SHOULD HAVE LEFT IT BLANK

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Well. At least you have a platform this go round. How come it’s always so extreme and crazy? “The 2024 Republican Party platform, released yesterday, calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment not to protect equal rights for Americans from discriminatory laws, as those who wrote, passed, and ratified the amendment intended. Instead it calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of fetuses from the time of fertilization. It says that states should start passing laws protecting those rights: so-called fetal personhood laws that have their roots in the 1960s and were considered a fringe idea until about fifteen years ago. Those laws prohibit all abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and several forms of contraception.” Oh boy. This is a winner if I’ve read read one. “Saying states should pass such laws echoes the language Trump has used to try to avoid the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular abortion stance by claiming, as the Supreme Court did in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, that states alone should write laws covering abortion.” Because that’s working so very well. Check your home state. “But in its reaction to the Republican platform today, the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization made it clear that the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to open the way for a national abortion ban. The Fourteenth Amendment, after all, gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” “It is important that the [Republican Party] reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” the organization said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.” And there you have it. National ban just a nudge nudge wink wink away. So when your presumed presidential candidate bobs and weaves and dodges and obfuscates, we don’t believe it. When your platform is modified to ‘soften’ language on abortion, we don’t believe it. Because beneath the words are efforts waiting to continue to do just the opposite. We believe your platform. We believe the people you are in league with, and have always been in league with. We do not believe you. And we definitely don’t believe the guy who brought us to this point. How you do lie.