There is a reason I have not, and likely will not, indulge in any Cancel My New York Times Subscription gesture. As crazy as much of its political coverage and a pretty big chunk of its opinion writing make me, the NYT is still one of the few newspapers with the wherewithal (and the motivation to use it) to engage in long investigations into important stories, such as this weekend’s NYT Magazine opus on the granular details of how the Supreme Court’s carefully manufactured conservative majority was so carefully manufactured.
Nine days after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the halls of the Mayflower Hotel, just blocks from the White House, were adorned with twinkling Christmas lights and abuzz with the possibilities of a future that had changed overnight. Hillary Clinton, the woman the anti-abortion movement feared more than perhaps anyone, had failed to win the presidency. And Leo and the conservative legal movement that he worked for years to create were about to reclaim power. With that power would come the chance to do what seemed unthinkable until this moment: strategize to take down Roe v. Wade.
The rest of the piece should be read in its entirety; in chunks is permitted if you’re inclined to throw magazines across the room in disgust. It describes in excruciating detail how complete the assault on the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American people was, and how little the expressed opinion of 60 percent of those answering questions in opinion polls mattered. It is a blow-by-blow account of how, given limitless funds and almost limitless determination, and gifted with a smug, near-sighted opposition, the anti-choice forces took control of the reproductive lives of millions of American women. For example, here is a portion of the account of how the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, at the time the only abortion provider in the benighted state of Mississippi, became the weapon of the anti-choice movement’s final triumph.
The legislation was written in a way that suggested it was grounded primarily in medical reasoning. But it featured specific legal language that aimed directly at A.D.F.’s real target. Roe had called the developing embryo and fetus “potential human life.” This bill described it as “an unborn human being” and highlighted specific details of prenatal development as evidence. The legislation stated that the United States was one of seven countries in the world to allow for abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a way to argue that the country was an outlier among developed nations.
Taylor knew a 15-week ban would criminalize only about 3 percent of the roughly 2,600 abortions that were performed in Mississippi that year. But stopping procedures was not the point. A.D.F.’s primary goal was to write bills as a litigation strategy, not draft laws that would make for the strongest public policy or end the greatest number of abortions. The Mississippi bill was a legal tool to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe—and set in motion a much larger plan to eventually end all abortion in America. Some lawmakers in Mississippi worried that they would be sued if the bill passed and did not want to be saddled with the exorbitant cost such litigation could bring. But A.D.F. had a plan for that too, offering to have its lawyers defend the law at no cost to the state. This free legal counsel was a selling point for Taylor when he lobbied the legislators to take up the bill.
To read this account, which is an excerpt from an upcoming book from two NYT staffers, is to hear the echoes of a thousand op-ed tut-tuts about how the conservatives only “wanted the issue” for fundraising, about how they knew what a political disaster a complete reversal would be, as well as all those more-progressive-than-thou liberals who claimed that Hillary Clinton’s warning about the ideological hijacking of the federal courts was “blackmail.” The end of Roe v. Wade was a towering exercise of sheer political will.
And the Los Angeles Times has brought us a warning about another shadowy, and mysteriously well-financed, conservative operation, this one aimed at further decimating voting-rights law. Let the paper introduce you to the United Sovereign Americans, whom I suspect we will all become terribly familiar with over the next several months.
The nearly 90 people gathered in the diner in February were there to understand how they can do their part in a plan to sue California to block certification of the 2024 election results unless the state can prove that ballots were cast only by people eligible to vote. If any votes are found to be ineligible, Hornik explained, then all voters are being disenfranchised—just like those decades ago who couldn’t vote because of their race. “If we think our right of suffrage...has been denied or diluted, we have to stop that immediately. We have to stop it right in its tracks,” said Hornik, co-founder of a group called United Sovereign Americans, which is led by a man who helped push former President Trump’s baseless challenges to Joe Biden’s election in 2020.
Of course, the argument is pure moonshine, but it is a distant cousin to the “equal protection” argument that prevailed in Bush v. Gore, in which not even the lawyers who thought it up had any faith until Rehnquist et. al bought it for strictly political reasons.
What United Sovereign Americans has planned is a legal long shot. But election experts worry that if even one sympathetic judge rules in their favor, it could sow doubts about the integrity of a presidential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump. “Sometimes the whole point is to whip up enough smoke that it seems like a fire,” said Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who specializes in voting rights.
Damn right I’m worried.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
