San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Court spurs national divide along red-blue axis
Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.
Call these the Disunited States.
The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and LGBTQ and voting rights.
On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism.
Even where public opinion is more mixed, like in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, the Republican grip on state legislatures has ensured that policies in those states conform with those of the reddest states in the union, rather than strike a middle ground.
The tearing at the seams has been accelerated by the six-vote conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which has embraced a muscular states-rights federalism. In the past 10 days the court has erased the constitutional right to an abortion, narrowed the federal government’s ability to regulate climate-warming pollution and blocked liberal states and cities from barring most of their citizens from carrying concealed guns outside of their homes.
“They’ve produced this Balkanized house divided, and we’re only beginning to see how bad that will be,” said David Blight, a Yale historian who specializes in the era of American history that led to the Civil War.
Historians have struggled to
find a parallel moment, raising the 19th-century fracturing over slavery; the clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court in the New Deal era of the 1930s; the fierce battles over civil rights during Reconstruction and in the 1950s and early 1960s; and the rise of armed, violent groups like the Weather Underground in the late ’60s.
Echoes of U.S. history
For some people, the divides have grown so deep and so personal that they have felt compelled to pick up and move from one America to the other.
“I did everything I could to put my mouth where my money was, to bridge the divide with my own actions,” said Howard Garrett, a Black, gay 29-year-old from Franklin, Tenn., who ran for alderman in recent years, organized the town’s first Juneteenth celebration and worked on LGBTQ outreach to local schools, only to be greeted with harassment and death threats.
Garrett moved to Washington, D.C., last year. “People were just sick in their heart,” he said, “and that was something you can’t change.”
On abortion, history seems to be riffing on itself.
Both supporters and opponents of abortion rights see a parallel to the abolition of slavery.
As states like Illinois and Colorado
vow to become “safe harbors” for women in surrounding states seeking to end their pregnancies, abortion rights advocates see an echo of past efforts by anti-slavery states in the North. But abortion opponents see themselves as emancipating the unborn, and often compare the Roe decision’s treatment of the fetus to the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that denied Black people the rights of American citizenship.
Conservatives are not resting on their victories. The anti-abortion movement, long predicated on returning the issue of reproductive rights to elected representatives in the states, talks now about putting a national abortion ban before Congress.
Roger Severino, a leading social conservative and senior official in the Trump administration, invoked the struggle of Black Americans for equality, saying the 10 years that passed between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ending “separate but equal” segregation and Congress’ passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 mirrored the struggle ahead on abortion.
“I cannot see us living in two Americas where we have two classes of human beings in this country: some protected fully in law, some who are not protected at all,” said Severino, now the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative think tank.
On climate change, the court’s decision to limit federal regulatory powers has underscored the impasse in Congress over legislation expressly limiting emissions of climate-warming pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
Division on a host of issues
But again, the states are stepping unto the breach. States from Virginia to Maine have banded together to limit carbon emissions under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. In the West, California, Oregon and Washington are pursuing a Pacific Coast Collaborative to coordinate clean fuel standards and move toward zero-emission cars.
Fossil fuel states are moving in the opposite direction, pressing for more exploration and more production of coal, oil and natural gas and for fewer emissions regulations, putting local jobs and overall economic priorities ahead of the impact of climate change.
As conservative states move to bar gender transition therapies for people under 18, California’s Legislature is considering a bill that would void any subpoena seeking information about people traveling to the state for such care.
But Alabama’s attorney general, invoking the Supreme Court’s reasoning in its abortion decision, said this past week that
federal courts must allow the state’s ban on gender-transition care to take effect.
And one state’s banned books are another’s teen summer reading list.
As the political divide between the states becomes more pronounced, what political scientists call “sorting” may accelerate. Conservative Illinois billionaire Kenneth Griffin announced last week that he had moved to Miami from Chicago, and would take Citadel, his hedge fund, with him. He told his employees that Florida offered a better corporate environment.
Joanna Turner Bisgrove, 46, a family physician at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, had worked her whole professional life in Oregon, Wis., a small town south of Madison, when her hospital was purchased by a Catholic health care chain that began restricting abortions and transgender care. After the Wisconsin Legislature took up the issue of transgender girls in sports, she said, friends of her gender-fluid child became magnets for bullying so bad that it made the local news.
Nearly a year ago, the Bisgroves finally moved across the red-blue border, to Evanston, Ill., where, Bisgrove said, her children would be accepted and her medical practice could thrive.
“In the end,” she said, “my morals would not square with what I could do.”