Will Dems Run on Roe v. Wade in 2022?

CLAY: Looking at the Texas law as it pertains to abortion and trying to project what we thought the Supreme Court might do. And, by the way, I’m Clay Travis; he’s Buck Sexton. We appreciate all of you hanging out with us. Encourage you to download the podcast. Blown away by how many of you are listening there. We also always love the 400-plus affiliates we have in all 50 states, and we thank all of you, for being such big proponents for the battles we fight every day, for being the tip of the spear to help us make a difference in this country.

So let’s talk about what’s going on in the Supreme Court. There’s been all these emergency appeals trying to strike down the Texas law. The Supreme Court late last night, issued a little bit, I think, Buck of a preview for where they might be going as many different cases from many different states reached the Supreme Court. I believe Mississippi is up next on the official docket of the Supreme Court and the law that Mississippi has put in place as it pertains to abortion. But predictably, the left-wing in this country, is losing their mind.

Listen to cut 14 here and what Joy Reid had to say on MSNBC last night.

REID: By next summer (dramatic pause), we could be living in our own version of the Handmaid’s Tale, where forced birth is the law in large sections of the country, including (dramatic pause) for children.

CLAY: All right, so that is the discussion that’s going on. Let’s have a more intelligent discussion.

BUCK: Have you ever heard forced birth, by the way? I’m wondering what… You know, they use all these euphemisms for abortion, and they also will have all these scary terms for people actually having their children. But that was a first for me. I’ve never heard that.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s the Handmaid’s Tale, where they’re trying to terrify women all over the country. But here’s the political angle on this mixed with the legal angle, which is what we talked about yesterday. I am not surprised at all that the Supreme Court decision here was 5-4. This is me putting my lawyer hat on. My prediction is that many of these state regulations are going to be held up by a 5-4 vote.

Chief Justice John Roberts is an institutionalist. He’s an incrementalist. He will be terrified by the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade from 1973. I think the balancing act that is going to end up occurring is by default… They’re not going to directly overrule Roe v. Wade. But they are going to allow more and more restrictive state laws to be legal. And that is going to effectively rescind a federal rule on abortion and return the decision, as it pertains to abortion, to individual states and individual state legislatures.

And I believe that margin is going to be 5-4. Even though there is a conservative majority, 6-3, I think John Roberts is going to side with the liberal element here. So in his mind, he can argue this is not a direct political decision. Even though the case is being made, Buck, I think, is going to be not an aggressive court overturning Roe v. Wade. They’re just going to punt this back to the individual states and allow them to make the decision.

BUCK: How do they do that without overturning Roe, because Roe says there’s a federal right to abortion?

CLAY: Interesting. So it’s a good question. So the history has been, what exactly does that right to abortions mean? In terms of how many weeks, what is going to be the standard? And I think they’re going to continue to dial back the number of weeks that a state can restrict abortion.

BUCK: Right. That may be a more Planned Parenthood v. Casey issue, when it comes to the actual specifics of what abortion entails.

CLAY: They’re going to avoid saying, “Hey, we’re directly overturning Roe v. Wade,” and they’re going to cite… This is my prediction. I think they’re going to look at technology, I think they’re going to look at medical advances, what you can determine about the state of a fetus now, compared to even back in 1973. And I think they are going to slowly dial back the amount of protection, federally, that exist, and allow states to incrementally take over more of the decision. That’s my prediction.

BUCK: This is where this is heading, Clay. It’s going to be the nastiest political fight we have seen, probably in our lifetimes.

CLAY: It’s going to be the Kavanaugh hearings on steroids.

BUCK: It’s going to make the fights over election results and things like that, look like a tea party, I think — and not like a Boston Tea Party, a nice one where the people have little China cups and stuff.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: And the reality here is the left is going to go absolutely all out. I mean, there’s this whole machinery of the abortion industry that is enormously influential and powerful. It’s really the only thing, as a Democrat, that you have to sign on. To be a Democrat, you must be pro-choice, pro-abortion.

There’s no room for other things, really, as a Democrat in today’s party or in their party. And they’re going to put a pressure campaign together against sitting Supreme Court justices, the likes of which we have never really seen before. It will be somewhat similar to the ferocity of the smearing Kavanaugh campaign, but it will be much more drawn out. And the stakes in their mind, will be even higher. The left has convinced, unfortunately, millions of women and just leftists in general, that there’s an enslavement of their body that would occur the moment that Roe v. Wade didn’t mean you could have an abortion in all nine months of a pregnancy.

