On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough's hypocrisy on the issue of abortion was on stark display.
Scarborough trashed Trump for flip-flopping on abortion. But has there been a bigger flip-flopper on the issue than Scarborough himself?
Back when he was a congressman, Scarborough scored perfect ratings from pro-life groups and goose eggs from the likes of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. Is there any doubt that back in those days, Scarborough was a consistent critic of Roe v. Wade?
But now, Scarborough has effectively become pro-choice. On today's Morning Joe, he criticized conservatives who supported the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe, and condemned judicial activism on the subject.
But what was Roe other than perhaps that most egregious all-time example of judicial activism? Back in 2019, before the Dobbs case was decided, MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos declared on Morning Joe that Roe was "ripe to be overturned" because "even if you are pro-choice, the right to privacy [upon which Roe was based] does not exist either in the history or the text of the Constitution." Cevallos also said that Roe "stands on a weak foundational basis."
Scarborough didn't have the guts to push back against Cevallos's incontrovertible opinion then. And ask yourself: if "simple country lawyer" Scarborough had somehow been a SCOTUS Justice back in 1973, would he have voted with the majority? Hard to imagine. For that matter, if Scarborough had been on the Court in 2022, would he have voted to uphold Roe? We'd love to see what his reasoning would have been.
When Never Trumper David French admitted that he supported the Dobbs decision, that Roe was wrongly decided and Dobbs was rightly decided, Scarborough stayed silent, except for a sotto voce "yeah," presumably acknowledging French's position, not his own.
So tell us, Joe. Was Roe rightly decided? And if not, why should an originalist SCOTUS majority have let it remain the law of the land?
French called Trump the "worst possible standard bearer" for the pro-life movement. You know who would be much, much worse, David? Kamala Harris. She'd be a standard bearer for the most radical pro-abortion position possible.
How proud would you be of your Never Trump virtue-signaling then, David, if, with backing by people like you, Harris got elected, pushed through legislation codifying Roe, and appointed enough Justices to destroy the Court's conservative majority?
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
9/4/24
6:15 am EDTDAVID FRENCH: I would say if you talk to a smart, reasonable pro-life activist, they would not have foreseen, and would not have foreseen the total public backlash that has been ongoing since Dobbs.
That that has taken the pro-life movement by surprise. The pro-life movement hasn't fully reacted to that, and Donald Trump is the worst possible standard-bearer.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, David, and how ironic is it that we conservatives, you and I, we are conservatives. Trump Republicans are not conservatives. I said it, you don't have to say it.
But we conservatives warned for years, and railed for years, against pushing things on Americans by judicial fiat. And instead of going out and winning on this issue, winning through the hearts and minds of Americans, winning democratically in elections and in grassroots, the Republicans said -- Donald Trump Republicans said, we're just going to win at the Supreme Court. The hell with what everybody else thinks. We're just going to win at the Supreme Court and, and, and we'll take that as a victory and run with it.
And what happened? Well, exactly what we conservatives said would happen. The same thing that happened when the liberal judges passed things that were out of line with what mainstream voters, what middle-class Americans, wanted.
FRENCH: Well, look, I'm going to say, I supported Dobbs. I thought Roe was wrongly decided and Dobbs was rightly decided. But what you began to see happen was there was so --because you had abandoned anybody who could go to the big American middle, and make that pro-life case, make that case in a way that people could hear it and understand it.
Because you went away from somebody like that, towards a Donald Trump, what happened is, the pro-life movement was not ready for the post-Roe world. The post-Roe world was going to be democracy. The post-Roe world was going to be people voting. And in embracing Donald Trump, in many ways, what happened was, you repelled the people who might otherwise vote for you.
And so now, there hasn't even been a pro-life referendum that's won, a pro-life vote that's won in a referendum, even in red states since Dobbs. And the movement is reeling right now.
