It was almost 50 years ago that the United States Supreme Court gave women control over their bodies prior to viability.
Within the next two years, they will take it away.
By a vote of 5-4, minutes before midnight, a very different Court refused — for the first time in 50 years — to say that an anti-abortion law is/was/will be unconstitutional.
By a vote of 5-4, the United States Supreme Court elected George W. Bush as president. The rest, as they say, was history.
I am old enough to remember.
Girls used to “get in trouble” in high school, meaning they dropped out of high school, while the boys went to college.
In college, we passed the hat for the bus fare to New York, hoping that no one started bleeding in Massachusetts, where even birth control was illegal.
For the last 30 years, we have been one vote away. For the last 30 years, Democrats have tried to convince women that we really are just one vote away.
Now we are no votes away.
Women younger than me don’t remember. Teenagers and 20-somethings can’t even imagine.
Wake up, girls.
Wealthy women can go to their OB-GYNs, and no one will be the wiser. Mothers can bring their daughters. Universities will take care of their own.
But teenagers? Twelve and 13-year-olds?
Victims of rape and incest?
Should those girls be forced to be mothers? Coat hangers or bus tickets? The girls least able to be mothers should be the first in line? Why?
This is the good news. Eighteen-year-olds had best to register to vote. The unimaginable is about to come true. All it took was one more vote. All it took was one term of Donald Trump.
Chief Justice John Roberts can no longer keep the Court out of politics. For better or for worse, Trump’s trio has made the case for court-packing, a terrible idea whose time may have come.
What can the president say? What can the Democrats in the Senate say?
This is the good news for Democrats. Texas has overplayed its hand. First, get rid of voting rights. Second, get rid of abortion rights. Third, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be, just maybe, about to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. Not to mention Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The jobs numbers were terrible. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster. But if anything, anything, could make half the country sit up and take notice, it is what Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the boys did, literally with seconds to go on the clock.
Cowards, they are.
Hiding behind a procedural trick. No, the state isn’t enforcing the law, so the state can’t be sued, and then the tricksters play their games. Conservatives, the last folks to anoint private attorneys general, will allow anyone in Texas to be sued — for $10,000 — if they so much as give a woman a ride to the gynecologist.
You have to hand it to those Texans. On the one hand, they believe in liberty — to not wear a mask. That’s liberty. But for the victim of rape or incest to have control over her body? No way. For a teenage girl to have a chance to finish high school? No way.
Shame on Texas.
