The Hobby Lobby ruling will be a blessing in disguise for Democrats, possibly this November but most certainly for 2016. That's the argument put forward by two MSNBC contributors on Hardball this evening, Washington Post columnist Melinda Henneberger and Michelle Bernard of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics, & Public Policy.
"I see this ruling as, definitely on the political front, being a good thing for the Democrats, because people are furious and thinking, I think it goes further than it does," Henneberger argued to guest host Steve Kornacki. Minutes later, Bernard saw a big problem for Republicans with women in 2016, if not 2014, insisting that Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" line and "corporate personhood" would be instrumental in locking down droves of female voters for Democrats in 2016:
I think where we're going to see a very large impact in terms of the women's vote is not necessarily during the 2014 midterms but in the presidential election. And it won't be on this issue as a single issue. It will be a large litmus test of the quote unquote "war on women" that we saw beginning with Mitt Romney's binders full of women in the last election.
And with this whole notion of corporate personhood, I think that you are going to see women think that this is a large problem that corporations are not people. And you will see married women, I think you will see single women, you will see African-American women, Hispanics, the quote/unquote other category of women that are looking at a long list of issues whether it is the Equal Pay Act, whether it is the Violence Against Women Act, or whether it is what we see happening with regard to contraception and Republicans being the party of binders full of women and corporate personhood and saying if corporations are equal to individuals this is not the party that we want to vote for.
And I think in 2016 it's going to be a much more important issue than we might see in the midterms.
