McCarthy-Era Law Aimed At Pro-Choice Protesters
Abortion-rights protesters outside the Supreme Court on May 8. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
Conservatives and corporate media pundits want to use a Red Scare statute to arrest people demonstrating against the GOP’s looming anti-abortion victory.
by Andrew Perez & David Sirota
Even as the Democrats’ feeble legislative attempt to codify federal protections for abortion rights goes down in flames, many Washington elites are directing their attention and anger towards the same target: no, not right-wing judges reaching their ideological hands into millions of people’s bodies, but instead the protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who are about to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Prominent Republican lawmakers, conservative operatives, and Beltway pundits are demanding the government arrest demonstrators — and to do so, they are citing a McCarthy-era statute passed to stop people from protesting the prosecutions of alleged communists. Ignored in the discourse is a past ruling from the Supreme Court effectively blessing conservative protests at the homes of abortion clinic workers.
The largely manufactured outrage is the latest distraction designed to shift attention away from the issue at hand: The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority is about to deny basic reproductive rights to tens of millions of people in roughly half the country.
Conservative operatives want Washington reporters focused on inane questions like who leaked the court’s draft opinion, and they want journalists and Democrats to criticize protesters who are outraged by the court’s overriding lack of respect for people’s bodily autonomy. It is part of a larger right-wing movement in recent years to cancel, criminalize, and literally crush dissent throughout the country, even as the conservative political noise machine continues to blare Braveheart-esque screams of “freedom!” against so-called “cancel culture.”
Corporate news outlets are taking the bait, fretting about the leak and calling for arrests over peaceful demonstrations. Like usual, they are focused on narrow flashpoints of anger and upheaval that will likely prove temporary, rather than the far more sweeping and ominous impact of the court’s looming ruling to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and allow states to force people to carry their pregnancies to term.
Even as the nation is poised to enact an injustice of historic proportions, those in power and their chosen mouthpieces only appear to care about one thing: upholding the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and ensuring they remain safely ensconced in the Washington bubble.
To his credit, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer issued the most rational statement of all, saying, “My house — there’s protests three, four times a week outside my house. The American way to peacefully protest is OK.”
But he has been drowned out by the voices demanding a crackdown.
The hypocrisy is particularly powerful among liberals like Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. He purports to support the pro-choice movement but he has spent his decades atop the Washington power structure failing to secure reproductive rights, and this week he has spent his time using his platform to deride the court protesters, calling them “reprehensible.” Durbin’s behavior — emblematic of so many liberals and media elites — evokes the warning of Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate,” King wrote in 1963 amid the civil rights struggle of his era. “The white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’”
The Ghost Of McCarthy
Justice Samuel Alito authored the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that was leaked to Politico last week. In the opinion, Alito writes the Roe decision “was egregiously wrong from the start” and finds that the Constitution “does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion.”