Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) warns that the GOP risks facing a wipeout at the polls in 2024 if her colleagues remain focused on passing strict state-level abortion bans rather than finding a “middle ground” on the issue.
Mace, a sometime Trump critic who survived reelection last year, sounded the alarm on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court chose to keep abortion pills legal, freezing a Trump-appointed federal judge’s ruling that restricted the drug.
Taking aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new six-week abortion ban legislation and a Republican bill in the South Carolina legislature that proposes “punishment by death” for women who undergo abortions, Mace said the GOP was sending "the wrong message heading into '24."
The Republican insisted that the anti-abortion extremists within her party were out of touch with their constituents, a majority she contended didn’t want abortion severely restricted or outlawed.
"We're going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities and finding that middle ground. The vast majority of people want some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle," Mace told ABC anchor Martha Raddatz.
"They want exceptions for rape and incest — they want women to have access to birth control,” she added.
\u201c\u201cAs Republicans, we need to read the room on this issue because the vast majority of folks are not in the extremes\u2026That is the wrong message heading into \u201924.\u201d \n\nRep. Nancy Mace warns GOP will \u201close huge\u201d if they don\u2019t find \u201cmiddle ground\u201d on abortion. https://t.co/85eY3ZKJdI\u201d— This Week (@This Week) 1682256707
Indeed, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National poll, released Monday, found that two-thirds of Americans (64 percent), including a majority of Republicans, opposed banning medication abortion — that is, the use of a prescription pill to end a pregnancy.
A CBS News/YouGov poll released over a week before found that 69 percent of Americans who support abortion wanted the Biden Administration to ignore court rulings seeking to end widespread access to the abortion drug mifepristone.
Americans’ broad support for abortion after the Dobbs decision has remained the same since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade last June, with a Pew Research Center poll showing that support rose from 61 percent in March 2022 (before the ruling) to 62 percent in July (after the ruling).
Mace’s comments offered a window into the divide within the GOP over abortion bans, an issue Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, recognize was central to the party’s historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms.
TheWashington Postreported last Thursday that Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, urged her party’s candidates in private to “address abortion” before it damaged them politically.
“You have to address it, not avoid it,” McDaniel reportedly said. “And then you can talk about other things.”
Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway implored Republican donors and candidates to infuse “compassion” into their discussions on abortion and emphasize the need for exceptions in abortion legislation.
During her ABC interview, Mace suggested that anywhere but the fringe of anti-abortion extremism were “commonsense positions that we can take and still be pro-life.”
"I saw what happened after Roe v. Wade because I represent a very purple district, as purple as this dress, and I saw the sentiment change dramatically," Mace said. "And as Republicans, we need to read the room on this issue."
\u201c\u201cI want women to know you can be pro-life and be pro-woman. They\u2019re not mutually exclusive.\u201d \n\nGOP Rep. Nancy Mace tells @MarthaRaddatz that Republicans need to "show compassion, especially to victims who have been raped" amid abortion debate. https://t.co/85eY3ZKJdI\u201d— This Week (@This Week) 1682257508
Mace also argued that dancing around or wholly ignoring the issue of abortion wasn’t a position Republicans should take, considering the widespread support for abortion among voters.
"We've buried our heads in the sand. We're afraid to talk about it. Because we're afraid, we want to go to the extreme corners of this issue. But that's not where the vast majority of Americans are right now. And we've got to show compassion, especially to victims who've been raped," said Mace, who has often shared her experience of being sexually assaulted at 16.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson announced Saturday that he would seek the Republican nomination for governor next year, a declaration that came a month after he told a church service that “God formed” him to fight against LGBTQ rights. His entry, however, had been anticipated for years, so much so that Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein preemptively attacked his likely opponent during his own campaign kickoff in January, warning in a video, “Robinson wants to tell you who you can marry, when you’ll be pregnant, and who you should hate.”
But while Stein has no intra-party opposition in his quest to succeed termed-out Gov. Roy Cooper, a fellow Democrat, Robinson will have some company in his primary. State Treasurer Dale Folwell announced a bid last month, while an advisor for former Rep. Mark Walker tells the News & Observer that he’ll also join the race in May. Folwell, who has trailed Robinson by 50 points or more in the few polls we’ve seen, acknowledged he’s the “underdog” while still arguing, “What I am going to talk about is how do we talk about problems without attacking people.” Walker also seems undeterred, despite his own weak third-place finish in last year’s Senate primary.
Robinson, who would be the Tar Heel State’s first Black chief executive, was a political unknown until 2018, when he became a conservative celebrity after giving a speech protesting the cancellation of a gun show in Greensboro. The former furniture factory worker went on to take the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in his first bid for office two years later. He beat state Rep. Yvonne Lewis Holley 52-48 in the general election despite standing by his past litany of antisemitic, Islamophobic, and transphobic screeds.
Robinson went on to make news over the following years with more bigoted comments. His most infamous remarks may have been those he offered in a 2021 address to a Baptist church. “There is no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality—any of that filth," he said. "And yes, I called it filth.” Robinson refused to apologize and has continued to spout hateful rhetoric in the years since. “We are called to be led by men,” he told congregants at another church just last year. “God sent women out … when they had to do their thing, but when it was time to face down Goliath, [He] sent David. Not Davita, David.”
