Posted on July 20,
2024
Running From Life
The folly of taking issues off the
table
by
Daniel
Clark
In an attempt to take the abortion issue "off the
table," Donald Trump and his newly trumpified Republican National Committee
have removed the pro-life plank from the party platform, where it had been
since Bob Dole first introduced it in 1976.
The new document, which was foisted upon the delegates without debate or
opportunity for amendment, reads like one of the ex-president's longer social
media posts, chock full of CPAC-approved commonsensiness and needlessly
capitalized nouns.
The
minimalistic 16-page paper does not mention abortion until page 15, when it
makes the self-contradictory statement, "We believe that the 14th Amendment to
the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied
Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free
to pass Laws protecting those Rights."
When the Constitution says you cannot be denied a right, upholding that
right at the state level is not optional.
Even Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v.
Wade, conceded that if it is ever ruled that the 14th Amendment applies to
the unborn, then abortion must be banned in all fifty states.
Notice that this new plank doesn't stop at recognizing
a right to life, nor does it complete the clause by including life, liberty and
property. Instead, it references only
life and liberty, as if they were of equal relevance. This is a nod to the false pro-abortion claim
to a liberty right, which relies on a far broader definition of that term than
its constitutional context allows. To
directly equate "liberty" with "freedom" would nullify all constitutionally
allowable restrictions on freedom, while rendering all guarantees of specific
freedoms redundant. It would make no
sense, for example, to specifically guarantee that Congress shall not abridge
the right to freely assemble, if this was already understood to be a component
of liberty. The narrower definition of
"liberty," as freedom from physical confinement, is the one that must apply. Yet, the GOP platform legitimizes the liberal
distortion in order to draw a moral equivalence. States are free to pass laws protecting the
unborn, or killing them and selling their organs. Whichever.
The Supreme Court's decision to defer the abortion
issue to the states does not compel such a morally vacuous statement in the
Republican platform, for the simple reason that the Republican Party exists at
the state level as well. It would be
perfectly simple to argue that the Dobbs ruling took the issue out of
the hands of Congress, while at the same time promising that the party would defend
unborn human life in every state. The
reason there's no such language is that the pro-abortion side has had political
momentum since that decision was handed down, causing Trump, whose opposition
to abortion was always suspect in the first place, to voice a desire to take
the issue off the table.
This April, after weeks of teasing an announcement
about abortion he absurdly claimed was going to make everybody happy, Trump
farcically concluded that everybody is already happy with the status quo, so
his work is done here. If he thinks
he can wish the issue away so easily, he might recall that his party, including
many of his own hand-picked candidates, already tried that approach in 2022.
During
the midterm election campaign, Republicans conceded abortion as a "Democrat issue." When it was brought up, they would pivot to
crime and inflation, but the opposing party didn't play along. Every day for five solid months, Democrats
crammed the airwaves with misrepresentations of anti-abortion bills, dishonest
anecdotes claiming a necessity for abortion, over-the-top emotional appeals,
and a thorough whitewashing of the act of abortion itself.
The voters bought it, and why not? It was the only side of the argument they heard. Another election campaign like that, and the
damage to the pro-life cause could be irreparable. Not that Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Lara's
RNC care a whit about that, but they might at least acknowledge the threat it
poses to themselves. By presuming to
take the issue off the table without the opposition agreeing to do the same,
they are unilaterally disarming. With
Republicns on the run, the Democrats will only pursue them with greater vigor,
resulting in a lopsided argument that will go something like this:
DEM: You just want to control women's lives! First you take away their reproductive
rights, then pretty soon they can't vote, drive or own property, and they have
to dress in puritanical garb, just like in that TV series that nobody
ever watches but is nonetheless poignant.
GOP: Who cares about that when you can't even feel
safe riding the subway?
DEM: Pretty soon, you'll have stormtroopers kicking
down doors and forcibly administering pregnancy tests! Then come the microchips and anal probes!
GOP: Have you noticed the cost of butter recently?
DEM: You'll even deny emergency abortion care in
life-threatening situations, including fetal werewolf syndrome, which causes
thousands of women every year to be mauled to death from inside!
GOP: Oh, yeah?
Well, what about that Chinese balloon?
No matter how ludicrous the accusations, the
Republicans will appear to validate them with their evasiveness. One would think a world class nineteen-dimensional
chess grand master like Donald Trump would be able to see that coming. To the contrary, he and his party seem
perversely determined to follow the used playbook of failed Senate candidates
like Don Bolduc, Blake Masters and Mehmet Oz.
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