WASHINGTON – “What’s going on here?” said a distraught Nancy Pelosi on Friday.
It’s a good question and I can answer it because I was at the start of the biting chain of events that led to women losing control of their own bodies. I watched America go from a beacon of modernity to a backward outlier.
Over the past three decades I have witnessed a bleak history of opportunism, fanaticism, mendacity, greed, hypocrisy and cowardice. This is a story about men gaining power by exchanging something that meant little to them compared to their own status: women’s rights.
It started innocently enough on a beautiful summer day in Kennebunkport, with sparkling ocean and a lunch of crab salad and English muffins.
I was talking about President Bush’s first appointment of a 43-year-old judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to fill the seat of outgoing Judge Thurgood Marshall. Clarence Thomas, standing in front of a weathered, gravel-covered cottage, looked uneasy as Bush defended his conservative choice.
Even then the warnings were clear. Ohio Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum threatened to investigate Judge Thomas’s record on abortion, saying, “I will not support another Reagan-Bush Supreme Court nominee who is silent about a woman’s right to choose and then going to court to weaken that right.”
Thomas was a far cry from the liberal lion and civil rights hero Marshall. He opposed affirmative action, even if it contributed to his rise, and he was defended by anti-abortion activists, who believed he would weaken a woman’s right to choose.
HW and his father were New England Episcopalians with a proud history of supporting Planned Parenthood. An early supporter in the 1940s, Prescott Bush once served as treasurer of a fundraising campaign. As a Texas congressman, HW was dubbed “Rubbers” by his colleagues for being such a cheerleader for family planning in the United States and around the world.
But when Bush joined Ronald Reagan in 1980, he took Reagan’s more restrictive stance. However, the Right remained suspicious of Bush and in hopes of securing his re-election, he appointed the ultra-conservative Thomas. He also wanted to appeal to black voters, still mad at the ugliness of Willie Horton who had helped him get to the White House.
Women’s rights were to remain in the background in re-election.
Three months later, Anita Hill told Congress her story about her boss, Thomas, who tormented her with unwanted attention and dirty talk about the porn movies he liked to watch. Joe Biden chaired those Senate hearings.
He allowed Hill to be brutally mauled by Republicans, then abruptly ended the hearings, canceling the appearance of her two corroborating witnesses. Many senators on the committee—which were made up entirely of white men—privately thought it was an office novel gone awry. Poor fellow, they said to each other, there’s no point in letting his life be ruined by someone they thought was, without any proof, a vengeful ex. Hill was smeared as a perjured erotomaniac, and Biden, who squandered a Democratic Senate majority, allowed a liar, a pervert, and a sexual harasser to be elevated to a lifelong seat on the court.
Women’s rights had to recede in the background of Biden’s desire to further the duality with his conservative colleagues. And with Thomas, those conservatives got the justice of their dreams, the first in a line of right-wing radicals.
When Donald Trump came along, with a history of lurid sexual transgressions, the family values Republicans and the religious right didn’t care. They knew he was the one who could take them to Valhalla of the Supreme Court.
Mitch McConnell and his followers at the Federalist Society hosted Trump. After breaking the rules to keep Merrick Garland off the job, McConnell walked right through Amy Coney Barrett. Trump, who was once a pro-choice, Nancy-and-Hillary-and-Chuck-loving Democrat, was happy to flip to win the fervor of an anti-abortion grassroots.
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Trump’s ego and ambition and McConnell’s desire for a conservative court that would withdraw the reach of government and deny protection to Americans who need or value them. They pushed through three conservative judges—one had to defend herself against assault charges and one was in a weird “Handmaid’s Tale”-esque cult—and that was checkmate for Roe.
Neil Gorsuch and another Trump appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, are now facing accusations from senators that they broke up to appear in court and downplayed their intentions to kick Roe out. “I’m a non-rock-the-boat kind of judge,” Kavanaugh told Susan Collins, according to Carl Hulse of The Times.
Thomas’s consensus with the fanatical majority opinion of Samuel Alito overthrowing Roe v. Wade horribly warned that he would apply the same rationale to birth control, same-sex marriage and consensual same-sex relationships.
When Thomas’ nomination was met with resistance, the Bush administration sold him as an excellent example of a black man who had pulled himself out of rough beginnings. That day in Kennebunkport, Thomas told of his upbringing by his grandparents, tenant farmers from rural Georgia.
But at court, he was cruel, pushing opinions that would crush the poor and underprivileged.
While his wife walked around helping Trump with his coup, Thomas was the supreme meerkat in a coup by extremists on the court. They snatched power from John Roberts and defied the will of the majority in this country in terrifying ways.
On Thursday, in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings, and Congress finally won a mild victory over gun control, Thomas opened the door to more guns on the streets. He wrote the majority opinion overturning a New York law restricting the right to carry a gun in public, and tossed out a claim that was more than a century old.
In another ruling last week, judges broke down the First Amendment’s separation of church and state, a foundation of the Republic. And then they will come to removing environmental protections and taking away the government’s ability to regulate and restrict corporate rights.
The court is out of control. We feel powerless to do anything about it. Clarence Thomas, of all people, has helped lead us to where we are, with unexplained extremists dictating how we live. And that is repulsive.