Next time the United States captures some hardened, mass-murdering terrorists, the CIA should tell President Obama that we captured some unborn children, and he’ll let them do whatever they want.
Tag: Abortion
The New Federalism Speech
As regular readers know (see here and here), I continue to believe that Rudy Giuliani is the best potential president in the GOP field – and specifically, the one most likely to accomplish conservative policy priorities – and would be a strong candidate in the general election. That assessment, which I won’t rehash here, is based in large part on Rudy’s personal characteristics, temperament and accomplishments; after all, ideas don’t run for president, people do. Of course, Rudy’s record on social issues has long been the primary obstacle to winning the nomination, and everyone who paid any attention whatsoever to Rudy’s record and to Republican politics over the past few decades knew that. Thus, a Rudy for President campaign needed to have a well-thought-out plan from Day One as to how to deal with that obstacle.
Since the summer of 2005, I have been laying out in public and in private – including to people who hoped, at the time, to have the ear of the Giuliani camp – my roadmap to how Rudy could overcome this obstacle. I never thought he could win over everyone, but I believed then and believe now that there was an opportunity, had Rudy played his cards the right way at the right time, to take the goodwill and respect Rudy enjoyed with socially conservative voters who respected him as a leader and offer a compromise that would keep enough pro-lifers, in particular, on board to build a winning coalition in the primaries and hold enough of the party together – and appeal to enough independent or swing voters – to march to victory in November.
Rudy has followed some of the paths I laid out (not that I take credit for this), but he never gave the speech I thought would really make the difference. When voters go to the polls tomorrow in Florida, they may breathe new life into Rudy’s campaign, or more likely they may end it. Either way, it’s probably too late to give this speech – and so I offer it to you, dear readers, and to posterity.
The Wrong Way To Argue About Abortion
Not only did Roe [v. Wade] not . . . resolve the deeply divisive issue of abortion; it did more than anything else to nourish it, by elevating it to the national level, where it is infinitely more difficult to resolve. National politics were not plagued by abortion protests, national abortion lobbying, or abortion marches on Congress before Roe v. Wade was decided. Profound disagreement existed among our citizens over the issue – as it does over other issues, such as the death penalty – but that disagreement was being worked out at the state level. As with many other issues, the division of sentiment within each State was not as closely balanced as it was among the population of the Nation as a whole, meaning not only that more people would be satisfied with the results of state-by-state resolution, but also that those results would be more stable. Pre-Roe, moreover, political compromise was possible.
Roe’s mandate for abortion on demand destroyed the compromises of the past, rendered compromise impossible for the future, and required the entire issue to be resolved uniformly, at the national level. At the same time, Roe created a vast new class of abortion consumers and abortion proponents by eliminating the moral opprobrium that had attached to the act. . . Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court, in particular, ever since.
Justice Scalia, dissenting in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 995-96 (1992).
It would, in fact, be a far better world if the President of the United States and the Justices appointed by the President had nothing to do with abortion policy, but in the world made by the seven Justices who made Roe and the four others (plus the author of Roe) who preserved it in 1992, abortion is a matter of federal law, to be addressed mainly by the selection of Supreme Court Justices.
It is possible that abortion opponents, like me, can hope that Justices who may be receptive to overruling Roe could be appointed by a President who is not. That, at least, is the central challenge for the presidential candidacy in particular of Rudy Guiliani, a long-time supporter of legal abortion who now seeks the presidential nomination of the Party of Life. The debate over whether Rudy can be trusted on the courts is for another day, but I must say that as much as I am willing to support him, I am not at all persuaded, and do not expect other pro-lifers to be persuaded, by this Deroy Murdock column arguing that abortion rates fell during Rudy’s tenure as Mayor of New York. The problem is, he doesn’t really have an argument that Giuliani had anything to do with this. About the only policy Murdock can point to to attribute this to Giuliani is that he was not as bad as Bloomberg:
New York pro-lifers concede that Giuliani never attempted anything like what current Mayor Michael Bloomberg promulgated in July 2002. Eight city-run hospitals added abortion instruction to the training expected of their OB-GYN medical residents. Giuliani could have issued such rules, but never did.
That’s something – evidence that Giuliani is hardly a zealot on the issue – but cold comfort in trying to make him out as actively participating in the decline in abortion rates.
In fact, specious claims about rates of abortion have been a staple of abortion’s most zealous cheerleaders, including Hillary Clinton, who claimed in 2005 that:
In the (first) three years since President Bush took office, eight states have seen an increase in abortion rates and four saw a decrease.
This was a thoroughly bogus claim that nonetheless survived vigorous debunking, but as you can see from the chart presented by FactCheck.org, abortion rates were declining gradually from about 1980 on nationwide, and underwent a particularly sharp drop between about 1989 and 1995, the tail end of which coincided with the beginning of Giuliani’s mayoralty.
On the other hand – and this is a very important part – the rates may go up and down, but no matter how you slice them, the overall number of abortions in this country is horrifying, and you can play with the charts all day long and not get them to where that is not true. (Compare the number of abortions to the number of executions some time, if you don’t believe me). Trends and blips don’t change that reality, which is why the issue is still, fundamentally, whether abortions should be thinkable at all in a civilized society.
I know Murdock, like many conservative New Yorkers, believes that the nation needs Giuliani’s brand of leadership and just wants to help. But if there’s one lesson Giuliani will need to fully absorb if he is going to succeed in wooing pro-life voters, it’s that we have heard a lot before and we are not easily fooled. Rudy has one, longstanding position on Life, and we have another. Pretending otherwise will not help. The middle ground, the sensible, moderate position, is what Justice Scalia spoke of 15 years ago – democracy, federalism, getting the Supreme Court out of the business of making the rules off the top of its head and restoring to individual jurisdictions the power to make their own rules in line with the varying standards of their own communities. Which is why the judiciary is the whole ball of wax, one that can’t be sugar-coated.