We haven't seen the last of Rand Paul yet. After bailing out of the 2016 Clown Car, he's been quietly marshaling his strength to try and hold onto his Senate seat for another term, despite the conviction of his former campaign manager, Jesse Benton.
In an email to supporters sent on behalf of the National Pro-Life Alliance, Paul touts an invented and magical loophole he and the forced-birth lobby sees as a way to force women to have babies.
Many “personhood” advocates, including Paul, believe that there is a magic loophole in Roe v. Wade that would allow Congress to declare fertilized eggs to be persons under the 14th Amendment, thereby banning all abortion without the need for a Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment overturning Roe. (Many leading anti-choice legal strategists, while they share the ultimate goal of criminalizing all abortion, are skeptical of this plan.) In the most recent version of his bill, Paul tries to allay concerns that granting legal rights to zygotes could outlaw some forms of birth control and in-vitro fertilization, although it’s not clear how effective his attempts at carve out exceptions would be.
Paul has publicly taken several contradictory positions on abortion rights, claiming at one point that abortion laws should not be changed and at another that the Life at Conception Act is merely meant to “drive the debate about when life begins.” However, in his email to anti-choice activists, he is very explicit that the goal of the bill is to enact a national ban on abortion without exceptions.
He writes in today’s email from the National Pro-Life Alliance that the “time to grovel before the Supreme Court is over” and that his bill could “end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it.”
One of the reasons Paul was knocked out in the early rounds of the contest is because he was viewed as being a sellout to "true conservative principles." A squish. This email strikes me as his way of consolidating support among the forced-birth contingent in order to win re-election in November.
It seems to me the only groveling being done here is Rand Paul, groveling to the extremists who propelled him into office.
