America's Next Attorney General Todd Blanche Promises To Dobbs Up Whole Country, Ban Abortion Everywhere
Also, stealth ballot initiatives threaten abortion rights in Kansas and Missouri.
Since Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion has won on the ballot in practically every state that’s put it on one — the only exception being Florida, which required the measure have 60 percent of the vote to pass. Recent polling shows that 60 to 64 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Indeed, the abortion nonsense has been so very unpopular that Trump has reportedly encouraged Republican candidates for office to not even talk about it.
But Todd Blanche has a different idea. In a call last week to a very sane-sounding group called Intercessors for America (which I guess is like the Protestant version of my Great Aunt Grace saying “Ooh di’, I pray for yoooou,” but more official/yell-y?) that was hosted by the White House Faith Office, the next attorney general of the United States pouted about how banning abortion throughout the nation is “taking longer than we want” but promised them that the White House, the HHS and the FDA, Donald Trump’s team and the Department of Justice were all working very hard to ensure “that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.”
Remember when they “just wanted to return it to the states”? Because of how they love state’s rights? Seems like they might have been lying about that.
Politico asked the Department of Justice what this was all about, but all they would say is that they want to crack down on the mailing of abortion pills. Blanche himself also quickly pivoted to the subject of mail-order abortion pills on the call, telling the group that if states have decided that they are going to “protect life,” they’re going to make sure that women in that state are forced to give birth whether they want to or not.
“If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that,” he said. “They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.”
Just to be clear, those “states” haven’t said that. With the exception of Florida (where a majority but not a 60 percent majority voted in favor of protecting abortion rights), the states that have banned abortion have not held actual votes on it. Indeed, Republicans have been working hard to keep abortion rights off the ballots in their states, because they know that people will vote to keep it legal if given the opportunity.
Neither Lisa Murkowski nor Susan Collins — the last of the supposedly pro-abortion-rights Republicans — has committed to voting for Blanche yet, though we can be pretty certain that Collins will be “concerned” about this plan and then vote for him anyway. For reasons of “She’s Susan Collins.” Mitch McConnell is ailing, and two others in the Republicans’ 53-member caucus have yet to affirm they’d vote for Blanche. We’ll find out soon enough.
States Are Also Looking For Ways To Ban Abortion, Even If Their Voters Don’t Want Them To
After Roe was overturned, one of the big surprises was that the Kansas state Supreme Court maintained that their state constitution included a right to abortion, regardless of how Republican state legislators felt about it. As you can imagine, they didn’t feel very good! So, rather than actually putting abortion on today’s ballot, voters will instead be voting on a constitutional amendment that will allow them to vote for judges directly.
Right now, the way judges are selected for the Kansas state Supreme Court is that a nine-person bipartisan panel comes up with a list of recommendations and then the governor chooses from that list of recommendations and appoints someone to the court. Kansas Republicans are betting that, if this passes, Kansas voters will choose judges who want to force them to have babies against their will. They might not want to count on that, however, given how overwhelmingly they voted in favor of maintaining abortion rights back in 2022.
Related: The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that “a state court just permanently struck down a long list of abortion restrictions, ruling that they violated the fundamental right to abortion, and health care providers’ right to free speech under the state constitution.” Just another reason why Kansans need impartial judges!
But Kansas isn’t the only state with an abortion-inspired ballot measure today.
Back in 2024, voters in the state of Missouri really hurt the feelings of their elected officials by voting in favor of keeping abortion legal in the state through a constitutional amendment. Today, Missourians will be voting on a proposal to make doing something like that a whole lot more difficult. Right now, in order to establish a new constitutional amendment, all anyone has to do is collect a certain amount of signatures from every congressional district, submit that to the Secretary of State and then get a majority of votes on the ballot. Easy peasy — if it’s something people want.
However, Amendment 4 would change that process, making it so these initiatives would have to get a majority of the vote not just in Missouri as a whole, but in each of the state’s eight congressional districts. Not sure why voters would vote to lose rights, but there’s no accounting for taste.
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Hey, Turns Out Some People Do Like Losing Their Rights!
Yesterday, when I was surely supposed to be doing something more responsible, I came upon this month-old Instagram post from Students for Life of America president Kristan Mercer Hawkins begging conservatives to stop calling to #RepealThe19th, both because she would, personally, like to retain her right to vote and because it will make women not vote for Republicans, for fear they will take away their right to vote.
Hawkins seemed to believe that it was just people trying to be “edgy” and that it was perhaps not even something they sincerely believed was a good idea.
It did not go over well! Hawkins was flooded with hundreds of responses — almost exclusively from people on her own side who really wanted to let her know that they very sincerely do want to take her right to vote away. And that they would like to eat her face.
She even got a response from noted anti-suffragist Dale Partridge (posting under the handle “relearnhq”) who informed her that the country will be balkanizing soon anyway, and they wouldn’t want women voting in their new nation, because of how “disastrous” it has been.
We have been here before with Dale Partridge.
The comments were also full of women saying that they would be so happy to give their votes up, just in case any men happen to be around and looking for a woman to whom they can give their approval.
Also, people who thought she might be Jewish and that this might somehow be relevant. Because, well, that’s who we’re dealing with here.
So many women like Kristan insisted that taking away the right to abortion was not about taking women’s rights away, was not about subverting their bodily autonomy — that it was just about the babies they loved so very much (though not enough to ensure they and their parents have health care). So many women like Kristan thought that they were the special exception to the rule, that they were accepted as equals by the men on their side — but, as many of her commenters made clear, they were not. This is what it was always, always about, and these men (and many of these women) have always hated women. Abortion rights were just a way to attack women’s autonomy by pretending to just care about the babies.
In the event that Dale Partridge turns out to be right and we balkanize into different countries, I do hope Kristan can learn to enjoy and appreciate her new life in Gilead, despite her lack of basic human rights. After all, it’s what she spent her life campaigning for.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
JFC I hate stupid people. Couple that with cruelty and you have the entire right summed up.
"The comments were also full of women saying that they would be so happy to give their votes up, just in case any men happen to be around and looking for a woman to whom they can give their approval."
Can these little knotheads just fucking STOP already? I am not giving up my right to vote b/c some misogynists and their little knotheaded companions think that women shouldn't have it.
This is a hill I am prepared to die on. Voting is sacred.
ETA: The balkanization can't come soon enough, IMO. We can't have a functioning, decent, social-contract-dependant, multicultural, pluralistic democracy with 30% of people in that mindset. We just can't.