Last week, the Senate rejected an extreme abortion bill put forward by Democrats, voting 51-49 against an effort to limit debate on the legislation.
All Republicans and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia voted “nay” on the motion to invoke cloture and advance the bill.
The bill died by a simple majority. However, the way the press tells it, Republicans used the filibuster to kill legislation that would have codified Roe v. Wade into law. Manchin even said he would’ve happily voted for the bill had it simply codified Roe.
First, the bill didn’t simply “codify” Roe. It went well beyond.
“While widely portrayed in the media as codifying Roe v. Wade,” explained law professor Jonathan Turley, “this legislation actually goes far beyond the current precedent of the Supreme Court and would effectively wipe out many state laws and state authority on abortion.”
Secondly, blaming the filibuster for Democrats’ failure to whip even a simple majority for cloture is a bit of a stretch. Had 55 senators voted to limit debate on the bill, perhaps the “filibuster” narrative would have some legs. However, the way things actually happened, a technically bipartisan majority rejected an effort to advance the legislation. There was a vote. Democrats simply didn’t have the numbers (this is to say nothing of the fact that they didn’t even reach the 60 votes necessary to move the bill forward).
Nevertheless, and despite what happened in the Senate, corporate journalists quickly blamed the bill’s death on a Republican-led “filibuster.”
“49-51, Senate Dems fall 11 votes shy of breaking a Republican-led filibuster to advance bill on abortion rights. Manchin, the lone Democratic no vote. No Republicans voted in the affirmative,” said CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju.
Said the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller, “Senate Democrats’ bill to write Roe v. Wade into law blocked by GOP-led filibuster as Supreme Court weighs abortion case.”
Miller, by the way, served previously as the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Chew on that for a bit.
In a move that surprised precisely no one, Democrats seized immediately on the bogus media-driven “filibuster” narrative.
“I believe in democracy,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told reporters after the bill failed to advance, “and I don’t believe the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority wants to do.”
“Majority” is a funny word to use to describe a 51-49 vote.
Indeed, as constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule put it last week, “Civics teachers around the country alarmed as they see ‘filibuster’ redefined to mean ‘loses 51-49.’”
Pivot!
CNN’s post-Jeff Zucker pivot to hard-hitting journalism is going swimmingly.
And by “swimmingly,” I mean “terribly.”
Last week, the flailing cable news network hosted a former classmate of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, giving her free rein to smear the jurist as a retrograde misogynist and theocrat after he authored a draft decision this year overturning Roe v. Wade.
Because who better to provide the public with a compelling and insightful analysis of the justice’s thinking than a former classmate from a 1972 undergraduate class at Princeton University?
That is sarcasm, by the way.
“I’m not that naive,” said Susan Squier, professor emeritus of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (of course) at Penn State University, “but there is a time when you just have to speak out. And those of us who went to Princeton have a privilege of having gone there, we can get listened to.”
And did you know I went to Princeton?
She continued, addressing the language of Alito’s draft decision, saying, “I read all 98 pages of it, and mind you, I’m trained as a scholar of literature and medicine, and I look at nuance, and when I saw that he had smuggled into the document the wording from the Mississippi Gestational Age Act, which as I understand it, now I’m not a lawyer, isn’t even law yet.”
“And he’s referring to unborn children rather than fetuses,” she added. “I was just stunned. I mean, I have read a lot of medical history going back for doing literature and medicine, and his is, like, a greatest hits of misogyny. He doesn’t consider the context. And this man was a historian at Princeton. He was a double major in history and poli-sci. But it’s as if he doesn’t believe history actually involves a record of things changing. Instead, it is history as, ‘Let’s go back to the Salem witch trials.’ It makes me so angry.”
Her host, CNN’s John Berman, then asked her to contrast 2022 with 1973, the year the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.
“What I would say is we seem to be heading into a religious state,” said Squier. “It is going to be a state run by Evangelical Christians.”
It is a bizarre takeaway, considering the Supreme Court is made up entirely of Catholics and Jews.
This is CNN, the most trusted name in news.
Let them eat cake
There’s a reason the corporate press gets viewed as out of touch with the concerns of everyday people.
Corporate media cronies keep telling on themselves, sneering at the worries of the people they ostensibly serve. Worse, the media types who do the sneering don’t even seem to realize they’re doing it!
The infant formula shortage in the United States is a real and serious crisis, serious enough that President Joe Biden met with manufacturers to address the matter.
But if you skimmed social media, you may have noticed HuffPost senior editor and former Los Angeles Times editor Ann Brenoff scoffing at the formula shortage crisis.
Democratic activist Amy Siskind began first, noting glibly, “Inflation down for the first time in 8 months, and should trend down from here ahead of the election. Now what will Fox News cover? Roll out the Southern border stories.”
First, “inflation was only 8.3% last month!” is a hell of a victory lap. Second, what good reason does Siskind have to believe inflation will only “trend down from here”? Third, the humanitarian crisis at the border is indeed a crisis. It’s as bad, and in many cases worse, as it was during the Trump presidency.
No one ever said Democratic activists were intelligent. But, really, Democrats ought to demand better from their allies.
As if this wasn’t embarrassing enough, enter HuffPost’s Ann Brenoff, who responded to Siskind, saying, “And don’t forget the baby formula shortage. OMG!”
Look, Siskind is an activist. Her whole bag is being a shameless goblin for her team, regardless of how stupid and little it makes her look.
But what is Brenoff’s excuse? She’s a senior editor at a major news publication. Doesn’t she see the news value in the nationwide baby formula shortage? Even the White House sees the problem, and it has an incentive to ignore it, given how its economic and monetary policies are wreaking havoc on the system.
But here’s Brenoff, laughing down fears and concerns regarding the real and troubling baby formula shortage in the U.S.
Oh, you’re scared you won’t be able to feed your babies? LOL.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting flashbacks to when corporate journalists openly mocked a Texas family of 11 for claiming rising inflation had made the cost of basic groceries, including milk, increasingly unaffordable.
The reason people increasingly see the corporate press as being out of touch is because, well, its members are exactly that.
