Supreme Court's pro-choice ruling good for Republicans

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By ROBYN BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 9, 2000

Though they might not admit it publicly, Republicans narrowly averted disaster in the U.S. Supreme Court this term. By a vote of 5-to-4, the court struck down Nebraska's law banning so-called partial-birth abortion.

Of course, at first blush, the case of Stenberg vs. Carhart appears to be a loss for Republicans. The court ruling means 31 state laws on partial-birth abortion -- an issue Republicans have trumpeted -- are effectively invalidated.

So why then is a decidedly pro-choice ruling good news for Republicans?

It keeps them in office.

On the abortion issue, Republicans are dancing a minuet in toe-shoes. If George W. Bush wins the presidency and actually appoints enough justices to overturn Roe vs. Wade (it will only take two more, since three sitting justices have expressly called for Roe's demise), the party's grip on Congress and days of overtaking one statehouse after the next may be numbered.

While polls show a reduction in the stridency with which Americans are pro-choice, supporters of abortion rights still outnumber opponents. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 62 percent of voters surveyed said they wanted justices appointed to the Supreme Court who would vote to uphold Roe, the 1973 decision that established a woman's constitutional right to choose an abortion. Most voters agree that if the Bill of Rights is to earn its stripes as a document of government restraint, then it simply must stand for the proposition that the state cannot requisition a woman's body for nine months.

Today's political complacency over abortion is more a consequence of having a Democrat in the White House than a marked shift in attitudes. Historically, when abortion rights are under threat, supporters rally.

After the Supreme Court's 1989 anti-abortion decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, Americans woke to the fact that Roe was nearing extinction. The result? Polls registered a spike in American support for choice.

Soon thereafter President Clinton was elected and the court decided Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in which a majority reaffirmed the core underpinnings of Roe. America's moderate center collectively exhaled and returned its political gaze to other issues.

But this nervous coalescing of support for abortion rights in the early 1990s no doubt captured the attention of Republican poll-watchers. A report titled, It's Abortion, Stupid, on the 1992 presidential campaign by Alan Abramowitz, political science professor at Emory University, found that 17 percent of Republican voters had defected from their party to vote for a pro-choice candidate.

Ann Stone, national chairperson of Republicans for Choice, says the dirty secret of the Republican Party is that it is relying on the Supreme Court to keep abortion legal so it may safely rail against abortion, attracting single-issue voters, without galvanizing the opposition. "It is a minuet," she says. "(Republican leaders) dance around (abortion) and they don't ever come to terms with it. They put it out there to keep people at the dance." If Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, were truly serious about outlawing abortion, Stone posits, "wouldn't we have had a vote on the constitutional amendment (banning it)?"

We haven't, because Republicans know that if Roe goes, so do they.

Had Roe been a casualty of the Republican revolution it isn't likely both state houses in places like Oregon, Pennsylvania and Ohio would have fallen under Republican control in 1994. It isn't likely we would have had the dramatic shift from 1976, when Democrats controlled both houses in 35 states and Republicans in four, to today, when Democrats control both houses in 19 states and Republicans in 18. The need to protect abortion rights state-by-state would have energized a listless pro-choice electorate.

By removing from legislative consideration one of the most controversial public policy issues of the day, the court may have inadvertently altered the political landscape. As the law of the land, Roe gave moderate pro-choice voters the opportunity to disengage.

It is telling that Bush has been coy on abortion as a campaign issue. While avowedly anti-choice, he has refused to state categorically that he will subject his Supreme Court nominees to an anti-abortion litmus test. Yet he has said the justices on the court he most admires are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- the court's two most conservative and rabidly anti-choice justices.

His duck-and-weave is calculated to placate anti-abortion Republicans while reassuring the mass of pro-choice voters that he isn't planning to do anything extreme.

Had the partial-birth abortion vote gone the other way, had the law been upheld with the majority of justices expressing hostility for Roe, Republicans would have publicly claimed victory. But privately they would have lamented like Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, who said, after his costly win at Asculum in 279 B.C., "One more such victory and we are lost."

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