that the world of ever-rising property values, second homes, huge degree and networking wage premiums, and a poor-but-vaguely-provided-for-and-pliant working class is anything but permanent.
Two points: 1. most of the electorate of both parties, including at the primaries stage, is making short of 150k (and I also think the insulated class you are thinking of is making way above that figure, but that's besides the point) 2. Thanks for this clarificaiton. With this I agree. Many are living perhaps with a delusion of a post-historical reality, but it's just that, a delusion. History and politics can have seriours, terrifying, consequences for all of us, no one is safe, certainly not the 99.9% which would very much be effected by a 1930s level economic depression, a WWIII or a devolvement of the US into Hungaria-style authoritarian regime. All of which are plausible scenarios at this point (not necessarily all at once), especially under a Trump admin with GOP trifecta.
As regards point 1... yes, but a goodly part of that "under 150k" electorate is young people who do not yet make that money but expect to someday, and moreover those folks and their parents are absolutely setting the broader "cultural" backdrop against which the Democrats operate.
Their weight within the party is entirely out of proportion to their numbers, all the moreso because the GOP no longer *has* much of an "ideas" demographic. Their high-SES demographics are mostly those of "mommy and daddy left me a fuckton of money" and "I built a hands-on business". The gentry, not the professionals and creatives. That basically means that they don't/can't take the lead on setting the cultural narrative, but that they are more in line with the electorate, which broadly doesn't like change.
On point 2... "making $150k per household or more, are now thoroughly divorced from most of the material concerns that have historically driven politics as we know it."
This sentence was meant to highlight sentiment, not objective reality, so yes, agreed in full.
But they are. Have you not seen Jan 6th? Are you not hearing the committee‘s findings? Trump very seriously attempted to ignore the elections and stay in the White House. Would it have been business as usual if he succeeded ? Yes, he failed, but only because specific people thwarted him, all of whom won’t be around next time round. Trump and many around him and behind him (e.g. Peter Thiel) seriously and explicitly do not believe in democracy. Why do intelligent people refuse to listen to their adversaries explicit words, promises and past actions ? It’s like Europe being surprised by Putin.
Again, so?
What about that would have prevented people of my economic means from nipping off to Canada for an abortion as needed, or seeking reproductive care in Europe for a few months in a dangerous pregnancy? What about that would have crippled my standard of living and punched me in the pocketbook?
If "loot makes the boys get up and shoot", then "bills drive voters to the polls". Ideals and genuine beliefs are a niche pastime at best by comparison.
Can even quite wealthy people with actual jobs nevertheless 'seek reproductive care in Europe for a few months' as if it ain't no thing?
The flippant dismissal of the idea that anyone in the middle class might be inconvenienced by draconian restrictions is not just politically counter-productive but not true on the merits either.
People with the incomes my wife and I enjoy can indeed do that, and they run the show for the Democrats now.
I didn't mean to imply anything different, sorry.
Where have you been the last two years? Trump's administration entirely mishandled testing and travel restrictions at the outset of the pandemic, so that we had to experience much more severe NPIs, and then fumbled the message on vaccines so that they are *still* controversial.
I don't want Trump in office, because I don't want SARS 2026.
(In case you're wondering why I blame Trump and not the public health establishment or Biden: the primary ways in which public health establishment failed us this past pandemic have involved failing to consider the tradeoffs between medical benefits (which they are familiar with quantifying) and non-medical benefits (which they are not). That is precisely the sort of situation in which strong political leadership is useful! And once Trump had poisoned the well of media commentary by polarizing the pandemic, Biden can't really "unpoison" it.)
Progressives need to be more clear when they are supporting minorities/low income people -- issues that DO require someone other that the super rich to give up something, design it carefully so as the cost is as small as possible, and campaign for it on those grounds -- and things that benefit "everyone" although maybe low income people more than others.
