Maureen Dowd: Too Much Church in the State

During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett tried to reassure Democrats who were leery of her role as a “handmaid” in a Christian group called “People of Praise.”

The group has a male-dominated hierarchy and a rigid view of sexuality reflecting conservative gender norms and rejecting openly gay men and women. Men, the group’s decision makers, “headed” their wives.

Justice Barrett said then that she would not impose her personal beliefs on the country. “Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion’ — and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she said amicably. “It’s not the law of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.”

Yet that’s what seems to be coming. Like a royal queen, she will impose her will on the world. It will be the law of Amy. And Sam. And Clarence. And Neil. And Brett.

It’s outrageous that five or six people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views on the rest of the country. While they will certainly provide the legal casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation. There are prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.

The explosive nature of Alito’s draft opinion on Roe has brought to the fore how radical the majority on the court is, willing to make women fit with their zealous worldview — a view most Americans reject. It has also shown how radical Republicans are; although after pushing for this result for decades, because it made a good political weapon, they are now pretending it’s no big deal. We will all have to live with the catastrophic results of their zealotry. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/catholic-roe-abortion-supreme-court.html

Talia Lavin: The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican

There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.

There has never been a lone wolf when it comes to racist terror in the United States; it suffuses every aspect of our politics and policy, and in latter years the mass howl of fear at change comes from a jaw that drips with blood. As long as we fail to recognize the wellspring of racial animus that animates the right wing in this country, the corpses will continue to accrue. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/buffalo-shooter-white-supremacist-great-replacement-donald-trump-1353509/

John Della Volpe: Young Americans Are Stressed. They Are Angry. And They Can Swing Congress

Yet there’s a reason to believe that Democrats can run their own once-in-a-century, Rich Strike-style derby and maintain control of Congress in November’s elections. A trifecta of events and likely developments create a narrow window for Mr. Biden and Democrats to regain their footing and shock the world.

The growing presence of Mr. Trump’s voice back on the national stage; the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on abortion and the likely fall of Roe v. Wade; and the opportunity for Mr. Biden to make good on a campaign commitment to address the student debt crisis have formed ideal conditions for Democratic renewal. While older voters will prioritize each party’s pledges to reduce inflation this fall, younger voters will additionally weigh the broad set of values and vision for the future held by Democrats and Republicans.

Young Americans are more likely to vote when they see a tangible difference between the parties and feel the consequences of election outcomes. As Generation Z and young millennials were tuning into politics more closely, millions watched Mr. Trump roll back climate policy, undermine the Affordable Care Act, deliver tax breaks for the wealthy and pave the way for white nationalist theorists to enter the public square — all moves that were antithetical to the values of reducing inequality and standing up for those without a voice. These are values that we’ve found in young Americans across most points on the ideological spectrum. As Mr. Trump’s regressive MAGA message gains newfound traction through Republican primaries and in Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter, the fear of Trumpism on the march can be weaponized by Democrats to motivate young voters, as it was in the last midterms.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/opinion/young-voters-midterms-democrats.html

Bany Sheelah Kolhatkar: The Devastating Economic Impacts of an Abortion

Last December, oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case leading to the leaked draft opinion last week that, if finalized, would overturn Roe v. Wade. During one especially illuminating moment, Chief Justice John Roberts attempted to draw Julie Rikelman—the litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who was arguing to have a ban on abortions after fifteen weeks in the state of Mississippi overturned—into a back-and-forth about the significance of the cutoff for having access to an abortion. Rikelman made a broader argument, that narrowing women’s access to the procedure could disproportionately harm low-income women or those experiencing personal crises. She turned to numbers to bolster her argument. “In fact,” Rikelman said, “the data has been very clear over the last fifty years that abortion has been critical to women’s equal participation in society. It’s been critical to their health, to their lives, their ability to pursue—”

“I’m sorry, what—what kind of data is that?” Roberts interrupted.

When Rikelman tried to answer, Roberts interrupted again. “Well, putting that data aside,” he said, “why would fifteen weeks be an inappropriate line?”