The Republican frontrunner showed absolutely no interest in changing in the lead-up to his new campaign, declaring in January that “abortion is not compatible with this nation, the same way slavery was not compatible with this nation.” This statement came just months after Robinson confirmed that his wife had an abortion in 1989, just prior to their marriage, saying, “It's because of this experience and our spiritual journey that we are so adamantly pro-life.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
The 1864 Arizona law that was reinstated by a judge’s ruling on Friday bans all abortions except to save the life of the mother. Described in most reports as a law passed during the time Arizona was a territory, before it achieved statehood in 1912, one important fact has been omitted both from the judge’s decision and from the press reports on the draconian abortion ban: Arizona was a territory in 1864 all right, but it wasn’t a territory of the United States. The territorial legislature that passed the abortion ban did so on behalf of the Confederate States of America, into which Arizona was accepted when Jefferson Davis signed “An Act to Organize the Territory of Arizona” on January 18, 1862.
Arizona remained a territory of the Confederate states until the end of the Civil War in 1865, which means that the legislature that passed the exceedingly strict abortion law in 1864 was a legislature recognized by the Confederacy and loyal to it. The Arizona Territory sent horses, men, and supplies to the Confederate army during the Civil War and organized Company A of the Arizona Rangers, which was reconstituted into the Arizona Scout Company after several battles with the Union Army of California.
The Arizona Scout Company joined a Texas Cavalry Division in the Confederate Army under Major General Tom Green. The Arizona Scouts fought against the Union Army’s Red River Campaign and in the battle of the Sabine Crossroads and the battle of Pleasant Hill, when the Union attempted to occupy the capital of Louisiana, then located in Shreveport. The Arizona Scouts went on to serve under Confederate General John Wharton in Arkansas, fighting several skirmishes and small battles until General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered all Confederate forces west of the Mississippi on May 26, 1865.
That’s how loyal the citizens of the Arizona Territory were to the Confederacy. They fought alongside Texans and gave their lives for the right to own slaves right up to the bitter end.
If you read Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v Wade, he runs down a list of states that had banned abortion as he tried to make the case that the United States had no “history and tradition” of legal abortion before the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868. The 14th Amendment, providing citizens with equal protection under the law, was one of the amendments to the Constitution on which the Roe decision relied. Among those states were Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, all states that had been in the Confederacy. Among them in banning abortion was Arizona, then a Confederate territory.
What’s the point of all this history? Well, I think it’s important to understand that many of the states that decided way back then to deny women the right to control their own reproductive lives also denied to their Black populations the right to control any part of their lives, as slaves.
Arizona recently passed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy which was due to go into effect on September 24. On September 23, however, a judge in Arizona decided that it is necessary to go all the way back to 1864 and reinstate a law passed by a Confederate territorial legislature.
Women who at least would have had the right to terminate their pregnancies in the first 15 weeks after conception are now banned from having an abortion at any time at all, including to remedy a pregnancy that is due to rape or incest. In cases involving a fetal condition which may endanger a woman’s life, the pregnancy must be endured until the point endangerment is actually reached. This means if a woman becomes pregnant with a baby suffering from anencephaly – a defect whereby the skull, brain and scalp do not completely form – or other conditions that can cause an early end to a pregnancy that endangers the life of a woman, Arizona demands that an abortion cannot be performed until an emergency is declared and an abortion becomes mandatory to save her life.
Under the terms of the 1864 law, anyone who performs an abortion or helps a woman obtain an abortion can be punished with up to five years in prison.
The decision by Arizona Judge Kellie Johnson threw the state into disarray, with arguments about which law should prevail – the 15-week ban which took effect last Saturday, or the draconian 1864 law. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who signed the 15-week ban, said the new abortion law would supersede the old law, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, said he would enforce the Confederate-era total ban on abortions.
Democrats are set to seize the issue in the upcoming midterm elections. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for governor against Republican Kari Lake, came out against the abortion ban almost immediately. “We cannot let her [Lake] hold public office and have the power to enact extreme anti-choice policies that she’s spent her entire campaign touting,” Hobbs said at a press conference on Saturday alongside Democrat Kris Mayes, who is running for attorney general.
But Republican candidates for every major office in the state of Arizona were silent on the abortion issue Saturday. From Kari Lake, nothing. From Blake Masters, running for Senate against Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly, nothing. From Abe Hamadeh, the Republican running for attorney general, nothing. Previously, Lake has called abortion “the ultimate sin” and has called for a ban on abortion pills. Masters has termed abortion “demonic” and called for a federal fetal personhood law that would ban abortions in every state.
Lately, Masters has dropped references to the fetal personhood law from his campaign website and deleted a section in which he said he is “100 percent pro-life.” Lake has refused to comment on the reinstatement of the 1864 ban on all abortions.
Which side will prevail in the struggle over women’s rights in Arizona is up to the voters in November. Election of Hobbs as governor and Mayes as attorney general will certainly help. Mayes has said she will not enforce the Arizona ban on abortion and will direct county prosecutors to do the same. Hobbs says she will veto any further laws against abortion and push the Arizona legislature to overturn the 1864 total ban, but with Republicans in charge of that body, she doesn’t stand much of a chance. Alternatively, both candidates say they will support a ballot measure giving voters the opportunity to decide where Arizona stands on abortion in 2024.
For now, the Confederate-era ban on abortions in Arizona stands.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter
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