Click here for an article at Slate by Lili Loofbourow entitled "The GOP Has Its Final Anti-Abortion Victory in Sight," subtitled "Stripping voter rights. Rigging the Supreme Court. Dull procedural tricks. It’s all paying off at once." The link to the article in WaPo says, "Every anti-abortion move the GOP has made for years is paying off at once." Discussing the law, Loofbourow says:
The point is this web-like convergence, across multiple states, that’s closing like a net around Americans capable of getting pregnant. Multiple states, with multiple paths to the Supreme Court. A law passed to invoke the high court can’t be dismissed as a “strategy” or a “tactic”—the law is exactly what it says. And it was passed to satisfy the beliefs of a minority. Take Georgia: 70 percent of Georgian voters and 68 percent of American voters don’t believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned.* It doesn’t matter. That isn’t stopping Georgia’s government. We’re long past democracy working, even if many have yet to realize it, because so much of its dismantling has been invisible to the public thanks to dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and maneuvers like Ainsworth’s, all of which we’ve been encouraged to consider merely improper. A long campaign to hobble and constrain our representative government at every turn is now paying off dramatically. For decades, extremists have been seizing control through the kind of procedural malfeasance that gets continually mislabeled as assholery or poor etiquette. Over and over, Americans have made the mistake of responding to Republican misbehavior by treating each case as an isolated insult to be transcended. The mature thing, we’ve been told, is to “rise above.”
Republicans have been working diligently at this for the last 40 years; finally, under Trump, it's all coming together. A key element was the recent tainted election in Georgia, where controversies were ruled on by the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, in favor of the Republican candidate -- Brian Kemp. That's right; Kemp supervised his own election, controversy be damned. As Loofbourow says:
Yes, a judge found that Kemp’s practices raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities.” It didn’t matter. He’s the governor now. In the name of what he called “voter maintenance,” the man canceled 1.4 million voter registrations in his tenure as secretary of state. He “won” his election by 55,000 votes. The thousand cuts he inflicted on Georgia worked: By the time that court decision came around, it was only a week before the election. Too much damage had been done. Kemp won—technically, but technical wins are all you need—and that yearslong series of cheats has empowered him now to sign a bill that would authorize punishing women for exercising their constitutional right to an abortion.
The damage inflicted by a Trump presidency is going to take decades to repair.
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