Opinion by Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent: Attorneys general will be at ground zero in the new abortion wars
could severely restrict or ban abortion, then centralize more enforcement power with incoming GOP attorneys general.
“Extremist Republican groups continue to push model legislation to ban abortion, and the central enforcer in that model legislation is state attorneys general,” Sean Rankin, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, told us in a statement.Meanwhile, Democrats are running to unseat GOP attorneys general in states including Georgia and Arizona. If they can win,, they’d be able to slow the antiabortion enforcement tide.
Which shows another area where Republicans might suffer politically from the backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision: Since public opinion is with the Democrats on this issue even in some conservative places, putting AGs at the forefront could backfire on the antiabortion forces, potentially resulting in the election of more Democrats.
Nevertheless, in conservative states, ambitious attorneys general will likely see being as draconian as possible on abortion as a good means to raise their profile among GOP primary voters and attention from right-wing media. And since many AGs start thinking about running for governor a few minutes after taking office, we’re likely to see battles focusing on how these laws are enforced, and against whom.
All of which is yet more evidence that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices might not have quite realized what they meant when they told us they were merely returning the abortion issue to the states to be decided by the people and their elected representatives. What they really did was set off a war that will go on for years to come, and unfold in all kinds of unforeseen and ugly ways.
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