[NY Times] When Joe Biden Voted to Let States Overturn Roe v. Wade

hat tip to @basso. Also kudos to @Sweet Lou 4 2 , who apparently cared enough about basso's original post to comment on it (albeit vulgarly)

When Joe Biden Voted to Let States Overturn Roe v. Wade

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/biden-abortion-rights.html

excerpt:

With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier.

The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” Mr. Biden, a Roman Catholic, said at the time. The decision, he said, was “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”

The bill never made it to the full Senate, and when it came back up the following year, Mr. Biden voted against it. His back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career.

As Mr. Biden prepares for the possibility of a third presidential run, women’s rights leaders and activists in both parties are recalling these shifts on abortion, which are likely to draw fresh scrutiny in a Democratic primary race where women are expected to make up a majority of voters.

Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973 as a 30-year-old practicing Catholic who soon concluded that the Supreme Court went “too far” on abortion rights in the Roe case. He told an interviewer the following year that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.” By the time he left the vice president’s mansion in early 2017, he was a 74-year-old who argued a far different view: that government doesn’t have “a right to tell other people that women, they can’t control their body,” as he put it in 2012.

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But some of Mr. Biden’s more moderate-to-conservative stances in his legislative record are raising questions in the party about whether he could win over an ascendant liberal wing eager to impose purity tests around issues of race and gender in 2020.

Even before announcing a candidacy, Mr. Biden has started trying to rebut those concerns, telling party officials in Delaware this month that he has “the most progressive record” of anyone running for president.

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Mr. Biden declined to be interviewed for this article. . . .

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As Mr. Biden put it to U.P.I. in 1986, “If it’s not government’s business, then you have to accept the whole of that concept, which means you don’t proscribe your right to have an abortion and you don’t take your money to assist someone else to have an abortion.”

In the 1980s, he repeatedly voted against funding abortions as part of the health care plan provided to federal employees and in federal prisons, except in cases where it was medically necessarily for the mother.

In 1981, he crafted the Biden amendment to ban the use of foreign aid for biomedical research related to abortion. He repeatedly voted for the so-called Hyde amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion, including through Medicaid. Both policies remain in place today, despite efforts by Democrats to end the ban on the use of federal funds.

In 1984, Mr. Biden supported an amendment praising the Reagan administration’s “Mexico City policy,” which banned federal funding for organizations around the world that provide abortion counseling or referrals. In 2005, he voted against it, supporting an amendment that would have nullified President George W. Bush’s reinstatement of the policy.

A voter guide put out in 1987 by two abortion rights groups described Mr. Biden as having an “erratic” record on reproductive rights, writing that he had a “mixed voting and rhetorical record on the issue of whether women should have the right to choose an abortion.”

“Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us,” Jeannie Rosoff, a founder of the abortion rights research organization Guttmacher Institute, told The Wall Street Journal as Mr. Biden weighed whether to enter the 1988 presidential race. “It’s very difficult to know whether this issue is purely personal, purely political or a combination of both with him.”

At the time, opponents of abortion rights say they saw him much the same way as liberals: “Unreliable,” said Marilyn Musgrave, a former Republican congresswoman from Colorado and current vice president of government affairs for the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group.

“I don’t believe he’s made a public statement recently about funding, so I don’t know where he really stands on that now,” said Ms. Musgrave. “Perhaps he evolved on that also.”

Aides to Mr. Biden declined to say whether he still supports those specific policies.
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more at the link

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and you're a bug

 

while we're on the subject of people changing politically

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-m...r-politics-culture-liberal-center-11651504379

Elon Musk Tweeted My Cartoon
Commentators on the left set about debunking my ‘lived experience’ with charts and abstractions.
By Colin Wright
May 2, 2022 12:05 pm ET



I was out for a walk last Thursday when Elon Musk tweeted a political cartoon that I created in August 2021. It received hundreds of thousands of retweets and more than 1.5 million likes. The stick figure in the middle depicts me, a center-left liberal in 2008, and how the ground had shifted under my feet by 2012 and 2021.

