Trump, GOP scramble to contain abortion ‘earthquake’
And the problem for Republicans doesn’t stop at abortion, but extends to the possible curtailment of IVF. A constellation of right-leaning groups, from former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom to the Heritage Foundation, have mounted efforts to restrict the widely popular procedure.
Read more at Politico
Republicans remade the judiciary. It’s haunting Donald Trump.
The right’s judicial recruitment apparatus — spearheaded by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, also known as the Concord Fund — has spent years promoting judges to state and federal benches, far outpacing similar efforts by Democrats. Years of preparation not only secured the conservative majority that ruled on the marquee Dobbs decision, which ended the federal right to abortion until viability, but also put right-leaning justices in place to rule on subsequent challenges to state abortion bans and other reproductive health-related cases.
Read more at Politico
Trump’s conflicting abortion stances are coming back to haunt him — and his party
“Republicans are saying, ‘We changed our minds; you should have some rights. Don’t look at what I’ve said five years ago,’ and voters rightly know that that’s bulls—,” the person added.
Read more at NBC News
Trump GOP Reaps The Whirlwind On Its Abortion Absolutism
A critical element of the GOP’s anti-abortion fanaticism was always a classic “us versus them” sorting exercise. On one side were God-fearing, chaste, proper, and upstanding women alongside their men and on the other side … oh my. Usually implicit but sometimes quite explicit was a fictional picture of a pro-abortion world populated by slutty liberal woman, Black women with no self respect or self control, serial baby-makers living out of wedlock, and a vile array of similarly atrocious caricatures.
Layer on top of that mean-spiritedness the MAGA Republican impulse to target, punish, and hurt its foes, and you could anticipate how this might go. Before Dobbs, it was easy for Trump et al. to use anti-abortion invective as a weapon. After Dobbs, the weaponization of abortion suddenly resulted in lots and lots of friendly fire. It wasn’t just those women who were affected, it was all women. The line between us and them blurred. What were easy cheap shots became self-inflicted wounds.
Read more at Talking Points Memo
Republicans Are Trying—and Failing—to Clean Up Their Abortion Mess
“I don’t think there’s a single Republican candidate in Arizona that was prepared for the fallout of this particular decision,” Stan Barnes, a GOP consultant and former Arizona state senator, told the Hill. Which is likely why their efforts to contain the backlash have been so clumsy: Even as they scrambled to distance themselves from the ban, Arizona Republicans in the state legislature this week blocked attempts by Democrats to undo it.
Read more at Vanity Fair