It’s a central pillar of leftism. It’s not just another thing. It is the one thing that they hold sacred on the left above all else. So they’ll fight for this, Clay, more ferociously and in more underhanded fashion to keep this thing alive, than anything else I think we’ve ever seen. Those are the stakes right now, politically for them. And you can see it already. They’re freaked out! Nothing has even happened yet.

CLAY: Yeah, and here’s the big picture, okay? Big picture, I think that the Democratic Party, they failed on the economy. They failed on the border. They failed on Afghanistan. They’re failing on covid. All of those are failures. I think that this is going to be what they run on in 2022, Buck.

BUCK: Well, if your prediction about the court is correct and there’s a major pairing back of the rights of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

CLAY: Even if it doesn’t happen, they’re setting the narrative that it’s going to happen, Buck, and they’re going to try to go after these suburban women. We talk about the 40% you lost; the 40% you got. Suburban women are in that 20%. They are what helped to get Joe Biden elected, and suburban men.

BUCK: But without Trump in the picture, do you think that really works? It’s going to be members of Congress. It’s gonna be senators and the state level.

CLAY: It’s a great question, and I think this is where they are desperation-wise though, Buck.

BUCK: What else do they have?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: They have the insurrection.

CLAY: Which I don’t believe is going to work, right? So I’m just trying to think, where are the battles going to be fought? Politics is about choosing the battles that you want to fight that you think you can win. I think there are losers on the economy. Losers on covid. Losers on the border. Losers on murder and crime.

BUCK: By the way, I don’t even know if you have to say, “I think,” Clay.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: We could say the data reflects it. Of course, I agree objectively speaking, that’s what’s going on. Even the data reflects what you’re saying, based on the poll numbers that Joe Biden currently has.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I also think they got a little lazy, where even the Russia collusion didn’t work to get Trump out of office, but it was incredibly effective — and people hate what I say this. They know it’s true. It’s incredibly effective as a smear to get into gears of the Trump administration —

CLAY: It delegitimized a lot. Yes.

BUCK: — to slow them down, to create all these other narratives, and to throw people into depositions and make them defend themselves, and all this crap that the Trump team had to deal with because of the Russia collusion lie. Now they think with the insurrection, “Oh, we’ll kind of run the same playbook of this thing that we make a huge deal about that we talk about forever.” But it doesn’t work when you’re in power, because people actually want results.

CLAY: That’s right. This is it. I think you’re right. This is the play. I’m not telling you where we are right now. I’m telling you, what is going to be the play in 2022? I think you’re right. Insurrection can’t work. It can motivate maybe some of that base. They can try it.

BUCK: They’ll try.

CLAY: But I don’t think it will resonate in suburban districts. What they’re going to go after is the Handmaid’s Tale argument that Joy Reid just tried to argue, that you are not going to be able to make a choice about whether or not to have a baby.

BUCK: But we do have to remember that it is likely, when we look back at the Kavanaugh situation — and I was living in D.C. and living a few blocks from the White House and just down the street from Capitol Hill when that whole thing went down, and it was crazy in that city, and people were astonished at how… It wasn’t just ugly. It was evil what they were doing to Brett Kavanaugh.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: The lies that people were telling about him. The way the media was reporting on it. Like I said, it made a lot of wartime conservatives out of people. But, Clay, that probably kept the Democrats from taking the Senate in 2018. Remember, that was… You know, I remember there were senators. I actually spoke to Lindsey Graham about it. Tucker gave him the rough treatment last night.

CLAY: Lindsey Graham was phenomenal in the Kavanaugh hearings.

BUCK: He was amazing on Kavanaugh, and he was going around on the election cycle, talking about that issue. He was. No, that was Lindsey Graham’s best moment ever. I saw the Tucker thing last night and thought, “Whew! Okay.” See? Sometimes, things get heated even within the GOP tent.

CLAY: I think you’re right. I think as bad as that hearing was in the Senate, I think this is going to be on steroids in 2022, ’cause I think it’s the only angle the Democrats think they can play.