Lemon, Aid

 

Drawing via Antarctica Journal.

Roy at his Substack and others are understandably feeling heated about the people who aren't feeling heated at all, who call themselves liberals but seem more concerned about the comfort and quiet of Supreme Court justices in their upscale neighborhoods than the 50-odd percent of the population with wombs whose rights are being snatched away by those same justices

It’s pretty wild to see how easily leaders from both sides of the aisle accepted this fraudulent crisis at face value when the engineers of the assault on our rights were the alleged targets.  At the same time, when you talk about the very real danger the draft Dobbs decision poses to not only the right to abortion but also other unenumerated rights such as gay marriage and contraception — as can be clearly read in Alito’s opinion — not to mention the dead certainty that Republicans will use the decision to try and ban abortion outright nationwide, the toffs don’t seem nearly as exercised.

Part of the reason, I think, is because conservatives are loudly declaring that they won’t do any such thing, and the Very Serious Democrats cannot bring themselves to suggest they’re lying.

I'm wondering if the Very Serious Democrats—TV civility Democrats like Paul Begala and Chris Coons, are worth the attention. For one thing,

People are protesting outside Justice Kavanaugh's house. Someone said "But think of his neighbors" and Kavanaugh's neighbor replied "We ARE his neighbors. We organized the protest"

— Chad Loder (@chadloder) May 8, 2022

Like Lacie Wooten-Holway of Chevy Chase, who's been protesting outside Kavanaugh's house for months but only started drawing a crowd since the release of Alito's draft, with others who have decided to break the civility rules:

In Chevy Chase, just beyond the District line, geniality among neighbors has long been part of the social code. But Wooten-Holway — who has had an abortion and is a survivor of sexual assault — cannot separate the politics from the personal.

It's not "antifa".

Then there's the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who doesn't mind using some strong language. Why isn't she on CNN?

“With this draft ruling striking down the nearly fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade and undermining the Constitutional right to privacy, Republicans would rip away women's right to make the most intimate and personal decisions,” the California Democrat wrote. “If handed down, this decision by GOP-appointed Justices would mean that, for the first time in our history, America’s daughters will have less freedom than their mothers.”

Pelosi claimed that “Republicans have made clear that their goal will be to seek to criminalize abortion nationwide,” citing actions at the state level such as “advancing extreme new laws, seeking to arrest doctors for offering reproductive care, ban abortion entirely with no exceptions, and even charge women with murder who exercise their right to choose.”

That story ran on local New York television and in The Hill ("Republicans slapped women in the face"), while Washington Post went with 

Senate Democrats tee up a doomed vote to write abortion protections into law

It's "doomed" because the Women's Health Protection Act codifying the Roe decision into statute, which Pelosi introduced in the House last September, is disagreeable to co-president Manchin, and ending the filibuster, which might imaginably make it passable (Collins and Murkowski, so probably not), is disagreeable to co-president Sinema, and here we are again, unable to make any progress because there aren't enough Democrats in the Senate.

Well, but then maybe that's the reason for having the vote, to make it present to the public why we need to have more Democrats in the Senate and remind them what we have to do to get them, which is, among other things, to vote for Tim Ryan and John Fetterman, no matter how obnoxious you think one of them is

Don't listen to what he says but watch what he does. He's no Joe Manchin. Note at bottom right: he's been 30 points more supportive of Democrats' agenda than 538 expected him to be on the basis of his annoying shtik. https://t.co/UTpuiVAHmh pic.twitter.com/TLySWipvno

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2022

Also, this is just true and more people should be saying it https://t.co/4gU3knTrS1 College (at least as it is) leaves too many kids without the knowledge/experience they need, and if you can't fix it you need to offer other options,

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2022

I'm not saying it's a good thing that the Supreme Court is about to override Roe, I'm saying it's a good thing that there are people, mostly women, trying to make some lemonade out of these lemons, and deserves more attention.