Cristina Cabrera and Kate Riga at TPM offer "Five Key Takeaways" from Samuel Alito's February 10 draft opinion written for the court majority. I'd like to focus on number 3.
They note Alito's look back at earlier eras of American history, wherein he fails to find an abiding commitment to abortion rights. He writes, “the inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
While racial resentment and white grievance have always been front and center politically for Donald Trump, so was gender politics. His boasts about having his way with women, even physically assaulting them, and the many reports of his egregious conduct reveal a man who rejects the equality of women. I often regard the MAGA campaign as invoking 1950s America, when white men ruled without much fear of pushback. Cabrera and Riga look further back, all the way to the 19th century.
Regardless of the inspiration (in nostalgia and myth) for MAGA, it's clear that the Republican Party wishes to move the calendar backwards to a time before the advances of civil rights and women's rights -- experienced in the latter half of the twentieth century -- that clash with the racial and gender hierarchies of the past. The Supreme Court's Republican majority is on board with this backward movement. As I wrote in a previous post:
Neither Amy Coney Barrett, nor the five Republican men on the high court, are committed to preserving a woman's right to choose or advancing maternal healthcare. Instead, they are poised to strip away an array of rights that Americans (and not just women) have regarded as constitutionally protected. This judicial crusade seeks, by taking us backwards, to Make America Great Again. I use that phrase not to denote a special affinity with Donald Trump, but to highlight the commonality of the agenda of the court's majority with the retrograde policy preferences of the contemporary Republican Party and the cultural resentment that motivates the Republican base.
These justices are clawing back rights of individuals that the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the executive branch have recognized in decades past.