Power Politics Are What the Mid-Terms Are About
By Ken Zino
The advertising and messages from Democratic candidates and office holders started over the weekend in Michigan. Levin Condemns Supreme Court Reversal of Roe (https://andylevin.house.gov/media/press-releases/levin-condemns-supreme-court-reversal-roe) was the headline on Friday from Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI).
The substance was:
“Simply put, this represents a total and blatant violation of human rights and further delegitimatizes the highest court in the land. I refuse to accept a future where my 17-year-old daughter cannot access reproductive health care freely…
“We cannot disentangle the movement to suppress reproductive freedom from the same regressive politics of our national past as they are borne from the same oppressive forces. This is about control by a small group of hyper-conservative, unaccountable justices contravening the will of the public to strip away rights and harm communities en masse,” Levin said.
However, this was farce coming after his yoga tweet. Yes, a tweet – since deleted – saying Levin was using yoga to deal with the Roe decision along with the passage of the bipartisan gun safety bill since they produced “a moment of wildly conflicting emotions” on Friday. His solution -- #AsanasWithAndy where he shares yoga poses.
Does anybody ever see a MAGA hat at yoga?
He represents Bloomfield Hills in Oakland County, in the metropolitan Detroit area, which leans Democratic. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won 343,000 votes, or 52% to Donald J. Trump’s 289,000 votes, for 43% in Oakland County, though Clinton's vote count was about 6,000 short in the county compared with Barrack Obama in 2012. In 2020, Joe Biden took 56.3% of the Oakland County vote, or 433,982.
Compared with Levin, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was far more grounded last Friday. She filed a lawsuit asking the Michigan Supreme Court to recognize a constitutional right to an abortion under the Due Process Clause of the state’s Constitution. It asks the court to stop enforcement of the Michigan’s 1931 anti-abortion law, which is a nearly absolute criminal ban that Whitmer argues violates the state’s due process clause providing a right to privacy and bodily autonomy. It also violates Michigan’s Equal Protection Clause due to the way the ban denies females equal rights because the law was adopted to reinforce antiquated notions of the proper role for women in society.
In Michigan, this issue is beyond settled. According to a poll conducted last January by WDIV/Detroit News, 67.3% of Michiganders support Roe and 65.7% support repealing the 1931 trigger ban on abortion. Over 77% believe abortion should be a woman’s decision. A sizeable majority of Michiganders agree that abortion is a decision for a woman to make in consultation with a medical professional she trusts.
Success here however will likely require years of legal maneuvering and winning elections, the sort of things that Republicans have proven more adept than Democrats. It is a path forward, though.
The backdrop to this election is an entrenched group of voters who increasingly support authoritarianism and will outlast Trump’s political career. Abstract discussions about policy won’t get it done. Perhaps fear will?
If so, then what do the Democrat candidates have to run on? The only possible course is to get Democratic-leaning voters out to vote in the midterms, which now seems plausible. How does the party get non-“elites” on its side to come out and vote? Power is the ability of political groups and/or individuals to insist on their views in opposition, obstruction and hostility to the desires of others.
There’s a lot going on here. Democrats have some issues to work with -- not all of them are the angst of gas prices and inflation. I would feel better, though, if every time I saw a Democratic talking head on TV, he or she didn’t have original art, or a Federal period fireplace in an expensive townhouse, or some other signifier of “out of touch elitism” as the backdrop.
•••
The Death of the Self
By Jim McCraw
Well, that’s it then. Six people, appointed justices of The Supreme Court Of The United States, four of whom are documented liars, just took away the right to a self from 335 million people in the United States, and, along the way, beat the hell out of the First Amendment, which protects every American citizen’s freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of the assembly and the right to petition the government.
First, I hasten to remind the reader the First Amendment used to mean freedom from religion, as well as freedom of religion. That is apparently no longer the case. A bunch of right-wing Christians has hijacked the Supreme Court through a long, long campaign and a grifting president, and now the 6-3 conservative majority says they don’t like it when you want an abortion, because they are Christians who believe that ending a pregnancy is wrong and against God’s will.
It’s time to call bullshit on all of that. The United States is NOT a Christian country, even though conservatives had “In God We Trust” added to our paper currency 65 years ago to fight communism.
This is a free country, a country that has welcomed people from everywhere for 233 years. When they come here, they bring Shinto, Tao, Buddhist, Islam, Ba’hai, Coptic, Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Episcopal religious background with them, among others. Some Americans have no religion at all. They enjoy freedom FROM religion, and they are surely entitled to that as well.
It’s my very strong belief that a group six avowed conservative Christian justices cannot and should not chain the entire population to their beliefs about religion, pregnancy, gay marriage, interracial marriage, trans lifestyle, or a dozen other things that trouble many Christian conservatives.
Every American who survives birth has a self, an inner being who shapes the inner and outer life, whether it’s a gay self or a Catholic self or a trans self, or a woman who wants a career now instead or a baby. This country is and has been built on self-determination.
Those six justices have just told us we are no longer entitled to a self, and that we have to believe what they believe, and do what they do, or we will be punished.