On his show Tuesday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough showed a stunning amount of ignorance for a former congressman.
And his rant about the new Texas anti-abortion law revealed quite a stunning departure from Scarborough’s former life as a Republican representative from Pensacola, evidence of his wholesale embrace of the leftist politics his employer is renowned for.
On his program, Scarborough took the U.S. Supreme Court to task for tossing a challenge to the new Lone Star State law that bans abortion after a heartbeat is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks.
Scarborough, who represented much of North Florida in Congress from 1995 to 2001, noted that abortion was “a constitutionally protected right, recognized as written into the Constitution for half a century.”
In his diatribe, he later added, “I guess what really surprises me the most is that the United States Supreme Court, that five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, would take away a constitutionally protected right, recognized as written into the Constitution for half a century, and do it based purely on procedural grounds.”
Obviously, this is a lot of left-wing hyperbole.
Abortion, obviously, is not “written into” the Constitution. By its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court arguably struck down any legal provisions protecting the life and rights of the unborn. It is true that the court anchored the decision in the 14th Amendment, but in her analysis of the decision, pro-life lawyer Susan Wills noted that that amendment “was not intended to create any new rights, but to secure to all persons, notably including freed slaves and their descendants, the rights and liberties already guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Along those lines, Scarborough tried to argue that the ruling would allow liberal states to create laws that expressly attack things like gun ownership or prayer in private schools – which only fails to admit that, unlike abortion, those things are expressly protected in the Bill of Rights.
And abortion supporters like Scarborough also fail to note that overturning Roe v. Wade would not end abortion. It would be up to the states to decide, and arguably at least 14 states would continue unfettered abortions if Roe went away.
Scarborough also maintained that “70 percent of Americans” support this “constitutional right.” Apparently, he missed the AP poll from June that showed backing for abortion falls to 34 percent during the second trimester, and drops to just 19 percent in the third.
But Scarborough also glides over his own personal history on abortion.
In 2001, as a congressman, he voted for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which included provisions to make it a crime to kill an unborn child during the commission of another crime.
As a lawyer in private practice nearly 30 years ago, Scarborough also for a time represented Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion activist who in 1993 murdered a Pensacola abortion doctor named David Gunn.
But one may hope that Scarborough and others who oppose the Texas law might consider the carnage that occurred just before it took effect.
The Daily Wire reported that last week, in the final hours before the law took effect at midnight on Sept. 1, one clinic in Fort Worth performed 67 abortions in 17 hours, and confirmed that abortifacient drugs worked in another 60 cases.
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