Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a foundational purpose of Republican politics for nearly half a century. The quest to end constitutional protections for abortion rights has determined who runs for office, how they run, and what they do when they win. It’s channeled massive sums of money into remaking all three branches of government at the state and federal level and ways that reverberate far beyond the immediate issue at hand. The anti-abortion movement gave us, in different ways, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and the world-changing chaos that entailed. But in the days since Politico published a leaked opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would finally scrap the 1973 ruling, the response from the party has been distinctly subdued.
In the aftermath, many Republicans, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell preferred to focus on the mechanics of the story, publicly deriding the leak as a historic breach of norms. (Which it is—thank God.)
Others downplayed the significance of the ruling itself, citing the wide variance in how abortion is regulated at the state level. The conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted that, “Nothing is actually going to change.”
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson
told Politico’s Burgess Everett that “the political ramifications of this thing are being overstated,” and that “It’s just never been an issue for me in Wisconsin.”
There weren’t the kind of vocal affirmations that you might expect upon achieving a goal that has galvanized and defined the conservative movement for generations. And that cautious, changing-the-subject response brought to mind the radio silence from the right last year, when the Supreme Court gave Texas permission to temporarily nullify Roe through a shadow-docket decision.
Some of this is just reflexive, for sure, but this shift in tone is also deliberate. This week Axios snagged a polling memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee advising candidates to say that “Abortion should be avoided as much as possible” (as opposed to outlawed and criminalized) and encouraging them to “be the compassionate consensus builder on abortion policy.”
