One Bernie With One Stone
There really is something rotten about the discussion of abortion and the Democratic Party.
In a Washington Post oped, the leader of a reproductive rights coalition calls out Democrats who would sideline abortion rights in the effort to build a big tent.
Oddly, the author doesn’t cite or link to statements by Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected official in the Democratic Party, who, within the last several weeks, came out against making abortion a litmus test not once, but twice. Not does the author cite or link to the statement by Tom Perez, the official head of the Democratic Party, chosen by the members of the Democratic National Committee, who supported Mello for the sake of electing Democrats, even if they were not pro-choice. (Perez was later forced to retract that statement.)
The sole example of Democratic backtracking that the author does focus on is…Bernie Sanders, accusing him of “throwing abortion rights under the bus.” Sanders, as his social media critics never tire of reminding us, is not in fact a registered Democrat. But he’s the author’s main—no, sole—target.
For the rest of the oped, the author focuses on the need to overturn the Hyde Amendment—never once mentioning, not once, that the Democratic Party’s Vice Presidential nominee in 2016—Hillary Clinton’s chosen candidate—came out against overturning the Hyde Amendment after Hillary Clinton had selected him as her running mate.
For the record, I have been staunchly critical of Sanders’s position on the role of abortion rights in the left’s campaign to become the electoral majority. Particularly since I believe reproductive freedom and access to abortion is critical to the issues of economic inequality that Sanders has been so passionate about. Overturning the Hyde Amendment, an effort that Sanders does support, is an important campaign, fusing issues of gender and class in ways the left needs to do. But it seems strange that Sanders would be the only politician identified by name in this piece as an example of Democratic Party waffling on abortion rights and reproductive justice.
The charitable interpretation is that the author would like to make abortion—and more important, the Hyde Amendment—a litmus test within the Democratic Party, that the author is simply trying to urge the party to remain firm on the issue, but is too timid or strategic to attack those official and elected party leaders who pose a threat to that position. It’s safer to displace that concern onto Sanders and behind Sanders, the Bernie Bros, because the neoliberal party establishment hates them anyway. So push for abortion rights by attacking critics of the party’s neoliberalism. Kill two birds with one stone.
That’s the charitable interpretation.
The uncharitable interpretation is that she’s just killing one bird.