THE END OF ROE

Recently, the country of Ireland voted to make abortion legal.  This vote, along with one legalizing gay marriage a few years ago, showed that the country once held underneath the puritanical boot of the Catholic church (divorce was illegal there until 1996!) was entering the modern world.  Sadly, the US now seems to be about to take a big step backward.
On Wednesday July 27th., Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced that he would be resigning, giving Donald Trump another Supreme Court justice appointment.  More importantly, this means that court will soon be moving rightward, given that Kennedy was often a moderate swing vote on many big issues, including Roe Vs. Wade.  There has probably been no time in its 45 year history that the Roe Vs Wade ruling has been in more jeopardy.  The religious right have been supporting Republicans since 1980, just waiting for this very moment.  The second the new judge is sworn in, conservative state legislatures will start passing challenges to abortion rights.  Lawyers have been waiting their whole lives to argue against Roe at the Supreme Court.
Yes, the man who once said he was "very pro choice" is now about to be the president who will almost definitely appoint a conservative judge that will allow abortion to be outlawed in multiple states.  Is there anything that the Democrats can do?  Not really.  The Republicans have a slim majority in the Senate, and plan to fast track whatever judge Trump picks to make sure he (it'll probably be a he) is appointed before the November election.
Is there any silver lining here for pro choice progressives?  Perhaps: the most recent Pew research poll done on the issue in 2016 revealed that 59% of Americans overall think that abortion should be legal in most cases, the highest it had been in twenty years.  And an even higher amount, (69%) believe that Roe Vs Wade should not be completely over turned.   And when it comes to women, the support is even higher:  79% of Democratic women and 60% of independents are pro choice.  Even 32% of Republican women support abortion rights, which is quite high given the party's stance.
Put simply, there have now been entire generations of women who have always assumed that getting an abortion was a viable option for them, who may wake up someday soon to find that option taken away.  This may have the effect of radicalizing and mobilizing women into voting more.  Polls show around only 50% of citizens between 18-29 years old voted in the 2016 presidential election, compared to 58% of all eligible citizens.  And while they often reject terms like pro life and pro choice, millennials generally oppose outlawing abortion completely. 
Will this issue be the one that pushes more young voters into the voting booth?  I think it's entirely possible that this and other issues that will soon be ruled on by a conservative court will backlash against the Republican party, who have wanted to over turn Roe Vs Wade since 1980, but have avoided making it  a primary issue in national elections.  In other words, the Republicans may win the battle here, but still lose the war in the long run.  I certainly hope so.

WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING

 "This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”'

We should have seen this coming.  When Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign with racist comments about Mexican immigrants ("they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists"), when he encouraged chants of "build the wall", or when last month he gave a speech describing undocumented immigrant children by saying “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”

And so now here we are; in the past six weeks almost two thousand children have been taken from their parents and put into custody.  Horror stories abound: one father killed himself after his three old son was taken from him.  One mother had her baby snatched away while she was breast feeding.  While the difficulty of dealing with parents with children asking for political asylum or trying to cross the border has existed for years, no administration has ever resorted to such outright cruelty.  It's all due to a change in policy that treats all undocumented immigrants as criminals, and therefore subject to separation  from their children.  Sadly, the administration seems to see this as having a double benefit; not only does it discourage further immigrants with children from trying to enter the country, it allows give them a bargaining chip to use when negotiating with congress to get the funding for that wall Trump's followers want so much.  The fact that innocent children are in the crossfire of this negotiation hardly seems to concern anyone working for Trump.  As John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told NPR so brusquely, “The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.”
Not surprisingly, this horrific policy has proven unpopular, with  even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, passing a resolution on Tuesday calling for immigration reform that maintains “the priority of family unity.”  So Trump has done his usual thing by brazenly lying about it, stating more than once his administration is just following a law passed by Democrats.  He never specifically stated what law he was talking about, because there is no such law.  This policy has been carried out by Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General, who has promoted and defended it, even going so far as to quote the bible in doing so!  And now the president's usually silent wife Melania has joined the fray, condemning the policy and then somehow claiming it is the responsibility of "both sides", putting a softer tone on her husband's lies.
All of this reveals just what a coward Trump truly is, despite all of his tough talk and bluster.   He ran a presidential campaign steeped in xenophobia and bigotry, promising to bring the full force of the government down on immigrants both legal and undocumented.  And now that his minions are doing just that, resulting in terrifying images of children being taken away from their parents, he lies and points at Democrats, somehow forgetting that congress is now controlled by his own party.  I don't think that Trump truly cares about the children (Tony Schwartz, the co author of Trump's ART OF THE DEAL book, who spent more time with Trump than any human ever should, once stated that  "There is no one Trump cares about in any deep enduring way—no one, not even his children.”) he's just afraid to own up to his own policy, a policy that Senator Lindsay Graham has so rightly pointed out, could be ended with a single phone call.  Hopefully, the outcry coming from even his supporters will eventually push him into making that phone call.  But don't think for a minute he'll be  doing it out of compassion for anyone but himself.