To be sure, the past decade has seen a withering Republican assault against women’s health clinics that provide abortion services.

As the Guttmacher Institute documented, between 2011 and 2015, states passed as many restrictions on abortion (288) as in the previous 15 years combined (292). Most of these took the form of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) Laws. This labyrinth of medically unnecessary and scientifically baseless rules on everything from requirements that clinics meet the same physical standards as surgical centers, mandates on physician admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, and even the width of hallway corridors are designed to disqualify many from legal operation. Even as these laws in states like Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi among others fight their way through the courts, more onerous legislation on patient waiting periods and mandatory, invasive ultrasound procedures are placing an undue burden on women’s access to abortion services. As bogus “fetal pain” and “fetal heartbeat” bills proliferate in GOP-dominated states, others like Georgia and Alabama are essentially trying to ban the procedure altogether. (Unlike actual, living American women, they argue, fetuses enjoy due process and equal protection of law under the 14th Amendment.)

The impact has been staggering. By May 2019, the New York Times reported, only about 750 clinics nationwide provided abortion services. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that approximately 275 facilities nationwide had closed since 2013. Of those 750 still in operation, roughly 40% do not provide abortions after 13 weeks. Six states now have only one clinic each. Only a judge’s reprieve in June kept the only facility in Missouri open. These closures, along with the ready availability of new drug therapies, are fueling a sea-change in how American women obtain abortions. As NPR reported two weeks ago about the latest findings from Guttmacher on the nation’s abortion rate:

The report noted a 25% increase in the use of medication abortion, with nearly 4 in 10 abortions in 2017 being performed using abortion pills instead of surgery.

The analysis also includes data suggesting an increase in women using pills or other methods to self-induce abortions without a medical provider's assistance; 18% of non-hospital facilities surveyed said they'd treated at least one patient for an attempted self-induced abortion — up from 12% in the last survey, according to Guttmacher.

But since Donald Trump ambled into the White House, the federal government has added its weight to the GOP states shuttering women’s health clinics. In 2017, Congress tried to follow the lead of states like Texas in prohibiting Medicaid dollars to be spent at Planned Parenthood’s 665 clinics around the country. Trying to sell that poison pill, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan wrongly claimed that it was the nation’s 13,900 “federally qualified health care centers” and rural health centers. But the former does not provide the range of contraceptive services as Planned Parenthood, while the latter are not required to serve clients regardless of their ability to pay. Neither provides abortion services.

The immediate threat to women’s health clinics is the Trump administration’s war on Title X. Signed into law by President Nixon, Title X funds healthcare services for millions of low-income women each year. “It funds services including contraception, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and breast and cervical cancer screenings,” Health Affairs recently reported, adding that “Title X regulations prohibit funds from being used for abortion care, though health centers that provide abortions have received Title X funds.” Thanks to Republican opposition in Congress, funding for Title X has been slashed from its 2010 peak of $317 million to just $286 million in 2019. But it is President Trump who had done the most serious damage with his Title X “gag rule.”

In June 2018, the Trump administration published a proposal to revise existing regulations to Title X. The rule contains two key changes: one revision, referred to as a “gag rule” by its opponents, prohibits Title X recipients from providing referrals for abortion care, even when requested by the patient. Another revision requires Title X-funded centers to “establish and maintain physical separation” from the provision of abortion.

For Planned Parenthood and other providers of women’s healthcare services, the consequences have already been severe. To avoid running afoul of the gag rule, Planned Parenthood announced it would no longer request Title X funding, some $60 million or roughly one-fifth of its annual operating budget. As Planned Parenthood summed it up:

Title X helps prevent over 1 million unintended pregnancies each year. In 2016 alone, health centers used Title X funding to provide 720,000 Pap tests, more than 4 million STD tests (including HIV tests), and nearly one million women with breast exams.

While the Title X program provides care and services to four million women each year, 40% of them (or 1.5 million) receive those tests, treatment, and counseling through Planned Parenthood clinics. In 2018, Vox explained why so “many of those Title X patients seek care at Planned Parenthood clinics.”

This is partially due to the fact that Planned Parenthood exists in many places where other family planning clinics don’t: A new analysis from the Guttmacher Institute estimates that there are 103 counties in the United States where Planned Parenthood is the only provider of publicly funded contraceptives. In an additional 229 counties, Planned Parenthood serves the majority of women who are low-income and qualify for government help paying for birth control…

Eighty-nine percent of Planned Parenthood clinics, for example, report being able to provide their patients with emergency contraceptives, compared to 34 percent of federally qualified health clinics (which typically serve low-income patients and are also a major recipient of Title X funding). And 81 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics say they provide same-day access to intrauterine devices (IUDs), the most effective type of reversible birth control. By contrast, just 30 percent of other clinics do that.

While some clinics will close due to the loss of their Title X dollars, others will reduce hours, slash staff, and increase fees to clients who may not be able to afford them. Maine Family Planning is trying to make up a $2 million shortfall, one-quarter of its annual budget. Paulette McElwain, CEO of Virginia League for Planned Parenthood, warned of a “public health disaster” in Virginia. "We're going to see unintended pregnancy rates go up, we're going to see STD rates go up, HIV rates go up," McElwain says of the regulations. "But we're going to do our best to be here, no matter what, for all the folks that rely on us." As Health Affairs reported:

While litigation is ongoing and may still result in the courts overturning the administration’s rule change, there are already consequences for patients’ access to care. Two Planned Parenthood health centers in Cincinnati closed this month. In Minnesota, the Mahube-Otwa Community Action Partnership, a provider that serves patients in rural areas of the state, is facing a 50 percent staff reduction. Some health centers opting out of Title X have said that they will make up the lost revenue through charging patients additional fees and limiting hours, barriers that could deter care.

Deter care, indeed. Between the state campaigns against abortion access and the Trump-Pence crusade against Title X providers, American women seeking the gamut of reproductive healthcare services will find fewer choices nearby or that they can afford. But even for those with the resources and insurance to pay for it, the continuing expansion of Catholic hospitals is making services like abortion, hysterectomies, and even some contraception options nearly impossible to obtain in some regions of the country. Just this month, Rewire News recounted the story of “a miscarrying woman [who] nearly died after a Catholic hospital sent her home three times.” While the Bellingham, Washington woman’s nightmare seems like it would be unusual in one of the progressive states now planning to fill the Title X shortfalls in their healthcare systems, it is not. Catholic hospital chains like PeaceHealth (which bans abortion unless its “direct purpose” is the “cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman” and it “cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable”) account for over 40% of the hospital beds in the Washington state.

Back in 2010, the Guttmacher Institute looked into the “return on investment” of public funded family planning programs. The incredible “ROI,” in terms of both taxpayers and women’s lives, was clear:

The public investment in family planning programs and providers not only helps women and couples avoid unintended pregnancy and abortion, but also helps many thousands avoid cervical cancer, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, infertility, and preterm and low birth weight births. This investment resulted in net government savings of $13.6 billion in 2010, or $7.09 for every public dollar spent.

Reflecting on that amazing data, in July Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times pondered why President Trump would put such a glorious public health success story in jeopardy. Referencing the Guttmacher research, Kristof lamented:

Title X is an odd target because it is the gold standard of cost-effectiveness. In 2010, one study found, publicly funded family planning averted 2.2 million unintended pregnancies, 99,100 cases of chlamydia and 3,680 cases of cervical cancer.

But with this month’s research confirming that women’s health clinic closures represent a death sentence for some patients and suffering for so many more, some of the women Kristof spoke to in West Virginia had better advice and better questions for President Trump. As Cassie, a 27-year-old woman who has been receiving birth control, breast exams, Pap tests, and more since she was 16 from the Women’s Health Center in Charleston, put it:

“If I would have gotten pregnant, I might have taken my own life,” she said, and she broke down, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Her advice to President Trump and his aides: “You don’t understand until you’ve been in someone’s shoes. You’ve got to talk to these women.”

Linsley Myers, a 23-year-old community college student in Trump-loving West Virginia, echoed that sentiment. Her message to Trump: “Why attack women?”

Why, indeed.

As I documented in February 2017 in “Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged,” the GOP blockade of President Obama’s judicial nominees was near. Using filibusters, “blue slips” and other obstructionist tactics, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ensured only 43% of Obama’s picks to district and appellate courts made it through the confirmation process during his first 14 months in office, less than half the 87% rate Republican George W. Bush achieved over the same period. By the next year, Obama’s success rate improved to 58%, but still badly lagged his predecessors from either party going back to Jimmy Carter. All of this was during a time when the Democrats maintained a Senate majority. By 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had no choice but to go “nuclear” and change Senate rules to end the filibuster on non-Supreme Court nominations. Nevertheless, over Barack Obama’s last two years in office, only a paltry 28 of his selections made it to their seats on the bench. As McConnell explained to Hugh Hewitt in June 2015, those few successes came only in those cases where two home state GOP senators blessed the selection:

“So far, the only judges we’ve confirmed have been federal district judges that have been signed off on by Republican senators,” McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“And do you expect that that will continue to be the case for the balance of this session?” Hewitt asked.

“I think that’s highly likely, yeah,” McConnell responded.

And that was before the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the hostage-taking of Merrick Garland. As Leader McConnell boasted in August 2016:

"One of my proudest moments was when I told Obama, 'You will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.'"

Not that vacancy and not dozens of others. When Barack Obama left the White House on January 20, 2017, there were 103 vacant federal judgeships, nearly double the 54 George W. Bush left unfilled 8 years earlier.

Of course, with Republican Donald Trump in the White House, the McConnell rules quickly went the way of the dodo. To grease the skids for Trump’s choice Neil Gorsuch into the Garland seat, McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. As his direction, the GOP has ceased following the “blue slip” rule, last week confirming Daniel Bress to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals despite objections from home state Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein. As for the notion that no nominee will be confirmed to the Supreme Court in a presidential election year, Mitch McConnell in May made clear that only applies when a Democrat is in the White House.

