I recently ended a column with this parting message: “People who still think voting doesn’t matter should go soak their heads.”
I’m saying it anew today, in the wake of a MAGA judge’s decree that the abortion drug mifepristone – in legal circulation nationwide for the past 23 years – should be pulled off the market, and that the federal Food and Drug Administration’s original approval of the pill should be retroactively invalidated.
The Friday ruling, concocted by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, is already being contested by the Justice Department – because the ruling is festooned with cartoon arguments seemingly copy-pasted from anti-abortion pamphlets – so it’s ultimately possible that women who want to make decisions for their own bodies will still have access to the drug. But what’s most important to understand is why an anti-abortion zealot like Kacsmaryk is a federal judge in the first place.
It’s because Donald Trump put him there.
And Trump would never have been positioned to put him there if a fatal percentage of lazy and/or oblivious Americans hadn’t decided to skip voting in the 2016 presidential election. Alas, the serial grifter’s sins were ignored or excused, and Hillary Clinton was dismissed as not pure enough or likable enough or dateable enough, or maybe her voice was too “shrill,” or maybe her emails were sinister.
Hillary warned in ’16 that the future composition of the federal judiciary was at stake, but the only people who really cared about that issue were white evangelicals. They subsumed their moral qualms about Trump because he promised to make the courts more theocratic; according to national exit polls, they gave him 79 percent of their votes (Hillary got 16 percent). All told, white evangelicals were 46 percent of Trump’s popular vote tally.
In 2017, Trump rewarded them by filling a federal bench vacancy with Matthew Kacsmaryk, an extremist Christian activist who shares the theocratic belief that people like him should dictate government policy for women nationwide. This is what happens when apathetic Americans fail to pay sufficient attention at election time.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling against the abortion pill, released on Good Friday, was predictably packed with long-refuted conspiracy theories about mifepristone – that the FDA rushed it to approval 23 years ago “to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety,” and that “adverse affects” of the drug “can overwhelm the medical system and place enormous pressure and stress on doctors.” (Fact check: More than 100 studies in 28 countries have long concluded that the drug is safe – indeed, that’s it’s safer than Tylenol, Viagra, and penicillin.)
Kacsmaryk also ruled that sending any abortion drug through the mail is a federal crime under the 1873 Comstock Act (which was enacted to halt the mailing of “lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile” materials), which is no surprise, given the fact that in his previous gig, as counsel to a religious group, he opposed civil rights for gays and contraception. Now he has the power to throw sand in the machinery of secular government and screw with women’s rights to a safe drug – despite his (empty) promise, during his confirmation hearing, that he wouldn’t rule in favor of any preconceived “policy preference.”
Maybe, at the end of this needless litigation trail, the zealot’s decree will be consigned to the trash by the 6-3 conservative U.S. Supreme Court (another Friday ruling, by a federal judge in Washington State, says the drug should remain on the market). But it’s abundantly clear that the forced-birth extremists, empowered by Trump, intend to use the courts to impose their ideology on the majority of Americans. Including the landslide majority that supports access to abortion drugs.
How ironic. When Sam Alito wrote the opinion abolishing Roe v. Wade, he declared that, henceforth, the abortion issue should “resolved like most questions in our democracy, by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” But now that voters have been signaling thumbs-up for abortion rights (in a Kansas referendum last summer, in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race last week), the extremists’ message is “never mind the voters, will use the courts instead.”
It’s nice that the voters in those local contests have stood up for sanity. But the lesson of 2016 should never be forgotten. The mere presence of zealots like Kacsmaryk on the federal bench demonstrates that we pay a fatal price when apathetic Americans sit on their asses.