‘Kamala Harris believes we need to fight back and block these dangerous and deadly laws before they take effect…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has not been shy about voicing her controversial policy visions—many of them on dubious legal footing.
The former San Francisco prosecutor, who has wavered on whether she would allow incarcerated felons to vote from prison and has declared that she would enact sweeping gun legislation through executive fiat—in clear violation of the Constitution—now says that she would model an abortion plan after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Kamala Harris believes we need to fight back and block these dangerous and deadly laws before they take effect,” said the new abortion plan unveiled Tuesday on her website.
Harris would formally unveil the plan during a town hall set to air Tuesday on MSNBC, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Voting Rights Act, which many Southern Democrats attempted to block and filibuster, including then Tennessee Sen. Al Gore Sr., specifically targeted Southern states that had implemented Jim Crow laws and other forms of segregation and were largely undertaking a phase of massive resistance against the federal intrusion at the time.
By contrast, many of the current laws being enacted largely by southern states pertaining to abortion seem designed to go before the federal courts expressly for the purpose of establishing a change in the law of the land.
The now conservative-dominated court is widely expected to address the law and either overturn it or send the decision back to the individual states.
However, the plan unveiled on Harris’s website claimed without evidence that the states had shown a “pattern” of violating the Roe v. Wade law that the activist Supreme Court used to legalize abortion nationwide in the 1970s.
“Harris will require, for the first time, that states and localities with a history of violating Roe v. Wade obtain approval from her Department of Justice before any abortion law or practice can take effect,” said the proposal.
Ironically, while the issue of abortion has deep ties within and greatly impacts the African–American community specifically, Harris’s abortion proponents would seem to be on the wrong side of history.
In a recent opinion regarding that blocked an Indiana law designed to prevent “eugenics” based abortions for reasons of race, illness or disability, Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American currently presiding on the Supreme Court, noted that abortion pioneer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, also happened to be an outspoken racist.
‘In Sanger’s view, frequent reproduction among ‘the majority of wage workers’ would lead to ‘the contributing of morons, feeble-minded, insane and various criminal types to the already tremendous social burden constituted by these unfit,'” Thomas noted in his dissent.
Indeed, studies such as the 2005 book Freakonomics confirmed that a drop in crime during the 1990s likely was linked to the Roe v. Wade decision some two decades earlier reducing the number of babies born in at-risk and impoverished communities.
Still, others argue that no amount of justification can outweigh the government-sanctioned termination of an innocent life and the slippery slope it creates.
That religious objectors must also subsidize through taxes and healthcare premiums the promiscuous and irresponsible lifestyles of others further aggrieves both religious objectors and fiscal conservatives.
It remained unclear how the plan would fit in Harris’s broader political strategy, where she trails several white, male candidates but is currently leading among female candidates and those of color.
Harris’s proposal specifically mentioned South Carolina, one of the earliest primary states, in what could be a bid to stand out on a crucial issue. The state is one of several that has pending heartbeat legislation.
But it could also be a grave miscalculation to emphasize such a morally charged matter in the Palmetto State, where Christian religious roots run deep among both the black and white communities.
As Thomas noted in his opinion, “some black groups saw ‘family planning’ as a euphemism for race genocide and believed that black people [were] taking the brunt of the ‘planning’ under Planned Parenthood’s ‘ghetto approach’ to distributing its services.”