A decade ago, Republicans went after the Affordable Care Act on a variety of fronts, including one that was unexpected. The Democrats’ landmark health care reform package expanded access to contraception, and as regular readers may recall, a surprising number of GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill had a problem with that.
In fact, in March 2012, the Senate narrowly defeated a proposal, known as the Blunt Amendment, intended to allow all U.S. employers to deny contraception coverage to employees as part of the businesses’ health plans.
Democrats suddenly had a campaign issue: Republicans, voters were told, have a problem with access to birth control.
It would be an exaggeration to say this was a defining issue in the 2012 cycle, but as Democrats sought to paint the GOP as moving too far to the right, it didn’t hurt that voters heard plenty about Republicans trying to undermine contraception access. It was the same year that Barack Obama was re-elected with relative ease; Democrats expanded their U.S. Senate majority; and Democratic candidates actually won the U.S. House popular vote.
A decade later, Chris Truax, a conservative Trump critic, made the case at The Bulwark yesterday that Democrats would be wise to focus heavily on birth control ahead of the 2022 midterms.
In fact, talk about nothing but birth control and how Republicans want to ban it. You can start with Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs which points out that Griswold v. Connecticut — the 1965 case that made it illegal for states to regulate contraception—relied on the same reasoning as Roe and should now be struck down as well. Do you think it’s going to be difficult for Democrats to make the case that the Republican party wants to go full Handmaid’s Tale and ban contraception as well as abortion?
There are elements of Truax’s larger piece that I disagreed with, but there’s no denying the fact that (a) the vast majority of Americans support contraception access; (b) many of those Americans would not take kindly to Republican efforts to limit contraception access; and (c) this is a topic many GOP officeholders and candidates would prefer to avoid in the 2022 cycle.
If Democrats were interested in making this a key part of their pitch in this year’s midterm elections, they would not lack for rhetorical ammunition.
Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly condemned the ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 case that struck down a state law that restricted married couples’ access to birth control.
A variety of Republican senators and candidates have also eagerly rejected the Griswold precedent in recent months.
A prominent GOP lawmaker in Ohio this week said she’d consider a contraception ban, and a Trump-backed GOP candidate in Michigan recently said the same thing. Mississippi’s Republican governor was asked whether his state might ban certain forms of contraception, and he didn’t say no. Though the bill ultimately died, Republican legislators in Louisiana explored an abortion ban that would’ve criminalized forms of birth control. This may not have been a part of the Democrats’ 2022 plans, but plans can sometimes change based on circumstances. As Truax concluded in his piece yesterday, “[I]f you think ‘Democrats want to eliminate the police!’ got traction, try putting a few million dollars into ‘Republicans want to ban birth control!’”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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