In stark contrast to Barack Obama, Donald Trump has enjoyed watching a conveyor belt of judicial nominees rapidly deposited into seats at all levels of the federal judiciary. Screened by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo and shepherded through the Senate by McConnell, Trump’s picks are quickly altering the balance on the bench. On February 14, 2017, Josh Katz of the New York Times looked at the federal open seats and the share of “senior” judges before concluding, “Trump could fill more judicial vacancies than any first-term president in decades.” A year ago, the Washington Post explained that the wave of new Trump judges wasn’t a record per se, but certainly was for the nation’s circuit courts of appeal. By September 2018, Kevin Schaul and Kevin Uhrmacher of the Washington Post showed, Trump easily shattered the mark for filling the appellate courts, more than doubling the number of circuit court judges President Obama had elevated at the same point in his tenure.

Arthur D. Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies the federal judiciary, summed up why that development is so important for the future:

“The Supreme Court gets the bulk of the attention, but the circuit courts decide the bulk of the cases. Because the Supreme Court these days is taking so few cases, the law of the circuit is, on many, many issues, the final law for the people who live in that circuit.”

By May 2019, the Trump judges numbered over 100, including 40 on the circuit courts of appeal. By the story of Trump’s transformation of the bench is about much more than numbers. “As a group,” the Washington Post documented, “the new judges are indeed whiter, more male and more conservative than recent presidents’ nominees.” Make that “much more conservative.” As Vox reported in January:

President Donald Trump’s judicial appointees are more conservative, on average, than those nominated by former Republican presidents, according to a new study commissioned by the liberal activist group Demand Justice.

The study, which was conducted by progressive think tank Data for Progress, found that Trump judicial appointees were, on average, 20 percent more conservative than George W. Bush’s.

The result has been an expansion of the strong Republican slant of several circuit courts, while narrowing or eliminating the Democratic advantage on others. In May, Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution tallied up the impact of Trump’s “bulldozer efficiency” in re-leveling the appellate courts:

Only the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has flipped from a Democrat-appointed majority to a Republican one during Trump’s tenure, but “the Trump circuit appointments have strengthened Republican-appointee majorities on four courts that already had such majorities — those of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th circuits,” according to Wheeler.

Even the legendarily liberal 9th Circuit Court presiding over nine western states is experiencing an extremist makeover. In April 2018, only six of its 29 active seats had been chosen by Republican presidents. A year later that number jumped to 13. GOP activists are itching to take down Donald Trump’s judicial bogeyman. As Adam Feldman of Empirical SCOTUS blog told Fox News:

"As the 9th Circuit shifts to become more conservative and better parallels the Supreme Court's ideological baseline, I could only imagine fewer liberal 9th Circuit decisions and fewer overturned 9th Circuit decisions generally.”

And to be sure, that ideological baseline has already changed greatly under Donald Trump. In four more years under GOP control of the White House and the Senate, that baseline—and perhaps American government itself—would be unrecognizable to most citizens of the United States.

Consider just some of the Supreme Court rulings in recent years already shifting the legal ground under Americans’ feet. In the Shelby County and Northwest Austin Municipal Utility cases, Chief Justice John Roberts realized his 30-year goal of gutting the vital “pre-clearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Citizens United washed away critical limits on federal campaign contributions and ushered in a new era of “dark” money. In the 2012 NFIB v. Sebelius case, despite narrowly preserving Obamacare, John Roberts confounded most analysts by ruling that the Affordable Care Act’s individual insurance mandate could not be justified using under Congress’ Article I Section 8 “Commerce Clause” power. Just as ominous, in Hobby Lobby Justice Samuel Alito ruled the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) meant the federal government could not “substantially burden religious exercise” of a closely held private business. And by a 5-4 vote, Obergefell v. Hodges made marriage equality the law of the land, a result made possible by former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s understanding of the 14th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection clauses (and, arguably, the influence of his gay mentor).

Oh, and one other thing. Anthony Kennedy is gone. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are on the Supreme Court. And waiting in the wings on Donald Trump’s short list for the next opening on the Court are some of the most reactionary jurists in the United States today.

It is into this right-wing maelstrom that the huge field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates is bringing the most ambitious domestic policy agenda since FDR and the New Deal. Taken together, proposals like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, election reform, subsidized childcare, student debt forgiveness, free college, and more represent the greatest expansion of the role of government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. And like the conservative Supreme Courts of the Progressive Era and the early New Deal, a growing, retrograde right-wing judicial branch is poised to stop this new movement dead in its tracks.

Consider, for example, the various proposals to enable universal health care in the United States. As of this writing, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seems poised to strike down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act under the preposterous theory that (a) without a penalty or “tax,” the individual mandate is unconstitutional; and (b) the mandate is somehow not “severable” from the rest of the law, meaning all of Obamacare must be struck down. That this wasn’t the case in 2012, when the original Medicaid expansion was invalidated but nothing else, doesn’t seem to matter to that GOP-dominated bench.

Even if Obamacare survives this latest Republican attempt to extinguish it, would-be Democratic replacements will soon come under immediate challenge. Bernie Sander’s proposed to eliminate the private insurance industry will doubtless be met with claims that the Commerce Clause does not empower Congress to sentence entire classes of companies to extinction. Just as important, any plan to reduce health care spending through government price-setting for physicians, clinics, medical devices, hospitals, tests, pharmaceuticals will undoubtedly end up in court as well. And within the ranks of acceptable conservative jurisprudence are “zombie” legal theories which will be resurrected precisely for those purposes.

As Jeffrey Rosen, Brian Beutler and Ian Milhiser have explained, a growing “rehabilitationist” movement within conservative legal circle is seeking to undermine the entire legal framework that has made American government since the New Deal possible. Targeting what they charge is a baseless expansion of the meaning of the Commerce Clause, they claim to represent the “Constitution in Exile.” As Bush SCOTUS short-lister Janice Rogers Brown famously put it:

“The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document...1937...marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

What Rogers Brown is decrying is 75 years of Supreme Court precedent dating back to Roosevelt’s second term which, among other things, upheld much of the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, and the expanded executive branch. One of the key tools for doing so, they argue, is to reanimate the 1905 Lochner standard. Often mocked in the same sentence with Dred Scott and Plessy, Lochner was among the most sinister cases in American history. As Milhiser explained, Lochner struck down a New York law limiting the work day for bakers who routinely labored where "sewage pipes leaked raw contents" in rat-infested "hot dungeons heated by lit ovens," the Supreme Court invented a new fundamental right, the "right of contract":

Though New York enacted a law limiting bakers' hours to 10 a day and 60 per week, a 5-4 Court struck this provision down in Lochner, resting the decision on a so-called "right to contract" that it read into the Fourteenth Amendment. The "right to contract" was, essentially, a right to be bound by nearly any contract a worker agreed to, no matter how desperate the circumstances or how uneven the bargaining power that forced them to agree to such a deal. Thus, if New York bakers agreed to work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, the state had no authority to take that "right" away from them.

Other decisions relying on this "right to contract" used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down minimum wage laws and laws preventing union busting.

Judges like Texas State Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and groups like the Goldwater Institute and the Institute for Justice want to resurrect long-discarded notions of the freedom of contract, a restricted commerce clause and “substantive due process” under the 14th Amendment. If they succeed, Rosen argued back in 2005, reactionary federal courts “could change the shape of laws governing the environment, workplace health and safety, anti-discrimination, and civil rights, making it difficult for the federal government to address problems for which the public demands a national response.”

But the potential legal crisis facing progressive policymakers is even more dire than that. In last month’s Gundy decision, an 8-member Supreme Court (Brett Kavanaugh did not participate) led by Justice Elena Kagan upheld the applicability of a national sex offender registry to 500,000 people convicted before its passage. In her majority opinion, she ruled that the legislation in question did not violate the “nondelegation doctrine,” a principle that Congress may not shift too much legislative power to another branch of government. (That principle has only been used successfully twice, both in 1935 to strike down New Deal laws.) As Kagan explained, the law provided an “intelligible principle” that Congress wanted the registry made retroactive when the attorney general deemed it practicable. “That delegation,” she wrote, “easily passes constitutional muster.” Besides, she explained:

“[I]f SORNA’s delegation is unconstitutional, then most of Government is unconstitutional—dependent as Congress is on the need to give discretion to executive officials to implement its programs.”

Which is exactly the point the furious conservatives wanted to make. Though voting with the majority in this narrow 5-3 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito made it clear where he stood. As Mark Joseph Stern summed up Alito’s position:

Justice Samuel Alito provided the fifth vote to uphold the law, but did so begrudgingly. “If a majority of this Court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years,” Alito explained, “I would support that effort. But because a majority is not willing to do that, it would be freakish to single out the provision at issue here for special treatment.” In other words, Alito isn’t going to break 84 years of precedent to the benefit of a half-million sex offenders.

In his dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch went further still, condemned the “intelligible principle” rule as a “misadventure.” Exhuming the nondelegation doctrine buried with Cro-Magnon conservative court in 1935, Gorsuch scorning “a plurality of an eight-member Court” for ignoring “the Constitution’s demands.” Were Gorsuch’s view to prevail, his new standard would take a wrecking ball to much of the federal government:

Gorsuch’s fuzzy new rule would work a revolution in federal law. Hundreds of statutes task the executive branch with some broad goal, then let agencies fill in the details. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has wide latitude to identify and restrict pollutants, because Congress doesn’t want to legislate every new regulation. Instead, it gives the EPA certain guidelines, then leaves it to the agency’s scientists to determine what rules would best serve the public. The same goes for the Department of Labor, whose experts are empowered to identify and remedy workplace abuses.

There’s little doubt where Justice Brett Kavanaugh stands on these questions. As Pema Levy warned in “How Brett Kavanaugh Could Cripple the Next Democratic President” a year ago:

Two words: Chevron deference.

During Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, SCOTUSBlog detailed the essential role that the “Auer Deference” and “Chevron Deference” make in enabling executive branch agencies to make administrative rules according their interpretation of federal law. As Levy explained:

Developed in a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Chevron is a framework judges use in determining whether the rules and actions of executive branch agencies are consistent with laws that have been passed by Congress. The modern administrative state promulgates thousands of rules each year, as highly specialized regulators work to implement congressional legislation that is often imprecise or unclear. That makes Chevron a key precedent shaping everything from health care to technology to the environment…

Under Chevron, the courts defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute when the law’s language is ambiguous and the agency’s interpretation is considered reasonable. Chevron therefore allows agencies to implement rules and regulations, even when the statutes—often vague—do not obviously call for them, or when judges would have personally interpreted the law differently. Part of the logic is that agencies, which build up expertise on the complex issues they regulate, are better positioned than judges to create workable rules.

But Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and a large slice of the conservative legal system are no fans of Chevron. “The Chevron doctrine encourages agency aggressiveness on a large scale,” Kavanaugh scoffed, “Under the guise of ambiguity, agencies can stretch the meaning of statutes enacted by Congress to accommodate their preferred policy outcomes.”

When Steve Bannon talked about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” this is precisely what he had in mind.

Imagine turning back the legal clock by a century in the United States and then trying to implement, say, the Green New Deal. Whether the version is from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Jay Inslee, Elizabeth Warren or anyone else, success is virtually impossible without Democratic control of the courts.

And so it goes on issue after issue. For example, fighting back against the massive GOP voter suppression machine is an obvious priority for any Democratic president. But the Roberts’ Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, blessed voter ID laws in states like Indiana, and declared in the recent Rucho and Lamone decision that the courts have no role in addressing even the most grotesque partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts. Dismantling the panoply of GOP disenfranchisement efforts is going to require Democratic victories at the ballot box and in courtrooms nationwide. Purges of voter rolls, limits on voting days and hours, limiting polling place locations, trying new voter identification schemes, attempting 21st century poll taxes, and even roadblocks to registration will all enjoy protection from Republican judges. Attempts to define congressional districts by the number of American citizens or even voting age population may be postponed, but they will be back.

Women’s reproductive rights, already in dire jeopardy, cannot withstand the assault of four more years of right-wing jurists. The head-on challenges to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are coming. Republican judges are making a joke of the “undue burden” standard for protecting abortion access. Victories at the Supreme Court for so-called Pregnancy Resource Centers mean that anti-abortion forces may lie to women. At the same time, unless First Amendment triumphs come soon for doctors and other abortion providers, states will be able to mandate that physicians must lie to women about mythical abortion-cancer links, made-up “abortion regret syndrome,” and even the dangerous fiction of “abortion reversal.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration and states like Georgia seeking to enshrine a “Fetal Fourteenth Amendment” in law. That is, zygotes, embryos, and fetuses enjoy due process of law and equal protection of the law; actual, living American women apparently do not.

And certainly, neither will LGBTQ Americans, either, if a conservative federal judiciary takes the day. An expanded Republican SCOTUS majority would likely overturn Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges opinion on marriage equality. The Trump administration has made clear it will support states in rejecting workplace protections for gay Americans, limit their ability to adopt children and enjoy the same civil rights as straight Americans. The United States will soon be deciding whether or not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to LGBTQ Americans. There is little doubt where conservatives will come down on those cases.

So, whether you back Bernie or Beto, plan to vote for Booker or Biden, believe Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that or think Mayor Pete has the answer, I ask you to think first about the courts. Think about the contributions of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two justices Barack Obama put on the Supreme Court. (That would be the same Barack Obama some now call an “establishment” or “corporate” Democrat.) I’m confident that any of the horde of Democratic White House hopefuls will make judicial nominations we can be proud of, and not just live with. To those of my friends and political allies now telling me they “won’t be told who to vote for” or they will stay home in November 2020 if their candidate doesn’t get the nomination or isn’t “treated fairly,” I’ll just say this.

We’ve seen that movie before, and we know how it ends. As Politico recently described Donald Trump’s plan to whip up his base in 2020 by focusing on his judicial picks:

Trump’s team believes that stacking the judicial system with conservative judges galvanizes the base, demonstrates his ability to follow through on a 2016 campaign promise and will help win over crucial 2020 states like Colorado, Florida and North Carolina. And Trump himself is convinced that judicial appointments are central to both his legacy and policy agenda, as he has pushed for young judges who can serve for decades, according to former administration aides, close White House advisers and those familiar with the administration’s judicial plans.

In 2016, exit polls showed that a fifth of all voters claimed that the Supreme Court was their single-most important issue. Donald Trump easily beat Hillary Clinton by 56 to 41 percent. Republican voters got what they wanted; arguably it’s the only thing they’ve gotten from Donald Trump. The Democratic Party—and the United States of America, for that matter—can’t let that happen again in 2020.

With her endorsement of Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore and public statements denouncing potential Democratic candidates for president in 2020, Conway has crossed the line repeatedly. Henry Kerner of the Office of Special Counsel told Congress that, before Conway, the OSC had "never issued two reports on the same person" in the 30 years it has been independent. And while the OSC had found two minor violations by different officials during the Obama administration, “The Office of Special Counsel found Conway guilty of 11 Hatch Act violations in its recent report, and two violations in a 2018 report.” It is with good reason that Kerner in his report recommended that Conway be removed from her post.

But for Conway and her Republican defenders, these gross Hatch Act abuses were nothing more than an ill-timed fart. Conway protested that OSC staff “want to chill free speech because they don’t know how to beat him [Trump] at the ballot box.” During a hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Republican Rep. Mark Meadows whined, “We have one standard for Kellyanne Conway and another standard for everyone else.” His colleague Jim Jordan regurgitated the same talking point, proclaiming, “Ms. Conway’s being targeted not just because she’s a conservative, not just because she’s in the Trump administration, but she’s being targeted because she’s good at what she does.” As Smith summed it up:

After the Office of Special Counsel recommended that White House adviser Kellyanne Conway be removed from her position for repeated violations of the Hatch Act, President Trump told the “Fox & Friends” television program, “I’m not going to fire her,” adding, “I think you’re entitled to free speech in this country.”

Conway had already signaled her lack of concern for the Hatch Act, which requires federal employees to refrain from using their public positions to engage in political activity. Responding last month to reporter questions about her track record of ignoring the act, Conway replied: “Blah, blah, blah. … Let me know when the trial starts.”

Conway’s trial hasn’t started yet, but a subpoena has been issued for her to appear before Chairman Elijah Cummings’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Meanwhile, right-wing attempts to paint the OSC’s Kerner as someone with a vendetta seem doomed to fail. After all, Kerner was a staffer for the same committee during the chairmanships of Republican hatchet men Jason Chaffetz and Darrell Issa. And, as it turns out, Issa was one of the GOP’s most aggressive defenders of the party’s own Hatch Act transgressors.

As you may recall, the violations of the Hatch Act came fast and furious during the administration of President George W. Bush. In 2011, the Office of Special Counsel released a devastating 118-page report that found that the Bush White House“engaged in widespread violations of a federal law which limits partisan political activity by government employees during the 2006 midterm elections” and concluded that “federal taxpayers footed the bill for improper activities that were intended to advance Republican political candidates.” Among the leading rulebreakers was President Bush's pick to head the General Services Administration. And when Lurita Doan first came under withering bipartisan criticism in early 2007 for using her office to promote Republican congressional candidates and awarding no-bid contracts to her friends, it was Darrell Issa who circled the wagons around her.

As Political Correction documented, time and again Issa came to Doan's defense, even going so far as to list her charitable contributions as proof of her virtue. That was hard to do with a straight face, given Doan's pathetic performance in front of his committee, then headed by Democrat Henry Waxman. As NPR detailed in March 2007:

In her testimony, Doan preferred to emphasize her entrepreneurial efforts. But Democrats were interested in other things: a contract that she tried to award to an old friend; negotiations with Sun Microsystems, in which she became involved; and, more especially, the briefing. In January, Scott Jennings -- the top aide to White House political adviser Karl Rove -- talked to GSA political appointees about the 2006 election results and the Republican goals for 2008.In one exchange, the lead-off questioner for committee Democrats, Iowa freshman Rep. Bruce Braley, a former trial lawyer, asked Doan, "Would you characterize his presentation as a purely factual presentation about the results of the 2006 election?"

Doan replied, "I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but I can say I honestly don't have a recollection of the presentation at all."

The slides showing the GOP's top 20 target seats for the 2008 election were made public.

Nevertheless, Darrell Issa, the same man who accused Valerie Plame of perjury, attacked the families of murdered Blackwater employees and accused Congressman Joe Sestak of Hatch Act violations, portrayed Doan as a victim during that March 2007 Oversight Committee hearing. NPR reported:

Republicans stuck up for Doan. Darrell Issa of California noted that she has been running GSA for just eight months: "In your eight months, I think you've probably found what I found in my nearly seven years now: That this is a bureaucracy that will resist you at every point, isn't it?"Doan's reply: "You're absolutely right."

Doan ultimately resigned from the GSA on May 1, 2008, after "the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog agency, conducted its own probe of those claims and concluded that she made the remarks and violated the Hatch Act, which generally prohibits employees of federal agencies from using their positions for political purposes."

For her part, the loyal Bushie Lurita Doan repaid the favor. In October 2008, Doan attacked the man Issa would eventually replace: "Most Americans have grown familiar with your lack of candor, misleading statements, and bitter partisan machinations, and certainly, your report serves as yet another example of the same ol' same ol' from Henry Waxman." And in January 2011, Doan reemerged in the pages of Townhall to praise "Issa's Early Effect":

Congressman Darrell Issa's chairmanship of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has already had an effect on Democrats in the Obama Administration, even before Issa has hosted a congressional oversight hearing. The announcement of the resignation of Josh Sharfstein, the Deputy Commissioner at Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is likely just the first of many such resignations that will occur as Executive agency leaders in the Obama Administration realize that their misguided policies can't stand up to public scrutiny...Expect an exodus of other political appointees from other federal agencies as soon as public scrutiny reveals more Obama Administration abuses of public trust. Many Democrats have depended on operating in the dark because they know their policies are indefensible. Liberal Dems who know that their policies cannot be defended are going to leave before Issa's hawk's eye turns on their activities.

As it turned out, “Hawkeye” Issa’s most memorable charge against Obama was a bogus one. Obama, Issa baselessly proclaimed in October 2010, “has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”

Before returning to the man who has doubtless been truly the most corrupt president in modern times, it’s worth looking at another high-profile scandal in which Republicans tried their best to ignore—or excuse—serious Hatch Act violations by their party. The revelations surrounding the Bush administration’s purge of U.S. prosecutors and politically motivated hiring of career civil servants provide a damning case study.

In May 2007, Republican California Congressman Dan Lundgren was only too happy to offer the criminalization-of-politics line in defense of another loyal Bushie, White House liaison Monica Goodling, and her boss, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Just moments after acknowledging Goodling's admission of violating civil service rules and Hatch Act prohibitions ("she did admit that she made mistakes in that regard"), Lundgren returned to the script, saying, “Let me just say this -- and I think it's an important point -- there is too much of a tendency in this environment to try and criminalize political disputes. That's been the effort here. They have found no basis for criminality, so the suggestion is now a vote of no confidence. Who knows what is next?”