Very sane and sensible newsletter. Hews closely to both public opinion, and to the actual law in almost all Western countries. Yet this view has almost no supporters among US politicians and opinion makers. So weird and sad.
I suspect this view has the support of the majority of US politicians and opinion makers. But they are too scared of their respective extremists to state that fact.
Witness the doxxing and subsequent protesting happening at the homes of Supreme Court Justices to see why they are scared.
And the torching of women’s health clinics and murder of abortion-providing OB-GYN’s, presumably…
Yes, absolutely.
Cf. Voting rights debate, immigration debate and recently even the trans debate. in none of those debates do the polar extremes currently dominating American discourse find much resonance in saner parts of the west that lacking the same politicized polarized drives, have smarter more nuanced positions that would be skewered by both sides in contemporary USA
It has a lot of support with a lot of politicians, including the vast majority of blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats. Those just aren't the people beating the drums about it, because it's not in their interest to increase the salience of the issue.
"(t)he loss of Roe should serve as a powerful reminder to the college-educated liberals who control the commanding heights of Democratic Party politics that losing elections is really bad."
I've said it before, I'll say it again, but the fact that "the commanding heights of Democratic Party politics" are controlled by people who don't understand that *winning elections is their actual and only job* is stupefying...
Here’s a sympathetic take –
College educated liberals are in a position where they (OK, fine, we) are fighting on behalf of disadvantaged people, but ourselves are pretty well off. This can make it hard to develop a permission structure for pragmatism. Moreover, the members of the marginalized groups you have social or para-social relationships with (newspaper columnists, book authors, etc), are ideological and unrepresentative of the broader group in ways that can be tricky to catch on to.
So if you state that Planned Parenthood should be fine with Tim Ryan supporting the Hyde Amendment, you’ll often get criticism that by taking this stance, you’re failing poor women, whom the Hyde Amendment disproportionately affects. Since the entire reason you support Planned Parenthood is to help such people, this has a lot of sting. The criticism might come from people that are themselves members of the marginalized groups in question, which lends them real moral authority.
In the age of social media, polarization by education, and so on, this kind of critique becomes ever more acute. Due to our own comparatively privileged positions, it can be hard to push back against such criticism. Even if leadership is able to take the heat and rebut it, donors might start getting cold feet.
I think most of the people involved are genuinely trying to do their best, and it’s just a tough row to hoe. The best antidote is a combination of engaging in good faith, and empiricism. Point out actual voting patterns among marginalized people, point to polling data, and so on.
Thank you, I truly appreciate the appeal to empathy.
At the same time, though, I admit that I'm somewhat skeptical of a mindset that enables one to view one's self as an advocate for a marginalized group while making significant, perhaps unfounded, quite possibly simplistic and condescending, assumptions about that group. I'm even more skeptical of the utility of most of the advocacy groups themselves (I know a bit about the one in your example based on a friend's almost literally unbelieveable experience working there).
That said, I love your antidote. Is this something you've been able to deploy IRL in some context? Do you work in the political/policy world?
My advocacy is for YIMBYism, and I think it that the nature of it forces you out of the mindset a lot. Housing shortages hurt working class people the most, but this is obviously not a working-class ideology (we talk about white NIMBYs, but YIMBYs are pretty melanin-deficient ourselves.) An easy example is the distinction between "what women think and believe" versus "what feminists think and believe". Imagine the stereotypical women's studies major going to Africa to spread the good news about overturning the global patriarchy.
I think a lot of progressives intuitively know this deep down and are open to the argument, but just struggle to articulate it -- but they can be convinced if you show them the numbers and the articles. It's critically important to establish credibility on the matter, and to speak to persuade, rather than win. If you're someone making a lot of "LOL, pronouns" jokes, then you'll be justifiably tuned out.
(This comes from, of all experience, my experience in the New Atheist movement.)
