[AP Photo/Gary D. Robertson]
By J. Katsfoter
Republished from The Red Clarion.
In North Carolina, the veto-proof supermajority of GOP lawmakers sent their Senate Bill 20 — an outright bar on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on medication-induced abortions after 10 weeks — to the desk of their governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. Cooper was elected in 2016 after “culture warriors” in the North Carolina legislature attempted to block local state anti-discrimination ordinances and pushed to require “single gender bathrooms to only allow people of the corresponding sex as listed on their birth certificate to use them.” A wave of corporate boycotts, likely the result of their fear of litigation surrounding the bathroom issue, damaged the North Carolina economy and handed the gubernatorial election to the upstart Democrat Cooper, who called the law unconstitutional. Cooper’s win in 2016 was by the barest majority — some 10,000 votes out of 4.7 million cast ballots. In 2020, he won by 4.4 points.
Now, Cooper has likely sealed his fate in 2024 by exercising his veto to counteract the Republican bill. Although the bill has been sent back, the North Carolina legislature has a veto-proof supermajority that will shortly override the governor’s objection.
Earlier this year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled partisan gerrymandering to be legal, overturning a long-standing ban on the anti-democratic process. This is all part of the empire-wide Republican suppression of democratic rights; the attack on bodily autonomy is merely one front of the right-fascist war on the crumbling center. Feckless and spineless Democrat leadership, in the form of the walking corpse propped up to give speeches and eat ice cream at the White House, has categorically refused to take meaningful action to protect bodily autonomy.
Control over the U.S. imperial government is often bandied about like a kind of game between the various factions of the capitalist ruling class. They scheme and plot to snatch the flag of victory, and it has been the perennial Democratic strategy to attempt to do this in the face of overwhelming defeat. The tired line within the Democratic Party has it that they do best when they are confronted with the annihilation of democratic rights. Since the election of F.D.R. at the end of the 1920s, the Democrats have tried to replicate the powerful class-collaborationism of the proto-fascist New Dealers. How do they do that? By building up the right-fascist danger as much as they can. Now, the Biden cronies are counting on the administration’s own failure to prevent the rapid rollback of political and social rights to carry them to victory in the 2024 presidential election.
But not all Democrats are so blind, or so cruel. Governor Cooper has wagered his own re-election, and has almost certainly lost it, on this issue. He, at least, has not hidden behind electoral deceit and partisan gamesmanship. Indeed, Cooper did what Biden and the White House ghouls would not dream of: as soon as Roe was overturned, he signed an executive order into law to guarantee abortion protections in his state.
Knowing that he cannot win in the halls of power where his opponents possess the silver-bullet override, Cooper has turned to the real source of power: the people. Unlike the run-of-the-mill elected officials in the Empire, Cooper has spent the last week going from rally to rally to raise local opposition to the oppressive bill. He, at least, has realized the limits of Democratic strategy.
Even so, Cooper’s defensive plan may win an hour, a day, a week, a year; it will not secure autonomy for those who need it. Nothing can do that short of a complete social revolution. In essence, every tactic taken by a lawmaker or executive to preserve some fundamental right under the Empire is a delaying tactic. Perhaps Governor Cooper will see that as time grinds on and his efforts prove no match for the overwhelming power of the right-fascist agenda. Perhaps Roy Cooper will awaken to the reality that, if he values the lives, the health, and the autonomy of those who can be pregnant, he must abandon the lackluster politics of the Democratic Party and embrace the social revolution.
The chances are slim, but we can hope. In the meantime, it is our duty, as the working people of the Empire, to exert whatever pressure we can to prevent the execution of the fascists’ plans, not only in North Carolina, but in each and every state where the right-fascist advance has reached its high-water mark. We, the working masses, must stand and thwart the path of the onrushing fascist tide, because the Democrats either won’t, as is the case with their all-Empire representatives, or can’t, as is the case with their local officials.
It is, after all, up to us.
