It has been 12 days since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. So far, President Joe Biden has reacted to that news with one speech—not even a prime-time Oval Office speech, but a middle-of-the-afternoon “press event” that didn’t allow for actual questions—during which he said he “stands with” women. He evidently didn’t mean that literally: We have not seen Biden physically standing with any of the people who have been protesting the court’s decision. And he evidently didn’t mean it figuratively either: We have not seen Biden echoing, amplifying, or even agreeing with calls for immediate action to protect reproductive rights by people like Senator Elizabeth Warren or Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush.
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Indeed, the revocation of abortion rights has been more than theoretical for at least 308 days. That’s when Texas’s infamous Senate Bill 8—the bounty-hunter bill that has effectively outlawed abortions—took effect. At the time, President Biden promised a “whole of government” response to what he called the “unconstitutional chaos” of the Texas bill. So far, we’ve seen a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice that was dismissed by the Supreme Court before the ink was dry on it, and nothing else from the whole rest of government.
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Six hundred and fifty-six days ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. That’s when everybody who was paying attention knew for a locked fact that the Supreme Court would take a shot at overturning
Roe v. Wade. Biden wasn’t yet president, but since taking office he’s had 532 days to prepare to address the threat, and in that time his administration has done nothing—nothing to protect reproductive rights, nothing to blunt the power of the courts to take them away, and nothing to set up backup protections for pregnant people to access services we knew the Supreme Court was going to take away.
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Biden could have refused to sign a 2022 budget that included the restrictive Hyde Amendment, which limits how federal funds can be used to promote reproductive health care. Even with the Hyde Amendment in place, Biden could right now begin leasing federal lands to abortion providers, providing services at military installations, and providing for travel vouchers for people who need to flee their Christofascist states in order to exert control over their own bodies.
In addition to putting forth actual policies and orders to protect rights, Biden could be using the bully pulpit to argue in favor of court expansion, instead of always being the wet blanket arguing against it.
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If Biden had been making a full court press for court reform over the course of his presidency, would that have made alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, a weak man who appears susceptible to peer pressure, join Chief Justice John Roberts in a more limited restriction of abortion rights, thereby preventing Roe from being overturned outright? We’ll never know, in part because Biden never said anything to make the court sweat.
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[E]xhausted by previous losses, the Democrats now believe they are powerless to help themselves and their voters, even when opportunities to act are presented to them. Most of the Democratic establishment has spent the past week and a half telling people what they can’t do, instead of telling people what they’re going to do.
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The rot is so deep that even in this moment of national crisis, Biden is still allowing Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to dictate the rules of the game. Last week, news leaked that the president was set to nominate a forced-birth extremist, Chad Meredith, to a lifetime federal judgeship in Kentucky as part of a “deal” with McConnell. In exchange for giving the Senate
minority leader another anti-abortion judge who will wield power for the rest of his days, Biden is set to get two US Attorneys—prosecutors—in the state.
The Nation
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