That was a surprising statement for him to make, given that Goodling, during her May 23, 2007 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, admitted that she had discriminated against job applicants who weren't Republicans or conservative loyalists. Admitting that she illicitly screened out civil service job applicants who happened to be Democrats, Goodling clarified for all why she sought immunity from the committee in the first place: "I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions, and I regret those mistakes."

But during his questioning, then-Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence ignored Goodling's confession to make a different point about the Bush administration's purge of U.S. attorneys then under investigation.

"I'm listening very intently. I'm studying this case, and I want to explore this issue of illegal behavior with you. Because it seems to me, so much of this, and even something of what we've heard today in this otherwise cordial hearing, is about the criminalization of politics. In a very real sense, it seems to be about the attempted criminalization of things that are vital to our constitutional system of government, namely the taking into consideration of politics in the appointment of political officials within the government." [Emphasis mine.]

"I am troubled," Pence concluded, "about the fact that we seem to be moving ever further down the road of the criminalization of politics."

As it turned out, the DOJ's own inspector general later rejected that criminalization-of-politics defense. (As the AP reported in May 2008, "A new Justice Department report concludes that politics illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration judges, and largely lays the blame on top aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.") Then, on July 28, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Office of the Inspector General jointly issued a report titled An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and Other Staff in the Office of the Attorney General. Its conclusion? Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and other Bush Justice Department political appointees had in fact committed crimes under the Hatch Act and other civil service rules.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump and Mike Pence. As The Washington Postreported on November 30, 2018, six White House staffers were issued warnings about their Hatch Act violations:

The White House officials who were reprimanded were principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah; deputy director of communications Jessica Ditto; Madeleine Westerhout, executive assistant to the president; Helen Aguirre Ferré, former director of media affairs; Alyssa Farah, press secretary for Vice President Pence; and Jacob Wood, deputy communications director for the Office of Management and Budget.

As the Post also noted:

The reprimands were the latest cases in which high-profile Trump administration officials have been found in violation of the Hatch Act.

Others sanctioned by the Office of Special Counsel for political messages include White House adviser Kellyanne Conway; Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswoman; Dan Scavino, former White House social media director; and Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

After Donald Trump’s Fourth of July Onanism on the Potomac, the only open question is how many more members of his team will join the list of those who broke the 1939 law also known as an “Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” As for Kellyanne Conway, Jason Scott Smith warned:

Laws, however, are only empty words if they are not upheld and faithfully executed by politically elected leaders and appointed officials. As Henry Kerner, whom Trump appointed to run the Office of Special Counsel, declared in his report, Conway’s “defiant attitude is inimical to the law, and her continued pattern of misconduct is unacceptable.” Conway’s actions, he concluded, “erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.” If Trump fails to dismiss Conway, he, too, will have eroded this crucial pillar of our system.

“Yet,” Jennifer Rubin laments, “Republicans defend this ethical cesspool.” And they’ll doubtless continue to do so by decrying “the criminalization of politics,” even as the GOP’s best and brightest politicize crime.

Consider the bill recently signed into law by Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey. The text of the legislation explicitly compares abortion to slavery—and more. The law, which makes abortion and attempted abortion felonies in the state of Alabama while offering no exceptions for cases of rape or incest, declares:

In the United States Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural law that "all men are created equal" was articulated. The self-evident truth found in natural law, that all human beings are equal from creation, was at least one of the bases for the anti-slavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the American civil rights movement. If those movements had not been able to appeal to the truth of universal human equality, they could not have been successful.

Further along in the text of Alabama HB 314, the law provides a comparative “body count “of abortions freely chosen by women in the United States with the historical bloodbaths of past “crimes against humanity.”

By comparison, more than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin's gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.

During the debate over new Kentucky anti-abortion bills in March, the Lexington Courier-Journal reported, “supporters of the bills continued to invoke references to the Holocaust and slavery, with several lawmakers and witnesses defending them as appropriate. Rep. Nancy Tate, a Meade County Republican and a sponsor of House Bill 5, agreed, “Absolutely, when taken in the proper context.” That context?

Tate, in an interview, said it's fair to compare abortion to slavery because like abortion, slavery once was legal in the United States. Abortion opponents are hopeful that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision of 1973 that legalized abortion, eventually will be reversed.

Two weeks ago, Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, mother of eight and wife of Wisconsin GOP Rep. Sean Duffy, announced that banning abortion was a “fundamental human rights issue.”

"This issue is as fundamental as an issue was back in the middle of the 1800s called slavery," she said on "The Story," hosted by fill-in anchor Ed Henry. "This is an issue about who gets to decide who is human enough so they can do whatever they want with that person — or the person they're saying is not a person.”

In Alabama, Republicans have announced that it is they who will decide who is or is not a person. Among their law’s definition is this one:

(7) UNBORN CHILD, CHILD or PERSON. A human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.

As we’ll see below, these GOP legislators are literally running afoul of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which begins by stating that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

As Perry Bacon Jr. recently detailed for FiveThirtyEight, several factors are fueling this new wave of absolutist abortion restrictions in red states. The elevation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the horde of new conservative judges across the federal bench and the zero risk of backlash in GOP-dominated states have empowered Republican legislatures and state houses to challenge Roe head on:

[A]bortion opponents have stepped up their efforts in 2019, according to advocates on both sides of the issue. Alabama this week enacted a law that bans all abortions except to save a woman’s life. There would be no exceptions for pregnancies caused by incest or rape, and conducting an abortion could result in a prison sentence of up to 99 years. Four other states — Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio — have adopted laws that ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Nevertheless, many of the leading lights have been making the despicable comparison of abortion to slavery for years. It’s no mystery as to why. These conservative ideologues don’t merely want to create a simple, visceral connection in Americans’ minds between abortion and the nation’s original sin. They specifically hope to use their demagoguery of the issue to peel away African-American voters from the Democratic Party. And by equating abortion and slavery, the Party of Lincoln seeks to portray the abolition of abortion as a historical inevitability morally required nationwide. (For more on that cynicism in action, just see the recently tabled Texas House Bill 896, also known as “The Abolition of Abortion Act. Among other things, it would have subjected Texas women obtaining abortions to the death penalty.)

Take, for example, former brain surgeon and failed GOP White House hopeful turned Trump HUD Secretary Ben Carson. In the fall of 2015, Carson explained to NBC’s Meet the Press why he wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion prohibited:

"Think about this. During slavery -- and I know that's one of those words you're not supposed to say, but I'm saying it -- during slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave. Anything that they chose to do. And, you know, what if the abolitionist had said, you know, 'I don't believe in slavery. I think it's wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do?' Where would we be?"

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) certainly agreed. “Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done,” Gohmert declared, before adding that the nation’s growing national debt is similarly “pretty immoral.” That pitbull with lipstick Sarah Palin concurred. “When that money comes due—and this isn't racist, but it'll be like slavery when that note is due,” she warned. “We are going to beholden to the foreign master." And abortion, Palin told Bill O’Reilly in 2015, is being used by Planned Parenthood to target the slaves’ descendants for ethnic cleansing. Claiming that “Planned Parenthood's foundation is based on racism,” the living gateway drug to Donald Trump argued that “80% of Planned Parenthood shops [are] set up in minority neighborhoods” because “they're in there trying to convince minority women that they're incapable of giving a child life.”

Of course, by 2015 "abortion is slavery" had become a staple Republican soundbite. Former Republican Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp declared in 2012 that Planned Parenthood is "a racist organization and it continues to target minorities for abortion destruction." Pro-choice Americans, Ohio legislator Matt Huffman explained, are no different than slave owners. And while some Southern Republicans compared healthcare reform to the "Great War of Yankee Aggression," former Louisiana Republican Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao ultimately opposed it over abortion coverage he wrongly claimed was provided by the Affordable Care Act:

"For me abortion is such a moral evil, at a par with slavery, that I cannot in good conscience support a bill that seeks to expand it."

Arizona Rep. Trent Franks was also among the Republican luminaries to proclaim that a woman's control over her own body is no different than a master over a slave's. Franks, who left Congress in 2017, suggested that the private decisions women make about their reproductive choices are no different than 4 million black slaves kept in bondage by 5 million Southern whites, one-third of whom were slaveholders. In fact, Franks argued in 2010, for African Americans it's even worse today:

"In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say 'How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.' And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery."

Anti-abortion groups have been running with that message for years. In 2010, Georgia Right to Life rented billboards to declare, "Black children are an endangered species." In 2011, the conservative Radiance Foundation similarly used billboards to mark Juneteenth which read, "The 13th Amendment Freed Us. Abortion Enslaves Us." That same year, billboards in New York and other cities announced:

"The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the womb."

But the best-known of all the Republican “abortion equals slavery” propagandists is former Arkansas Governor and failed GOP presidential wannabe turned Fox News fixture Mike Huckabee. In July 2012, the Texas Tribune reported, "Huckabee compared abortion to slavery, asking if society could reject slavery and 'come to the conclusion that one person can take the life of another person.'" As the Huffington Post recounted the next year:

"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong."

Two years later, he told an anti-choice group that he believed the issue of abortion was resolved "150 years ago when the issue of slavery was finally settled in this country, and we decided that it no longer was a political issue, it wasn't an issue of geography, it was an issue of morality." In 2011, he again argued against abortion rights being determined at the state level, saying that "it was wrong to own a slave in Mississippi and Michigan."

It's more than a little ironic that the Baptist minister Mike Huckabee would present himself as some sort of 21st century abolitionist and declare "the Supreme Court was wrong when it denied Dred Scott his rights and said, 'blacks are inferior human beings.'" After all, Huckabee's Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 on that very claim. Sixteen years before the shots fired on Fort Sumpter, the Southern Baptists explained their separation from the American Baptist church this way:

An evil hour has arrived...In December last, the acting Board of Convention, at Boston, adopted a new qualification for missionaries, a new rule viz, that: "If anyone who shall offer himself for a missionary, having slaves, should insist on retaining them as his property, they could not appoint him." "One thing is certain," they continue, "we could never be a party to any arrangement which applies approbation of slavery."

