Tuesday, everyday Kansans, the same folks who gave Donald
Trump a 15-point victory over Joe Biden, thrashed, by 18 points, a GOP power
grab amendment which would have granted the state legislature, controlled
by the looniest of right-wing pseudo-Christians, the ability to outlaw abortion
in literally all cases, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or even the life
of the mother. And those folks are blinkered
enough to have done so.
All of this, obviously, comes in the wake of SCOTUS’s ruling
in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the nearly
50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision ensuring the right to abortion under certain
limitations. We can trace this, of
course, to the egregious manipulation of the SCOTUS approval process by Mitch
McConnell, certainly one of the most loathsome creatures to have slithered
across the political landscape in decades.
If McConnell had a soul, let alone any ethical sensibility,
Merrick Garland would have been confirmed (or at least had a vote!), and Amy Coney Barrett wouldn’t have. This is not, Curmie hastens to add,
necessarily to suggest that Justice Barrett is unqualified, only that there
wasn’t sufficient time to appropriately vet her candidacy prior to the 2020 election,
and McConnell is on record as saying that his job was to get her confirmed
(not, be it noted, to give her a fair hearing).
McConnell’s hypocrisy, outrageous as it was, wouldn’t have
mattered, of course, if Hillary Clinton had run a competent campaign, or (perhaps)
if the trio of Trump appointees, nominated by a candidate who had lost the
popular vote by a pretty sizable margin, had been honest in their responses to
questions about Roe. They lied. Everyone—left, right, and center—knew they
lied, but it would have been impolitic to have said so, so they got away with
it in a GOP-dominated Senate. (Side
note: no one believes Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t have a definition of “woman,”
either.)
The Dodds ruling was red meat to the right-wing base, but it
appears that Curmie may have been correct back in early May when he wrote:
Be careful what you wish for, GOP. You’ll likely find that your rallying cry
whimpered its way to death alongside the SCOTUS ruling you so despise….
“Right this wrong” is a far more rousing slogan than
“Maintain the status quo!”. Now, the
energy is on the other side. Far more
people will rally, both literally and figuratively, behind what they perceive
as an issue of gender-based discrimination than did so because a single petty
criminal was inadvertently killed by an asshole (not necessarily racist) cop in
Minnesota. And the protests will almost
certainly be less violent, making them less objectionable to those in the
middle, politically.
It’s difficult, from outside the state, to get much of a
read of what was happening in Kansas.
Curmie still has a lot of friends there, but virtually all if not indeed
literally all of them are at least as progressive as he is. Two things were clear from their posts on
Facebook: that they were genuinely concerned that the amendment might pass (it’s
Kansas, after all), and that they were organized and ready to take on the
challenge. Curmie went into Tuesday
cautiously optimistic, but no more than that.
After all, the state’s GOP had orchestrated their attempted
overthrow of abortion rights very competently.
Last year, they passed a law which was (no doubt intentionally) sufficiently vaguely worded that the
state’s League of Women Voters stopped their decades-old tradition of
registering new voters. This tactic wasn’t
aimed at abortion rights per se, of course, but who, exactly, are those
prospective voters who couldn’t register the way generations of their forebears
could? Well, at a guess, they’re young,
disenfranchised, disproportionately female… whyever would the entitled white
male power structure want those people to have political suasion?
The campaign from the Bible-thumpers (though seldom Bible-readers)
was promoted as “Value Them Both,” nomenclature which bears as much
relationship to reality as the “German Democratic Republic” or “states rights”
as the cause of the Civil War. The whole
impetus of the proposed amendment was to deny autonomy to women and to grant
personhood to fertilized (not even implanted) eggs. The ways in which this proposal values
pregnant women elude Curmie’s normally well-developed imagination, let alone
his logic.
Then, the vote was scheduled not during the general election
(as those for other constitutional amendments were), but during the primaries
in early August: when the voter turnout is disproportionately older and more
conservative. Oh, yeah, and the
opposition would have three months less time to organize. Interesting coincidence, huh?
By the way, exceptionally high turnout, as much as twice the
total for the last “normal” election season, for a traditionally sleepy August
primary certainly contributed to Tuesday’s result. Give people something important on the ballot
and they’ll show up. Who’da thunk it,
right?
Finally, there was an robocall campaign which flat-out lied
about what a vote meant. Voting “yes”
was to turn over power to the legislature, but the “anonymous” call reversed
that. Curmie doesn’t know if that call
was aimed primarily if not exclusively at, say, registered Democrats, but at
least three friends posted on Facebook that they received that robocall, and a
number of their friends commented that they had, too. Luckily, the “no” side was all over that
nonsense, and voted the way they intended.
Given all this, the serious thumping administered to this
amendment is rather impressive. The New York Times is now suggesting, based on the Kansas results, that voters in only seven states would endorse the
kind of proposal presented to Kansans (one other state would be a complete
toss-up). Was Tuesday’s result in Kansas
truly a bellwether, even a portent? Is it,
as Politico would have us believe, “a political earthquake with the potential to reshape
the entire midterm campaign”?
Frankly, Curmie doubts it, although it sure would be nice if
it were true. GOP pols may be pawns of
corporate power, evangelical immoderation, and the NRA, but they’re not total
idiots… well, some of them are, but you know what I mean, Gentle Reader. There’s plenty of time for the right to
re-group and re-strategize before November.
But this week may lead to a little more forthrightness from
both sides. Curmie has already seen that
Mike Collier, the Democrat running for Lieutenant Governor of Texas, will (if
elected, of course) “codify Roe v. Wade into Texas law.” Curmie doubts that it's entirely coincidental
that Collier’s tweet first appeared less than an hour after the news
networks declared Kansas’s Value Them Both Amendment soundly defeated. If all we get out of this week is a
Democratic Party prepared to run on what it believes, and perhaps a Republican Party
that must either stake out an extremist position or be seen to equivocate, Curmie
would call this a win.
Hell, it’s a win, anyway, and Curmie celebrates (in absentia) with his Kansas friends.
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