In practice, my experience is that most dedicated feminists are actually pretty about other countries. Avoiding "Neocolonialism" can be used as a justification for focusing on material issues, rather than ideological approaches.
this is convincing, but maybe a simpler way to put it: values issues (by comparison to bread and butter issues) seem hard to compromise on--for both right and left? every fight ends up being not about whether you want more or less of something but what kind of person you are? which is why maybe conservatives are not at all going to slow down when Roe is overturned. They want 110% of the loaf, too.
I find this analysis much more persuasive than the accusations of virtue signaling and self-interested careerism which are more common on the board.
Just as with the populist reactionary movement, you are better served by taking progressives at their word when they tell you what they believe and care about, than constructing elaborate sociological frameworks that turn them into zombified puppets manipulated by false consciousness.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those guys, and I used to work in the federal policy world! Maybe all olds, at a certain point, come to find the world, including a niche of it they knew very well at one time, incomprehensible. But I don't even understand what the game is now!
For a long time, I thought that people in politics now cared only about winning elections, and not at all about governing. If even winning elections is off the table, though, what the hell is the point? Virtue signalling and fuel for the fire of self-righteousness? Does that actually feel good to people?
What color is the sky on this planet?
“Virtue signalling and fuel for the fire of self-righteousness?”
I mean… duh?
What could possibly have convinced you anything else was the case recently?
No, I get that that is what drives this view. I just don't understand how it can be satisfying *in any way whatsoever* if you care one iota about what the actual policy is.
When you work in electoral politics and you keep losing elections, your takeaway should be "I failed." I literally Do Not Understand a mindset that makes this OK as long as losing makes you feel good about yourself.
They never fail themselves, it's the world that failed them
"They were hoodwinked by group X" is the most satisfying response to loosing elections in this way
"Eliminating Roe endangers abortion rights gravely, but also means the American people will be more exposed to extremist pro-life activist demands"
I'll make the bold prediction that repealing Roe will break the logjam and eventually leads to the pro-choice position becoming more popular, and then legal, over a decade plus time span. Red states are going to go absolutely nuts here- prosecuting women who've had abortions, brutally investigating miscarriages, in some cases prosecuting miscarriages (!), going full War on Drugs looking for mailed abortion pills, and also maybe prosecuting Americans outside of their states who 'facilitated' an abortion. The steady drumbeat of total insanity is going to wear American public opinion down. My read on the opinion polls is that many people are conflicted and don't have ironclad views either way. And let's be honest- the mass media is still a huge advantage that the left has. A decade of insane overreach, plus red state politicians saying absolutely nuts things, is going to be what it takes to finally swing public opinion.
In fact, I think Republican elites are more fired up about abortion than the median Republican voter. Even today, in 2022. Those polls don't capture preference intensity. I think a lot of people who vote R but aren't evangelicals hold surprisingly nuanced opinions on the topic
It'll be Prohibition all over again. Decades of political warfare that culminated in the prohibitionists finally catching the garbage truck they'd been chasing and organizing for all these years.....and being completely discredited.
I think this piece undermines its own thesis in some important ways. The first part totally misunderstands what the draft opinion is doing almost to the point I wonder if Matt read it. This would be an axe to the concept of substantive due process which back before liberals became 'progressives' was a really forward looking concept worth defending. These throw away lines against judicial review are also poorly conceived. If the Supreme Court can never say a piece of legislation went too far or violates the constitution what exactly is it for? Are there any limits on what a legislature or executive can do? If there's no judicial review, who stops it?
Now, that being said, Roe and Casey really do make America an outlier in the West. I don't think that by itself is bad. There are a number of areas where we are outliers with respect to individual liberties and that's mostly a good thing. But if you want to win on a position that keeps abortion legal you have to be ready to defend where you would draw the line and why, which is what this piece totally fails to do!
To me it's very telling that one would be hard pressed to find a doctor to perform a truly elective abortion on an apparently healthy pregnancy past the around the 16 week point. That says to me what most doctors and most people, including pro choice people, intuitively know, which is that there is a threshold beyond which abortion takes on an ethical dimension it does not have in earlier weeks. In practice when it happens after that it is typically because of some kind of medical crisis in a pregnancy the woman intended to take to term.
