WASHINGTON — “What is happening here?” a distraught Nancy Pelosi said on Friday.
It’s a good question and I can answer it, because I was there at the start of the corrosive chain of events that led to women losing control of their own bodies. I saw America transform from a beacon of modernity into a benighted outlier.
Over the past 30 years, I have witnessed a sad tale of opportunism. This is a story of men trading away something that was less important than their own stature, the rights to women.
It began innocently enough on a sunny summer day in Kennebunkport with the ocean sparkling and a lunch consisting of crab meat salad, English muffins and lunch.
I was covering the first President Bush’s nomination of a 43-year-old U.S. appeals court judge for the D.C. Circuit to fill the vacant seat of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Clarence Thomas stood in front of a weather-beaten cottage with shingles and looked uncomfortable as Bush defended his conservative decision.
Even then, the warnings were clear. Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio threatened to investigate Judge Thomas’s record on abortion, saying, “I will not support yet another Reagan-Bush Supreme Court nominee who remains silent on a woman’s right to choose and then ascends to the court to weaken that right.”
Thomas was far removed from Marshall, the liberal-lioness and civil rights activist. He opposed affirmative action, even though it contributed to his rise, and he was championed by anti-abortion activists, who were confident that he would weaken a woman’s right to choose.
H.W. H.W. Prescott Bush had been an early supporter in the ’40s and once served as a treasurer of a fund-raising campaign. H.W. Bush was a Texas congressman. was christened “Rubbers” by his colleagues because he was such a cheerleader for family planning in the United States and around the world.
But when Bush joined Ronald Reagan on the ticket in 1980, he adopted Reagan’s more restrictive position. Bush’s right-wing supporters were still skeptical of him, so he appointed Thomas, an ultraconservative conservative, to bring them around for his reelection. He also wanted to appeal more to Black voters, who were still angry at the Willie Horton uglyness that had helped him reach the White House.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to re-election.
Anita Hill, three months later, told Congress her story about Thomas, her boss. He used to torture her with unwanted attention and dirty talk about pornographic films he enjoyed. Joe Biden was the chair of those Senate hearings.
He allowed Hill to be vilified by Republicans, and then abruptly ended hearings, cancelling the appearances of her two corroborating witness. Many senators on the committee — composed entirely of white men — privately thought it was an office romance gone wrong. They all agreed that it was no point in letting Hill’s life be destroyed by someone who, with no evidence, was a vindictive ex. Hill was denigrated as a perjuring psychomaniac and Biden, who wasted a Democratic Senate majority allowed a liar and pervert to be elevated to a lifetime spot on the court.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Biden’s desire to foster bipartisanship with his conservative colleagues. Thomas was the right-wing radical who gave these conservatives the justice they wanted.
When Donald Trump came along, trailing a history of lurid sexual transgressions, the family-values Republicans and religious right didn’t care. They knew he was their one and only hope to bring them to Valhalla through the Supreme Court.
Mitch McConnell, his Federalist Society minions, used Trump as the host. McConnell broke the rules to keep Merrick Grland off the court and jammed through Amy Coney Barrett. Trump, who had once been a pro-choice, Nancy-and-Hillary-and-Chuck loving Democrat, was happy to flip to gain the fervor of an anti-abortion base.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Trump’s ego and ambition and McConnell’s desire for a conservative court that would pull back the reach of the government, denying protections to Americans who need or value them. They pushed through three conservative justices — one had to defend himself against sexual assault charges and one was in a weird “Handmaid’s Tale”-style sect — and that was checkmate for Roe.
Senators have accused Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee of dissembling to get on to the court and playing down their intentions to overturn Roe. “I am a don’t-rock-the-boat kind of judge,” Kavanaugh told Susan Collins, according to The Times’s Carl Hulse.
Thomas’s concurring opinion to the fanatical Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade chillingly warned that he would apply the same rationale to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex consensual relations.
Back when Thomas’s nomination ran into resistance, the Bush administration sold him as a sterling example of a Black man who had pulled himself up from rough beginnings. Thomas spoke about his childhood in Kennebunkport with his grandparents, rural Georgia sharecroppers.
However, he was cruel on the court, pushing opinions that would crush the poor and the underprivileged.
While his wife was busy helping Trump with his coup attempt, Thomas was the chief firebrand in a coup involving extremists on court. They took power away from John Roberts. They are defying the majority will of this country in terrifying ways.
Thomas opened the doors to more guns on the streets on Thursday, in the midst of mass shootings and Congress finally winning a slight victory on gun control. He wrote the majority opinion that overturned a New York law restricting the right to carry handguns in public places. This was a change of over a century.
In another ruling this past week, the justices chipped away at the First Amendment’s separation between church and state, a foundation of the Republic. And next, they will get around to removing environmental protections and gutting the government’s ability to regulate and restrict business rights.
The court is out-of-control. We feel powerless to change it. Clarence Thomas, the most prominent of all people, has helped us get to where we are today, with unaccountable extremists dictating our lives. This is revolting.
Source: NY Times