Last fall, Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who studies gender, race, and the effects of reproductive-health policies on people’s lives marshalled a hundred and fifty-four economists to file an amicus brief against the abortion ban, in which they outlined decades of research on how unwanted pregnancies can affect women’s education, employment, and earning prospects, and can impact the labor market more broadly. “Economists as a whole don’t have disagreement about this,” Myers said. “This is not a question about the minimum wage—if you bring that up, then they’ll start arguing. But, if you ask about the role of childbearing in women’s lives, they don’t argue on many of the facts.”

The legalization of abortion, in the seventies, had dramatic effects on the ages at which and the circumstances under which women became mothers. It reduced the number of teen-age mothers by a third, and that of women who got married as teen-agers by a fifth. “Those effects are concentrated among young women and women of color,” Myers said. “Even when abortion was illegal, women who had the means would find a way.” Women who were able to delay motherhood through legal access to abortion were much more likely to finish college, pursue higher degrees, spend longer in the labor force, and enter higher-paying occupations; they were much less likely to fall into poverty later in life. “Fifty years later, the question is: does it still matter?” Myers said, of abortion access. “In short, the answer is yes.”

The draft opinion suggests that the conservative members of the Court accepted as fact the fantasy version of reality presented by the Dobbs argument—or perhaps that they simply don’t think that the potential economic effects of an abortion ban on women’s lives are relevant to the discussion. In truth, most people don’t have access to paid family leave: the U.S. is one of the few nations that doesn’t guarantee paid leave to new parents. The cost of child care is prohibitively expensive, averaging more than a thousand dollars a month for infants. Research conducted by economists such as Claudia Goldin, at Harvard, and Francine Blau, at Cornell University, has shown that the gender pay gap begins to widen once women become mothers. The workplace protections that do exist for mothers apply mostly to people with college degrees; at the lower end of the economic spectrum, where hourly workers may be engaged in shift work with unpredictable hours, there are few safeguards in place. “I think we need the data. And we have it. And we gave it to them,” Myers told me. “And it just seems to not be reflected in that draft.” https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-devastating-economic-impacts-of-an-abortion-ban

Jamelle Bouie: The Slaughter in Buffalo Hasn’t Quieted the Great Replacement Caucus

Make no mistake: The idea that apparently inspired a white supremacist who is accused of killing and injuring more than a dozen people last Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo — that nefarious elites are using immigration to “replace” white Americans with pliant foreigners — is virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Republican rhetoric.

“This administration wants complete open borders,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in an interview last month. “And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it really [that] they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?”

“The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall,” said J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, in a campaign ad. “They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Hours after the shooting, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters, said on Twitter, “The Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal aliens — that’s their electoral strategy.” And on Monday, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, Elise Stefanik of New York, tweeted that it was a “FACT that DEMOCRATS have been explicitly pushing for amnesty for years — specifically for political and electoral purposes.”

Republican politicians aside, there’s also Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News program is a direct conduit for white nationalist ideas, including the idea of “the great replacement.” There are more than 400 episodes of his show, according to a recent Times investigation, in which Carlson has either amplified or promoted the theory that Democrats and other members of the liberal elite (like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros) are using immigration to replace the native-born majority with a new, foreign-born electorate.

The reason Joe Biden has not ended illegal immigration to the United States, Carlson charged in a monologue last year, is that he wants to “change the racial mix of the country” and “reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world.” This policy, Carlson continued, is “sometimes called the great replacement — the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”

The point of making the connection between this rhetoric and that of the accused shooter is not to say that Carlson or Republican politicians are directly responsible for the ideas in his manifesto or for the slaughter itself. But the shooting in Buffalo is only the latest in a series of mass shootings inspired by this particular racist conspiracy theory. In the United States, there have been at least two others: the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and the 2019 shooting in El Paso that killed 23 people. And abroad, there was the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 where a gunman attacked a mosque, killing 51 people. (The accused killer in Buffalo singled out the Christchurch shooter for praise in his manifesto.) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/buffalo-great-replacement-republicans.html

Margaret Atwood: I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.