The great news of course is that drawing a line around those points is both where the population is and would keep the vast, vast majority of abortion legal. Why not just defend that policy on its merits? It's probably what we're going to have to get used to doing and there's no reason to treat it like some weird, mushy, unprincipled compromise, which this essay does, even as it tries to defend it.
If you're asking why liberals can't just agree to ban late-term abortions with a life/health exception, I had a conversation about this with someone on Twitter, and his response was basically that right-wingers would interpret the life/health exception narrowly and in bad faith, so he was not willing to compromise unrestricted abortion at all stages of gestation. https://twitter.com/tinioril/status/1522756080866152450
As Matt points out but doesn't dwell on, health exceptions are sometimes construed to include mental health, which no doubt makes a lot of people queasy.
Ok, but that's the opposite of what we're talking about. It explains why *pro-lifers* might feel unwilling to occupy the middle ground of public opinion, not why pro-choicers might.
Oops, I guess I should respond to the point *you* were trying to make! 😂
To that person, I would say write the damn bill then and include all the exceptions and checks and balances you need to feel comfortable. But the whole "the other side won't play fair so I won't play at all" is turning out to be a sure-fire way to lose.
Yeah. Also, the best way to avoid having those bad interpretations is to win elections, and the best way to maximize your odds of winning elections is to take reasonable positions that the voters agree with. So it's kind of self-defeating.
To answer your judicial review questions:
1) The Supreme Court would still do normal court stuff of interpreting laws in ambiguous cases. They would just lose the power to overturn laws.
2) The legislature would be responsible for judging whether laws follow the Constitution. In practice, that means the legislature can do whatever it wants.
This is the way it works in the UK, and it seems fine.
If a position relies on having a completely different form of government I would suggest rethinking its plausibility.
Agreed. This is exactly what it sounds like when progressives scream about abolishing the electoral college.
Like, sure, the electoral college is a dumb institution that wouldn't exist in an ideal world. But unfortunately it is real, and you're never going to get the massive amount of suppprt needed to abolish it. So you need to find ways to work within it rather than screaming at it or pretending that it doesn't exist.
I mean, there’s a very concrete path in the interstate popular vote compact to get rid of the effectiveness of the electoral college.
I'm very skeptical of the long term feasibility of the interstate compact. Would California actually give its electoral votes to a Republican who won the national popular vote but only got 40% of the vote in California? Under the interstate compact, every time a Republican wins the popular vote they will probably win 40+ states and 400+ electoral votes. I don't see progressive legislatures standing for that for long.
As a Californian, I would be queasy if that were to happen. However, it's written into the law and it's *supposed* to happen when the NPV goes into effect.
Imagine California trying to back out of the pact after election day with a new law that ex post facto cancels its commitment to vote for the national popular winner. Just a tad bit of chaos and constitutional crises there.
I think what everyone wants is a system where every time anyone wins the popular vote they win 50 states and 538 electoral votes. The point of the compact is that no one will actually care about the electoral votes any more, even though they will still technically exist. (Just like how no one actually cares about how many faithless electors there have been in most of the past elections.)
Sure but it's also understanding what these doctrines do. It's far from clear to me that we'd be a more liberal society if the federal courts were never able to draw any constitutional lines on that which can pass the average state legislature.
It does not. Just remove this power from the Court (a power it gave itself!) and leave everything else the same.
Yes, because removing a core power from an inherently anti-democratic institution is just *so easy*.
It worked *only* in the UK due to their exceptional democratic traditions and customs , which the US has clearly demonstrated to lack. Most democracies lack such strong consensus and deeply ingrained culture and need legal-institutional safeguards. The founding fathers of US wisely understood this. And btw I believe recently even the UK adopted a Supreme Court model of sorts.