If Huckabee’s Baptists sided with the slave owners, they were not alone among the Christian denominations to face schism over the issue. The cracks that began between Old School and New School Presbyterians in 1837 broke wide open in 1857. One leader predicted, “The Potomac will be dyed with blood.” And in 1844, the Methodist Church, the largest organization in the country, split in two over the rising abolitionist fervor among its northern members. North Carolina’s delegates to the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church supported the resolution of separation:

"We believe an immediate division of the Methodist Episcopal Church is indispensable to the peace, prosperity, and honor of the Southern portion thereof, if not essential to her continued existence we regard the officious, and unwarranted interference of the Northern portion of the Church with the subject of slavery alone, a sufficient cause for a division of our Church."

To put it another way, many of the faith-based communities now demanding the restriction of women’s reproductive rights insisted on perpetual bondage for millions of Americans in the 19th century. As for Mike Huckabee, his Southern Baptist Convention only issued an apology for choosing moral depravity over human freedom in 1995.

Back in 2013, Imani Gandy made a simple but compelling request in her piece, “Abortion Is Not Like Slavery, So Stop Comparing the Two.” Writing in Rewire News, Gandy declared, “Abortion is not slavery, nor is it comparable to slavery.” While “abortion, quite simply, allows women the freedom to live full and free lives and to retain control over their bodies,” slavery forcibly guaranteed the opposite.

Slavery, on the other hand, was the centuries-long system under which Black men and women were treated not as human beings, with attendant freedom and liberty, but as chattel—human property owned by other humans, stripped of their freedom and cruelly forced to work under inhumane conditions. During slavery, Black human beings were murdered, raped, and treated like animals simply for the economic benefit of white aristocracy and to further white supremacy.

Gandy concluded with a warning about America’s grim past and the potential for a shameful future:

If abortion is like slavery—indeed, if abortion is the most divisive issue since slavery—then what of the women who suffered under slavery? What of the women who performed self-abortions in order to resist slavery? They cease to exist.

But they did exist. And even the most ardent hagiographers of the Dixie aristocracy recognized their degradation. Mary Chesnut, that self-proclaimed “objective” diarist of the Confederacy, acknowledged that those women literally did not own their bodies.

“God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity. ... Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children - and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.''

Mrs. Chesnut also shared a story from her husband, who “saw a poor negro woman in the last stages of pregnancy, sitting by the roadside in bitter wailing, her eyes smashed up, and frightfully punished in the face.” When she learned that the “brute” responsible for this beating was “some woman we did not know,” a relieved Mrs. Chesnut sighed, “thank Heaven.”

But we shouldn’t rely on the beneficiaries of the slave power for their accounts. Former slaves could and did speak for themselves. And they experienced the brutality, the depravity, the family separation and sheer inhumanity of chattel slavery firsthand.

Consider Harriet Tubman, the woman who until recently was set to become the new face of the American twenty-dollar bill. The girl who “grew up as a neglected weed—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it,” would become “the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” And Harriet Tubman’s story was one shared by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women across the South:

“I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang - one of them left two children. We were always uneasy.”

While Tubman had concluded, “there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other,” the despair of family destruction drove some slaves to the latter. Former slave William Wells Brown told the story of a woman on a steamboat full of slaves on the Mississippi River. After her husband and children were all sold to different buyers, she chose death:

“With all our care, we lost one woman who had been taken from her husband and children, and having no desire to live without them, in the agony of her soul jumped overboard and drowned herself.”

From 1936 to 1938, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) deployed workers throughout the South to collect the oral histories of former slaves. Among the 2,000 interviews they conducted was the testimony of Mingo White. “When I was about 4 or 5 years old, I was loaded in a wagon with a lot more people in it,” he recounted, “Where I was bound I don’t know.” Laura Clark of Livingston, Alabama had been sold off in North Carolina when she was six or seven years old.

“I recollect Mammy said to old Julie, ‘Take care my baby child (that was me), and if I never see her no more raise her for God.’ Then she fell off the wagon where us was all sitting and roll over on the ground just a-crying…I didn’t have sense enough for to know what ailed Mammy, but I know now and I never seed her no more in this life.”

Delia Garlic of Montgomery recalled numerous episodes of abuse. When the master’s baby Delia was holding began to cry, his daughter “picked up a hot iron and run it all down my arm and hand. It took off the flesh when she done it.” Later, the master’s second wife “picked up a stick of stovewood and flails it against my head. I didn’t know nothing more ‘till I come to, lyin’ on the floor.”

After Nat Turner’s unsuccessful slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, Alabama and other Southern states made it a crime for anyone to teach a slave how to read. “The white folks didn’t allow us to even look at a book,” Mary Ella Grandberry remembered. “They would scold and sometimes whip us if they caught us with our heads in a book.” William Henry Towns put it this way:

“If we so much as spoke of learning to read and write we was scolded like the devil. If we was caught looking in a book we was treated the same as if we had killed somebody.”

Frederick Douglass explained why. “Once you learn to read you will be forever free.”

“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.”

It's no wonder Douglass confronted his fellow countrymen by asking, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

If, as Douglass proclaimed, “knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave,” it is because he or she is made more deeply aware of the alternatives to bondage, to the possibilities of choice, to the potential for sovereignty over one’s own mind and body. Which is another painfully obvious reason why the slavery to abortion analogy, if it is to be used at all, should be reversed.

Why else would the Trump Department of Health and Human Services have issued its Title X gag rule which would have barred federally funded family planning programs for lower-income Americans from receiving the money if they say or do anything to advise or assist a patient about securing an abortion? Why do the Trump administration and GOP-governed states allow so-called “pregnancy crisis centers” to lie to American women about what services they provide and the supposed “risks” of abortion? Why are Republican-dominated states across the country requiring doctors to commit medical malpractice by deceiving their patients about mythical “abortion regret,” “abortion reversal,” and baseless claims about links to breast cancer? As Alabama abortion provider Dr. Willie Parker explained to a patient seeking the procedure:

“I’m required by law to tell you that by having an abortion, you can increase your risk of breast cancer. There’s no scientific evidence to support that.”

The Republican Party that loudly proclaims its desire to “protect the doctor-patient relationship” simply doesn’t believe what it says. Not when the patient is a woman and her physician provides abortions. The truth, the GOP worries, shall set you free.

The end of the Civil War brought emancipation for America’s four million slaves. The 13th Amendment of 1865 proclaimed, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” But freedom alone was not sufficient to achieve the aims secured by the Union force of arms. The freed men, women, and children needed their citizenship codified and enshrined for all time. That is the project, still unfinished, of the 14th Amendment of 1868. As Section 1 explains:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Over 150 years later, tens of millions of African Americans, LGBTQ American, Americans of any stripe, are still fighting for the realization of that promise. They will continue, as Frederick Douglass urged, to “agitate, agitate, agitate.”

Meanwhile, four million children are born in the United States each year. Roughly one million women choose to have abortions annually. And with rates estimated at 15 to 20 percent by the Guttmacher Institute and others, another 1 million-plus miscarriages occur yearly, most before the women involved even knew they were pregnant. Nevertheless, the reddest of red states like Alabama have ignored the plain text and plainer meaning of the 14th amendment by proclaiming that an “unborn” child at “any stage of development” is a “person.” Under Georgia’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” law, such a “person” qualifies as a resident for population purposes and as a tax deduction for its mother. At the federal level, the Trump administration has unilaterally declared what should be called the “Fetal 14th Amendment.” (The 2016 GOP Platform rejected this idea and instead called for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution.) In a nutshell, fetuses are to enjoy the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection of the law, guarantees denied to millions of actual, living American women.

Left unchallenged and unblocked, these laws promise a dark, dystopian future for American women’s health care. The Georgia law, for example, promises conspiracy charges for anyone assisting a woman in obtaining an abortion out of state. If this sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened the federal mandate for arresting and returning escaped slaves to their owners in the South. Designed to combat Northern vigilance committees and personal liberty laws aimed at protecting the runaways, the act led to “shocking confrontations” as anti-slavery groups intervened to protect escapees or liberate those in custody. The result, as the New York Times described it earlier this year:

The uproar of these pitched battles...helped turn Northern moderates into abolitionists and temperate Southerners into fire-eaters; at its height in 1854, it prompted President Franklin Pierce to order 1,500 federal troops to escort a single fugitive in Boston named Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia.

Enforcing the fugitive slave law put the federal government emphatically on the side of slavery over freedom, which hastened the collapse of the national political system, the rise of the antislavery Republican Party and the coming of the war.

Of course, abortion isn’t slavery. The United States is not geographically riven and headed toward a second civil war. To suggest the emergence of a “New Underground Railroad” is indeed “tone deaf and inappropriate.” But some of the same social, cultural, and religious forces that backed slavery over freedom and unconditional bondage over personal autonomy are now working overtime to constrict the choices and bodily sovereignty of American women. It’s hard not to conjure up the likes of Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, and their ilk when reading Harriet Tubman’s prayer:

“As I lay so sick on my bed, from Christmas till March, I was always praying for poor ole master. 'Pears like I didn't do nothing but pray for ole master. 'Oh, Lord, convert ole master;' 'Oh, dear Lord, change dat man's heart, and make him a Christian.'”

Until that change of hearts comes, we know what to do. Agitate, agitate, agitate.

As Yale Law School professor Harold Koh told Anderson Cooper on CNN on April 16:

Well, you know, Anderson, athletes and dancers have signature moves and so do lawyers. And Bill Barr is sort of a four-step process. First, refuse and deny, delay. Second, summarize. Third, slant. And four, omit.

So, he was there asked by congressional committee for the opinion. He refused and delayed. Second, when asked to give something, he summarized. Third, when he offered the conclusions, he slanted it toward his client. And then when the opinion was released three years later, it turned out he omitted some of the most unfavorable conclusions to his client.

The full memo of the Office of Legal Counsel was only declassified and released in 1993 after Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in the presidential election the previous November. As Goodman lamented, “The true content of the opinion, given what Barr told the American people and testified before Congress, remains much to the discredit of the Attorney General.” But if you thought the smoke screen surrounding that GOP memo about “renditioning” foreign suspects to the United States was a one-off, you’d be wrong. As we’ll see below, when the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama in April 2009 released a set of secret Bush administration memos that authorized the torture of terrorism detainees, Republicans and their water carriers accused Obama of “criminalizing conservatism.”

