“Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.”

— American writer George Saunders

Two years ago, Republicans across America rejoiced when the U.S. Supreme Court blew out the windows with Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

That landmark decision overruled both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and sent the question of legalized abortion careening to the states.

What many Republicans failed to understand then was that the contest over legal abortion was over.

The Democrats had won.

Fifty years of Roe v. Wade had set in cement American attitudes on abortion. Roe made abortion safe and legal and widely available.

And there would be hell to pay for turning back the clock.

Last week when the Arizona Supreme Court did its job and ruled the state Legislature had “never affirmatively created a right to, or independently authorized, elective abortion,” it handed Republicans the anchor to drown themselves.

Stick with Arizona’s 1864 abortion law — a Civil War-era relic that would imprison doctors or others who assist abortion — and you provide Democrats a vivid argument that Republicans are mired in the horse-and-buggy past.

In the panic........

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