January 17, 2006
What Planet Are Democrats From?
By Mark
Davis
So, this is how far
we have come.
In 2006, a good man
like Samuel Alito can be lectured on human behavior by the likes
of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Mr. Kennedy and his
colleagues can gang up on a man who seems to have made almost
no enemies and paint him as some pernicious closet misogynist
bigot.
Meanwhile, their fellow
Democrat senator who was an admitted member of the Ku Klux Klan
is toasted as a pillar of virtue.
Robert Byrd can hang
with lynch mobs in West Virginia in his past and get a free pass;
but Sam Alito doesn't get a break for even the most tangential
brush with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, some of whose members
might not have been the most enlightened souls in the Ivy League.
I expected this kind
of character assassination in the juvenile exercise that these
hearings have become. Martha Alito, his wife, apparently did not,
brought to tears Wednesday by what has become pathetically routine:
the perverse abandonment of basic decency in order to score cheap
political shots in an election year.
As despicable as Mr.
Kennedy's behavior has been – and this is without even addressing
his questionless Bush-bashing diatribes that have wasted the time
of the committee, the nominee and the public – his is not
the most discouraging sin of these hearings.
That falls to Sen.
Dick Durbin of Illinois for a comment he probably let fly without
a second thought late Wednesday afternoon.
Mr. Durbin was dwelling
on the famous 1985 job application in which Judge Alito expressed
pride in his view that the Constitution contains no right to abortion.
The judge was right
then, and, if he has remained steadfast in this belief, he is
right today.
But the fraud
of Roe vs. Wade is so tightly woven through our society
that those words have grown more controversial as the concrete
of that horrible decision has dried.
The sad fact
is that because of Democrat dishonesty on the issue and the complete
failure of Republicans to call them on it, a majority of Americans
probably do not have the slightest clue what would happen should
Roe vs. Wade be punted.
And, apparently, some
U.S. senators with law degrees do not know, either.
Mr. Durbin's quote
to Judge Alito: "I'm concerned that many people will leave
this hearing with a question as to whether or not you could be
the deciding vote that would eliminate the legality of abortion,
that would make it illegal in this country."
This is a moment of
such profound deviousness or ignorance that the mind staggers.
Either the senator
does not know how our system works (despite his Georgetown law
school diploma), or he sought to foist an intentional scare on
an underinformed America.
The moment
Roe is reversed, every state gets to make its own abortion
laws.
That's it. No federal
ban on abortion. No back alleys. No coat hangers.
This is not
like a light switch. Roe made abortion legal across the
land, but the absence of Roe does not bring a coast-to-coast
ban. It would simply fall to the 50 state legislatures to fashion
their own laws, and that is where those favoring and opposing
abortion rights would properly have it out to determine how easy
or difficult it should be to terminate a life inside the womb
from Massachusetts to Texas, from New York to Alabama.
Most states
probably would keep the status quo of abortion guidelines that
have become familiar in the 32 years of the Roe era.
Some would curtail abortion availability, but still others might
liberalize it even further.
If more people
grasped this, we could probably have a reasoned debate about Roe,
and more people could bring themselves to see that the abortion
emperor has never had any clothes.
It was a
sham for the Supreme Court to concoct a universal abortion right
in the Constitution in 1973. Intentionally misrepresenting the
effects of Roe's reversal is unforgivable.
Mark
Davis is a columnist for the Dallas
Morning News.
The Mark Davis
Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network.
His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.
