Im-Politic: Why the Crucial Abortion Debates are (Long) Over

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abortion, abortion rights, Constitution, Gallup, heartbeat bills, Im-Politic, Kaiser Family Foundation, National Opinion Research Center, Pew Research Center, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Quinnipiac College poll, Robert G. McCloskey, Roe vs. Wade, Supreme Court

If only most of the major challenges facing Americans were as easy to meet as arriving at a satisfactory compromise over abortion. In fact, in the key respects, the challenge has already been met, as a general consensus is staring the nation in its collective face, has been in place literally for decades, and looks guaranteed to remain solidly in place for the foreseeable future.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, given the political and policy brawl that has erupted in recent weeks over a handful of states’ approval of laws dramatically reducing the circumstances in which abortion will remain legal?  But this contention is backed up strongly by the national legal regime regulating abortion right now, by all the polling, and by everything known about how the Supreme Court – which it’s thought on both sides of the issue could well transform the status quo it’s created since its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision – historically has handled such explosive questions. Moreover, abortion is one of those matters in which the politics, the law, and the history powerfully reinforce each other.

Let’s start with the law. The major Supreme Court decisions are of course the Roe case – which established a Constitutional right to abortion but also authorized states to infringe on it in various ways during a pregnancy’s second and third trimesters – but also a ruling in the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey case. In it, a 5-4 majority of the Court created a standard to govern such state restrictions on abortion, holding that such measures could not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions that “created a substantial obstacle” to undergoing the procedure “before the fetus attains viability.”

Revealingly, that guideline nicely describes the current U.S. consensus on abortion rights: Women deserve a fundamental right to abortion, but (like most other rights), it’s not absolute. More specifically, the most widely agreed on exceptions involve what are clearly exceptional (and exceptionally tragic) – mainly rape, incest, serious threats to the pregnant woman’s health, and a high likelihood that the new baby would suffer from serious defects. (See this recent Gallup summary for some representative data.)

Still more revealingly: These public attitudes have been remarkably stable over time. At least three separate polls – shown in the aforementioned Gallup summary, by Pew, and by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) – make this point emphatically.

And at least as important – NORC’s findings show that a sizable gap has existed between public support for the “tragic” exceptions to the right to abortion on the one hand (which have demonstrated at least 70 percent backing for the four decades examined), and other proposed exceptions (whose support generally has remained between 30 percent and 50 percent).

In turn, these legal and political considerations both create towering obstacles even to a Court now featuring a conservative majority overturning either the Roe or the Casey regimes. And least plausible of all is the wish-dream of abortion rights opponents and the nightmare of abortion rights supporters – that the Court bases such a reversal on cases brought deliberately in order to uphold the highly restrictive new state laws. For outlawing abortion even in the aftermath of rape and incest, for example, would seem the epitome of creating a Casey-violating undue burden on the fundamental right to abortion. The various “heartbeat” bills for their part can’t be squared with the Court’s determination in Roe and other decisions since that a fetus isn’t viable until long after the six weeks at which this function can first be detected.

Indeed, such laws repeatedly have been struck down in various courts, and the Supreme Court has refused to consider the two that reached it on appeal. And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the high court’s recent record tracks well with public opinion (including on the heartbeat bills, according to Kaiser Family Foundation and Quinnipiac University survey results presented in this sweeping summary of decades of abortion poll findings).

But couldn’t the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority decide the time is ripe to get rid of Roe and follow-on decisions? Not if it bears any resemblance to its predecessors since the New Deal era. For one of the seminal findings about the Court came back in 1960, in Harvard political scientist Robert G. McCloskey’s classic study, The American Supreme Court. As McCloskey argued compellingly, the Court is most successful when it pays attention to public opinion, and runs into its greatest troubles when it gets too far ahead of or too far behind these attitudes. If you’re skeptical, just think of the tumult that followed the pre-Civil War Dred Scott case and its invalidation of crucial pieces of New Deal legislation during the Great Depression.

None of this is to say that lots of thorny abortion-related decisions will continue to face Americans – like federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide a wide range of women’s health care services, including abortion services; and about what kinds of reproductive health services like birth control religious organizations should be required to provide for female employees in their health insurance plans. And few of them have generated enough polling evidence to identify consensus with any justifiable confidence.

