The email below was sent to Washington Post reporters Devlin Barrett and Ann Marimow in response to their front-page article this morning. Unlike past Post coverage that denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to use the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause to force so-called sanctuary states, counties and cities into compliance with federal immigration law, the Post now seems to celebrate the Biden administration’s reliance on the same clause in its just-announced lawsuit aimed at blocking Texas’s new, admittedly draconian if largely uneforceable, abortion law.
Dear Devlin and Ann,
It would seem all the leftist noise about “My Body, My Choice” is only situationally applicable. On the same day the attorney general sued Texas to keep the state’s new abortion law from purportedly “prevent[ing] women from exercising their constitutional rights,” the president announced his constitutionally questionable intention to eliminate comparable choices for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Americans who’ll now be forced to accept a Covid vaccine or suffer financial ruin.
Never mind the fact that, simultaneously, the Biden administration is ostensibly facilitating the illegal immigration and secret dispersal throughout the country of thousands of unvaccinated, unscreened (for Covid) and unvetted foreign nationals every day (more than 200,000 in July alone, and that only includes migrants we know about).
Speaking of illegal migration and the current administration’s welcoming of it, it seems Attorney General Merrick Garland’s concern about states ignoring the Constitution is rather situational, too, unless he makes headlines again by suing sanctuary states like California, and maybe even a few sanctuary counties (e.g., Montgomery County, Md.) and cities (e.g., Washington, D.C.) that ignore the same Supremacy Clause upon which his suit against Texas is based.
Incidentally, how long do you suppose it’ll be before crazy-left woketivists demand the summary termination of AG Garland for his decidedly unwoke reference to women’s right to an abortion during yesterday’s news conference? Shouldn’t he have talked about “birthing people’s” rights? Hasn’t this CIS gendered old white man yet been subjected to an instructive struggle session with the administration’s Maoist LGBTQ’ers who certainly would have told him men can now have babies too?
Mind you, I’m no opponent of vaccines or abortion. In fact, if I were the King, I’d wave my scepter and make vaccines mandatory for all adults and abortions mandatory for all pregnant birthing people who were unwed, uneducated, largely unemployable and unable to document a minimum household annual income of $60,000, indexed for inflation.
But the U.S. did away with kings 245 years ago, and my judgment may be otherwise insensitive since I managed to make it out of my birthing person’s womb alive. So if we’re all as open-minded as we’d like to believe we are, shouldn’t we also consider, if only briefly, the fetal point of view when it comes to abortion?
After all, with perhaps one immaculate exception, pregnancies don’t just happen spontaneously. One must voluntarily choose to have sex or be artificially inseminated if one is to become pregnant. And if sex is criminally forced upon one, one can still have a pharmacist (in many states) or a physician (in others) provide a dose of RU-486 the next morning, well before Texas’s admittedly draconian and impossible-to-enforce six-week deadline would come into play.
Which is why I’m more agnostic about Texas’s new law than The Post and the rest of the left seem to be. I’m more inclined to follow Justice Brandeis’s lead in patiently affording the states a little leeway as our “laboratories of democracy,” where laws are made with the consent of the governed. And if a majority of Texans consent to this new law, then why shouldn’t the rest of us show them some Brandeis-like deference?
If the state’s administration of this law turns out to be as horrible as many suggest, maybe Democrats will finally manage to turn Texas blue. Surely the left would love that, right? Or maybe enlightened birthing people and their mates will protest en masse by fleeing Texas and settling in some true-blue states that are suddenly suffering population losses. Taking their significant buying power, brain power and creative ingenuity to such states would surely devastate the Lone Star State’s booming economy. And Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would sure have a lot of man-splaining to do if that were to happen.
Of course, if the worst result of this new law turns out to be that birthing people in Texas become a little more particular about when and with whom they have sex, and a little more disciplined about home-testing for pregnancies soon after sex, that wouldn’t exactly constitute a sky-is-falling disaster, much less one requiring federal intervention, would it?
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.