Finally, need I remind you the it is only thanks to the idependent judiciary that trump failed to steal the elections and democracy was saved last January (and indeed, repeatedly throughout his presidency as some of his most terrible policies were stopped repeatedly)? Without judicial review the constitution is meaningless. Saying the courts shouldn’t have the power to declare laws unconstitutional is *the same* as saying US should have no constitution and no bill of rights.
Most countries don't have real judicial review, and the legislature can always overrule the judiciary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
Meh. EU countries are limited by EU court of human rights for instance. Many countries have ultimate parliamentary sovereignty only as a theoretical “nuclear option” rarely if ever used. In fact US has such “nuclear option” in the form of court packing, require a simple majority in congress (!) to enact at any moment, in addition to the formal ultimate popular sovereignty enacted in the ability to amend to constitution (rightly difficult to do as a feature not a bug).
As Richard Gadsen notes, EU governments are free to ignore the EU Court of Human Rights, it has no real power. Anyways, constitutional courts there are just not striking down laws broadly left and right. The US is kind of unique in this regard. I don't find your other arguments persuasive, Republicans would simply pack the court right back once they return to power- doesn't seem like much of a solution. According to political scientists the US has the hardest-to-amend constitution of any democracy. There's 160 democracies on Earth, so that's quite a statement!
The German court has struck down 600 laws in about 70 years.
The problem with this is that either you have a position that US law overrides state law, in which case you don't have a federation any more, or the Supreme Court has the right to say in which cases the proper legislature is the federal one and in which cases it is the state one. This is not a UK concern (not being a federation), but the German Supreme Court works exactly like this.
It's certainly possible to maintain a hierarchy between federal and state laws that can be enforced by the courts, but to stop judicial review of laws against the constitution. In that case, a state law could make abortion illegal unless that would go against a federal law. Or you could have a different mechanism.
But the division of powers between the federal and the state level is a different question from whether the judiciary or the legislative branch has the last word in interpreting the individual rights in the constitution. The US was an outlier on this for a very long time (although I think that's changed post-WWII).
Absolutely, the question of individual rights is resolved in many different ways, from the British way, which used to be "entirely up to the legislature" and is now "the Court should try to interpret any ambiguities in the law so it's compatible with human rights, but if it can't, then it upholds the law and makes a declaration of incompatibility which is supposed to embarrass the legislature into changing it", to the Canadian way where the legislature has to expressly overide human rights (ie, you can breach them, but only if the Bill says so), to the American way where laws can be struck down, which is pretty common - e.g. both Germany and France have the same principle.
One note, though: in Europe, Supreme Courts are usually the only court that can strike down legislation; if a lower court believes that the constitutionality of a law is in doubt, then it has to suspend the case and refer to the Supreme Court, which then decides and sends the case back to the lower court to rule on the facts of the specific case. This avoids many of the difficulties of the US system where the District and Circuit Courts make constitutional decisions that have to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
"if a lower court believes that the constitutionality of a law is in doubt, then it has to suspend the case and refer to the Supreme Court, which then decides and sends the case back to the lower court to rule on the facts of the specific case"
But doesn't the sheer workload of doing that overwhelm the Supreme Court here? Just seems like that's a ton of cases every single year
Once the law is struck down, that's the end of that law - and remember it only refers if it thinks the law is invalid.
Also there are just many fewer legislatures (17 in Germany, 1 in France)
Finally, you don't get lots of cases, either the law is valid or not, if it's struck down, then that's the end of that law; the legislature can hack out bits and repass it without being in breach of the law.
Imagine if the US courts looked at a law and said "the Murder Act makes cruel and unusual punishment possible, Murder Act is therefore stricken". The legislature would then pass a new Murder Act that would (presumably) be constitutional.
(note that they will generally rule that a law that replaces a stricken one can be retrospective)
The result is that either the law is OK or not. You don't get "did this police officer exceed his 5th Amendment powers in this case", but "does this law permit police officers to do so, if so, the legislature must write a new law that doesn't".