As it turns out, the “criminalization of politics” talking point was first deployed by the GOP in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal, which exploded in 1986. It was the late President George H.W. Bush who popularized the term when he announced his Christmas Day 1992 pardons of several Iran-Contra figures. Those pardons, it turned out, had been manufactured by none other than Attorney General William Barr.

As the once and future attorney general explained his rationale almost a decade later on April 5, 2001:

I asked some of my staff to look into the indictment that was brought, and also some of the other people I felt had been unjustly treated and whether they felt that they would have been treated this way under standard Department guidelines. I don’t remember going through the pardon office, but I did ask some of the seasoned professionals around the Department about this, asked them to look into it. Based on those discussions, I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others…

The big ones obviously were the Iran Contra ones. I certainly did not oppose any of them. I favored the broadest— There were some people arguing just for Weinberger, and I said, No, in for a penny, in for a pound. Elliot Abrams was one I felt had been very unjustly treated.

Among other things, Elliott Abrams would go on to become President Donald Trump’s point man on engineering regime change in Venezuela.

Of course, “Cover-Up General” William Barr, then as now, was only doing the bidding of the president of the United States. In announcing his pardons for two Reagan administration officials awaiting trial (Caspar Weinberger and Duane Clarridge) and four others already convicted (Clair George, Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and Alan Fiers), Bush 41 tried to convert criminal prosecutions into mere partisan politics. As the New York Times reported at the time:

Mr. Bush said today that the Walsh prosecution reflected 'a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.'

He added: 'These differences should have been addressed in the political arena without the Damocles sword of criminality hanging over the heads of some of the combatants. The proper target is the President, not his subordinates; the proper forum is the voting booth, not the courtroom.' [Emphasis mine.]

Among others, Maine Democratic Sen. George Mitchell torched Bush’s defense of the pardons. “It is not as the president stated today a matter of criminalizing policy differences,” Mitchell charged. “If members of the executive branch lie to the Congress, obstruct justice and otherwise break the law, how can policy differences be fairly and legally resolved in a democracy?”

If this language sounds nauseatingly familiar and oddly current, it should. After all, right-wing water carriers, including radio host Mark Levin and Andrew McCarthy of the National Review both decried special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation as the “criminalization of politics.” Last December, ardent Trump defender Alan Dershowitz even published a book titled Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy. Echoing Bush’s 1992 talking points, he argued in a New York Times op-ed, “When Politics is Criminalized,” that:

[E]lastic criminal laws should not be stretched to cover Mr. Trump’s exercise of his constitutionally authorized power. When the president asked the director of the F.B.I. to drop its investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, or fired James Comey from the F.B.I., or provided classified information to the Russians, he was acting within his constitutional powers. Those actions may deserve opprobrium, but they should not be deemed criminal. The proper place to litigate the wisdom of such actions should be at the ballot box, not in the jury box.

Not be deemed criminal, that is, even if the president and members of his administration lied about them. Just as they did in Iran-Contra.

Iran-Contra, as you'll recall, almost laid waste to the Reagan presidency. Desperate to free U.S. hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon, President Reagan provided weapons Tehran badly needed in its long war with Saddam Hussein (who, of course, was backed by the United States). In a clumsy and illegal attempt to skirt U.S. law, the proceeds of those sales were then funneled to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. As the New York Times reported, Reagan's fiasco started with an emissary bearing gifts from the Gipper himself:

A retired Central Intelligence Agency official has confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee that on the secret mission to Teheran last May, Robert C. McFarlane and his party carried a Bible with a handwritten verse from President Reagan for Iranian leaders.

According to a person who has read the committee's draft report, the retired C.I.A. official, George W. Cave, an Iran expert who was part of the mission, said the group had 10 falsified passports, believed to be Irish, and a key-shaped cake to symbolize the anticipated ''opening'' to Iran.

As his diaries published in 2005 show, Reagan was under no illusions about the illegality of the scheme—or that it constituted anything other than a swap of arms for hostages. On Dec. 5, 1985, Reagan wrote in his diary:

N.S.C. briefing--probably Bud's last. Subject was our undercover effort to free our 5 hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. It is a complex undertaking with only a few of us in on it. I won't even write in the diary what we're up to.

Nevertheless, just two days later, Reagan wrote about that very topic. On Dec. 7, Reagan noted this in his diary:

Day opened with "Rex" (our new dog) on our bed. I then had a meeting with Don R., Cap W. and Bud M., John P., Geo. Schultz and Mahan of C.I.A. This had to do with the complex plan which could return our 5 hostages & help some officials in Iran who want to turn that country from its present course & on to a better relationship with us. It calls for Israel selling some weapons to Iran. As they are delivered in installments by air our hostages will be released. The weapons will go to the moderate leaders in the army who are essential if there is to be a change to a more stable govt. We then sell Israel replacements for the delivered weapons. None of this is a gift--the Iranians pay cash for the weapons--so does Israel.George S. Cap and Don are opposed--Cong. has imposed a law that we can't sell Iran weapons or sell any other country weapons for resale to Iran. Geo. also thinks this violates our policy of not paying off terrorists. I claim the weapons are for those who want to change the govt of Iran & no ransom is being pd. for the hostages. No direct sale would be made by us to Iran but we would be replacing the weapons sold by Israel.

In case there was any doubt that Ronald Reagan blessed the delivery of hundreds of advanced anti-tank weapons to Tehran, the president himself removed it with his Jan. 17, 1986, diary entry, which stated, "I agreed to sell TOWs to Iran."

Of course, that's not what Reagan told the nation—at least not at first. On Nov. 13, 1986, just as revelations about the weapons shipments to Tehran began to surface, Reagan took to the airwaves to address the American people—and lie to their faces:

The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false. The United States has not made concessions to those who hold our people captive in Lebanon. And we will not. The United States has not swapped boatloads or planeloads of American weapons for the return of American hostages. And we will not...To summarize: Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands. That no concessions policy remains in force, in spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments. We did not -- repeat -- did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.

But less than six months later, the Gipper was forced to rewrite his historical revisionism. As he told the American people in a nationally televised address on March 4, 1987:

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.

Of course, the pathetic saga didn't end there. Then Lt. Colonel and now Fox News commentator Oliver North saw his Iran-Contra conviction overturned by an appellate court led by faithful Republican partisan and later Iraq WMD commissioner Laurence Silberman. And in December 1992, outgoing President George H.W. Bush offered Christmas pardons to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra scandal figures. Among them were John Poindexter and Elliott Abrams, men who eight years later reprised their roles in the administration of George W. Bush. As it turns out, Abrams—one of the people who brought you the Iraq War—also served as an adviser to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. In that capacity, he argued that Congress should give President Obama an authorization to use force against Iran for a preventive war to destroy Tehran's nuclear program. During the 2016 campaign, he advised both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. And Michael Ledeen, the man who helped set up the weapons triangle between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, in 2016 co-wrote a book titled The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. His co-author? None other than Trump booster, and the shortest-tenured national security adviser ever, Gen. Michael Flynn.

As it turned out, it was then-Rep. Dick Cheney, later Bush 41's secretary of defense and Bush 43's vice president, who authored the sneering 1987 congressional Iran-Contra Committee minority report:

The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra affair were just that - mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for 'the rule of law,' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more hysterical conclusions the committees' report tries to reach.

(The American people, of course, never got to see much of that evidence. In 2001, President Bush the Son acted to make sure it would be much more difficult for the public to access the records of President Bush the Father.)

The "criminalization of politics" arrow has been the first one pulled from the Republican scandal quiver ever since.

Take, for example, the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame by the Bush administration in July 2003. After her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed about the yellow cake uranium he didn't find in Niger, Americans learned that his wife worked for the CIA on, of all things, WMD proliferation issues. Neither Karl Rove nor others were ever charged with the technical and narrowly defined offense of revealing the Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak and others. But Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. And to the shock troops of the conservative movement, Libby the felon was a victim of the criminalization of politics.

The usual cavalcade of apologists for Republican lawbreaking swarmed to Libby's defense. With Libby's looming indictment in the fall of 2005, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison compared him to Martha Stewart, and offered a new variant of the old sound bite, the "perjury technicality." Hutchison said she hoped

That if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

Hutchison, of course, had plenty of company in offering the criminalization of politics canard in the CIA leak case. On Oct. 14, 2005, Bill Kristol complained, "I am worried about what happens to the administration if Rove is indicted," adding, "I think it's the criminalization of politics that's really gotten totally out of hand." In succeeding days, Kristol's Fox News colleagues Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Stuart Varney, and Chris Wallace joined the chorus. On Oct. 24, Kristol took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to denounce a supposed Democratic strategy of criminalizing conservatives. When Libby was later convicted, the Wall Street Journal editorial page called for a pardon. The WSJ cited grave dangers if the Libby verdict were to stand: "Perhaps the worst precedent would be normalizing the criminalization of policy differences."

Fox News regular Tucker Carlson tried to normalize a precedent of his own. While failing to mention that his father, Richard, was on the board of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund, Carlson launched a smear campaign against special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In November 2005, he insisted Fitzgerald was "accusing Libby—falsely and in public—of undermining this country's security," adding, "Fitzgerald should apologize, though of course he never will." Reversing his past position in support of independent counsels, Carlson in February 2007 blasted "this lunatic Fitzgerald, running around destroying people's lives for no good reason." After Fitzgerald in a May 2007 court filing confirmed Plame's covert status, Carlson called the Bush appointee a liar:

“CIA clearly didn't really give a shit about keeping her identity secret if she's going to work at f**king Langley...I call bullshit on that, I don't care what they say.”

As for Scooter Libby, he had his sentence commuted by President George W. Bush and later received a full pardon from President Trump. Presiding over Libby’s trial and conviction was federal district court Judge Reggie Walton. Following his verdict in the Libby case, Walton received death threats. First appointed by United States Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007, Judge Walton is now the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Walton is now hearing a Freedom of Information Act case involving the Mueller report and has stated that he may review the Justice Department’s redactions. “Obviously there is a real concern as to whether there is full transparency,” he said this week. "The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the American public to be concerned" about the redactions.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay called bullshit, too, when he was indicted on money laundering charges. DeLay, who had previously been reprimanded by the House and saw several of his aides convicted in the Jack Abramoff and other scandals, declared as early as April 2005 of the ethics charges then swirling around him: "Democrats have made clear that their only agenda is the politics of personal destruction and the criminalization of politics." Amazingly, that comment came before DeLay's own October 2005 indictment in Texas for money laundering in association with his PAC Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC).

