‘Within a Year Abortion Will Be Illegal in Half of the United States’
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow says she expects abortion will be illegal in half the states across the country within the next year, as President Donald Trump replaces Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. But she made clear that the Democratic base is absolutely expecting its political leaders to lay their bodies on the line to block President Trump’s eventual nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The 81-year old jurist announced his retirement Wednesday afternoon, sending shock waves and panic throughout the left, and Fox News to begin the drumbeat to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Maddow ran down a list of Kennedy’s opinions that forever changed America, for better or for worse.
“Anthony Kennedy is why we got President George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, Anthony Kennedy is why we have same-sex marriage rights in the Obergefell case, Anthony Kennedy is why we don’t execute children in the Roper case, Anthony Kennedy is the reason we gutted the Voting Rights Act, he’s the reason we have unlimited secret money in politics in Citizens United, he’s the reason we have the Trump Muslim ban from yesterday,” she detailed.
“I think a lot of particularly Democrats and progressives and centrists today will be focused on the fact that Anthony Kennedy is very probably why we have abortion rights in this country. I think within a year abortion will be illegal in half of the United States, because of this,” the longtime progressive journalist warned.
“I think that Democrats right now are facing a test, because Democrats have a ‘limiter’ on their behavior. They’re like, you’re driving a stock car, and it tells you you can go 120 miles an hour or something, but then, when you’re actually driving it in real life you find that it gets to a limiter,” she continued with an analogy of left versus right.
“Democrats have a limiter that Republicans don’t have in modern politics right now,” she told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, a moderate anti-Trump Republican.
“Democrats are really constrained by this idea that you should honor precedent, and that you should play fair, and that you shouldn’t make radical departures from the way that things have been done in this country, for generations if not centuries.”
“And Republicans are unconstrained by that,” Maddow continued. “When Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the Senate decided they were not going to allow President Obama to make a Supreme Court nomination, that was a Republican hard ball tactic [that] almost no Republicans had any problem with.”
“Democrats would have to play a similar kind of hard ball now, to try and keep this seat from being a nomination and a confirmation before there’s a new Senate potentially chosen, and a new Senate majority.”
“I think that Democrats are obviously fighting from a position of weakness,” she continued. “Democrats have the option to use, exhaust, and push to the limit every tactic that they’ve got to keep there from being a hearing, to keep there from being a vote, to put, to delay it as long as they can, in the expectation that the same argument that Republicans made, that there had to be an election before there could be any new nomination – that could be applied to what they’re doing here too.”
“I do think that the Democratic base is going to want them to fight that hard, to really try to save the Court or die trying.”
She concluded, “I think the Democratic base is going to expect [Democratic leaders in the Senate] to all but lay their bodies on the line to stop the Senate rather than allow any nominee to go forward.”