At the outset, I stand happily beside “my fellow liberal,” who is slightly to my left. In 2012 he sprints to the left, dragging out the left end of the political spectrum along and pulling the political “center” closer to me. By 2021 my fellow liberal is a “woke ‘progressive,’ ” so far to the left that I’m now right of center, even though I haven’t moved.

When my cartoon went viral, it resonated with many people—and caused dissonance in the left-wing media. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent called it a “silly chart” that has been “brutally debunked.” His colleague Philip Bump described it as “simply wrong” and an “obvious exaggeration.” Mr. Bump even provided a series of actual silly charts showing “the average ideological score (using a metric called DW-NOMINATE)” and “evaluations of ideology as measured in the biennial General Social Survey (GSS).”

Debunking a cartoon with a chart is like answering a love poem with a syllogism. Politics and culture, like most of human reality, can’t be reduced to data and abstractions without losing much of their essence. And self-styled progressives, who love to talk about the importance of “lived experience,” are awfully disdainful of their critics.

I created the cartoon to help sort out my feelings of increasing political alienation from the left. I’m a lifelong Democrat. I turned 18 in 2003 and have never voted for a Republican. But over the past decade, and especially the past five years, I’ve watched my party distance itself from the values and principles I hold dear.

People on the left once viewed free speech as sacrosanct and championed speaking truth to power. Now they disparage open expression as a danger to democracy and minorities. The aspiration of judging individuals by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin has given way to identity politics and “equity” initiatives that prioritize group interests over individual rights. Women’s rights, previously understood as relating to their oppression on the basis of sex, is now viewed by the left through the lens of gender identity, which gives priority to men who declare themselves to be women. Today’s progressive can’t even tell you what a woman is. The right may be inconsistent in its support of free speech, individual rights and women’s rights, but the left is consistent in its opposition to all three.

It is important to keep these shifts in mind when evaluating the “accuracy” of my cartoon, because the most common criticism is that it portrays the right as remaining stationary since 2008. A similar drawing depicting specific issues such as abortion, climate change or immigration might tell a different story. But with respect to the important cultural values I have in mind—free speech, individual rights and women’s rights—my cartoon is consistent with the lived experience of many liberals and centrists.

It’s also based on my own. I am an evolutionary biologist, and from 2008 to 2020 I worked to become a university professor. But while working as a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State in 2018, I found myself ostracized by scientific colleagues and people I thought were my close friends because I was unwilling to promote scientifically inaccurate claims about biology to avoid offending those who identify as transgender.

Suddenly, simple truths, supported by both science and common sense—such as “male and female are real biological categories defined by reproductive anatomy”—became taboo. For my great sin of stating plain biological facts and advocating for civil discourse, I endured relentless smears as “transphobic,” “far right,” even a “white supremacist.” Similar experiences have played out for millions across the U.S. and abroad.

I hope many on the left will resist the urge to debunk or dismiss my cartoon and instead use it as an opportunity to understand why so many people feel it describes their experience. Something has happened over the past decade to make many liberals feel politically homeless, and a lack of curiosity about why is a recipe for not only political failure but social strife. It contributes to our increasing inability to have reasonable, compassionate discussions on issues of great importance.

I am heartened to observe that among many of the loudest voices on social media, my cartoon has generated a tremendous amount of discussion. People have created and shared their own versions, which are both entertaining and educational. I encourage everyone to take the time to draw their own cartoons as a reminder that political parties aren’t static entities and that it’s best to ground yourself in lasting principles instead of a tribal red-vs.-blue mindset.

Individuals also change, and this is more often a healthy sign of growth and maturity than evidence of radicalization. So long as we remain curious and open to civil discourse, our differences become our strength.

Mr. Wright, an evolutionary biologist, is founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand.

Appeared in the May 3, 2022, print edition.
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