(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Ms. Messing, There is Only One Option For Democrats to Win on Abortion: Win More National Elections [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-07-08
Democratic advocates have taken to calling their party’s response to the curtailment of abortion access “flat-footed”. Deborah Messing recently outright questioned the point of voting at all given the state of things. Such statements are not just wildly steeped in ignorance, they are destructive to the very goals these people seek to achieve.
It is understandably frustrating that despite controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, Democrats at the national level appear to be so powerless at the federal level, particularly as it relates to their recent setbacks at the Supreme Court concerning abortion and gun control. In fact, they’re largely right to feel this way in that Biden and his emaciated legislative majorities are functionally unable to do much of anything on these issues and they will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. However, Democrats must accept this and understand that the change they crave will very likely take not years, but decades, to enact.
The cold reality these dejected Democrats must embrace is that there is no viable path to protecting abortion access or passing meaningful gun control legislation outside of a long and sustained set of victories at the ballot box. Which, that is exactly what the Democrat Party is planning to do, most especially by using Republicans’ own victory in the abortion fight against them.
Critics of the Democratic Party’s plan to have their candidates run on the abortion issue in November should keep in mind that it will took Republicans almost 50 years of winning state and national elections, oftentimes by galvanizing their base with promises to overturn Roe. Tenacity over time was the key to their success and only by matching that strategy can Democrat hope to turn the tide back in their favor.
Republicans never lost hope in their fight despite taking losses on a host of policy issues alone the way; they understood that change of great magnitude rarely comes quickly in our nation given that our political institutions are purpose built to ensure a “conservative” approach to policymaking. Chief among these mechanisms are the Senate’s filibuster and the lifetime appointments that Supreme Court justices enjoy.
As to the filibuster, Democrats would have already ended it if they had the votes. They don’t. Given that the filibuster is not in the Constitution but a rule adopted but he senate itself, all that is needed to remove it is a simple majority vote. Democrats now have a Senate majority but multiple members of their caucus, most notably Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are staunchly opposed to removing it.
Even if these are the only two Democratic Senators standing in the way of this change, that would still require Democrats to expand their Senate majority by two more seats to overcome this procedural hurdle. So, once again, winning at the ballot box in future elections to expand their legislative majorities is the only path forward for Democrats to advance the policy issues most important to them at the federal level legislatively. That is the point of voting, Ms. Messing. Without more victories, there is no legislative path to success on the issues Democrats care most about.
The Supreme Court, the other primary impediment to rapid policy change in America, is even more intractable an issue when it comes to potentially liberalizing the status quo. With appointments that last a lifetime and only nine total seats that intermittently and oftentimes randomly open up, the current Court looks to remain dominated by conservatives for a generation or longer.
Achieving dominance on the Court took Republicans decades of winning Presidential and Senatorial elections at just the right time, most especially 2016 which ultimately gave President Trump the ability to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat with a staunch conservative. Even then, Republican Party leaders in Congress had to violate a host of institutional norms to get the results they wanted. They did this by utilizing multiple scorched earth tactics over the last several years in order to systematically pack the Court with ideological purists they knew would be wiling to overturn Roe. This again isn’t a path Democrats can replicate without, first and foremost, winning more elections.
So again, Ms. Messing, the point of voting remains simple in that it’s the only way to both keep things from getting worse or, over a long period of time, to get things back on the right track.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/8/2109151/-Ms-Messing-There-is-Only-One-Option-For-Democrats-to-Win-on-Abortion-Win-More-National-Elections
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
