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Enjoy the Silence
Shhh. Listen. There: That sound you’re not hearing is the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s
prophetic voice. It’s probably been stilled for only a week, but we’ll
take what we can get.
The Long Retreat
Yesterday we speculated that John Ashcroft’s testimony might
be the beginning of a Republican-party-wide retreat on abortion. Under
the new dispensation, the overturning of Roe v. Wade would
no longer even get lip service; for nervously pro-life politicians, banning
partial-birth abortion would become an ultimate goal rather than an interim
tactic. Now there’s more evidence that something like this shift is underway.
This morning, Laura Bush told the Today show that she doesn’t think
Roe should be overturned. She had declined repeated attempts to express
her views on the subject during the campaign, and Bushies had, without
ever saying anything explicit, led pro-lifers to believe that she was
quietly one of them. (Of course, she may very well think of the position
she stated today as pro-life; she does want to reduce the number of abortions
by, e.g., encouraging adoption.) Pro-life activists are worried about
the comments by Ashcroft and Mrs. Bush, and waiting to hear from their
friends in the Bush administration about what they portend.
The Quotable Maverick
In
Arianna Huffington’s latest column, Mark Salter, John McCain’s chief of
staff, predicts that tighter controls on campaign finance are just around
the corner: “Growing numbers of members running for reelection feel they
are losing control of their campaigns. It’s not just independent expenditure
committees running ads against them that are the problem; it’s the groups
running ads for them that can turn out to be counterproductive, with uncoordinated
messages — which the candidates cannot influence.” And why can’t
the candidates coordinate with those groups? Because of the very campaign-finance
restrictions McCain wants to strengthen. In any case, it is nowhere written
that candidates have some kind of right to control the political dialogue
surrounding their races. The notion that they do is rather obviously illiberal,
not to mention contrary to the Constitution.
Which perhaps explains McCain’s remark about John Ashcroft on Face
the Nation the other day: “Yes, I support him. And on the basis that
he has given me the ironclad assurance that he will enforce the laws,
rather than test their constitutionality.” We wouldn’t want attorneys
general checking the constitutionality of laws before enforcing them!
At least not if we want to pass campaign-finance “reform.”
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