If Roe Goes ...

In If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You Think, in the Sunday Washington Post for Sept. 28, 2008, Linda Hirshman writes of a possible dystopia that may eventuate if John McCain is elected president. She points out, first of all, something we all know already: that any McCain appointee to the Supreme Court will surely tip the scale against the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the U.S.

Some pundits who are not particularly anti-abortion have written that overturning Roe won't be all that bad. They say it may even be a good thing for each state to go through the political process and figure out what it wants to do about abortion. Potentially, many states will leave abortion legal, though perhaps with some restrictions.

But, says Hirshman, that state of affairs would mean that women in banning states who seek abortions would have to cross state lines to get them. This is a far bigger deal than just worrying about how these women could manage abortion travel. For it isn't at all out of the question that abortion-banning states could enforce their laws upon residents who obtain legal abortions out-of-state.

It would start very simply, with the state passing a law forbidding pregnant women to leave the state to seek an abortion that is illegal in the home state. But, once that is done, asks Hirshman,

How would state laws forbidding pregnant women to leave be enforced? The Hope Clinic in Granite City, Ill., is just 10 minutes from the Missouri border. Police from the prohibiting state can just take the license plates of local vehicles at the abortion clinics across the state lines and arrest the women when they re-enter the state. Or a traffic stop can produce a search. Tips from pharmacy workers, disapproving parents or disappointed boyfriends can alert the police to arrest the pregnant woman for intent to seek an abortion out of state. The state law may allow interested parties to seek injunctions to stop her from leaving.

Isn't there some legal or constitutional rule, though, that would keep states from such draconian law enforcement? Maybe, maybe not. There are Supreme Court decisions and other pronouncements on the books, writes Hirshman, that allow states to prosecute their own citizens for involvement in state-restricted activities that are perfectly legal elsewhere:

In some indirect — but ominous — cases, the Supreme Court has shown itself to be open to the idea that a state has an interest in its citizens' behavior wherever it occurs. ... In 1993, the court recognized the interest of a state that forbids gambling in upholding a federal law prohibiting broadcasters from tempting its citizens with advertisements for out-of-state lotteries.

The Supreme Court, if McCain wins, could go 5-4 in favor of (a) overturning Roe and then (b) upholding abortion-banning states' prosecutions of legal-elsewhere abortions.


Conceptually, however, a Democratic Senate could block any and all McCain nominees that might become complicit in Roe's demise. If, say, the aging liberal John Paul Stevens were to retire or die, and the Senate refused to confirm a McCain-nominated replacement, the court could operate indefinitely with only eight justices. Minus Stevens, the current lineup would be expected to split 4-4 on most abortion cases.

Not a problem? Think again:

Even if the Senate, uncharacteristically, refused to confirm a McCain nominee — or nominees, if he kept sending up names — leaving the court at eight justices, women's options would probably erode rapidly. It's easy to imagine the anti-abortion states pushing the envelope with once improbably restrictive laws, such as one requiring clinics to be licensed by the state and prohibiting women from getting abortions in unlicensed clinics, either in- or out-of-state.

If a clinic went to federal court to enjoin such a law, the case would eventually reach one of the 13 federal Courts of Appeal, 11 of which are firmly dominated by Republican appointees and would probably produce a decision either refusing to follow Roe or, more likely, making some transparent distinction between Roe and the new case. In a divided Supreme Court, four justices would probably vote to affirm the lower court, and four to reverse, leaving the appeals court's decision standing. This means that the states that fell within the Circuit in question would come under an anti-abortion umbrella allowing anything up to explicit reversal of Roe.

Get it? If a liberal justice departs the court during a McCain administration — even if the Senate majority remains staunchly pro-choice — Roe could stay on the books and yet abortions could go back to being legally unavailable, just be virtue of overly restrictive state licensing practices that the federal courts would decline to interfere with. oldstyleliberal thinks that is truly scary; he hopes Justice Stevens lives to be 110.

