While American women see their right to abortion threatened, I will not devote this column to the perfidy of the Republicans who are inspired by the Bible to illuminate very modern debates on the control of women over their bodies.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Of course the Republican Party is treacherous. More and more radical, more and more contemptuous of democratic norms, he pushes the cursor ever further to the right, to the point of making people like Dick Cheney look like centrists.
No, today I just want to recall this old certainty which is brilliantly illustrated by American political life…
The left wants to be right, the right wants to win.
Donald Trump has appointed three justices to the Supreme Court. He became president thanks to a whim of the American electoral system: Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College.
Fine, it happens.
But I vividly remember those progressives who were tricked into voting for M.me Clinton, before the 2016 presidential election. I remember his loooong fight against a Bernie Sanders who did not want to throw in the towel for the Democratic nomination, which forced Mme Clinton to fight friendly fires well into the election season. I remember the progressives who weren’t sure if they were going to vote for M.me Clinton because too much this, not enough that…
Mme Clinton was an imperfect candidate, light years ahead of candidate Obama, eight years before, unable to stir up the same waves of enthusiasm.
Democrats therefore did not go to vote. Perhaps they were “right” in their desire for progressive purity.
What happened ?
Trump won.
And he (notably) appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court of the United States, three judges who one might suspect are against the right to abortion.
I also remember Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rightly celebrated as a heroine in the fight for women’s rights in the United States… But who clung to her Supreme Court seat for far, far too long, until his death at the age of 87.
Who was president when RBG died on September 18, 2020? Yes, Donald Trump, 46 days before the presidential election he was going to lose. But the death of Mme Ginsburg gave President Trump the right to fill another Supreme Court seat: He nominated the very, very conservative Amy Coney Barrett, a personal friend of Jesus.
If RBG had chosen to step down at the height of Obama’s presidency, say at the start of Obama’s term when he had a comfortable parliamentary majority, Obama would have replaced it with a judge whom the Bible does not inspire. not legally. If Mme Ginsburg had retired in 2008, at age 75, a still venerable age, she would certainly have been replaced by a liberal judge or a liberal judge.
But no. RBG hung on, hung on and hung on, to die of old age under a Republican President who of course replaced her with Mme Barrett, a judge who is sure to vote to limit women’s right to control their bodies as soon as she can.
I know I know ! The same Republican senators who refused to initiate Justice Merrick Garland’s probation process that Barack Obama wanted to see in the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was too close to the 2016 presidential election (eight months later) n did not hesitate to endorse Judge Amy Coney Barrett a month and a half before the 2020 presidential election…
I agreed from the start of this column that Republicans are treacherous.
But they win elections. And they appoint the judges who make the law. And which will perhaps give the right to say to the States of the Union: you can prohibit abortion.
Democrats have tools to retaliate against Republican treachery. They could have decided to create (or threaten to create) four additional Supreme Court justice posts, for example. The Democratic establishment (with President Biden in the lead) decided that was extreme.
The American left plays by the rules; the American right wants to win, just win. Democratic boy scouts get eaten out by Republicans.
Faced with adversaries who treat them as enemies, the Democrats continue to believe that decorum must be respected, that common sense will prevail, as if they were living in an episode of The West Wing, where dignity always ended up triumphing in Washington. This series, it should be remembered, was fiction.