“In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.”

“In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or ‘handmaids,’ and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.”

“Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?”

For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.

The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.

Similarly, it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

If Justice Alito wants you to be governed by the laws of the 17th century, you should take a close look at that century. Is that when you want to live? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/supreme-court-roe-handmaids-tale-abortion-margaret-atwood/629833/
 

The Lancet: Why Roe v. Wade must be defended

In the USA, Black women have an unintended pregnancy rate double that of non-Hispanic White women. And the maternal mortality rate for Black women, to which unsafe abortion is an important contributor, is almost three times higher than for white women. These sharp racial and class disparities need urgent solutions, not more legal barriers. The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision, women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women's blood on their hands.

The 2018 Guttmacher–Lancet Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights For All concluded that these rights, which included the right to safe abortion services and the treatment of complications from unsafe abortion, were central to any conception of a woman's wellbeing and gender equality. The availability of an essential package of sexual and reproductive health interventions should be a fundamental right for all women—including, comprehensive sexuality education; access to modern contraceptives; safe abortion services; prevention and treatment of HIV and other sexually transmissible diseases; prevention and treatment for gender-based violence; counselling for sexual health; and services for infertility. What kind of society has the USA become when a small group of Justices is allowed to harm women, their families, and their communities that they have been appointed to protect?

The route forward is unclear and perilous. This Court's argument suggests possible future attacks on a raft of other civil rights, from marriage equality to contraception. Despite urgent pleas from some members of Congress, the long-overdue encoding of Roe into law by the Biden administration is highly unlikely. That a Court is about to force through a health policy supported by only 39% of Americans is dysfunctional. Indeed, if the Court denies women the right to safe abortion, it will be a judicial endorsement of state control over women—a breathtaking setback for the health and rights of women, one that will have global reverberations. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00870-4/fulltext

Amy Davidson Sorkin: How Alito’s Draft Opinion on Abortion Rights Would Change America

Those who have watched Samuel Alito during his sixteen years as a Supreme Court Justice will not have been surprised to learn that his draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a restrictive Mississippi abortion law, is written in a register of scorn. Alito’s 2015 dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry, complains that “those who cling to old beliefs” will be forced to “whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes,” lest they be subject to “turn-about” persecution by gays and lesbians and their sympathizers. What’s different about his Dobbs opinion, which was leaked to Politico last week, though, is that it’s not a dissent. It was, apparently, circulated in February as the draft “opinion of the court,” with four other Justices joining Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade (decided in 1973) and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Alito calls Roe “egregiously wrong” and writes that there is no constitutional right to seek an abortion—not at any stage, in any pregnancy, or for any reason he acknowledges. His signature note of grievance may still be present, but it is accompanied by a blast of triumphalism.

Assuming that Alito’s majority stays intact—and that the final opinion resembles the draft—Dobbs will mark a shift in the country that goes beyond access to abortion. (The decision had been expected in late June.) Alito’s companions in aiming to throw out Roe are, it seems, Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, the last three of whom were nominated by Donald Trump. Chief Justice John Roberts had reportedly hoped that a majority could be found to uphold the Mississippi law while leaving Roe, in some form, in place. But his vote hardly matters. The ambitions of the Court’s five most conservative members seem unrestrained.

The most immediate effect of Dobbs, if the draft opinion holds, will be that tens of millions of women will abruptly lose access to abortion. The ruling itself would not institute a ban, but it would give states almost boundless power to do so. More than twenty states already have measures in place that would severely curtail access: “trigger laws,” designed to go into effect once Roe is overturned; restrictions in state constitutions; or laws that predate Roe but were left on the books. After the draft was leaked, Louisiana legislators moved forward with a bill that would not only ban almost all abortions but would define them as homicides. Sixteen states, meanwhile, have laws protecting abortion rights. This should be cold comfort to people who live in those jurisdictions or who have the financial means to travel. Their own rights will be conditional; they may feel that their choice of where to live is constrained; their country will be more divided and unequal than it is now. But the burden will fall most heavily on Americans with less money.

