It has not, and we were reminded of it like a freshly scabbed, deep knife wound today.
The Supreme Court has decided to take up Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban. It will allow the Court to reconsider the entire basis of abortion rights in America, and if the Court decides in favor of Mississippi - which it appears to have a better than 50-50 chance to - it will have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two seminal cases protecting a woman's right to choose in America. Doing so would allow legislatures to ban abortions completely, regardless of fetal viability. The Court granted review after lower courts struck down the Mississippi law for failing to comply with Roe and Casey.
I am no fan of doomerism, but we have to face reality. There is now every possibility that the ultra-right-wing Court is poised to make a woman's right to choose subservient to the wills of gerrymandered state legislatures using Dobbs v. Jackson Women Health Organization, as the Mississippi case is formally known.
Overturning Roe appears to already have the support of at least four justices on the apex court. According to the Supreme Court procedures, cases cannot be accepted for review unless at least four justices vote to hear them. In 2020, when the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital (a way to severely limit the supply of medical professionals who can perform abortion services) on a 5-4 margin, the Late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still on the Court and on the majority side. But now, Amy Coney Barrett, the third and final Donald Trump appointee, holds her seat.
Today's Supreme Court has just three Democratic appointees: Justices Breyer (Clinton), Sotomayor (Obama), and Kagan (Obama), to six conservative Republican appointees: Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito appointed by George W. Bush, Justice Thomas, appointed by George Bush Sr., and three Trump-appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
It did not have to be this way.
The situation would have been completely reversed had the 2016 election been won by Hillary Clinton. It would have been she, rather than Donald Trump, who would have appointed three justices, two of them to replace conservatives Scalia and Kennedy, and a third holding a liberal seat.
Or, if Democrats had been successful in holding the Senate in 2014, when they lost 9 seats thanks to the lowest-turnout midterm election in decades, that too might have saved a woman's right to choose. Had Democrats held the majority during 2015 and 2016 in the Senate, President Obama's nominee to the Court after the death of Antonin Scalia - Merrick Garland - would have been confirmed. Justice Ginsburg may also have seen it fit to retire before President Obama's term in office ended. That would have preserved one pro-choice vote, and flipped one anti-choice vote to pro-choice, likely securing a pro-choice majority for generations.
Both of these catastrophes - the Democratic loss in 2014 and Hillary Clinton's defeat in the electoral college in 2016 despite winning the popular vote handily - are the results of far-left ratfuckery.
During both of President Obama's terms in office, the professional leftist cabal coalesced to try to convince ordinary people - a lot of them Democrats and sympathetic to Democrats on issues - that Democrats were no better than Republicans in any substantive way. Despite the fact that the Obama-Biden administration clawed this country back from the brink of the Great Recession and managed to deliver major health care reform, student loan reform, banking reform, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, leftists created an entire industry predicated on calling Obama and the Democratic party weak-kneed sellouts.
This same cadre, which prefers to call themselves "anti-establishment", would then fuel the Bernie Sanders candidacy for president in 2016, which ran on the same theme of Democrats and Republicans being two faces of the same party because Hillary Clinton was willing to devise workable solutions rather than proposing pie-in-the-sky pony-demands that were neither properly thought out nor had a chance of passing.
The far-leftist argument never had any merit, of course. Their idea that a Congressional backbencher who, despite being in Washington for 30 years, had passed almost nothing of consequence would suddenly create a socialist utopia with a magic wand and some executive orders was preposterous.
But it sold just enough. They weren't able to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major party, but they created lasting damage.
It is well known that Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, for a grand total of fewer than 80,000 votes, and analysis shows that more than enough people who had voted for Sanders in the primary switched to voting for Trump in the general election to have swung each of those three states.
To say that those voters were deeply influenced by Bernie Sanders's own staff and allies would be an understatement. Briahna Joy Gray, a campaign staffer for Sanders in 2016 who would become his 2020 campaign's national spokesperson, posted a video of herself dancing for joy that she had voted third party and that Hillary Clinton wasn't elected. Other prominent supporters of the Bernie 2016 campaign, including current Congressional candidate Nina Turner, regularly appeared on television even after Sanders dropped out to claim that she would not endorse Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders himself had threatened that his supporters would not back Hillary just before dropping out.
The fact that a significant portion of Sanders voters would rather vote for Trump than Clinton was a direct result of the campaign that leftists had run throughout the Obama administration and the campaign that Sanders ran in 2016. If Republicans were focused on 11 investigations of Benghazi, the far left focused their sexist fire against Clinton because she gave some speeches and didn't tickle their socialist fancies, to the same effect: framing her as corrupt.
Of course their supporters as well as many unsuspecting Democratic-leaning voters got swept up in this lie.
Ultimately, that is what elected Donald Trump, and the election of Donald Trump ultimately led to three new young right-wing justices who have now put a woman's right to choose in jeopardy.
Sure, most Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters bamboozled by the far left realized after Trump was elected that there was no room for "both-sides" games and that Donald Trump was an existential threat to our republic. Many non-voters realized that their choice not to vote under the assumption that Hillary Clinton was well-positioned to win no matter what had cost the country.
It's why, in 2020, Democratic primary voters did not mess around. They ended the primary early and overwhelmingly nominated Joe Biden. Biden defeated Trump.
That was incredibly important.
But for many critically important issues - and for far too many people - the 2014 and 2016 elections will have brought long-term, nearly irreversible, damage. I fear that the damage from a right-wing judiciary - and a far-right Supreme Court - has only begun. I fear that voting rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, workers' rights, environmental justice, anti-poverty efforts, and racial equity will all continue to suffer from the Trump years long after Trump is gone and faded.
Our nation - and its most vulnerable citizens - will pay a heavy price for a long, long time to come for the intransigence of the far left.