Redrawing the Electoral Map in 2008

In order for Democrat Barack Obama to defeat Republican John McCain for president on Nov. 4, 2008, Obama will have to redraw the electoral map from 2004. When John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in that year, the map looked like this:



Says Wikipedia, "President George W. Bush won the popular vote in 31 states (denoted in red) with 286 electoral votes. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the popular vote in 19 states and the District of Columbia (denoted in blue) and 251 electoral votes." One maverick elector in Minnesota voted for John Edwards. Bush won by just 35 electoral votes; if Ohio had gone the other way with its 20 votes, Kerry would be president today.

Obama needs to (a) hold on to virtually all of Kerry's blue states, including Michigan (17 electoral votes), which looks dicey for him; and (b) pick up some of the Bush red states. If he picks up Florida (27 electoral votes) he could even lose, say, New Hampshire (4 votes) and wind up with 274 votes, enough to win.

Florida could thus be crucial to Obama, says Dan Balz's article Obama Hopes to Reverse Party Fortunes in Vote-Rich Fla. in today's Washington Post. Right now, most experts are giving the state to McCain by a hair. But, says Balz, Obama workers in Florida are "targeting 600,000 African Americans who are registered to vote but who do not regularly turn out on Election Day."

It will be a shock to oldstyleliberal if Obama's people can't flip Florida, with that many potential supporters to be brought off the sidelines!


At any rate, you can keep up to date on how the potential electoral vote stacks up in 2008 by visiting Electoral-vote.com. As of today, Sept. 27, the electoral map, based on independent polling results, shows Obama losing no Kerry 2004 states and looking to pick up Iowa (7 votes) and New Mexico (5 votes), which Bush won last time. Plus, Obama has razor-thin leads in former Bush states Virginia (13 votes) and Colorado (9 votes). If Obama flips all four of those states, he'll wind up winning 286 electoral votes, where 270 are needed to win.

That puts Obama currently at +16. If he can't flip Florida, and this map right now shows him not doing so, then he needs at least one of the two razor-thin, potentially "new blue" states, Virginia or Colorado. He also needs to hold onto "old blue" Kerry states like Minnesota (10 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) where his lead is currently tiny.

The Archetypal Sarah Palin

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, has been impressed with Sarah Palin.

So have millions of other voters, one way or another, since John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate just before Labor Day. Some love her and some love to hate her, but no other vice presidential candidate has ever, in my recollection, stirred so much passion and controversy.

When we react with our emotions and our gut feelings, then try to get our intellect on the same page, we are projecting. Specifically, we are casting the recipient of the projection in the role of an archetype.

An archetype is a potent figure in our unconscious mind, said the psychologist Carl Jung. Such an archetypal figure, common to all human beings, is the (imaginary) perfect mother. We are all born with the mother archetype, which in childhood we project onto our actual mom. That's how we "just know" our mom will nurture and protect us, in advance of any actual experience of having a mother.

Another potent figure in the unconscious mind of every human male, Jung said, is the anima, the archetype which gives us men our image of the (again, imaginary) ideal woman.

Neither of these two archetypes, nor any other archetypal ideal hidden in the deep, unconscious psyche, bears any necessary relation to those whom we project the archetypes out upon. Mom may be cruel, and the woman that a man marries because his anima was projected out upon her may turn out to be entirely wrong for him.

But never mind. We project our archetypes out onto people all the same, and we react to people based on these projections. That's part of what's going on with Sarah Palin. It's why oldstyleliberal is so impressed.


But archetypal projections are more complicated than that. Archetypes serve as points around which our life experiences and memories cluster — again, in ways that we are scarcely conscious of. These clusters Jung called complexes. We not only have a mother archetype that we all hold in common, we each as individuals have a mother complex. The mother complex can modify the archetype in strange ways. If our mother was neglectful and cruel, the mother complex that we harbor can take the ideal represented by the mother archetype and append the qualifier "... not!"

We also have, each of us in our conscious mind, structures that can pull against the dictates of the unconscious archetypes. In this day of rampant feminism, we have all learned to expect different things of women and mothers than our archetypes might otherwise have us do.

