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Dobbs and the Right to Abortion
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US Politics Digest – April 2023
In this course, Dr David Andersen (Durham University) explores the latest developments in US politics up to April 2023. In the first lecture, we think about the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, and its impact on the right to abortion in the United States. In the second lecture, we think about the impact of the 2022 midterms, in which the Democrats outperformed expectations, keeping control of the Senate, but (narrowly) losing control of the House of Representatives. In the third lecture, we look at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address, before turning in the fourth lecture to the Nashville school shooting and its potential impact (if any) on gun control legislation in the United States. In the fifth lecture, we think about the potential for a stand-off between the White House and the (Republican) House of Representatives over the debt ceiling, before turning in the sixth lecture to look at the first moves in the 2024 presidential election. Finally, in the seventh lecture, we explore the various indictments of former president – and 2024 Republican primary candidate – Donald Trump.
Dobbs and the Right to Abortion
In this lecture we think about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (2022), a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court, which held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. As we move through the lecture, we consider: (i) the two landmark cases that were struck down by Dobbs: Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992); (ii) the series of cases in the 1960s and 70s that expanded rights in relation to sex and marriage, e.g. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Loving v. Virginia (1967), Eisenstadt v Bard (1972); (iii) the extent to which the Supreme Court has become more politicised since the 1980s, including: the (Democratic) Senate’s rejection of (Republican) President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987; the (Republican) Senate’s effective blocking of (Democratic) President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016; and (Republican) President Donald Trump’s nomination of three Supreme Court justices between 2017-202; (iv) the significance of the Dobbs decision, including: the better-than-expected results for the Democrats in the 2022 midterms, and the increase in federalism (i.e. individual states legislating on matters that were previously reserved for the federal government).
Hi. My name is David Anderson.
00:00:06I'm an associate professor of United States's politics at
00:00:07Durham University. And today,
00:00:10we're going to talk about some recent current events and
00:00:11developments in American politics,
00:00:14focusing on what's happened from the middle of twenty
00:00:16twenty two up through the first quarter of twenty twenty three.
00:00:18I'm gonna start today by talking about perhaps the
00:00:22biggest development in the Supreme Court constitutional
00:00:24law in the last fifty years in the United States.
00:00:27And that of course is the DOBs verse Jackson Women's Health
00:00:30Organization decision that came out in June of twenty twenty two.
00:00:32Now, DOBs was a monumental case, and that is because it
00:00:36struck down two pillars of constitutional law that the
00:00:40United States has relied on for about fifty years now.
00:00:44And that was Roe v Wade,
00:00:47which was handed down in nineteen seventy three,
00:00:48and Planned Parenthood versus Casey,
00:00:51which came down in nineteen ninety two. And these two decisions
00:00:52cemented the right to abortion in American politics and government.
00:00:56So the issue of abortion has been a hot political topic in
00:01:01the United States for well over fifty years,
00:01:04but it's important to realize that abortion is not the
00:01:07central issue here. It's sex and sexuality.
00:01:10The United States kind of stands alone, and that it is a
00:01:13very rigid country in regulating sex and sexuality,
00:01:18and it has a long history of passing legislation that tells
00:01:22people who they're allowed to love and how they're allowed to
00:01:25love them. Now, the time that Roe V Wade was handed down as a
00:01:28Supreme Court decision There was a lot of action in
00:01:32loosening up these restrictions in the United States.
00:01:35It started largely in the 1960s.
00:01:38In nineteen sixty five,
00:01:40there was a very important decision that for the first
00:01:41time said, married couples in the United States had a right
00:01:45to access birth control. Before nineteen sixty five,
00:01:49almost every state in the United States said that It was
00:01:52criminal to use birth control to prevent a pregnancy from happening.
00:01:56Now that was only for married couples,
00:02:01and it took another five years before this right was extended
00:02:03to unmarried couples.
00:02:07About the same time, the court looked at laws that restricted
00:02:09the racial categories people who could get married.
00:02:13It was illegal in the United States for a white person to
00:02:16marry a non white person for a very long time. And that was
00:02:20only struck down in nineteen sixty seven. So the abortion
00:02:24decision that came with Roe V Wade was the last of a
00:02:28series of decisions that opened up the right to sex and
00:02:32sexuality in the United States.
00:02:35So wrote v Wade What it did is it created a legal standard in
00:02:38the United States that stood for fifty years.
00:02:41And what that standard said was not that abortion was always
00:02:44going to be legal.
00:02:48What it did is it restricted the ability of the states to
00:02:49restrict abortion.
00:02:53It said that in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy,
00:02:54she had the full rights to decide what to do with that
00:02:58pregnancy, including terminating.
00:03:01In the third trimester,
00:03:03when the court decided that a fetus was viable,
00:03:05that is could live outside of the womb, the state had
00:03:08priority and could criminalize and ban abortion.
00:03:12But the gray area was in the second trimester.
00:03:16When the court was unsure about whether viability existed. In
00:03:19this area, states had some area to restrict abortion, but not total.
00:03:23And this is where the conversation was for fifty
00:03:29years. So what happened?
00:03:32But what happened is largely the politicization
00:03:34of the American Court system. Now,
00:03:38the American Court system has always been politicized
00:03:40and presidents, of course,
00:03:43have the ability to appoint justices onto the Supreme Court
00:03:44subject to the ratification of the Senate.