Also, the conventions of legislation under a civil law regime are that it has to have many more specifics, rather than laying down principles that the court must work out.
Except that much of the art of appeal is to argue why particular facts cause a new interpretation on the application of a law. Ruling on such interpretations can be the same thing as overruling the legislation. It's far easier to claim "The Founders wanted us to use the way-back machine" because they knew that they could craft a document, like the Bible, that would never have to admit, or force their successors to engage in the oh- so-exhausting work to deal with changes in the world, or culture.
Or would, maybe, if they did not have first fast the post voting for MP.
How would you address this regarding the SC cases around 1 person 1 vote (Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v Sims, etc.) ?
"If the Supreme Court can never say a piece of legislation went too far or violates the constitution what exactly is it for? Are there any limits on what a legislature or executive can do? If there's no judicial review, who stops it?"
Many or most developed countries actually don't place the judiciary above the legislature- America is fairly unique here. Britain doesn't really have judicial review, the Netherlands explicitly outlaws it in its constitution! In most countries, the legislature can overrule the judiciary and that's the end of it. Take a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
This is true, but the process under which that works varies a lot. Generally, the court can say "you're breaching individual rights" and then the legislature has to do something - though it can say "yes, we are, and we know it, and we don't care". Canada's "notwithstanding" clause, for instance.
But even in countries where that isn't true, judicial review is much more constrained. For instance, they generally just strike down a specific law (rather than creating a broad interpretation); often it's only the Supreme Court that can do it (a lesser court has to enforce an unconstitutional law, or refer the case to the Supreme Court for review - this is true in both Germany and France, for example).
Of course, there is the European Court of Human Rights for many countries - but that doesn't have enforcement powers, it just can pass a case saying "you have breached human rights" and then the state can do something or not at its discretion.
Great essay. Quick anecdote: my first child died at 9mo of a rare genetic cancer. We tested our next 3 pregnancies and fortunately all clear. But otherwise we would have had to have a 15 week plus abortion, because impossible to get earlier test results for this. The mutation was an early infancy, absolutely certain death sentence. point being we need legal late abortion not just to protect mothers health.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/TZpCR/1/
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0cSHF/1/
I didn't find any, the specific Gallup polling I used to make those charts only asks about specific scenarios in the first and third trimesters, not the second.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
One of the things it's been interesting to see over the last ~10 years is how ineffective Planned Parenthood, in particular, has been as the judicial and political landscapes have shifted. To the point where many activists I know have entirely given up on them and there's lots of activist energy around abortion funds and pills-by-mail instead. I think this is basically right and that there's significant opportunity for popular stances there. It's one thing to say you can't practice this type of medicine in a red state, totally another to criminalize folks taking a weekend away in New England or California for personal reasons.
One point that's kind of obvious but that a lot of observers across the spectrum nevertheless forget is that when it comes to public policy, the debate about abortion is about criminalization. For abortion to be legal, you don't actually need a law that says it's legal. You just need an absence of laws addressing the topic. It isn't like, say, gay marriage, which requires an affirmative act of the government to exist.
Pro-choice liberals in reddish states really ought to shape their rhetoric around this. The standard line that pro-choicers tend to emphasize when they try to mollify moderate religious conservatives is John Kerry's "I agree with my church's position on abortion but I don't believe the government should impose that view on the whole country." That's ok, but it's a bit bloodless and they could do much better than that. Instead, say "Abortion is wrong, but I don't support throwing women and doctors into jail for having abortions. That's a bad solution. Instead, I support spending a lot more money on programs to help pregnant women, so that more of them will decide voluntarily not to have abortions."
I wouldn't be surprised if R politicians in reddish states start adopting this view
I'm a moderately pro-life conservative in an extremely red state, and this is my hope as well.
Now that we pretty much have our way on abortion, we can stop posturing for the national political battles on the subject, and will have to grapple with the actual effects of our preferred policies.