What we project is accordingly inflected according to our culture and personal history. Today, our culture is in flux regarding women, wives, and mothers. Our personal histories are widely varied as a result. Whether we are male or female, young or old, we all have complicated histories with respect to how we image women.

Some of us see Sarah Palin as an "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "Right on! Such a person is just what the country needs right now."

Others of us see Palin as representing that same "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "No way! She'd set the clock back a hundred years on feminism, women's rights, and a lot of other things."

All the lionizing of Palin from the right, and all the disparagement from the left, are tinged with whether we like or dislike the woman we see in the light of our projections. If Sarah Palin were Abraham Palin, with the same (thin) résumé, McCain's pick for vice president would still draw criticism, à la Dan Quayle. But not nearly as stridently.


P.S. For another take on the archetypal Sarah Palin, see The Projection of Sarah Palin at the Symbol Watcher website. This one casts Palin in the role of the Great Mother archetype: "at once container, cherisher and guardian of life, as well as ruler, possessive controller/destroyer and seductress." Interesting reading!

Let's Focus on What's Important

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, thinks we all need to stop, take a deep breath, and retract our claws. This year's election campaign is setting all-time records for nastiness and ugliness, just when we need to keep our focus on important issues.

There is big trouble on the fiscal horizon. In his most recent Sunday op-ed piece, "The Next President's Due Bill," Washington Post columnist David Broder notes that according to the Congressional Budget Office, "the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance — a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign."

According to this report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center:

Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by an estimated $4.2 trillion (McCain) and $2.9 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years. Both candidates argue that their proposals should be scored against a "current policy" baseline instead of current law. Such a baseline assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended and the AMT patch made permanent. Against current policy, Senator Obama's proposals would raise $600 billion and Senator McCain's proposals lose a similar amount.

And Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby summarized that in this recent piece:

According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan.

We talk about the national debt in terms of changes and increments — plus or minus $1.2 trillion or so — because it's too huge to imagine in absolute terms. (To see how huge, click here.) The national debt — the nation's outstanding public debt — is the federal government's "accumulated deficits plus accumulated off-budget surpluses" (see this web page). When U.S. budget deficits grow, as they have done precipitously this year due to rising expenditures and falling tax revenues in an economic downturn, the national debt grows. And 22.7% of this debt is now owed outside the U.S. to foreign governments and international organizations (see here).

According to this article by Jeremy J. Siegel at Kiplinger.com, the ceiling on the national debt is about to be increased by Congress to $10.6 trillion dollars. This is not in itself bad, even if a lot of the money is owed to China and others: "Although our national debt is large, the annual output of the U.S. economy -- our gross domestic product -- now exceeds $14 trillion. With a national debt now totaling $9 trillion, the ratio of debt to GDP is only 63%."

So we can afford to carry a national debt this high, but even so, Siegel says, "The nation's debt will grow rapidly over the next two decades as entitlement spending surges to meet the demands of more than 80 million retiring baby-boomers." That's the "real debt crisis" we are going to be facing soon.

That's why "Defending the Insiders: Change in Washington? Not Without Them," Norman J. Ornstein's column in today's Post is must reading. Ornstein, one of those much-reviled "Washington insiders" for many, many years, says the key initiatives undertaken by the next president and Congress

... have to come in reforming our large entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — to cope with explosive growth in the number of older people. Change to these programs would mean pain for large numbers of voters. As that late, great Washington insider Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago, serious reform of entitlements, absent an immediate meltdown, can only occur if there is broad, bipartisan cover from leaders on the left, center and right, from Democrats and Republicans, from inside Congress and key interest groups such as AARP and the business community.

That kind of consensus is forged through the political process. It's done by finding allies and building coalitions via intense bargaining and politicking. The skills needed are far more likely to be possessed by Washington insiders than iconoclastic outside reformers.

In other words, we can't really afford the kind of "change" both candidates are now offering the country, if "change" means a radical shift toward either the left or the right. The kind of "change" we actually need is one that greases the wheels for broad consensus — for meeting in the middle. Washington insiders can be our most precious facilitators in this, but only if the political hatreds this election seems to be breeding can be set aside.

So, as I say, can we all just retract our claws?