But the broadest, most important abortion-related questions have been decided – especially in the court of public opinion. The procedure will remain a strongly protected Constitutional right early in pregnancy, and a more weakly protected right in later phases. Throughout pregnancies, this right will receive virtually absolute protection in genuinely traumatic circumstances, and be subjected by states to curbs on its availability that don’t “substantially” nullify it in practical terms — and that therefore should not be reflexively condemned as stepping stones to wide-ranging bans.

So abortion rights supporters need to give up on extending strong protections deep into pregnancy. And abortion rights opponents should forget about overturning Roe and Casey. It’s true that medical advances that keep pushing fetal survivability (if not viability without pervasive support) back closer to conception will one day resume adding fuel to the abortion debate fire. And public opinion is by no means set in stone. But for more than forty years since Roe, Americans collectively have been saying that the general abortion debate is over, and the courts have plainly agreed. It’s high time that politicians and activists across the spectrum got the message.

Im-Politic: A Moral Quandary Surrounding American Morals?

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abortion, Gallup, gay marriage, Im-Politic, marijuana, moderates, morals, polling, public opinion, social conservatives, social liberals, Trump, values

This’ll be one of those posts where I confess I just don’t know what the heck is going on. But the info seems so compelling – and possibly contradictory – that it can’t be ignored.

The first half of the puzzle comes from Gallup’s new finding that a large (81 percent) of Americans judge the country’s moral values to be “only fair” or “poor,” and that 77 percent believe that this problem is getting worse. Although I know there will be many who are tempted to respond with something to the effect of “Ah, Trump,” keep in mind that these numbers haven’t changed dramatically since the company began asking such questions in 2002. (Somewhat greater shifts – for the worse – are evident since the early 1990s, when Gallup’s questions were somewhat differently worded.)

Another intriguing result: More than a third of respondents rated the state of U.S. morality as “fair” – which isn’t necessarily negative. In fact, combining the 36 percent of Americans taking this view with the (dwindling) share who view it as “excellent/good” (17 percent) sums to a majority that’s arguably pleased with the nation’s ethics. And these sub-categories (called “internals” by polling insiders) have remained broadly stable over the last decade and a half as well.

Less intriguing: Over the last year, self-identified social liberals have become much more concerned about America’s morals, with the share perceiving a worsening spurting from 58 percent to 71 percent. Social moderates became markedly more pessimistic, too, and that definitely looks like a Trump effect. So does the less dramatic drop in the share of those considering themselves as social conservatives telling Gallup that moral decay intensified during that time.

But here’s where the real mystery comes in. Another Gallup survey, taken just a few weeks ago, reported “Americans Hold Record Liberal Views on Most Moral Issues”. Give the company credit: It’s recognized the apparent paradox: “Even liberals, who seemingly should be pleased with the growing number of Americans who agree with their point of view on the morality of prominent social issues, are more likely to say things are getting worse than getting better.”

Gallup offers two possible explanations, but I don’t find them especially convincing. The first, after all, assumes (at least logically) that social liberals believe that many Americans who have swung their way on gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, and the like are still insensitive (at best) toward racism and poverty. Or even have become more so. The second assumes that liberals believe that these same, increasingly tolerant Americans keep displaying “lack of respect or tolerance for others,” or are getting even coarser.

Nor am I persuaded by another possible explanation that could well be proposed by social conservatives: that although they increasingly support more liberal moral positions and views, deep down inside, liberals and moderates recognize them as dangerous and therefore perceive American morals to be declining.

So I’m left in the dark, but certain something important is taking place within the national psyche. What do all of you think?

Im-Politic: New Survey Shows Surprising Areas of National Consensus

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abortion, American Values Survey, blacks, China, Democrats, Donald Trump, equal opportunity, family leave, Hispanics, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, independents, inequality, Islam, minimum wage, multinational corporations, Muslims, offshoring, parental leave, police killings, polls, Public religious Research Institute, race relations, regulations, Republicans, same-sex marriage, Trade, whites

Just when you think you’re getting a handle on the American public’s mood in these raucous political and social times, along comes some polling data that rock your world. And I’m pleased to report that, in the case of the new American Values Survey published by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRII), the net results strike me as encouraging as they are surprising. Specifically, they indicate that the U.S. public is much less divided on many hot button social and cultural issues than politicians and the national media coverage have been indicating. In fact, the findings of this November survey suggest the gathering of a common sense consensus on these supposedly bitterly divisive matters.

