Democrats are going to try to shift the entire election so it becomes about abortion.
Donald Trump made a very savvy political move in dissociating himself from the issue entirely; he said that the federal government should not be involved in the abortion issue.
Though I am strenuously against abortion, the reality is that the most the president of the United States can do unilaterally without congressional approval is implement items like the Mexico City policy, which is funding for abortion overseas, or target spending at Planned Parenthood domestically.
The reality is that there used to be a fairly wide consensus that the federal government should not involve itself in abortion by funding abortion. Joe Biden is the one who broke that pact by saying that you and I should fund abortions across the country. He’s the one who said the Hyde Amendment should go.
So Trump made a politically moderate move by saying let the states take care of it.
Then, on Tuesday, an Arizona state Supreme Court decision came down that reinstated a 160-year-old abortion ban in the state of Arizona unless it was necessary to save a woman’s life.
By the way, this gives the lie to the frequently used Democratic narrative that there were no abortion laws and no one cared about it until Roe v. Wade. There were abortion laws on virtually every state book dating back centuries in this country.
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What Democrats want is for pro-lifers to move really fast and really hard in a wide variety of battleground states, hoping they will then get the Michigan-Kansas response.
As you may recall, Kansas put a measure on the ballot calling essentially for the capacity to change the state constitution to allow for abortion legislation, and opponents said, “They’re going to ban all abortions in the state.” Instead, Kansas ended up enshrining abortion in the state constitution. The same thing happened in Michigan.
This is an argument I’ve had with many of my pro-life colleagues. We all have the same exact position when it comes to life, that life should be protected from the point of conception. The question is: How do you reach that in a durable manner such that the law does not end up being reversed and allowing millions of abortions over the course of time?
That is a pragmatic question, and not every state is going to approach it the same way; Mississippi, Alabama, and deep red states can pass very strict abortion bans and all will be fine because the vast majority of the population supports such bans.
But in Arizona, a very split state right now, it becomes far more difficult.
The reason the Democrats are elevating this — not just on the state level, but on the national level — is because they are hoping to be able to pin the full pro-life position on Trump federally, even though this is happening in the state of Arizona.
There was a report that Arizona Republican legislators thought the court’s decision would flip the legislature to the Democrats and affect the presidential election.
Trump preempted the Arizona Supreme Court decision by taking it off the federal table.
That leaves Democrats with a conundrum.
The conundrum is that Trump is more moderate than they are on this issue — and they know electorally, that could hurt them.