NC DEMOCRATS HOPE
HIGH COURT LEAK WILL
HELP IN THE MID-TERMS
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
It’s not a word you hear often, but two weeks ago Democrats in North Carolina and across the country were getting used to it…doom.
Thanks to an unpopular presidency, runaway inflation, and overall despair about where the country is headed, Republicans were licking their proverbial chops at their midterm election prospects this coming November.
But last week, “the leak” struck the political world like lightning, and all of a sudden, the GOP were all seen as ogres who’ve worked overtime to not only restrict, but eliminate a woman’s constitutional right to choose.
The governor of Mississippi even got on TV last Sunday promising that he would ban the use of legal contraceptions in his state if necessary.
All of a sudden, Democrats in general, and particularly those here in North Carolina, are happily leaning hard on a breakthrough issue that they hope will drive women to the polls this November, determined to protect their constitutional right to choose by keeping otherwise lackluster Democrats in office across the board.
The official U.S. Supreme Court decision possibly overturning Roe v. Wade isn’t due until either late June or early July, but that would place it close enough to the November midterms to leave a definite bad taste in the collective mouths of women who believe that neither government, the courts or anyone else has the right to dictate to them what they can do with their bodies.
“A woman’s body is her’s, not the government’s,” NC Attorney General Josh Stein, who is expected to run for governor in 2024, said. “A woman’s right to choose is before North Carolina voters this November and every election to come.”
“There is only one way to protect our reproductive freedom and ensure everyone has the right to make their own health care decisions…” said the North Carolina Democratic Party in a statement, “… electing Democrats up and down the ballot.”
NC Democratic Party Chairwoman Bobbie Richardson further told reporters, “if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, that decision would be devastating for the millions of people across North Carolina, whose abortion access and control over their bodies now hang in the balance.”
The NCDP chair also promised to “fight like hell’ to preserve a woman’s right to choose.”
Political experts know that Richardson and other Democrats were seeding the political landscape with outrage, hoping that enough of it will stick to give NC Dems a fighting chance to take back the General Assembly, and possibly retain control of the the U.S. House and Senate.
Democrats will be exploiting the Supreme Court leak the same way Republicans have been exploiting rising crime rates across the nation.
On the national scene, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who is well aware that there are plenty of women who don’t care about abortion rights, wrote in a letter to her Democratic Caucus, “Republicans have made clear that their goal will be to seek to criminalize abortion nationwide. Republican state legislators across the country are already 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. These draconian measures could even criminalize contraceptive care, in vitro fertilization and post-miscarriage care, dragging our nation back to a dark time decades into the past.”
The Democrat-led U.S. Senate says it will hold a vote at codify a woman’s constitutional right to choose. Senate republicans run the risk of trying to stop the measure.
And how is the North Carolina Republican Party responding to what clearly is an unexpected turn of events in their political fortunes?
In a carefully worded, reasonably toned statement, the state GOP said it is “…optimistic that the Supreme Court will overturn Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade later this summer.”
Later in the NCGOP statement it continued, “Such a decision will highlight the extreme importance of the 2022 election cycle in North Carolina. The North Carolina General Assembly will be called upon to enact legislation protecting the unborn in this state. Radical Progressive Activists will stop at nothing to stop pro-life legislation from being enacted - and will sue immediately if they cannot. The fight for the Sanctity of Life will be fought in Raleigh and other state capitals rather than in Washington, DC.”
Finally, the NC GOP statement ends saying, “The balance of the General Assembly and the Supreme Court in North Carolina has never been more important, and we will continue fighting from now through Election Day and beyond to ensure that we have pro-life majorities as we face a post-Roe future."
Recent published reports say the Republican-led NC General Assembly “…will try to ban or further restrict abortions in North Carolina, legal and political experts say.” But Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper will likely veto any restrictions during the remainder of the 2022 secession.
But if Republicans gain supermajorities in November enough to override a governor’s veto, then most legal experts surmise that that would be the end of legal abortions in North Carolina by next year.
So much still has to happen.
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PROF. IRV. JOYNER
FOR POOR PEOPLE OF COLOR,
THE GAINS OF THE PAST,
ARE ABOUT TO BE LOST
By Cash Michaels
An analysis
He was a black Fayetteville minister who was also a Democratic lawmaker in the North Carolina General Assembly, who strongly supported fully funding a program that allowed poor women across the state to have unfettered access to abortion services.
When asked why, by a reporter, the legislator said he was totally against abortion personally because as a minister he considered it a sin. But as an elected representative of his district, it was his job to make sure that poor women were able to access the same legal, constitutionally protected services that other women had access to.
That state lawmaker/minister from Fayetteville has since died, but if he were alive today, he would certainly have concerns about how last week’s leak of a purported U.S. Supreme Court draft decision overturning the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling will affect poor women of color.
Effectively, if the unpublished decision holds, it would remove a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, leaving it up to individual states to manage access to abortion services.
In North Carolina, abortion is legal, with some restrictions. But according to Irving Joyner, law professor at North Carolina Central University Law School in Durham, not just poor women of color , but people of color, are now very much at risk as a result.
“Any restriction on a woman’s freedom of choice will have a heavier impact on African Americans and people of color than anyone else,” Prof. Joyner says. “The focus of this draft decision is on the rights to privacy, the right to choose and who can control [a] woman’s body. The right to choose does not always result in a decision to abort, which some people object to, but many other decisions about a person’s body and individuality are also implicated.”
“With this extremely radical leaning Supreme Court decision, the license which will be given to legislators is to assert more controls over a person’s choice and the federal constitution should not withdraw these protections from the people.,” Prof. Joyner continued. “If the right to privacy for women can be dismantled so casually, as done in this draft opinion, so can the right to privacy in a person’s home and personal affairs be taken away or curtailed. This is a very dangerous development in constitutional law.”
But it doesn’t stop there, added Prof. Joyner.
The draft proved that this conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court was will to buck legal precedent, which hereto now upheld landmark decisions in the past to maintain the legal foundation of jurisprudence and insure legal stability.
“If you simply dispense with this treasured and guarded principle in the abortion context, it can be easily done with other treasured and cherished rights,” Joyner continued. “ Chief among these rights, and these challenges are presently on the Supreme Court dockets, are the rights of racial minorities to be admitted to higher education institutions, the right to vote and the ability of state courts to determine the constitutionality of race-based redistricting decisions by state legislatures. If the Supreme Court can disregard over fifty years of precedents in the Roe v. Wade line of cases, it can and will do the same thing in other areas of the law. This legal drifting back to the “days of old” will not bode well for the presently understood protections which exist for the rights of African Americans, people of color and other minority or disfavored groups in this country.”
Prof. Joyner concluded, “Across the country today and with the emerging political power of ultra-right wing forces who are increasingly controlling most state governments, the rights of African Americans are under attack and now we are in imminent danger of losing critical protections which we have fought for and won with past U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding our constitutional rights.”
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