Will Dems campaign on repro rights or keep kissing up to police?
You can’t outflank the GOP on “law-and-order” messaging, because they are fascists.
Except for the lizard people on the Supreme Court and fringe GOP state lawmakers, even anti-abortion activists seem troubled by two outcomes of a post-Roe world: little girls forced to go through with a pregnancy resulting from rape and the criminalization of women seeking an abortion, or even suffering a miscarriage or still-birth.
That might explain the 18-point landslide to protect reproductive rights in deep-red Kansas. The state has famously existed in the liberal imagination as an Idiocracy of rubes voting against their own interests; well, this week they voted against having cops and right-wing DA’s visiting the clinic where their wife or daughter is being treated for an unwanted pregnancy or the complications of a wanted pregnancy ending in a miscarriage or still-birth.
As much as pro-choice people might be tempted to paint anti-choice activists as sexist ghouls, the thing is, a person who’s genuinely convinced abortion is murder and then devotes their life to combatting it does have reservoirs of compassion that can be tapped into. A North Carolina woman I met while reporting on the overdose crisis in the state is anti-abortion: she also rescues stray dogs and works in harm reduction, trecking through the mountains of Wilkes County to help people addicted to opioids access Buprenorphine.
Are you going to convince her that baby murder is alright? No. Can you convince her that she doesn’t want to see her daughter’s mugshot on the news because she had a stillbirth? Probably!
The question is, are Democrats smart enough to use this to their advantage in the midterms? Or are they going to keep pumping money into police coffers in the doomed effort to appear tough on crime?
Last week, President Joe Biden pledged billions of federal dollars to law enforcement. The funds, included in the 2023 budget, will go towards hiring 100,000 more officers.
“The President recognizes that if we want to fight crime and make our neighborhoods safe, we need to invest more money in funding effective, accountable, community policing – not less” the White House said in a statement.
Right, and Republicans immediately admitted they’d wrongly clocked Biden and the rest of the Democrats as anti-public safety. No. Again and again we see that once a lawmaker is painted as “soft-on-crime” the feeding frenzy never ends.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Substance to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.