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Donald Trump
The aftershock from Arizona’s reinstatement of an archaic 1864 abortion ban when medical care involved leeches and bloodletting has Donald Trump and other Republican candidates scrambling for cover. In Wisconsin, they have nowhere to hide.
Wisconsin voters already said “no thanks” to time traveling with Republicans back to the 1800s when slavery was legal and women’s voting rights and abortion rights weren’t.
When Wisconsin Republicans tried to reinstate an 1849 abortion ban in 2022, that’s what created the record voter turnout in 2023 finally ending 15 years of corrupt rightwing Republican control of the state supreme court. The newly elected court is now ready to turn that outdated 175-year-old abortion ban back into the cruel ancient history of frontier justice it should be when the appeal arrives from the lower court that struck it down.
The court also got rid of the radically gerrymandered voting maps approved by the previous court that produced lopsided Republican majorities in the legislature even when Wisconsin cast more votes for Democrats.
Vote in November
With a fair chance to win majority control of the state Assembly for the first time in a decade and a half, Democrats and independents have even more incentive to turn out in large numbers in November. Other states, both red states and blue states, are trying to catch up with Wisconsin by taking additional measures to protect reproductive freedom for women this year.
Republican states including Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio have already protected abortion rights. Access will be on the ballot this year in Arizona, Florida, Maryland and New York. They could be joined by Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska and other states. The last thing Republicans want voters to realize amid all the turmoil is that their destruction of constitutional rights for women is just the beginning. With Trump firmly in control of the party, their ultimate political goal is to roll back equal rights for all Americans to the Civil War era of the 1860s.
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From the moment Trump descended on his golden escalator to declare his candidacy, he has been the voice of White male supremacy. His initial denunciation of Black and Brown immigrants as “rapists and murderers” has now escalated into denigrating non-White Americans and immigrants as “sub-humans poisoning the blood of our nation.”
Trump justifies abolishing 50 years of constitutional rights for women as defending states’ rights. That’s exactly the same cover story southern states used 160 years ago to declare war on President Lincoln’s democracy to protect their right to savagely abuse black slaves as work animals rather than human beings.
Mob Violence
The most violent attempt to overthrow democracy since the Civil War was Trump’s creation of the mob insurrection attacking Congress to try to stop the certification of President Biden’s election victory in 2021.
Trump pledges to pardon most of those violent insurrectionists if he’s elected, calling them “hostages” of the Biden administration. Their violent rampage led to the deaths of at least five Capitol police officers and left 140 others with physical injuries including brain damage from being beaten with flagpoles, baseball bats and other clubs.
Trump continues to shamelessly lie that Biden must have somehow stolen millions of the 81 million votes he won in both Democratic and Republican states to defeat such an outstanding president as Trump. These days Trump’s continuous stream of lies about election fraud are now joined by another constant stream of lies about – get this – how popular it was for his appointees on the Supreme Court to demolish the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade.
You heard it here first. Trump swears “all legal scholars on both sides wanted, in fact demanded” that abortion rights be abolished. Not only that, but “everybody from the Republicans and Democrats” wanted the issue of abortion to be returned to the states.
Just don’t ask Trump what those “legal scholars” were on both sides of? On both sides of destroying Roe v. Wade? Funny, no one remembers either that Democrats were clamoring with Republicans for their states to outlaw abortions. He’s babbling nonsense, something he does a lot these days.
If the constitutional rights of every American protected by the U.S. Constitution differ from state to state, they aren’t protected at all. One of our most constitutionally protected rights is freedom of religion. It prohibits politicians from imposing their religious beliefs on any other Americans by law. Wisconsin is onto the new double talk by anti-abortion Republicans like California millionaire Eric Hovde who traveled back to Wisconsin to run against Sen Tammy Baldwin. After supporting the court’s destruction of abortion rights for women, Hovde is now making vague promises about allowing some unspecified exceptions. How nice of him.
Wisconsin should take full advantage of their Supreme Court’s support for fair elections to vote for President Biden, Sen. Baldwin and other politicians who will protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.
