How House Democrats plan to take advantage of Republican overreach on abortion
The lights are beginning to go on that the Tea party wasn’t about electing Fiscons, it was just a Toomeyan cloaking device for religious conservatives.
That started the biggest backlash in the short, otherwise happy life of the new Republican House. The Daily Show ran jokes about the “rape loophole.” Instead of a popular bill, Smith had handed the GOP a toxic mess. And Israel intends to keep using it against them. He’s talking about this a day after the DCCC sent out a fundraising message pegged to the “forcible rape” mess, subject line “Outrageous.”
“We need to bring out 9 million independent voters,” Israel explains. “If you do a geographic analysis of them, they live in about 37 fairly suburban, moderate districts across the country. Those 9 million independent voters, in those 37 [districts], elected Republicans because Republicans said that they would, on Day One, focus on revitalizing jobs. And what did they do on Day One? They redefined rape. That is not what those independent voters expected from the new Republican majority.”
This is the kind of bluster you can engage in after your opponent has dunked on himself. It will undoubtedly continue until at least Nov. 6, 2012. Abortion rights activists, whose relevance had been waning during elections fought over the war in Iraq and the Great Recession, have found a toehold in politics again.