An effect of his draft opinion would be that Americans who care about reproductive rights will be asked to expend a great deal of energy carrying their fight to every level of government, perhaps most especially in elections for state legislatures, which is where, for the immediate future, access to abortion will be doled out or withheld. For many, it will be dispiriting and deeply sad to be asked to wage battles long thought won, when there are so many other struggles to be fought—child care, climate change, Trump. The light that Dobbs casts on each party’s priorities could nonetheless be bracing. Elections are worth the effort. It may be Alito’s Court, but it’s not yet his America. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/how-alitos-draft-opinion-on-abortion-rights-would-change-america

David Lauter: Essential Politics: Conspiracy theories and fear of immigrants — a toxic mix

Long before Donald Trump descended the escalator to the Trump Tower lobby, where he launched his presidential campaign while labelling Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” immigration was playing a powerful role in motivating voters on the right.

Along with opposition to the Affordable Care Act, the effort to stop immigration reform played a key role in mobilizing conservatives during President Obama’s two terms in office. Trump’s candidacy further ramped up the political focus on immigration. It also allowed the spread of toxic falsehoods that had been largely relegated to the fringe.

One of the most pernicious is “replacement theory” — the belief that elites (big business, Democratic politicians, major cultural figures and so on) have conspired to bring large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. in a deliberate effort to replace the native-born population with more subservient people who will work for less and vote for whom they’re told.

The conspiracy theory, which gained traction on the far right in Europe before being popularized in the U.S., has become a staple of some prominent cable television figures, such as the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said last year that President Biden wanted to increase immigration “to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”

Support for immigration restriction continues to be a major rallying cry for the Republican base. A lot of the rhetorical ire is aimed at illegal border crossing, but proposals to dramatically reduce legal immigration became official White House policy under Trump and remain important to a large segment of his core supporters.

The AP-NORC study asked a number of questions about immigration, including two aimed specifically at gauging how many Americans believe key parts of the replacement theory.

One question asked whether “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”

About 1 in 7 Americans said they “strongly agree” with that. A similar share said they were “very concerned” that “native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”

About 1 in 5 Americans agreed with both of those tenets of replacement theory to at least some extent.

That finding was “the primary thing that got our attention” when analyzing the study results, said Jennifer Benz of NORC. The researchers were struck by “how widespread the belief in these core arguments of replacement theory are,” Benz said. “It’s a larger segment of the population than we may have expected going into this who have this fairly extreme view.”

Viewers of right-wing media especially shared those ideas: Among people who said they most often watch OANN or Newsmax, 45% agreed with both of the replacement theory statements. So did 31% of Fox viewers, compared with 13% of CNN viewers.

That reflects the partisan nature of America’s immigration debate, but something else as well: The most widespread support for ideas central to replacement theory came from Americans who believe generally in conspiracy theories.

The AP-NORC study used a four-question scale to measure a person’s belief in conspiracies. The questions ask if people believe that major events are the result of plots executed in secret, whether events are directed by a small group of powerful people, whether those people are unknown to voters and whether that group controls the outcome of elections, wars, economic recessions and other major developments.

People who scored high on the conspiracy scale were, in The problem for American democracy is not so much the share of Americans who believe in conspiracies, but the political system’s weakened ability to keep those ideas at bay.

Through most of U.S. history, “we’ve generally counted on our elites” to not exploit conspiratorial thinking among their followers, Uscinski noted. Some presidents “would dabble in conspiracy theories now and then,” but mostly, they steered clear of them. Trump changed all that.

“The way that Trump used it was at a level and volume we haven’t seen,” he said. And other ambitious political figures have taken note. “They’ve seen the prototype,” he said. “It works.”  https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2022-05-13/conspiracy-theories-and-fear-of-immigrants-a-toxic-mix-essential-politics