How the SCOTUS Leak Exposed the Games Being Played With Abortion

Abortion has been a massively contentious political issue for my whole entire lifetime (and I ain't young). It was probably the first political issue I really learned about, growing up as a devout Catholic with ardently anti-abortion family members. As part of my youth group at church I even attended a couple of local anti-abortion protests, the first time I ever protested anything.

Of course, I later ended up in grad school in the humanities, where the feelings about abortion are pretty much the polar opposite. This experience (which I like to call "bubble jumping") has maybe given me some special insight into the current reactions to the leaked SCOTUS opinion on Roe and Casey.

Pro-choice folks have been justifiably enraged over the theft of rights by the hands of a court put in place by presidents who didn't win the popular vote and whose draft decision reads like something out of the late 1800s. Much of this rage has been vented at the Democratic Party for failing to stop this, and prominent Democrats have been having to play catchup with the mood of their base. The reaction by anti-abortion types has been far more muted. Most of what I see is more about the leak itself than the prospect of their dream of killing Roe coming true after five decades of grinding battle. 

I think an explanation for all of these reactions is that the political games that have been played with abortion for my entire life have been exposed. Alito et al have flung the gaming table over, chips flying. I want to start with the games played by Democratic politicians, then the more significant ones played by Republicans.

A lot of the commentary I've seen on Twitter focuses on how Democrats failed to codify Roe into law despite having some opportunities. While this claim over-simplifies the ease of these opportunities, there is something to it. Namely, Democrats know that while they are in the majority on abortion, they are a diverse coalition of groups that can't afford to alienate too many people, lest they defect. There are plenty of Republicans, for instance, who are pro-choice in their private views, but they maintain party discipline when it comes to voting. Instead of being a coalition of groups, Republicans are an ideological bloc, and thus have an in-built advantage despite that bloc's minoritarian nature. 

The game the Democrats kept playing with their base was proclaiming that Roe was settled, a kind of bulwark or firewall, so it did not need to be codified. That game allowed Democrats to get the votes of pro-choicers while trying not to alienate swing voters. They never believed that the Right's onslaught on the courts, especially pronounced in Trump's administration, could actually overturn Roe. 

This is related to another game, that the Republicans' thwarting of the will of the people via undemocratic means or breaking established norms (the stolen 2000 election, Garland's nomination being crushed, Barrett's being rammed through, gerrymandering, Senate filibuster) did not necessitate an escalation. Instead their response was to tell people to keep voting. And while that is a necessary component of a strategy to preserve Roe, it is obvious now that it is hardly sufficient. The Court's leaked decision has exposed the Democrats' failed gamble at the political gaming table.

This exposure has enraged the Democratic base, but it has also quieted the Republican one. The Republican Party's biggest game on abortion was to constantly use it as a way to rile up their base and get support (especially for judges who would gut regulation on behalf of their corporate backers). It worked, even though the anti-Roe position is very unpopular. They knew, however, that the average anti-abortion person is several degrees more passionate about this topic than the average person who supports Roe, mostly passively. In this way they were able to pull off the political magic trick of having a very unpopular opinion that actually GAINED them votes. 

Unfortunately for Republicans, the leak has exposed the true stakes at the gaming table, and the momentum of outrage has completely shifted. This is especially the case for younger voters, the kinds of people most likely to get into the streets. Republicans and anti-abortion types have not been rejoicing about winning a victory because the coming backlash is easy to see. 

Also, the anti-abortion movement (less so the Republican party itself) has talked to its membership as if THEY are the majority, and lot of people in this movement actually believe it. The public reaction is proof positive that they most certainly are not, and many of them I think are genuinely shocked. 

Additionally, there's a big game that's been exposed as a cheat. The anti-abortion movement treats ending a pregnancy as tantamount to murder and a fetus as a full-fledged human being, but this decision does nothing of the kind. It does not ban abortion nationwide, it only allows states to do so. It also does not establish fetal personhood. This Court is as friendly as anti-abortion folks could ever hope to have, and even now they are not getting a decision that fully coincides with their ideology. They were promised something that could never actually be delivered, and now they are being forced to defend a suboptimal outcome from getting rolled back. 

GOP politicians are desperate to scream about leaks because they don't want to have to defend the SCOTUS decision, either to the public or their opponents. Democrats are scrambling to appease their enraged base while fully knowing the time to stop this would have been in 2015 when they stood by while Obama was not allowed to nominate a justice. Both have been playing games on abortion, and now the bill is coming due. I don't know where things are heading, all I know is that the old rules of the abortion game, in place my whole life, are gone forever.