The unexpected areas of agreement start with a subject close to the leading headline-maker of the day – Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s call for a temporary ban on travel by all non-citizen Muslims into the United States. It’s too early for a poll on this specific proposal. But I found it instructive that, according to the PRII, Americans agree by a 56 percent to 41 percent margin that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life.” In 2011, only 47 percent agreed and 48 percent disagreed.

Moreover, although breaking the results down by political leanings produces differences, even 43 percent of Democrats share these suspicions of Islam. For Republican and independents, the figures are 76 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

The survey shows an even split on the question of whether immigrants “strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents” (47 percent agreed) or “constitute a burden on the U.S. because they take jobs, housing, and health care” (46 percent). But only last year, the “strengthen” option won out by 57 percent to 35 percent. The partisan gap is indeed wide, with 63 percent of Republicans holding such negative views of immigrants and 66 percent disagreeing. But 32 percent of Democrats were focused on immigrant-created economic burdens as well.

Even more suggestive of consensus on this issue, though, are the results for a slightly different question. Fully 45 percent of Democrats agreed that “illegal immigrants are at least somewhat responsible for America’s current economic woes” (as well as 70 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of independents). And check out the racial split: Majorities of white and black Americans (58 percent and 52 percent, respectively) told held illegal immigrants “at least somewhat responsible” for the nation’s economic troubles – along with 40 percent of Hispanic Americans. For good measure, so do 44 percent of the white and college-educated, who often benefit from low-wage illegal immigrant labor.

The PRII survey will scarcely comfort President Obama, Congress’ Republican leadership, or the multinational corporations who all support America’s current trade policies. Breakdowns were not provided, but 86 percent of Americans hold “corporations moving American jobs overseas…somewhat or very responsible for the present economic troubles facing the U.S.” That’s up from 74 percent in 2012. “China’s unfair trade practices” were cited by 73 percent. Not surprisingly, 72 percent of Americans believe the country is still in a recession, a figure that’s remained pretty steady 2012. Keep in mind that the current recovery began, at least technically, in mid-2009.

Large majorities also believed that “the current economic system is heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy” (79 percent); that lack of equal opportunity in America is a “big problem” (65 percent); and that “hard work is no guarantee of success” (64 percent – including 52 percent of Republicans).

And these majorities extended to numerous economic policies. Just over three-quarters of all Americans favor increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour (including 60 percent of Republicans). Eighty five percent support paid sick leave and 82 percent back paid parental leave. And although no questions were asked about desired regulatory policy changes, 69 percent of respondents blamed “burdensome government regulations” for at least some of the nation’s economic predicament.

Signs of common ground were also evident on domestic social issues that are thought to be highly polarizing. For example, relatively few Democrats (36 percent) or Republicans (43 percent) considered abortion important to them “personally.” And the partisan split on same-sex marriage was smaller, and at lower levels of salience – 28 percent for Democrats and 29 percent for Republicans.

Big divides remained on numerous issues, to be sure – like confidence in the federal government, and a $15 minimum wage (lots of Republicans climb off that boat), and police treatment of minorities. Interestingly, in this vein, minority Americans are significantly more optimistic than whites that “America’s best days are ahead of us.”

But it’s hard to finish this latest American Values Survey feeling deeply pessimistic that the nation can’t overcome its differences and create that better future. In fact, one of my biggest reasons for hopefulness is the following finding: “Nearly two-thirds (66%) of the public agrees that, ‘everyday Americans understand what the government should do better than the so-called ‘experts.’ There is broad agreement across racial, generational, and partisan lines.”

Im-Politic: So Why Not Trump-Sanders? (Or Vice Versa?)

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2016 elections, abortion, Bernie Sanders, campaign finance, Democrats, Donald Trump, Im-Politic, Immigration, New Deal coalition, politics, realignment, Republicans, Trade, Wall Street reform

As long as we’re in this political Annus Bizarricus (or whatever the Latin-ism would be), why not take it one pattern-shattering one step further.  Why not make the case for a Trump-Sanders (or Sanders-Trump) fusion ticket?

I’m not saying that it’s likely to happen, or that it’s even possible. Nor am I saying that it should necessarily happen for the good of the country. What I am saying is that it’s nothing less than stunning at how strong a case can be made for this merger, at least on paper.