Unsurprisingly, the conservative echo chamber rushed to DeLay's defense and amplified his talking point. Days after DeLay's indictment by District Attorney Ronnie Earle, Robert Novak penned a column titled “Criminalizing Politics,” concluding:

“Democrats are ecstatic. The criminalization of politics may work, even if the case against DeLay is as threadbare as it looks.”

DeLay, who on the day of his booking said, "Let people see Christ through me," had a similar message following his conviction in November 2010:

“This is an abuse of power. It's a miscarriage of justice. I still maintain my innocence. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system.”

(Ultimately, The Hammer claimed vindication when a Texas appeals court, by a 2-to-1 vote, threw out his money laundering conviction.)

Like Libby and DeLay’s defenders, congressional Republicans sang from the same “criminalization of politics” hymnal during the imbroglio surrounding the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys beginning in 2006. In May 2007, Republican California Congressman Dan Lungren was only too happy to offer the criminalization of politics ruse for Monica Goodling and Alberto Gonzales alike. Just moments after acknowledging Goodling's admission of violating civil service rules and Hatch Act prohibitions ("She did admit that she made mistakes in that regard"), Lundgren returned to the script:

“Let me just say this -- and I think it's an important point -- there is too much of a tendency in this environment to try and criminalize political disputes. That's been the effort here. They have found no basis for criminality, so the suggestion is now a vote of no confidence. Who knows what is next?”

That was a surprising statement for him to make, given that Bush White House liaison Goodling, in her May 23, 2007, testimony, admitted she had discriminated against job applicants who weren't Republican or conservative loyalists. Admitting that she illicitly screened out civil service job applicants who happened to be Democrats, Goodling clarified for all why she sought immunity from the committee in the first place:

"I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions, and I regret those mistakes."

But during his questioning, then-Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence ignored Goodling's confession to make a different point about the Bush administration's purge of U.S. attorneys then under investigation.

"I'm listening very intently. I'm studying this case, and I want to explore this issue of illegal behavior with you. Because it seems to me, so much of this, and even something of what we've heard today in this otherwise cordial hearing, is about the criminalization of politics. In a very real sense, it seems to be about the attempted criminalization of things that are vital to our constitutional system of government, namely the taking into consideration of politics in the appointment of political officials within the government." [Emphasis mine.]

"I am troubled," Pence concluded, "about the fact that we seem to be moving ever further down the road of the criminalization of politics."

As it turned out, the DOJ's own inspector general later rejected that criminalization of politics defense. (As the AP reported in May 2008, "A new Justice Department report concludes that politics illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration judges, and largely lays the blame on top aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.") But in a July 2010 report for the Department of Justice, Bush appointee Nora Dannehy effectively swept the prosecutor purge under the rug, concluding that the Bush administration's actions in sacking seven U.S. attorneys were inappropriately political, but not criminal.

The same, however, cannot be said of President Bush's regime of detainee torture implemented after the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As I have documented elsewhere, U.S. and international law not only define waterboarding as torture, but require the legal prosecution of torturers. As Scott Horton explained, after Vice President Cheney (soon followed by President Bush) boasted of their support for waterboarding and other so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques”:

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture?...What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants.

Alas, it was not to be. Despite the agreement by President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's John McCain that waterboarding constitutes torture, Bush, Cheney, and their henchmen never faced justice for authorizing torture and forever staining the honor of the United States.

As a candidate for the presidency, then-Sen. Barack Obama denounced waterboarding as torture. "It's time to stop the political parsing and to close the legal loopholes," Obama said on Oct. 29, 2007. "Waterboarding is torture, and so are other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' like 'head-slapping' and 'extreme temperatures.' It's time to reclaim our values and reaffirm our Constitution." As president, Obama reiterated his belief in the illegality of the Bush administration torture techniques. As recently as his May 2013 speech at the National Defense University, Obama declared:

In some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values -- by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law... We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

Yet even he before he was sworn in, President-elect Obama made it clear that the Bush torture team need not fear punishment from him:

We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.

From a political and economic perspective, Obama's fear of looking into that rearview mirror was understandable. After all, the economy he inherited from President Bush was in free fall. In the last quarter of 2008, the GDP collapsed by 8.9 percent; 2.2 million jobs evaporated in the first quarter of 2009 alone. With the economy requiring immediate action and his ambitious agenda for 2009, President Obama was afraid to risk a total political conflagration in Washington by launching the kind of investigation the Bush administration's possible war crimes demanded.

So Obama signaled to Team Bush and its Republican allies that there would be no accountability for their high crimes and misdemeanors. And he did so by reducing war crimes to that talking point conservatives love most: criminalizing politics. During his confirmation hearings on Jan. 16, 2009, attorney general nominee Eric Holder declared, "Waterboarding is torture." But he also reassured Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee about something else:

I think President-elect Obama has said it well. We don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist between the outgoing administration and the administration that is about to take over. We certainly don't want to do that.

Ultimately, President Barack Obama never prosecuted anyone involved in the design and execution of President Bush's program of detainee torture. While the memos authorizing these potential war crimes have seen the light of day, the identities of those who ordered and perpetrated them did not. Attorney General Holder announced, "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department." (Ultimately, none were prosecuted, as Holder in August 2012 ended his last investigation into two detainee deaths.) President Obama went further in seemingly backing away from any legal action against the Bush torture team:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution...This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.

But spending that time and energy was never about "laying blame for the past"; it would have been about redeeming American values by holding America's leaders to account for failing to uphold those values—and the law. As George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, now carrying water for Trump, put it in 2010:

Because it would have been politically unpopular to prosecute people for torture, the Obama Administration has allowed officials to downgrade torture from a war crime to a talking point.

And a Republican talking point at that. After all, what Eric Holder called "criminalizing policy differences" is the standard defense Republican miscreants have used for decades to fight off scandals, including Iran-Contra, the Valerie Plame affair, illicit domestic surveillance by the NSA, and the Bush administration's prosecutor purge. And when the Obama administration in April 2009 released those four torture memos authored by Bush attorneys Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Yoo, Republicans in Congress and their amen corner in the media charged that the new president was "criminalizing conservatism."

Powerline's John Hinderaker made that exact charge in a piece by the same title. "Many liberals don't just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail," he wrote, adding, "Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences." In a scathing editorial on April 23, 2009, titled "Presidential Poison," the Wall Street Journal went on the attack, using the GOP's tried-and-untrue “criminalizing politics” canard:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret...Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow...

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.

But almost 10 years later, no "patriotic official" has been indicted, no judges have been impeached, and no professor has been stripped of his academic tenure—not even the one who defined torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." John Yoo was awarded an endowed faculty chair at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Bush appointee Jay Bybee remains on the federal bench. Cheney's legal alchemist David Addington is now creating alternative realities at the Heritage Foundation. Psychologist James Mitchell, one of the consultants who helped the Bush administration render the Geneva Conventions quaint, didn't lose his professional credentials, even after claiming, "I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country." Jose Rodriguez, who as head of the CIA's clandestine service personally ordered the destruction of dozens of interrogation videotapes, is a conservative hero who smeared the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA torture program despite having never read a word of it. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney appeared regularly on your television screen to accuse President Obama of treason. As for Cheney's former Oval Office sock puppet, George W. Bush, he's free to paint himself in the shower and give speeches to "replenish the ol' coffers."

Now, the walls are closing in on another Republican president, Donald Trump. With the U.S. intelligence community having long ago concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump get elected, the Mueller probe is continuing to unearth more revelations about the four Trump-Russia scandals. (They are: possible collusion with Moscow by the Trump campaign, potential conflicts of interest involving Trump’s businesses, changing U.S. policies toward Russia as a result, and obstruction of justice.) Thirty-three people have been indicted in connection with Mueller’s “several ongoing investigations”; several, including Flynn and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, have pleaded guilty. The “Perjury Chart” on the website Just Security has begun tracking the Team Trump players who have misled, lied to, or perjured themselves before investigators and congressional committees.

In response to this week’s developments, Republican press, pundits, and politicians have rounded up the usual talking points. (These are generally the same people who, along with Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, and posing Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, have said of Hillary Clinton, “Lock her up.”) PJ Media lamented, “Mueller racks up yet another process crime with Michael Cohen's guilty plea.” Sean Hannity protested that Gen. Michael Flynn’s life had been ruined by Mueller, who has “set out to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the presidency of Donald J. Trump.” He wrote, “No matter how many lives are ruined in the process. You can't get him on the crime. Let's get him on a process crime. Let's set a perjury trap.”

Libby defender Tucker Carlson agreed, resurrecting the old Scooter sound bites about “perjury technicalities” and “no underlying crime” this week to warn, “Boy, there had better be a huge crime underlying all of this. We’re really going through a lot and so if this winds up being a bunch of stupid perjury charges, I mean, someone should be punished for it.”

Rush Limbaugh and the folks at PJ Media aren’t the only ones whining that “every one of Mueller’s indictments is a process crime.” As Steve Benen noted, the GOP’s best and brightest on Capitol Hill have been regurgitating the same talking point:

Some Republicans, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, said Cohen’s admission doesn’t prove collusion between Russia and the president. […]

Graham, who has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, said he had “no idea what that’s all about” when asked his reaction to Cohen’s guilty plea, adding that it “seems to be a process crime.”

Of course, another word for “process crime” is “crime.” Breaking the law is breaking the law, unless the miscreants and the narrators of the story are Republicans. In that case, as the late George H.W. Bush and a generation of Republicans have insisted, the lawlessness is merely “the criminalization of policy differences.” But almost 26 years after Poppy first debuted that tried-and-untrue GOP defense, it remains a cynical fraud. As Bob Bauer put on the blog Lawfare a year ago:

If there is evidence that a presidential campaign established a political alliance with a foreign power, and the successful candidate upon achieving office then obstructs an inquiry into the facts of that relationship, it is a strange indeed to suggest that an investigation is somehow an abuse of law and the legal process.

It is a not a criminalization of politics to investigate serious allegations of criminality in politics.

