Republican politicians did their best to split hairs on abortion for half a century, using the desire of the religious far right to outlaw reproductive freedom to raise money and whip votes, but never quite actually even coming close to overturning Roe, to be able to sneak a few votes from moderates and independents.
And then, in the summer of 2022, the inevitable happened.
You pack a Supreme Court with people who say they’re going to overturn Roe, they’re eventually going to overturn Roe.
The last couple of election cycles – the 2022 congressional midterms, the 2023 cycle that saw the Virginia General Assembly go blue – have demonstrated why GOP leaders had been so careful to not do what they told their base they wanted to do.
The Trump-packed Supreme Court isn’t going to overrule Dobbs, so, the abortion issue is going to be a headwind, yet again, for Republicans in the 2024 cycle.
“President Trump has bragged about his role in stripping reproductive rights away from this generation of American women, rights that had been assumed and provided protection for women since 1973. And President Trump is proud of his role in stripping away reproductive freedom that has left Virginia is the only state in the South where women can still make their own decisions about contraception and their own decisions about abortion before fetal viability,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., whose Senate seat is up for re-election in the 2024 cycle.
A field of 10 Republicans are vying for the GOP nomination to run against Kaine in the Nov. 5 election, a group of has-beens and never-weres.
Those folks will damage themselves by racing to the bottom to embrace the finer tenets of Trumpism to be able to appeal to the Republican base, which will make it hard for them to be able to do much to reach moderates and independents for whom the post-Dobbs world is an unwelcome reality.
“Certainly the election results in Virginia in November 2023 demonstrated that’s where the Virginia public is,” Kaine said. “They don’t want legislators making women’s reproductive decisions for them. They think women should be able to make those decisions themselves, and I strongly agree with where Virginians are on that really important topic.”
To that end, Kaine has drafted legislation to restore the Roe protection as a statutory protection, restoring federal law to where it was before the Dobbs decision, essentially, the Roe protection that American women had come to count on.
“We don’t have the votes yet to pass it, but my prediction is this that the more and more Americans see about the devastating effect that the Trump-led effort to destroy Roe is having on American women all over the country, the more people will realize that we need to put a national protection in place. That is my hope,” Kaine said.
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Chris Graham