Which will hopefully focus on implementing state-level policies that reduce abortion from the demand side of things. (E.g. having more support for pregnant women and mothers, and maybe even subsidize contraceptives)
But that's an awful lot riding on 'hope'.
I assume the "Let's send abortion back to the states" line I have been hearing my whole life from Republicans will soon go away.
National type bans are certainly in the works.
As always since the beginning, "States' Rights" is a rhetorical tool that is jettisoned as soon as it no longer benefits ones' side.
One reason the Democratic party should really try to get any sort of national abortion protection Bill passed, however limited, is to get the Supreme Court to overturn it and set a precedent that it's a state matter.
I like to idly speculate whether the Supreme Court would strike down a Democratic-passed codification of Roe/Casey on Commerce Clause grounds and uphold a Republican-passed national ban on abortions on Commerce Clause grounds.
The Fourteenth explicitly authorizes Congress to legislate to enforce it. If Congress regulates abortion as an exercise of the Fourteenth, it will be very difficult for SCOTUS to overrule it without destroying it's remaining credibility.
It does?
See, I think SCOTUS does care about consistency and that people who think all the Republican appointees do is play Calvinball are making the mistaking of thinking legal reporters like Mark Joseph Stern, Dahlia Lithwick, etc. are actually accurately describing the cases they "report" on.
Neither view seems to line up entirely with the evidence, to be frank, and that's partly because the make-up of SCOTUS changed dramatically in the last 5 years. Originally I was with you; Kennedy and Roberts, while essentially believing that the Constitution was written by and for the benefit of the "higher orders", were at least going to pay it and the centuries of precedent that gradually made it less elitist some attention.
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas have no such scruples.
The evidence suggests that going forward they're going to do literally whatever the fuck they can get Kavanaugh, who is on most issues the closest thing they've got to a swing vote now, to sign on with, especially after January 2023.
Occasionally it'll be Barrett in that position.
What that actually means beyond Roe, I don't think anyone has really worked out just yet, but rolling back most of the last hundred years of professionalization of the bureaucracy, the steady advance of regulation over economic life, etc... all seem to be vaguely plausible in a way they were not in 2016.
That might just mean that the US bifurcates into "states where the government acts like a first-world nation" and "states where it doesn't" with the Federal government rolled back to defense and foreign affairs.
Which is likely what would have happened in the absence of the World Wars and the New Deal anyway, so let's just call that the broad sweep of history and see where it leads.
The idea that Roberts/Kennedy act as reliable, consistent legal thinkers on the court is just kind of a laughably poor understanding. Roberts especially is more of a politician than a Justice at this point. The most ruthlessly consistent Justice is easily Gorsuch.
Of course, but Roberts and Kennedy are/were scared of what would come of obviously and blatantly attempting to roll back the entire Constitution to the state of play in 1800. That tempered the way they acted.
Gorsuch might be internally consistent, but he's consistently bughouse nuts by any modern conception.
If you want the entire Constitution ridden down in flames because of how hard it is to amend, getting Gorsuch-like people on the Supreme Court is a great way to do it, because there's going to come a day when power flows from the barrel of a gun if there is no legal way to leave the 19th century.
Conservative justices veto progressive legislation because progressive legislation tends to do an end around of state lawmakers or the Constitution. Like it or not, the Constitution has always given wide leeway for States to make their own rules. Progressives sometimes like that and sometimes they don’t. But they don’t take a principled stance on the system.
One of the problems has been that most of these decisions were written by the squishiest justice in the majority, which tends to result in some pretty squishy reasoning.
Casey is a mess, but it's a mess because it's an opinion that had to get Souter and Kennedy and O'Connor to sign on to it. And that's the rare case where there was a concur/dissent (two, actually, one Stevens and one Blackmun). Most of the others (Lawrence, Obergefell, etc) are majority opinions written by Kennedy and the liberal justices weren't able to write the clear reasoning that I think Ginsburg or Sotomayor or Kagan could have laid out for those decisions.
