When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion almost two years ago, the conservative justices used the phrase “democratic process” almost a dozen times between them to describe what would come next, suggesting that the court was merely handing decision-making powers back to the voters. After a string of victories for legalized abortion in elections across the country, Republicans are turning to a “democratic process,” all right — but it’s the one that took place in the 19th century.
In early April, Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court ruled that a total ban on abortion from 1864, fittingly shepherded by a legislator who “married” a series of pubescent children, could be enforced. The court had been asked to decide whether a 15-week ban legislators had passed in the spring of 2022, before Dobbs, actually replaced the zombie law — which would at least allow women to get abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The majority ruled that it didn’t.
The high-level Republican panic that followed is a testament to how illegal abortion has upended politics. Donald Trump, who once took credit for Roe’s death and recently claimed to support the right of each state to set its abortion laws, soon posted on Truth Social that “the Supreme Court in Arizona went too far on their Abortion Ruling, enacting and approving an inappropriate Law from 1864,” and calling for lawmakers to use “HEART, COMMON SENSE, and ACT IMMEDIATELY, to remedy what has happened.” Meanwhile, Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who was for the 19th-century law before she was against it, frantically worked the phones to get state lawmakers to repeal it. (They’ve twice refused, most recently on Wednesday.) Lake also posted a video on X in which she claimed that a “total........