Donald Trump Makes a Compelling Case Against Donald Trump's Supreme Court
"I did it, and I'm proud to have done it."
Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, before a United Center crowd so fired up that they could barely be bothered to be annoyed that the Beyoncé concert they were promised did not take place. Harris’s speech was less half as long as Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention a month earlier, and included—I crunched the numbers here—two fewer mentions of Kid Rock, and one fewer blow-by-blow of a phone conversation in which Dana White allegedly abandoned his wife on their tropical vacation to yelp sweatily on the RNC stage for a few minutes.
Harris brought up the Supreme Court only once*** over the course of 38 minutes, which isn’t out of the ordinary; Joe Biden, for comparison’s sake, didn’t bring it up at all in 2020. Hillary Clinton discussed the Court only in general terms in 2016, citing the importance of appointing justices “who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights,” neither of which the Court has done a single blessed time in the eight years since.
Harris made that mention count, though, as she launched into a forceful repudiation of the Republican Party’s war on bodily autonomy and access to abortion care. “Let’s be clear about how we got here: Donald Trump hand-picked members of the United States Supreme Court to take away reproductive freedom,” she said. “And now he brags about it! His words: ‘I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.’ End-quote.”
The Trump line she quoted is from a Fox News town hall in January, during which his halting efforts to soften his anti-choice record for strategic purposes—“you have to win elections,” he said—quickly gave way to his overpowering desire to brag about his accomplishments. “For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated,” he said. “I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”
Harris’s analysis is probably not groundbreaking stuff for readers of the Balls & Strikes newsletter. But it is cool and good that she is doing what all Democratic politicians should be doing right now, which is tying Trump to a historically unpopular Supreme Court that is responsible for a historically unpopular Supreme Court decision that he explicitly guaranteed would take place if he were elected president. Sure enough, less than two years after the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, Trump delivered on that promise.
The challenge he faces in 2024, of course, is that many of the voters whose support he needs to win despise the Supreme Court he built and its decision to overturn Roe. As a result, he is spinning like a top on the campaign trail whenever his Supreme Court comes up, sometimes issuing screeching disclaimers of anti-abortion politics and sometimes proclaiming to have “no regrets” about how enthusiastically he embraced it, depending on whether the reporter asking him the questions is employed by Fox News or someone else.
As Trump acknowledged, Republicans spent five decades trying to cobble together a Supreme Court majority that would overturn Roe v. Wade. But they would not have accomplished that goal without Trump, who appointed the trio of justices who cast the deciding votes, and without whom Roe would still be good law as you read this sentence. As Harris demonstrated on Thursday, there is not a lot Democrats actually have to do to make this point; reading Trump’s words back to the camera is about as direct as the message can get.
***CORRECTION: Harris in fact mentioned the Court twice: One in the context of reproductive rights, and a second time in the context of the justices’ decision to grant Trump immunity from criminal prosecution. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails—how he would use the immense powers of the presidency…to serve the only client he has ever had: himself,” she said. As I wrote earlier this month, the immunity decision is yet another Court-related political liability for Trump, and is likely contributing to his reluctance to discuss the Court at all on the campaign trail. I apologize for the error.
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We would all be better off if people would stop saying things like, but for Dobbs, Roe would still be good law as you read this sentence. In Casey, a Republican Supreme Court all but gutted Roe and allowed states to impose inane and cynical restrictions on abortions under the pretense that they were “reasonable” regulations of implementing the procedure. Mississippi originally brought the Dobbs case to have the Supreme Court bless one of those absurd laws that all but forbade abortion in the name of regulating it. Only when the Trump** triad was complete did Mississippi change its claim to ask for overturning Roe. The anti-abortion assault on Roe was a long-term project that as a practical matter succeeded in many states.