00:03:48And this has always been a political process.
00:03:50But starting in the 1980s,
00:03:53this became much more apparent to the public. In the 1980s,
00:03:55for the first time, the Senate seemed poised to strike down a
00:03:59presidential nominee for the Supreme Court.
00:04:03And once that happened, the public started paying attention,
00:04:05and the justices started becoming more political in nature.
00:04:09Over time, this ramped up, and in the modern era, the
00:04:13Supreme Court is a clearly, nakedly political body.
00:04:17This is epitomized over what happened during the Obama
00:04:22presidency under the Senate leadership of Mitch McConnell.
00:04:26What Mitch McConnell aimed to do was correct what he saw as
00:04:30an overly liberal Supreme Court system.
00:04:35And he did this by withholding the nominations of president
00:04:38Obama's political appointments to the Supreme Court.
00:04:42Most famously, when Justice Antonine Scalia passed away
00:04:45just ten months before a presidential election.
00:04:49Senator McConnell said he would not hold hearings on Obama's
00:04:52appointee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
00:04:55Merrick Garland never even got a hearing to become the next
00:04:58Supreme Court justice. Instead,
00:05:02Mitch McConnell held that appointment open for the next president.
00:05:05Hoping that a Republican would win the twenty sixteen
00:05:08presidential election. Of course, that happened.
00:05:11President Trump went on to win the presidential election in
00:05:14twenty sixteen, appointed a new member to the bench.
00:05:17Over the next four years,
00:05:21President Trump was able to appoint two more Supreme Court
00:05:23justices. The last one, Amy Comey Barrett was appointed
00:05:26just a month before the next presidential election.
00:05:31McConnell's tactic
00:05:35withholding a nomination hearing for Obama's appointment
00:05:37and granting one to Trump's appointment allowed the
00:05:41conservatives and the Republican Party to seize
00:05:44control of the Supreme Court.
00:05:47Now the Supreme Court has always been a political body.
00:05:49The difference is that today,
00:05:52the public is very much aware of it.
00:05:53So what's the significance of the DOP's decision? Yes,
00:05:56abortion is no longer protected as a civil right in the United
00:05:59States, at least not fully.
00:06:03What happens next is actually politics.
00:06:05The first thing is the public is going to have to form a
00:06:08solid opinion on and we are very unsure of what the public
00:06:12is going to think about abortion in the coming years.
00:06:15We know that before Roe v Wade came down as a decision,
00:06:18More than sixty percent of the American population wanted
00:06:22abortion to be legalized, and a smaller minority,
00:06:25about thirty percent wanted it criminalized.
00:06:28After RoeV weighed though,
00:06:32the people who supported availability of abortion kind of stood down.
00:06:33They'd won the battle They didn't feel the need to fight
00:06:38very hard anymore, so their voices went away.
00:06:41The pro life segment of America,
00:06:44who wanted to see abortion criminalized again well,
00:06:46they stood up. And it took them fifty years to cast down roe v wade.
00:06:48It's an open question whether abortion is going to continue
00:06:54to be a hot button issue in the United States. If it is, and if
00:06:57public opinion polling is correct,
00:07:01and public opinion polling currently shows that sixty to
00:07:03seventy five percent of Americans want abortion legal
00:07:06in some way or another.
00:07:09This could be a monumental issue in American politics,
00:07:11and we do have some indications of it.
00:07:14And the twenty twenty two midterms,
00:07:16all of the political expectations was for a red wave
00:07:18that the Republican party would sweep into Congress likely take
00:07:21the House and the Senate potentially by large margins.
00:07:24This didn't happen. Instead,
00:07:28the Democratic Party held on to the Senate and only lost the
00:07:31House by a few seats.
00:07:34Some of this has to be explained by the DOB's decision.
00:07:36If abortion continues to help the Democratic party in this way,
00:07:40it's going to be very challenging for the Republican
00:07:44Party to hold on to power.
00:07:46Another big area where the DOB's decision is likely to be
00:07:48influential is what we're seeing happening across the
00:07:51states right now. And this is federalism.
00:07:53Federalism is the principle where the federal government
00:07:56has control of certain things,
00:07:59and the states have control of certain other things.
00:08:00Right now,
00:08:04abortion is no longer federally protected by the Supreme Court
00:08:05decision Roe V Wade. So the states are free to legislate on
00:08:08it. And what we've seen is a rush of movement at the state
00:08:12level to criminalize abortion.
00:08:15Now it's not happening everywhere.
00:08:18There are lots of democratic held states that are protecting abortion,
00:08:19but in the red states that are criminalizing and thus changing their laws,
00:08:24There's a big expectation that this will have political ramifications.
00:08:28We don't know what those ramifications will be yet,
00:08:32but it's the thing to watch right now across the United States.
00:08:35
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Andersen, D. (2023, August 23). US Politics Digest – April 2023 - Dobbs and the Right to Abortion [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/us-politics-digest-april-2023/another-debt-ceiling-crisis
MLA style
Andersen, D. "US Politics Digest – April 2023 – Dobbs and the Right to Abortion." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 23 Aug 2023, https://massolit.io/courses/us-politics-digest-april-2023/another-debt-ceiling-crisis