Informed Speculation

Eleanor Clift carries so much water for the pro-abortion crowd that it’s a wonder her back hasn’t broken. Her latest screed starts off very poorly:

The Alito hearing couldn’t have come out better for the Republicans if the Supreme Court nominee himself had chaired the committee. Even though it was a Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who brought Alito’s wife to tears by asking her husband if he was “a closet bigot,” the Democrats got blamed for hectoring the nominee with questions he wasn’t going to answer.

Oh, please! Everyone with a lick of sense knows that Graham was saying out loud what the implications of the Democratic questions were, and giving Alito a chance to defend himself. It wasn’t the chance at clearing his name that made his wife cry, it was the fact that he had been accused of these things to begin with! How very stupid of Eleanor…

Clift, hilariously, admits as much in the very next paragraph, thus completely undermining her first:

The shock of the rhetorical ploy briefly drove Martha-Ann Alito from the hearing room and gave Graham the stage to defend the judge’s character and bemoan the “guilt by association” tactics employed by Democrats. It turns out that Graham had a hand in helping prep Alito for the hearings, which raises the issue of whether the line was scripted.

Well, that’s a very interesting – *cough* – ‘argument’ there, Eleanor…

But it gets worse:

A pro-choice Republican who spoke with NEWSWEEK but didn’t want her name used said she is more worried about Alito after hearing him testify, and wishes the Democrats would spend their time finding a candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries “or we’re going to get four more years of judges like this.” She thinks that to win the White House the Democrats need a more centrist candidate than Clinton. “The math is against her.”

Let’s pause for a moment here: a pro-choice Republican wants the Democrats to retake the White House so Republicans can’t put any more judges on the bench. Riiiiiggghhhhtttt…oh, that’s got to be a view held by at least – well, maybe by the one person Eleanor found. I assure you that the rank-and-file Republicans would not even recognize such a sentiment.

“Any activist will tell you they’d rather have the issue out there than to have it resolved,” says this pro-choice Republican, who has worked on the Hill and for various Republican interest groups. “If Roe were overturned, we’d be electing Democrats as far as the eye can see.”

According to this source, even committed right-to-life activists don’t want Roe struck from the books before society is ready. “They think if given the time, they can change the culture. I think they’re deluded, but they know it’s going to take time.”

What an interesting person, this pro-choice Republican of Eleanor’s. Let’s allow this pink elephant to continue:

So what is the most likely scenario? The fight over Roe is not imminent. The more immediate challenge will be whether underage pregnant women will have to notify their parents of abortion plans, and extending the right of privacy to minors. “Would we have had Sandra Day O’Connor with us on that?” says the pro-choice Republican. “I’m not sure.” She expects Alito to vote to erode Roe, and then the argument will be, sometime in the not too distant future, that the ruling is a shell, and it will be overturned.

Then the battle moves back to state legislatures, and some places—like Utah, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma and South Dakota—would outlaw abortions while other states, like New York and California, would be decried by the Right as “abortion mills.” Politically, the end of Roe would crack open the Republican coalition in the country and on Capitol Hill. The party is full of secret pro-choicers, Republicans who signed on to a package that included the pro-life position with the belief that it would never happen. They’ve kept their mouth shut all these years, but they’ll be mad as hell and not willing to take it any more. “Even if there’s no right to privacy in the Constitution, there ought to be,” says this pro-choice Republican. “It’s an American virtue.”

One hardly knows where to begin, but begin we must, so:

(1) I think most Americans know quite well that Roe, if it is ever overturned, will be overturned because it was a bad decision, based on an imaginary interpretation of a phantom constitutional provision, the ‘right to privacy’.

(2) If Roe was overturned, and we have no reason to suspect it will be anytime soon, if ever, and it goes back to the states to decide, I’d be willing to bet that all (or at least almost all) states would allow abortions on some level. They might not be as convenient and plentiful as Eleanor would like, but they would still exist, and legally.

(3) I suspect that this pro-choice Republican of Eleanors is a convenient, James Frey-like embellishment, because I have never heard any Republican, pro-choice or pro-life, who shared the desires of this one, that Republicans basically should not hold the Presidency because Roe might be overturned. If that’s a Republican sentiment, the tent has become too big.

(4) Is the Republican party full of ‘secret pro-choicers’? There’s two things going on here. One, is the party full of pro-choicers? Sure, there are quite a few, but there’s no need for them to be secretive about it, I don’t believe…maybe the politicians have to be circumspect, but certainly the average Republican voter has no need to hide his views on an issue that means far, far less to the man on the street than almost any issue you could dream up. Frankly, your average American is sick of abortion – both the procedure and the debate.

There’s more than a little narcissism involved with Clift and another pro-abortion crusaders: they seem to think the biggest worry of the average American is the demise of Roe just because it is their biggest worry. If it weren’t for Supreme Court nomination hearings, I doubt the issue would even be on the national radar screen…