Responding last week to the news that the United States Supreme Court seems poised to at last overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden jumped feet first down one of his favorite wells. “What are the next things that are going to be attacked?” Biden asked. “Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that exists in American history,” Biden said, helpfully clarifying that he meant “recent American history.” He continued: “This is about a lot more than abortion.”
The thing is, though: It’s actually not “about a lot more than abortion.” It’s about abortion and nothing else, and it has been since the late 1970s. Rhetorically, it may make sense for the Democratic Party to pretend that the Republican Party of today is more “extreme” on abortion than the Republican Party of yesterday, just as it may make sense for clownish figures such as Eric Swalwell to pretend that the last half-century of focused pro-life activism was really about banning “interracial marriage” or ending “women’s right to vote.” But that doesn’t make any of those claims true.
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