Democracy Hypocrisy

As the stokers of the outrage engine continue to add fuel to the Left's melt-down over the Dobbs ruling (in case you're living under a rock, that's the one that overturned Roe v Wade and returned the matter of regulating abortion to the states), the already-pathetic quality of logic and low signal-to-noise ratio we normally endure in the "town square" has sunk to even more abyssal depths.

First, the misinformation and disinformation (where oh where is the Ministry of Truth?). Dobbs did not ban abortion, nor did Dobbs limit it in any fashion. Indeed, Dobbs removed the limits that Roe imposed.

Some states had laws on the books that preceded Roe and that will re-take effect. Some states have laws on the books with "triggers" that would only take effect if Roe was repealed. Some states have abortion rules that are less restrictive than Roe. And some states have enacted new legislation just this year, perhaps because they knew a Dobbs decision was in the pipeline.

Every so often, we hear "Democracy!" sky-screams from the Left (the Right, it seems, better understands that we live in a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy, and that the system protects individuals from the excesses of unfettered majority rule) when circumstances add up a certain way. When Clinton garnered a higher national popular vote than Trump, we heard all about it, no matter that popular vote is an utterly meaningless tally under our system. And, as Trump did things the Left didn't like, we heard over and over how his presidency was illegitimate because he didn't win the popular vote. See: devoid of logic.

When six Supreme Court justices voted to undo what seven previous Justices did 49 years ago, we heard more of those sky-screams... not to lament that the seven's decision wasn't enacted democratically, but that the six's was 'undemocratic.' That, in both cases, all the Justices were ultimately the product of elections (elect a President and Senators as your proxies, and they put Justices into the Court), is of no consequence.

Liam McCollum @MLiamMcCollum

AOC: the right to our bodies does not belong to nine Supreme Court justices SCOTUS: that's literally what we said

"Democracy," we now know, has been given the Humpty Dumpty treatment.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

When a majority can be asserted (no actual vote, just a finger pointed at a favorable poll) for a preferred outcome, then "Democracy!" is be-all-end-all. However, when those factors don’t present, the sky scream turns to "fascism!" and variations of "my rights!"

The "my rights!" notion, currently formed as "my body, my choice!" is particularly rich from a group that has absolutely no regard for bodily autonomy for any matter apart from abortion and gender-transitioning. I went into detail here about the deep hypocrisy of Leftists who chant that mantra, and as we just saw with the Bruen decision that restored Second Amendment Rights in the handful of states that are still engaging in arbitrary denial, rights that don't matter to the Left are rights that are rejected by them.

But, you can't swing a dead cat around the political sandbox without hitting hypocrites.

When the Dobbs ruling came out, I started pointing out that the Democrats had forty-nine years and two "total control" sessions of government (under Carter and under Obama) to codify Roe, and they didn't.

I was not alone.

Why didn't they write Roe into law? Two possibilities: they didn't actually have the votes, despite their Senate supermajorities, or they wanted to keep Roe under the perception of threat in order to continue motivating voter turnout.

Or, both.

As proof that the Left chooses to keep issues in play rather than addressing them, consider that birth control pills remain prescription-based, when they could easily be dispensed over-the-counter by pharmacists. Why? So that the Democrats can continue to argue that the Right hates women when it opposes coercing insurers to pay for them. The recent bit of theater that was the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022, a bill that Chuck Schumer knew wouldn’t pass, and a bill that didn’t even get all 50 Democratic Senators voting for it, was a sop to the activists that was guaranteed to go nowhere.

Thing is, if parsed logically, the Left should want abortion regulation to be decided at the state level, instead of by Congress.

As someone on Quora (follow me there!) pointed out, as long as abortion remains in the hands of state legislatures, it will remain available to everyone in America. Yes, some will have to travel, but the alternative is fraught:

Anything one party can do, the other can do as well (a lesson Harry Reid failed to heed, likely out of a hubristic belief that his party would hold power forever, and the Democrats paid dearly for his arrogance).

If the Democrats can get to a point that they could legalize abortion at the national level (again, they had chances, but failed to do so), doesn't that mean the Republicans similarly could achieve a level of representation that'd allow them to ban abortion nationwide. ?

I repeat - Any act of Congress that legalizes abortion nationwide can be overwritten by a future Congress, that could ban abortion nationwide.

For an issue as irreconcilable as abortion, what the Court did in Dobbs is truly the best and wisest action. This is a legislative matter, not one for Court decree (the Constitution is silent on abortion, both explicitly and by any impartial search for implicit protections), and the question of personhood is so metaphysical that it should be addressed democratically rather than decreed.

The Left’s emotional reaction to Dobbs is not going to be abated by sober analysis from its talking heads. They see a golden opportunity here, a means by which to whip the base that's been beaten down by the disastrous Biden presidency into a single-issue fervor. Faced with a very high likelihood of losing both houses of Congress to the GOP in November, and a President wholly unwilling to reverse policy course in an attempt to rescue his party from electoral doom, those talking heads are going to milk the Dobbs decision for all it's worth over the next four and a half months. They've got nothing else to run on, so in a way the Court threw them a lifeline.

Political considerations are not supposed to inform the Court's decisions. This doesn't mean they don't - both Roe and Sebelius (upholding Obamacare) were politically motivated. The Court remedied one of those errors with Dobbs, and in doing so may have rekindled the Left's rhetoric about court-packing (though I find it extremely unlikely it'd actually happen - they know it'd not work out as intended) and their hopes for keeping the Senate in the mid-terms.

You and I care about those outcomes, but you and I should also always remember that the process matters more than the outcome in the long run. Blowing up the system to get a particular result may feel good in the short term, but the damage hurts everyone in the long term.

Representative government serves us best when government's control is as localized as possible. For some matters, such as national defense, investing power at the federal level is most logical. For others, such as education, policing, and municipal services, we are better served by power and decision making kept with our city, town, or municipality. And, in our federal system, where states have substantial power to govern themselves, there are many things that some want managed at the federal level but are better managed by states. Abortion is one of them, and pro-choice advocates should recognize the political realities and peril associated with trying to manage it at the national level.

The Dobbs decision restored democratic control over abortion. Apparently, many of those screaming “Democracy!” don’t actually believe in it.

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A footnote: Google has become useless as a search engine for politically-charged news. All its front-page results seem intent on guiding us away from stories and facts that run counter to preferred left-leaning narratives. I’ve defaulted to DuckDuckGo for all such searches.

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Peter.