For her youth and progressive views, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is frequently hailed as the future of the Democratic party. If that holds true, abortion-weary Republicans will never be welcome crossover votes, and Democrats who are not “all in” on unmitigated abortion access will soon become extinct.
Ocasio-Cortez recently went after former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has abandoned the Republican Party to support Joe Biden in November, after he criticized her.
“It’s important to remember that Kasich is an anti-choice extremist,” she tweeted Monday. “He 100% will (and has) signed away our reproductive rights the moment he has the opportunity to do so.”
Before he left office, Kasich signed legislation that would ban the abortion procedure used for almost all abortions performed in the second trimester, but he also vetoed a bill that would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat.
“The central provision of [the bill], that an abortion cannot be performed if a heartbeat has been detected in the unborn child, is contrary to the Supreme Court of the United States’s current rulings on abortion,” Kasich said, showing a surprising deference to bad law, an action that one might expect would be exculpatory in the eyes of Ocasio-Cortez.
As for pro-life Democrats, they are already an endangered species, growing more endangered by the election. Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Democrat who lost his March primary to a more progressive candidate, is among this group of pro-life Democrats. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is another. Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson is a third.
Each of these Democrats, along with 102 others, recently signed an open letter to the Democratic National Committee, imploring the party to moderate its official position on abortion. The letter asked the party to avoid supporting a repeal of the Hyde Amendment, a provision in federal law that prohibits taxpayer-funded abortion. Until very recently, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden even supported this provision.
“We are concerned about a betrayal of Democratic Party values,” the letter also says. “An extreme position on abortion rights violates our commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Polling consistently shows that one in three Democrats are pro-life. We must respect and include these 21 million Democrats.”
The number is actually less than one in three, but in any case, 29% of Democrats polled do consider themselves pro-life. That is a significant number of people, although as the party has crept consistently to the left on abortion, it has been rewarded for doing so. Democrats hold a House majority and have a real shot at gaining seats in the Senate. Pollsters aren’t iterating that the margins depend on the pro-life Democrat vote. There is no real incentive for moderating.
In any case, if Democrats can keep presenting “decent” candidates in the face of a disruptive and graceless President Trump, they will gain the Kasichs who, at the very least, are willing to overlook for a time the Democrats’ prevailing position on abortion and, at most, will simply accept Roe v. Wade.
As for pro-life Democrats, the letter signatories seem to think the party is ceding “large swathes of the United States to the Republican Party.” That may be true, but if Democrats continue to win in Congress and gain the presidency, what does it matter?
