On All In last night, author Rebecca Traister was on fire as she talked about the tactics employed by Republicans to chip away at abortion rights.
"People have been pointing that out in various ways. Through starting in 2010 before then, too, in 2010, the rise of the Tea party, which we were told over and over by pundits and politicians, was about tax policy. They wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. Karl Rove was instructing to take over state legislatures. This has been Republican strategy for a long time. The chipping away, which is a different strategy, has actually made abortion inaccessible. all but illegal for vast swaths of Americans in this country," she said.
"Vast swaths of the nation where you have to travel hours, hundreds of miles to get an abortion because the chipping away laws, the closing of clinics, the TRAP laws, the limits, having to stay overnight, that makes it economically inaccessible in a country that, practically as soon as it codified abortion as legal, passed a legislative rider, the Hyde Amendment, that prevented poor women from using federal insurance to pay for abortion. Abortion is ever more inaccessible ever since it became legal and a lot of people have been pointing this out and yelling about it and arguing about it and filing lawsuits about it. We have always been told we were hysterical and being dramatic and nobody is going to overturn Roe. Of course they will try to do so."
"There has always been a kind of conventional wisdom that they are not going to try to go through the front door. i don't think it's a crazy conventional wisdom in terms of gaining out the constitutional strategy. I guess my question to you is, look, my understanding is the federal courts will strike it down. Who knows. Are there four votes on the court to take on at Roe?" Hayes said.
"That's basically where they are at. It's blatantly unconstitutional. The court of appeals and places are going to strike down these bans and then whether the court takes one of the cases and what they do is another question," said the ACLU's Brigette Amiri.
"There are so many cases in the pipeline about the restrictions and you have been talking about as well that could present an opportunity to the Supreme Court to undermine or undo Roe versus Wade. it's not just the pieces. It's all the other cases."
"They can pick and choose and if they are thinking about preserving the majority," Hayes said.
"Correct."
"Under other circumstances maybe they wouldn't have gone for a full frontal challenge to Roe," Traister said. "They would have been aiming towards the same thing and depriving women of reproductive autonomy, and with it their economic, social, sexual, and personal liberty. Their humanity and their rights. They will take whatever strategy they can get. Right now, Trump and the Republican party's control of the judiciary has opened up a new door for them and they are trying to go through it. They have been going through the other doors up until now."
Hayes pointed out the recent SCOTUS case of the Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hall "in which precedent was overturned and there was a dissenting view and Steven Breyer was in the dissent. And he said, 'The majority surrendered to the temptation to overrule Hall, even though it was a well-reasoned decision that caused no serious practical problems in the four decades since we decided it. Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.' "