One difference on the other side is that right-wing decisions are often written by the squishiest justice (usually Roberts or Kennedy), but that side of the court is much more prepared to let Thomas or Alito or Scalia write a concurrence that often lays out a much better legal (if inferior political) case for the decision.
Not quite sure why there aren't equivalent concurrences on the left, but I wonder sometimes if Kennedy would only agree if they promised not to make a concurrence, where he didn't make the same demand when he voted with the right.
We often hear that the problem with Roe was that it was "poorly reasoned" or written (e.g., focused on due process rather than equal protection). For these cases with very high public valence, does this matter at all? I mean, great for classes in Con Law, but should any of the rest of us care?
I suspect the really only relevant sentence in the Alito draft decision is "Roe and Casey are hereby overturned." The rest is noise.
Yes, you should care because if SCOTUS hands down decisions based on shoddy reasoning, it makes a mockery of the rule of law. An opinion based on nonsense basically boils down to, "We're ruling this way because we want to, it doesn't have to make any sense." If people on the left want to complain about the tyranny of unelected judges, well, that's exactly what that sort of decision is.
I think that comes down to whether you think that the Supreme Court is purely an exercise of power and a matter of who the justices are, or whether you think it is a court that rules on the basis of law and legal reasoning.
Indeed, a good question.
It's fascinating -- and no doubt completely coincidental -- how legal reasoning and interpretation on the basis of law line up with partisan leanings and the party identification of the President that nominated a particular justice. At least on the biggest, most controversial issues.
Yes, but are you sure the causality doesn't run the other way? Definitionally, a good argument is one that is hard to argue against. If the Supreme Court justices make a really good argument for their decision, then
* it's hard for a think tank to argue it should get overturned, which means
* it's hard for a politician to find material for speeches calling for the decision's reversal, which means
* it's hard to build a political movement against the decision, which means
* the decision isn't going to be one of "the biggest, most controversial issues."
It matters a lot as far as setting the terms of engagement. How you protect abortion rights and the kinds of arguments that matter are very different when it's about constitutional interpretation rather than the democratic process. However, it is also very fair to say that much of the problem with Roe being trash law doesn't actually have to do with the issue at hand so much as it's institutional and jurisprudential impacts.
The language in these decisions clearly have knock-on effects. Thus, "undue burden" and protecting women's health in Casey led to tons of laws in red states that bent over backwards to prove that outlawing abortions was done on behalf of women, and that forcing abortion clinics to adopt policies that would basically put them out of business (doctors' admitting privileges, super-wide corridors) were not an undue burden because think of the women.
Right, but the reason Roe/Casey are a shitshow isn't really in the outcomes/standards the court settles on. The court has developed all sorts of wonky balancing tests and language over the years in all sorts of areas. The shitshow is in determining if and where there's any basis for the court to create a standard to begin with. Roe's foundation is vague, undersupported, in tension with other precedent, and generally emblematic of a style of jurisprudence where judges are basically free to invent rights where they see fit to produce the policy outcomes they, or the public, prefer.
The problem with the Roe line of cases is that it all hangs on Lochner but they overturned Lochner so they had to go through ridiculous cartwheels to duck the fact that they were writing law based on what they already said was bad precedent.
Which is why the Ginsburg argument that they should base it on Equal Treatment is so much more persuasive.
Hillary would have gotten 50k more votes with this position in the states she needed them and won. But she refused to back Roe and insisted on an expansive abortion policy. She rejected safe, legal and rare. She lost.
Personally, 20-22 weeks is the right number. Families should have the right to consider abortion in the case of fetal abnormalities. That’s a tough decision and one families may not agree on and a week is what 15 weeks gives you.
I am also in the "squishy middle" on this issue and find it somewhat infuriating how apparently every journalist in existence is on one of the two edges.