It's All About Roe

Here on the eve of nuclear option deployment, it's helpful to remember what brought us to this ignominious showdown. In a word, it's all about Roe. Sure, many Democratic senators raise other issues with Bush's most controversial judicial nominees, but the common thread is their abortion rights positions.

Some 32 years ago, the Roe decision brought the democratic process on abortion rights to a screeching halt. Even those of us who support abortion rights should recognize that was a very unfortunate way for a democracy to proceed. And damaging.

Yes, the legal impediment to abortion was removed, but at what cost? Since that momentous decision we have suffered through a bruising--sometimes even bloody--cultural civil war for a third of a century, the federal judiciary has become dangerously politicized and the prime battleground for political struggle, and now the Senate is on the brink, perhaps, of thorough dysfunction. Quite a high price to pay for frustrating the democratic process. Oh that the court in 1973 had had the sense and foresight to leave this issue to the State legislatures where it belongs.

It's ironic that Roe's fateful ending of the debate over abortion law stands poised to drive a change to the end of debate rules of the US Senate, which in turn will grease the path of conservative nominees to the federal bench, and perhaps to Roe's eventual undoing.