Hell Yes, the Overturning of Roe Has Given the GOP a Good Case of Prickly Heat

 

No doubt in my mind that the overturning of Roe (combining subliminally with the exposures of the January 6th Committee) are tilting election prospects toward the Democrats, and I'm coming to resent the poor-mouthing I hear from some Democratic activists. Maybe we lose the Democratic House and the Democratic Senate, and maybe we don't. You cherry-pick your intimations of doom, and I'll cherry-pick ... my cherries. The prediction that 2022 is going to rival 2010 for the Democrats has become conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is a ass and a idiot (to paraphrase Mr. Bumble).

Because some Republican leaders know they're on dangerous, extremist ground, they're actually trying to pump the brakes on the conservative lust to regulate women and punish the queer, because they surely feel the seismic rumbling under the earth beneath them. From the NYTimes, this small wrap-up of the case of nerves some Republican governors have developed (italics added):

...in Nebraska, where an effort to pass a trigger ban narrowly failed early this year, Gov. Pete Ricketts has discussed the possibility of a special session but has yet to call one. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has largely avoided questions about whether he would take immediate steps to pass new restrictions. In South Dakota, where a ban went into effect after Roe was struck down, Gov. Kristi Noem backed away from an initial pledge to call lawmakers to the Capitol to consider more abortion bills....

But they can't stop the runaway train of conservative cruelty and authoritarianism, so Republican-dominated states try to outdo one another on medieval tortures for women who become pregnant by accident or by force. 

"Some Republican-controlled states have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, draconian restrictions on abortion, some banning the procedure almost from conception and with no exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. Many of these laws are far more extreme than Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban. Some states, most famously Texas, have also put in place highly unusual enforcement mechanisms intended to evade the possibility of court challenges, with a few even attempting to criminalize crossing state lines for the purpose of procuring abortions" (Damon Linker).

Republicans in the US Congress join in the legislative spite-fest by blocking a bill yesterday that would have expanded healthcare coverage for military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Which roused Jon Stewart so passionately:

 

That may seem a diversion from the topic at hand, but not really. Republican legislative activity is all part of a pattern of denial, punishment, and subjugation. So I have more than hope that the Republicans who can't help themselves will be hoist with their own petard. By any human measure, they've gone too far, and the interest in seeing them defeated among young women (and other casually haphazard voters) has burgeoned and cannot be denied.