Boil the Frog Slowly

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The phrase "boil the frog" comes from the old story of placing a frog in a pot and cooking him by turning up the heat slowly over time. The frog thinks he's got a nice hot tub going, and the one who controls the heat has dinner.....eventually.

That's the way Jack Balkin sees the recent Supreme Court ruling concerning the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. Slowly chipping away at Roe v. Wade, procedure by procedure, rather than getting it overturned on the whole, accomplishes three key things. It keeps moderates from leaving the Republican party, it provides fresh meat to the base, and it keeps the opposition from mounting a strong counterattack.

I still think "morning after" medical advancements will render this moot, but it's an interesting take on the subject.

A far more prudent strategy, and the one the President and his advisers will likely adopt, would be to appoint Justices who will preserve Roe but chip away at it slowly, for example, by devising new procedural rules that make it difficult to challenge abortion regulations in federal court, by upholding restrictions on particular medical procedures like partial birth abortion, and by further limiting abortions for minors and poor women. Moderates and independents may not like these changes, but such rulings will be much less likely to induce wholesale defections from the Republican coalition than wiping Roe v. Wade off the books. The latter is a simple, easy to understand result that people can get angry about and rally around. Procedural limitations on abortion, by contrast, are hard to explain to voters and therefore risk less political danger for the Republicans.

Chipping away at Roe slowly not only allows the party to keep moderates and independents from bolting, it also preserves a hated symbol for the party's base of religious conservatives to struggle against. As long as Roe remains law, religious conservatives can point to it as a example of what is wrong with America and with a liberal activist judiciary (which is, of course, increasingly staffed by conservative Republican Presidents!). Thus, the reverse litmus test not only holds the party's winning coalition together, it's also good practical politics.

Read the whole thing here.

-UF