Clearly, there’s a vast stylistic gap between the two candidates. Real estate tycoon Donald Trump flaunts his jet set, billionaire lifestyle. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders clearly is proud of his Ben-and-Jerry set Sixties roots. The core Trump and Sanders constituencies seem dramatically different, too – downwardly mobile, socially and culturally traditional older middle class and working class white men and women for the former, college-educated, relatively affluent younger whites, and aging Baby Boomers who remain socially and culturally young at heart for the latter.

But odd couple pairings as such are hardly unknown in American politics. Think Obama-Biden. Or Reagan-Bush. Or Carter-Mondale. Or JFK-LBJ. Nor is it unknown for voting blocs that appear to have nothing in common suddenly to link arms to transform the political landscape. Think “New Deal coalition” – which ruled American politics for decades thanks to southern Democrats joining with Catholic workers from the big northeastern cities. And the modern Republican party has succeeded largely by appealing to a wide variety of conservatives who lately seem increasingly and deeply resentful of each other: one percenters and other “country club conservatives,” those downwardly mobile middle- and working-class whites, evangelical/cultural conservatives, and libertarians.

And think of the issue stances that Trump and Sanders themselves have in common – which include the hottest-button subjects of the present campaign. Both plainly have it in for Wall Street and its unearned and often destructive privileges. As a result, both obviously want an end to a campaign finance regime that favors the plutocrats and other moneyed special interests. Both strongly opposed the second Iraq War. (Although Trump has promised to defeat ISIS militarily, mainly with American power, he’s also hinted at a more standoffish approach, at least at first.  Sanders has suggested that Middle Eastern countries themselves should do the heaviest military lifting.) Both have been outspoken critics of America’s current, offshoring-happy trade policies. And although Sanders has recently sought to assure Democratic Hispanic voters of his Open Borders bona fides, his earlier stance on immigration issues made clear his grave – and Trump-like – concerns that mass influxes of poorly skilled and educated newcomers in particular would kneecap American workers’ wages.  

Moreover, largely as a result of these broad areas of agreement – and potential agreement – both are suspect partisans in the eyes of many Republicans and Democrats – and for entirely understandable reasons.

It’s even easy to see, at least in theory, where certain stretches of Trump-Sanders common ground could foster consensus in areas where they don’t appear to see eye to eye. For example, fighting climate change has been one of Sanders’ major political passions. Trump has said little on the subject. But trade measures that significantly cut imports from China would limit total global greenhouse gas emissions and pollution levels by slowing the growth of China’s appallingly filthy manufacturing sector. And by doing so, it would enable domestic manufacturers to accept stricter regulations on their own emissions etc without losing global competitiveness, and/or feeling greater pressure to send production to China and other pollution/greenhouse havens.

Another example (though not remotely such a no-brainer): Sanders is strongly pro-choice. Reacting to charges that Planned Parenthood has engaged in and even profited from trade fetal tissue, Trump has been highly critical of the organization and the government subsidies it receives. Yet abortion clearly isn’t an issue that excites Trump one way or the other. So if he really is a master deal cutter, he would surely be open to some kind of compromise.  

One possibility;  He emphatically endorses the essence of Roe vs. Wade and the principle of women controlling their own bodies – and futures – in exchange for a wrist-slap for Planned Parenthood and even a promise by the organization to steer widely clear of the body parts business (in a way that skirted the issue of its actual record, which is as yet unclear). In turn, it’s possible that supporters of both candidates have become so trusting in their apolitical instincts, and so tired of the dueling talking points of more conventional politicians on both sides, that a deal along these lines could pave the way for a stronger national consensus on the issue.

In fact, the main obstacles to this “Dream Ticket” arguably are personal. And, as The Donald might put it, “Yuuuuuuge.” Who would get top billing? Could they work out some kind of co-presidency deal (which would need to be informal due to Constitutional issues)? Could they exchange the presidency and vice presidency after two years?

I’m sure that readers will be able to think of many more pro- and anti-arguments – and I hope you’ll bring them up in comments! But I also hope that the skeptics in particular will keep two points in mind. First, although America’s major political parties in their current forms make sense in many other respects, in many others, they’re completely illogical and inconsistent – as is being made clear by the strength of “outsider” candidates, and in particular by many Republican voters’ lack of interest in Trump’s ideological purity. Second, American politics has seen major realignments before, and generally within the two-party framework.

So even if Trump and Sanders won’t or can’t pull this revolution off, it still might simply be awaiting a different, more ideological and temperamentally compatible, and more imaginative group of leaders. Which is to say, it might simply be awaiting a better generation of politicians.