If the courts won’t save red states from GOP extremism, who will?
By now, everyone has heard the news of the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’s SB8, a law which includes a process for putting a bounty on the heads of anyone even remotely involved in an abortion. Lawmakers in Indiana, Kentucky, and other deep-red states are busy redrawing districts to ensure GOP domination for the next decade, but you can bet they’re taking notes on this major christofascist victory in Texas and drawing up battle plans accordingly. We are perhaps months away from having to smuggle people seeking abortion care across the Illinois border.
I like to brand myself an optimist, but we need to have a clear-eyed, stone-sober, ice-on-your-spine conversation about who or what is going to save us red-state types from more bills like SB8. I’ll skip to the end: No one. Nothing.
First, let’s dispel the “lone savior” myth. Since a smattering of narrow victories by southern Democrats in 2020, I’ve heard a lot about how our own version of Stacey Abrams will spring forth, fully formed, from the head of some unknown deity, and with a mighty trumpet blast call an extra 100,000 hitherto-undiscovered voters out of their hiding places so we can finally wrest power from Mitch McConnell and all the forces of Hell itself. This cheerfully indolent strategy has a possibility of working in the Deep South, where…
