It was only a matter of time. With Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy resigning from his position, the evangelical right wing of the Republican party will get their ultimate pound of flesh.
By averting their gaze from all the Trump scandals, and remaining steadfast in their support of Trump's authoritarianism, they will finally select a justice that will vote to throw Roe V. Wade back down to the states to decide abortion rights.
I have a variety of friends on my Facebook feed, on account of the fact that I was raised in what many would call Trumpistan, and spent the rest of my existence migrating in and out of various progressive causes.
The posts from my liberal friends are, not surprisingly, in shock over Kennedy's resignation. How could a moderate justice abandon us in our hour of need?
Yet, across the news spectrum, almost everyone on the vocal Left or Right seems to be ignorant of how old all those justices are. Kennedy will be 82 when he retires at the end of the month. He's been in the job since 1988. That's 30 years, folks. When you look at the other justices, three others are 70 or older. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as tough as she may be, is still 85 years old. Just because it takes the American public 20 or so years to develop name recognition (how many of the justices can you name without consulting Wikipedia?) doesn't mean the fate we all share - death - is going to take a holiday. I worry about dying on a daily basis; I'm 55. At 82, I want to be riding my bike around all day and drinking wine.
There are various lists with potential picks being floated, all very conservative. I don't like to pick horses for the various political horse races we have afoot, but Bloomberg reported three Trump favorites - Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Kethledge. The first is a guaranteed death-vote for Roe, while the latter two have serious political chops outside of being judges. Trump isn't going to pick any purist that is likely to send him into the maw of a Mueller organization, so it's a toss-up. Barrett would be sticking a finger in the eye of progressive women by having a woman cast the deciding vote on abortion. But the latter two are more likely to help Trump weather the gathering storm over Russia in the election.
Conservatives need to be careful of what they wish for. Abortion has been a convenient punching bag issue for them - binding a moral cause to their constituency while their representatives pass tax cuts for their sponsors and rob those same people blind. But the reality is the American voter doesn't understand tax policy. They do understand abortion, and are overwhelmingly for a woman's right to choose. And the world has come a long way from the original court decision in 1973. If state houses follow a Roe repeal with an explosion of laws saying life begins at conception, a good hunk of modern birth control will also be outlawed. And the punishment of the first doctors, and patients, under these necessarily draconian laws will bring outrage unlike any we've seen. You think 2000 separated toddlers at the border is something? Just wait.
There's a famous Chinese chengyu, a proverb of sorts, about Si Wang, who had a horse. When the horse ran away, the villagers came to Si Wang, and said, "Bad news! You lost your horse!" Si Wang wisely said, "Good news, bad news, who knows?" The next day, the horse returned, bringing another horse.
I think it's a good idea to listen to Si Wang with the current situation. We live in a slowly awakening democracy, a giant finally moving after many years of sleep. Good news, bad news? Stay tuned.
Chuck Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.