Unless, of course, you’re a Republican. Then, as President Richard Nixon counseled Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973, “Just say that it’s persecution. Political partisan persecution crap.” Donald Trump has been only too happy to call the tentacles of the Russia investigation “a witch hunt” no fewer than 261 times. Earlier this month, Attorney General Barr refused to contradict Trump’s witch hunt charge, telling senators, “It really depends on where you're sitting, if you are somebody who is being falsely accused of something.” As for Trump’s Republican allies in Congress, they already made up their minds even before Barr released his sanitized, abridged version of the special counsel’s report on April 18. As California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes put it on Fox News earlier this week, “Whatever happens on Thursday, Donald Trump is a free man.”

And whatever steps Democrats may take to force the release of the Mueller report, Donald Trump’s tax returns, his accounting firm’s records, or pretty much anything else that could put the 45th president in legal jeopardy, his men on the Supreme Court will definitely put a halt to it. That would be Justice Neil Gorsuch (whose mother Anne Gorsuch was cited for contempt of Congress during her rocky Reagan-era reign at the EPA) and Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who, as Bill Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr’s hatchet man in 1998, said of the investigation into Clinton that it was “our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear—piece by painful piece.”

All of which means Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and Capitol Hill Republicans will soon stop whining about the “criminalization of politics” and get on with the people’s work. Things like investigating the Obama Justice Department for “spying” and prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her email server.

On the heels of Donald Trump’s total capitulation over the record-length government shutdown he bragged about starting, the president and his allies are desperately looking for new leverage to extract some $5.7 billion in border funding for the rest of the year. With the agreement that reopened the government only keeping the lights on until Feb. 15, born-again Trump bathwater-drinker Graham urged the White House to double down on blackmail as a negotiating strategy. As CNN reported:

"His wall money is necessary. His barrier money," Graham said. "We've got to raise the debt ceiling in March. So [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin was there telling us about that. We've got to come up with a budget agreement. If you want to continue to get the military refurbished and rebuild it, then we need to end the last two years of sequestration."

He added, "so there's a package we could put together that would solve several problems. My thought is while we're talking about all these things that are coming due pretty soon, let's think bigger rather than smaller."

And what does Graham mean by thinking bigger? “Taking such a step would amount to a dramatic move by the President,” as Manu Raju and Clare Foran of CNN explained on Tuesday, “He could dare Democrats to block funding for the border wall and risk sending the country into default in the process.” Or as Matthew Yglesias summed it up, “In other words: Trump would be able to threaten not just a government shutdown but a default on the national debt to get his way.”

That’s no exaggeration. As Graham himself put it in August 2017:

“We should use our majority in a clever way. So if you had putting the country at default and building a wall, so that's like 0 for 2. Nobody wants us to default on the debt, and almost everybody wants to secure the border. That's a pretty good combination.”

Graham is not alone in encouraging border-wall brinksmanship. Among the GOP conferees currently working with their Democratic colleagues to hammer out an agreement before the Feb. 15 drop-dead date, Sens. Richard Shelby, Roy Blunt, and Lamar Alexander are backing the debt-ceiling gambit.

To be sure, the debt ceiling does have to be raised. After increases were suspended for two years, the amount of money the United States can legally borrow will have to raised in early March. The national debt, which was at roughly $19 trillion when Barack Obama left office, now nears $22 trillion. As the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) again warned last week, thanks to higher spending and lower receipts in the wake of the GOP tax cuts, the U.S. will run a $900 billion deficit this year and produce annual trillion-dollar deficits beginning in fiscal year 2022. If Congress fails to raise the debt limit next month, through “extraordinary measures” the Treasury can forestall the “drop-dead date” until as late as August.

So, just what would happen to the United States should Congress fail to hit that drop-dead date. In a nutshell, America would experience an economic nightmare that would make the $11 billion lost during the needless government shutdown seem like happy days. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Lindsey Graham, who in January 2011 warned what would happen if Democrats did not pay the GOP’s ransom for releasing the Republicans’ debt ceiling hostage:

"Let me tell you what's involved if we don't lift the debt ceiling: financial collapse and calamity throughout the world. That's not lost upon me. But we've done this 93 times. And if we keep doing the same old thing, then that is insanity to the nth degree."

Then as now, Senator Graham had plenty of company among the GOP’s best and brightest. To force President Obama to slash spending, they made clear they were more than willing to destroy the American economy. Then-House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) warned, “You can’t not raise the debt ceiling.” His boss, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) put it this way 8 years ago:

"That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on Election Day said, 'we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.' And you can't create jobs if you default on the federal debt."

As noted above, the U.S. debt limit places a cap on Uncle Sam's borrowing authority. From 1980 to 2010, presidents and congressional majorities from both parties routinely raised the debt ceiling roughly 40 times to enable the Treasury to borrow more money to pay the bills the federal government had already incurred. This was the case when Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt during his eight years in office. After 17 debt-ceiling hikes during Reagan's tenure, George W. Bush required seven more as he nearly doubled the U.S. national debt again. Failure to raise the debt ceiling would immediately jeopardize the full faith and credit of the United States and thus trigger a sovereign default. That’s why, as Steve Benen noted in May 2011, there was no doubt about WWRD (What Would Reagan Do?) when it came to the lifting of the debt limit. The Gipper had told us so himself:

"The full consequences of a default -- or even the serious prospect of default -- by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar."

That’s why, as the debt-ceiling crisis reached the point of no return in the summer of 2011, warning lights worldwide were flashing red.

With the prospect of Washington having to immediately cut federal spending by a staggering 44 percent, the Bipartisan Policy Center warned, "On an annualized basis, the cut in spending alone is a 10 percent cut in GDP." The IMF sounded the alarm, too, pleading with Congress that "the debt ceiling should be raised as soon as possible to avoid damage to the economy and world financial markets." President Obama's Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner ("Failure to increase the limit would be deeply irresponsible") and chief economist, Austan Goolsbee ("If we get to the point where you've damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity") issued dire forecasts about the cataclysmic consequences of a U.S. default that August.

But GOP default deniers like Michele Bachmann dismissed those predictions out of hand. Bachmann accused Secretary Geithner of "outright blatant lies" and "scare tactics." For his part, then-South Carolina Rep. and current Trump OMB chief Mulvaney scoffed at the warnings, despite his own admission that he didn't know what would happen if the U.S. defaulted on its debt. As ThinkProgress reported:

Yesterday, newly-elected Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) appeared on Fox Business to talk about his own intention to vote against raising the debt ceiling. The host asked Mulvaney if he was willing to "risk the possibility of a default on our debt." Mulvaney responded that he has "no difficulty in" voting against raising the debt limit and that it's worth it to "force a discussion" about spending. The host then followed up by asking, "What do you think would happen if the debt ceiling wasn't raised?" Mulvaney responded, "Well, I don't know. I've asked that question a lot. I've heard Goolsbee on Sunday say it'd be catastrophic, I've heard others say that. I did some research last night from [the Congressional Research Service], they don't know what that means. I think they're guessing."

People like Bachmann and Mulvaney could have just talked to Ezra Klein, who called their brand of default denialism "the scariest thing I've ever heard on television:"

It makes perfect sense unless you, like me, had spent the previous few days talking to economists, investors and economic policymakers about what could happen if we start playing games with the debt ceiling. Their answers were across-the-board apocalyptic. If the U.S. government is so incapable of solving its political problems that it can't come to an agreement on the debt ceiling, they said, that's basically the end of the United States as the world's reserve currency. We won't be considered safe enough to serve as the investment of last resort. We would lose the most important advantage our economy has in the global financial system -- and we'd probably lose it forever. Skyrocketing interest rates would slow our economy and, in real terms, make it even harder to pay back our debt, which would in turn send interest rates going even higher. It's an economic death spiral we associate with third-world countries, not with the United States.

Ultimately, the United States didn't default on its debt in the summer of 2011. The Budget Control Act, the same agreement that imposed the "sequester" on future federal spending, included a deal to raise the debt ceiling. Nevertheless, America paid a price, as the GOP's manufactured uncertainty over the economy stifled job creation, drove down consumer confidence, and led Standard & Poor's to lower Uncle Sam's credit rating. It's with good reason the Republican blackmail came to be known as the "Tea Party Downgrade."

To understand why the insanity of 2011 earned that moniker, just listen to the folks from Standard & Poor’s:

A Standard & Poor's director said for the first time Thursday that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default -- a position put forth by some Republicans. Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that "people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default," Mukherji said. "That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable," he added. "This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns."

That rhetoric may not be common among AAA sovereigns, but is just part of the daily talking points from what former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill called “our version of al Qaeda terrorists.”

Remember, the United States did not default in the summer of 2011. But just the prospect of that calamity created by the Republicans was sufficient to do serious damage to the economy in general and to working Americans in particular.

During the tense summer of 2011, U.S. job creation faltered, consumer confidence plummeted, and borrowing costs jumped as Republicans threatened to bring the global economy to its knees.

The obvious lesson should have been that Congress should never again flirt with debt-ceiling denialism. Instead, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the GOP’s hostage-taking a blueprint for the future. As the Washington Post reported at the time:

"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting," he said. "Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this -- it's a hostage that's worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done."

McConnell, the Post revealed, "said he could imagine doing this again." And as he explained to CNBC's Larry Kudlow, McConnell's future hostage-taking wasn't a threat, but a promise:

"What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order."

Democrats reached a different conclusion. After regaining the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have pushed for returning to the “Gephardt Rule,” under which budget bills impacting the debt limit automatically triggered the limit’s increase. The contrast with the GOP House takeover could not be starker. After all, if they simply followed the GOP rules, Democrats could insist on tying the next debt-ceiling increase to comprehensive immigration reform, new funding and enhancements to Obamacare, legislation protecting special counsel Robert Mueller, the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, or even his resignation. But they won’t do any of those things. And as Senator Minority Leader Charles Schumer said, Democrats certainly don’t want to link the resolution of Trump’s border-wall temper tantrum to the next hike in the debt limit: “No more hostages. No, I think that’s not a good idea. We ought to be negotiating to get an agreement, not add added elements into it.”

Who could blame Schumer and his allies in Congress? After all, both Donald Trump and his head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, are proven “default deniers” who have made statements like this about not raising the debt ceiling: "I have heard people say that if we don't do it it will be the end of the world. I have yet to meet someone who can articulate the negative consequences."

Of course, there’s one more reason why Democrats won’t play a game of chicken that could result in national economic suicide. Both sides don’t do it.