As a Rudy supporter, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried when I start seeing columns like this:
Rudy Giuliani is playing the role of a contortionist in his attempts to convince enough pro-life voters to support his presidential candidacy.
After an unblemished record as a pro-choice mayor of New York City (if you don’t count the “blemish” of babies not allowed to live), Giuliani surprised a lot of people when he said if he is elected president he would name only “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court. That sounded pretty good to some, until Giuliani added last week during a CNN interview that he thinks a person who believes the Constitution should be interpreted as written could also vote to uphold Roe v. Wade and that he supports public financing of abortions for poor women who want them.
Twisting himself even further, Giuliani said denying a poor woman tax dollars to pay for an abortion would deprive her of a “constitutional right.”
While the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and a free press, it does not follow that the government should buy me a newspaper if I can’t afford one. And as a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade, why would Giuliani name judges who oppose it? Would a pro-life candidate be credible if he promised to name only judges who read into the Constitution whatever he or she wished?
Giuliani claims that Roe v. Wade established a “constitutional right” to abortion. The Court, unable to find that “right” clearly stated anywhere in the Constitution, finally concluded that it was implied in either the 14th Amendment, which protects ones right to privacy, or in the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights.
Abraham Lincoln dealt with the danger of reading into the Constitution ideas and supposed rights that are not there in his brilliant speech at Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860. Addressing the issue of slavery and whether it should it be allowed to spread to territories outside of those states in which it was then practiced and rebutting Sen. Stephen Douglas’ assertion that the Founders intended “popular sovereignty” to determine such things, Lincoln said: “An inspection of the Constitution will show that the right of property in a slave is not ‘distinctly and expressly affirmed’ in it (Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in Dred Scott contends that it was). Bear in mind, the Judges do not pledge their judicial opinion that such right is impliedly affirmed in the Constitution; but they pledge their veracity that it is ‘distinctly and expressly’ affirmed there – ‘distinctly,’ that is, not mingled with anything else – ‘expressly,’ that is, in words meaning just that, without the aid of any inference, and susceptible of no other meaning.”
Lincoln’s point was there are no distinct words in the Constitution expressing the right of a human to own another human. The Taney Court had to misread the Constitution in order to assert such a “right,” which is what the Court did in Roe v. Wade a century later.
If Giuliani believes in a strict construction interpretation of the Constitution, he could not support abortion, because a strict constructionist does not find language permitting it. For him to take the position he does on abortion and then to say he would nominate strict constructionists to the bench twists him and the law into a pretzel.
Giuliani says people who don’t like his position do not have to vote for him. Many social conservatives who view abortion as a make or break issue are likely to follow his advice.
The political calculus by which Rudy attains the GOP nod doesn’t necessarily involve the Cal Thomases of the world jumping on the Giuliani bandwagon. To put it bluntly, Rudy doesn’t need every social conservative vote to win. At the same time, it will be very, very hard for Rudy to garner the nomination if folks like Cal Thomas are actively opposing his candidacy. While it’s true that many social and religious conservatives have been waiting for casus belli regarding Rudy’s candidacy, most have been open to entente with the Mayor as long as he is willing to meet them halfway on the cultural issues they care so much about. While Rudy’s campaign has been drawing up position papers that do just that, as the wise Kavon noted earlier today, the Mayor is in dire need of a crash course in how to communicate with the average national Republican voter, which is a distinctly different breed from the average NYC Republican voter. Like Kavon and J-Pod, I believe Rudy can stop the bleeding fairly painlessly, but it will require the Mayor to start listening to folks who have been inside a mega-church. (Admittedly, I haven’t been, so perhaps I should hold off on sending my CV at this juncture.)
April 10th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I hate to worry you further Dave, but Maggie Gallagher has a similarly negative column up (from Rudy’s perspective):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucmg/20070410/cm_ucmg/rudytoprolifersdropdead
April 10th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
DaveG:
You wrote
“While it’s true that many social and religious conservatives have been waiting for casus belli regarding Rudy’s candidacy, most have been open to entente with the Mayor as long as he is willing to meet them halfway on the cultural issues they care so much about.”
Maggie G addressed this point directly:
“Personally, I know I tried really hard to find a way to make the match work. But it takes two to tango, and Rudy’s clearly not interested in meeting anyone — not me, not most of his spouses, not his son — halfway. Or a quarter of the way. In fact, being Rudy, he’s not budging a step. All the deep-seated longing for rapprochement clearly runs in only one direction.”
Rudy’s a talented leader, but he seems to be flirting with abandoning “functionally pro-life” for plain-ol’ pro-choice. That’s a tough place from which to win the GOP nomination.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
The debates are going to have a large effect. It’s likely that Huckabee, Tancredo, Hunter or Brownback will come out swinging. It will hurt them but the leaders have further to fall.
It could very well end up that Rudy was a placeholder for a cultural Republican to emerge.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I used to believe that, due to the bizarre disdain McCain had engendered from many conservatives, he’d be more likely to cause some sort of intra-party rebellion, then the well-liked, if ideologically ill-fitting, Giuliani. That assumption is becoming increasingly unlikely. There will be an absolute firestorm of opposition if Giuliani somehow wrests the Republican nomination from McCain, Romney, and Thompson. I practically become ill just thinking about it.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Imagine a food fight but with handgrenades instead of food. There’s your convention floor if a firm pro-choice Rudy wins the nomination. It’ll be a hot day in Minnesota.
April 11th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Isn’t it a fascinating primary this time around?
April 11th, 2007 at 1:44 am
Oh, that fight is going to happen way before the convention floor. It’s already starting now, way before I thought it’d start, and this issue isn’t going away any time soon.
Would conservative candidates benefit from a disillusionment with Guiliani? Absolutely. But, if a strong conservative candidate doesn’t arise and Romney is still viewed with suspicion, I think McCain could benefit most. Some of Guiliani’s more moderate supporters would probably go to McCain. He could become the nominee just by hanging in there. With a year and a half long primary season, I think having the nominee determined by default — last man standing! — is a real possibility.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Is Thompson now out, as he announced he has had Lymphoma??
April 11th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Its not just social conservatives who have problems with Rudy.
Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute critiqued Rudy’s defiance of immigration laws in the City Journal:
Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.
April 11th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Rudy Giuliani will be very tough on immigration on a national level. Very tough. Just wait and see.