Enough with the Hippie Punching

It seems that whenever a Democrat in the White House does not want to do anything meaningful, their first response is to attack the progressives in the party, as the Biden administration has with its lackluster and lackadaisical response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

They literally had almost weeks to address this issue as a result of the leaked opinion, and it’s taken them 2 weeks to make a response, and this one is decidedly weak tea:

Three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Biden used a break between Group of Seven summit meetings at the luxury Schloss Elmau resort in Germany to get an update on the stunning and sudden loss of abortion rights for millions of Americans back home.

Huddling with top aides, including some who dialed in from the White House, Biden declared at the outset of the call that he wanted to endorse ending the Senate filibuster to codify Roe into law, a position he so far had refused to take, angering many Democrats in the process.

But Biden kept his decision private until three days later when, during a news conference in Madrid, he deployed the carefully crafted language he and his team had perfected just moments before, denouncing the “outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court” and calling for “an exception to the filibuster for this action to deal with the Supreme Court decision.”

Weak tea. There was nearly 2 months for a response. The response was delayed.

For many Democrats, however, it was too little and too late — just one more example over the two weeks in which Biden and his team struggled to come up with a muscular plan of action on abortion rights, even though the Supreme Court ruling had been presaged two months earlier with the leak of a draft opinion.

Yes, they struggled over 2 weeks, because they did NOTHING over the 7 weeks before that.

This is political malpractice of the highest order, as well as a betrayal of their obligations to protect the Republic.

Seriously, does anyone at the White House do anything but explain Biden’s gaffes?

………

White House officials defend the urgency of Biden’s response and the actions he has taken on abortion, which they argue are in step with mainstream opinion. “The president has been showing his deep outrage as an American and executing his bold plan — which is the product of months of hard work — ever since this decision was handed down,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement Saturday.

“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party. It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign,” she said.

(emphasis mine)

There it is the hippie punching.

The only reason for them to work “very hard” to come up with a response in 2 weeks is because they die nothing in the prior 7 weeks.

………

About four hours after the decision overturning Roe v. Wade was handed down on June 24, the White House emailed numerous abortion rights allies asking them to join a call with top officials that afternoon to “hear more about the Supreme Court ruling and the fight ahead.” Those invited expected a fiery call to action and a detailed plan from the White House, a road map not just for the immediate aftermath but for the weeks and months ahead.

Instead, top White House and administration officials stressed the issue was important to Biden and reiterated the actions the president had already outlined earlier that day, including expanding access to the abortion pill and protecting women who travel across state lines to get an abortion. The call lasted about 20 minutes and officials took no questions, according to an outside adviser who was on the call. Afterward, multiple attendees complained to each other that the call was a waste of time, the outside adviser said, and left deflated.

That does seem to be a kind of standard for this administration, “A waste of time that left people deflated.”

Unfortunately, this administration, in particularly the old Obama hands who are serving now, see the barbarians trying to burn everything down as the opposition, and the party base as the enemy.

………

Biden had been planning to nominate a conservative opponent of abortion rights to a lifetime federal judgeship in Kentucky on the very day that Roe was overturned, according to emails first reported by the Louisville Courier Journal. The White House appears to have abandoned that idea after the abortion ruling, according to those emails.

Again, they are not taking folks like Mitch McConnell seriously.

………

But Biden’s delivery lacked the urgent tone that many Democrats felt was required, and even some White House officials later said they wished the president had been more fiery, another senior administration official said. The official added that they felt Biden had missed the mark in part because he and his team had been unprepared for the timing of the decision, and the reality of the ruling had not fully set in.

The response should be to have declared the Supreme Court decision nakedly partisan and nakedly corrupt, which is something that should have been done in 2001.

………

On Friday, exactly two weeks after the abortion ruling, Biden again stood in the White House and addressed the nation. He excoriated the Supreme Court ruling and railed against the “extreme” laws in some states that do not allow abortion even in the cases of rape and incest.

Again, why did it take two weeks?

………

For Jennifer Palmieri, a White House communications director under Obama, the criticism was never fair to begin with. “Republicans gamed the system, and they got two Supreme Court justices they shouldn’t have, and those people had a 40-year plan to overturn Roe and they did it. And to continue to blame Biden for the fact that more Americans didn’t vote for Democrats is an epic example of missing the forest,” she said.

Jennifer Palmieri just admitted that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has known the agenda of the radical right in America for more than 40 years, and has not engaged in a meaningful fight against this.

It was easy for the party to raise money, and for the consultants to get big paychecks, off of Roe v. Wade, so nothing meaningful was done to take this off of the table.

It is to quote (not) Tallyrand, “Worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”