I don't think there's irony there. The republican platform explicitly wants to overturn Roe. Russo was months ago. If the new justice is right of Roberts, it would get overturned.

The evangelicals are part of their coalition. They have to at least pretend to try to overturn it or the evangelicals won't show up.

Each party is a coalition of interests whether it's a particular minority, class, etc. They have to at least pander to every part of their coalition, otherwise they don't show up to vote. If nothing gets done, they can simply flail their arms, yell, scream and blame the other party. The important thing is making it look like they are trying.

Each party also has a coalition of large donors who expect a lot more for their money than mere pandering and aren't fooled by the tactics used for the previously mentioned coalitions. Parties without donors die, so this is a existential requirement.

This is essentially why voters never get what they want and donors always do.

A 5-4 conservative majority Supreme Court keeps striking down abortion restrictions, much less rolling anything back. A 6-3 wouldn’t flip it, though you might get some more enforcement of the viability limit. Only Alito and Thomas would actually vote to flip it if it came to that.

I'm not sure what your point is. One doesn't need to overturn Roe outright to overturn Roe in practice for many americans. If there are no abortion providers in your state, and your state bans telemedicine medication abortion, you can't get an abortion. That roe still protects Californians isn't relevant to you in mississippi or georgia or nebraska.

And that really, truly, only takes a 6-3 majority. If Barrett replaced Ginsburg in July, the ruling would have gone the other way. And consternation states well continue to violate the law in an effort to get it changed.

> I'm not sure what your point is. One doesn't need to overturn Roe outright to overturn Roe in practice for many americans. If there are no abortion providers in your state, and your state bans telemedicine medication abortion, you can't get an abortion. That roe still protects Californians isn't relevant to you in mississippi or georgia or nebraska.

Restrictions that eliminated every provider in a state likely would violate Roe itself, as would things like heartbeat laws. Yes, one imagines a 6-3 court would uphold more restrictions than today. But things like mandatory counseling, waiting periods, parental consent periods, 12 week limits, etc., exist in more conservative European countries like Germany, Italy, etc. Even insofar as Roe recognizes a right to bodily autonomy that precludes banning abortion entirely, why shouldn’t the most conservative states in the most religious developed country in the world be able to decide that they’re going to do the minimum required to protect that right, as opposed to something behind that one right.

Not that I want to get in the way of a reasonably articulated airing of the other side of this issue, which I appreciate you offering, but:

One reason is that the most conservative states in the country are still mostly polarized between rural and urban districts, with urban districts housing large majorities of people who want access to reproductive health services, but are denied that by a coalition of mostly rural conservatives to whom the welfare of urban denizens are an externality.

That is to say, the state legislatures aren't really speaking for Jackson or Birmingham or Little Rock (you can look up the demographics if you want). Even in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the county, the spread between Espy and Hyde-Smith in 2018 was just 7 points.

If (say) Kansas City could somehow secede from Kansas, leaving two states --- Rural and Urban Kansas --- I think the principled argument here would be stronger.

In addition to what tptacek says, I have a few other concerns about this line of reasoning. First, with regard to access, there are a number of states that have only a handful of abortion providers as is (the Dakotas collectively have 3 abortion providers). If you are forced to travel 3-4 hours (or more!) for a medical procedure once, sure perhaps that's unavoidable. But to have to do it two or perhaps 3 times makes the service de facto inaccessible to many.

If clinics were common and accessible, having counseling and waiting periods might be more palatable. The problems arise when that counseling is structure to guilt women into not having abortions, or when the waiting periods make it de facto impossible for people to access a medical procedure. I take a very pragmatic view of the law in this regard. That is, someone should not have to lose their job to get an abortion. I recognize that there are other medical procedures where the same thing could happen (and I argue that we should have stronger protections for those cases too!), but it's more egregious when the law is constructed to take advantage of our lack of social safety to make it more difficult to access rights. There's a strong parallel with voter ID laws here.

Also, I don't believe there are prohibitions on counseling, waiting periods, parental consent periods at the federal level in the US. Mississippi has laws requiring all of those, as well as ultrasound, and necessary requirements about the facility. So I don't see how that's relevant. States certainly can, and do, already put into practice those limitations. Russo went further.

Secondly, I personally take issue with religious justification for laws. Even indirectly, especially since we live in a country that claims to provide religious freedom I recognize that this isn't really legally tenable, but when there's a clear religious justification for a law, in my opinion, we should apply stricter scrutiny to that law.

Third, and this perhaps combines some elements of the first two, as well as tptacek's comments: there's a tyranny of the majority (or perhaps plurality) situation that arises. Restrictions on how someone can exercise a legally protected right are dangerous, and should only, be done with very compelling reasons. Most abortion restrictions aren't very compelling.

I also don't see that adding additional legal restrictions is "the minimum to protect that right". Meddling with a right to make it more difficult to exercise isn't doing the minimum, it's something else entirely. Instituting a new law cannot be the minimum. To give an example, the 15th amendment did the minimum in regards to giving black people the right to vote in the US. States that instituted poll taxes and literacy tests were not doing the minimum, they were abridging the right. At a state level, "the minimum" might have been to do nothing to prevent voter intimidation which also happened some. So to return to the modern example, "doing the minimum" might be, like, not instituting buffer zone laws.