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Now that Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have overturned Roe v. Wade, many Democrats have raised alarms about marriage equality and other civil rights being at risk. Republicans are certainly aware of these arguments, but as Vanity Fair noted, they’re eager to put Americans’ minds at ease.
Asked about Democratic proposals to protect contraception access, same-sex marriage, and potentially even interracial marriage, Republican senators said they didn’t much see the point.
Such measures seem to have little appeal to the GOP, whose members insist that those protections are unnecessary because those rights are not under threat. “I’ll worry about hypotheticals at the time we have it,” Ted Cruz told Axios. “I have no reason to believe these precedents are going to fall,” added Lindsey Graham. “Nothing like that should even be thought about by anybody because it’s not endangered in any way,” Chuck Grassley told the outlet.
The Iowa Republican added, “I don’t know why people would come to that conclusion.”
Well, perhaps people would come to that conclusion because Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion just last month in which he said the marriage equality ruling, among others, was “demonstrably erroneous” and should be “reconsidered.”
But stepping back, what I find striking about Republicans’ attitudes is their familiarity. GOP senators want Americans to believe other civil rights will be fine, and there’s no point in being scared of Democratic concerns, but it was also GOP senators who told Americans that the Roe precedent would endure.
In the fall of 2020, for example, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa insisted the likelihood of Roe being overturned was “very minimal.” She added, “I don’t see that happening.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis used similar rhetoric during his re-election campaign in North Carolina.
Two years earlier, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, then-Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah declared, “I don’t think anybody is going to overturn Roe v. Wade.” The late senator added at the time that Democratic concerns about the future of reproductive rights were “pathetic.”
Circling back to our earlier coverage, the deception at least made tactical sense: The more voters realized how much damage an even-more-conservative Supreme Court was likely to do, the more Republican officials and candidates risked an electoral backlash.
It’s precisely why so many in the GOP simply pretended that reproductive rights weren’t on the line, Roe‘s future was sound, and Americans could count on the status quo remaining in place.
“Just keep voting for Republicans,” the party effectively said. “There won’t be dramatic changes. Roe has been around for a half-century and it’s not going anywhere. Trust us. Democrats are just trying to scare you. Don’t listen to them.”
And then Republican-appointed justices overturned Roe.
Now, ahead of another election cycle, GOP senators are again saying there’s no cause for concern, and that Democrats, as Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana put it, are just “trying to stir up fear where there is no fear.”
Do they not realize that they have a bit of a credibility problem?