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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Reproductive rights groups rebound and gear up to stop the Roberts nomination.
Aug 26, 2005 | This summer, the reproductive rights movement has resembled nothing so much as an underdog prizefighter come out of retirement: They've been up! They've been down! They seem to be getting up again! They certainly came out swinging, making noise, getting people to talk about squeaky-clean conservative Judge John Roberts' record. But then they took a monster right (and left) hook after a sensational anti-Roberts ad produced by NARAL flopped like a dead mackerel. Even some pro-choice Democrats told them to shut up already with their single-issue alarmism.
In the wake of the fury over the NARAL ad, which imprecisely stated that Roberts' political ideology "leads him to excuse violence against other Americans," it looked like the women's groups had indeed clammed up. But this past week there have been signs of life. As other progressive groups abandon their "wait and see" attitudes and start to come out against Roberts, the voices of reproductive freedom are again some of the loudest in the national debate, and their project seems to be once again building momentum. Roberts is still expected to gain full Senate confirmation, but even moderate Democrats like Dianne Feinstein, once sanguine about the nomination, are starting to express doubts. Some of the pro-choice groups may even be fighting the urge to say, "We told you so."
What happened? In a nutshell, Roberts' record happened. The release of documents from the Ronald Reagan library have shed light on Roberts' time as associate counsel to Reagan and as deputy solicitor general under Kenneth Starr during the Reagan and first Bush administrations. We've now been able to read Roberts' writings on the subject of equal pay for women for jobs of "comparable value," which he called in a 1984 memo "a radical redistributive concept." There is his repeated use of the term "so-called" with regard to the right to privacy. He also writes of the "purported gender gap," and "perceived problems of gender discrimination." In the early 1990s, Roberts voluntarily argued for the government in front of the Supreme Court on the side of abortion clinic protesters in the Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic case. And in a 1985 memo he made a crack about housewives becoming lawyers that may have been a housewife joke, or may have been a lawyer joke, but either way was not a knee-slapper.
Before the Roberts record began to embolden progressives to take a strong stand against the nominee, some pro-choice groups were alone in fiercely opposing him, and NARAL's stumble earned them the back of the hand from some (mostly male) Democrats. The popular blogger Daily Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zuniga) enraged feminist bloggers like Jessica Valenti (Feministing) and Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) when he blogged, in the midst of the NARAL fuss, not about the ad, but about his frustrations with NARAL's "single issue" politics, and their single-minded devotion to what he called a "pet cause."
The dust-up exposed an ever-deepening fracture in the Democratic Party over how important abortion rights should be. It's come up in the debate over the Senate candidacy of Pennsylvania state treasurer Bob Casey Jr., who some Democrats think would be the strongest opponent to conservative Sen. Rick Santorum, even though Casey is anti-abortion. It's also emerged in a smaller-arena quarrel between Frances Kissling of Catholics for Free Choice and the Democrats' new religious guru Jim Wallis of Sojourners, especially after Wallis endorsed some limits on abortion in a recent New York Times Op-Ed.
The new comity over the Roberts nomination in progressive circles, and the growing consensus about opposing him, may demonstrate that liberals can fight these battles and still emerge united. That's good, because these battles are not going away.
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Women's groups and other progressive legal advocates have been gearing up for a fight over a new Supreme Court nominee since the last Bush term. But a loose coalition of women's organizations went into overdrive when, instead of the expected announcement that Chief Justice William Rehnquist would retire at the end of this session, we learned on July 1 that Sandra Day O'Connor would be stepping down. "That was a pivotal moment because she was the swing vote," said Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Not on Roe per se, but on keeping Roe solid without it being slowly eviscerated. So we have cared very deeply about who replaces her."
A couple of weeks of speculation -- with hopeful guesses that Bush might pick a woman, a minority or a moderate as an olive branch to those fuming over the Rove-Plame leak -- finally ended with the announcement on the evening of Tuesday, July 19, that conservative white-guy John Roberts would be the nominee.
The reproductive rights institutions were ready to move. Groups like the National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Feminist Majority, the National Abortion Federation, and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health were quick to voice their opposition to Roberts. They planned rallies, press conferences and call-in days, and urged their constituents to voice their concerns over Roberts to their senators.
At 9 on the morning of the 20th, an e-mail went out from NARAL Pro-Choice New York announcing a "Rally to Save the Court" that afternoon. "This is it," read the e-mail. "Judge John Roberts Jr. has been nominated by President Bush ... His nomination to the courts will be putting a woman's right to choose in extreme jeopardy." Two days later, there was a NOW rally outside New York Gov. George Pataki's office. The press release said that speakers would urge Pataki not to veto emergency contraception legislation and "voice their opposition to President Bush's anti-choice Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts." The rallies weren't huge. But they'd happened fast, and the early days of debate about Roberts seemed to buzz with an urgent energy and snap that had been notably absent on the left.
