In his remarks, not only does Johnson claim Roe “gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children,” but he rails against the imagined economic detriments of abortion, pushing his caucus’ outlandish claim that by depleting a hypothetical workforce, abortion has defunded social security: “Think about the implications of that on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest,” Johnson says. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this… Roe was a terrible corruption.” Mind you, social security and health care have been gutted in the last several years by Republican lawmakers, not people who choose to end a pregnancy.
While there’s no question that the far right wants to stick it to pretty much everyone else, in this case I’m not talking about Senator Joseph McCarthy, but rather Representative (and briefly Speaker) Kevin McCarthy.
If you’re going to look to the past for the source for our troubles, or at least for a major moment when we lost the chance to actually get the US to live up to the ideals we claim to represent, I think you’d need to look at Andrew Johnson as the shitbag who enabled the traitorous pre-fascist scum to remain in power in the country.
The trouble started long before the US existed, but there was a moment, bought with tremendous amounts of blood and suffering, that could have led to actual freedom if Andrew Johnson had not become president.
Ah sorry seeing the name next to Nixon made me think Joe not Kevin.