Romney's Out of Flops on Abortion

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/romneys-out-flops-abortion

Romney's Out of Flops on Abortion

Paul Waldman

February 22, 2012


snip//

So today, Will Saletan offers a long, exhaustive story about Romney's history with abortion, documenting every movement on the issue over Romney's career, and all the ways (many of them shamelessly dishonest) that he has tried to justify those movements:

When you see the story in its full context, three things become clear. First, this was no flip-flop. Romney is a man with many facets, groping his way through a series of fluid positions on an array of difficult issues. His journey isn’t complete. It never will be. Second, for Romney, abortion was never really a policy question. He didn’t want to change the law. What he wanted to change was his identity. And third, the malleability at Romney’s core is as much about his past as about his future. Again and again, he has struggled to make sense not just of what he should do, but of who he has been. The problem with Romney isn’t that he keeps changing his mind. The problem is that he keeps changing his story.

Saletan paints Romney's history of changes on abortion like everything else about Romney: careful, methodical, planned, full of rewritings of the past, and utterly devoid of any discernible principle or genuine sentiment.

If he gets elected, though, will Romney be different in any meaningful way from a candidate who had been anti-abortion all his or her life? Let's look at what he'll actually do. He'll instantly reinstate the Mexico City Policy that bans U.S. support for any group that even suggests abortion overseas, pushing that pendulum back to the Republican side. He'll sign any legislation Congress might come up with restricting reproductive rights. And perhaps most importantly, he'll appoint to federal courts, and to the Supreme Court, judges who want to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Romney were elected and one of the five justices who currently support Roe (Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor) retires or dies, he will absolutely, positively appoint a successor who is ready to overturn Roe.

Because he doesn't have much choice, whatever he believes deep down. He has to dance with the one who brung him, and the Republican party will simply not tolerate anything less. Republicans may fear that he'll get to the White House and suddenly shift back to being pro-choice, but that simply isn't going to happen. Try to imagine the category-5 shitstorm that would result if a President Romney nominated someone to the Supreme Court that Republicans felt was a less-than-reliable vote to overturn Roe. If he was in his first term, he'd immediately get primary challengers. If he was in his second term, they'd try to impeach him. Even if most Americans don't want to overturn Roe, the political cost of another shift for Romney would just be too high. And it's hard to argue that for him, there's any other calculation to be made.