The Nuclear Option: Democrats Finally Realize Abortion Shouldn’t Be Left Up to the Courts

Democrats running for president have taken a shockingly sensible position on the most deeply divisive issue in American politics for the past half-century.

Threatened by a slew of new state laws around the country making it illegal to perform late-term abortions after baby’s hearts have begun beating, Democrats have seized on a new tactic for ensuring that they can preserve the “constitutional right” to abortion up to the moment of birth. (And even after, according to some Democrat politicians, so long as the newborn is kept “comfortable” while the grownups decide how best to dispose of the live baby.)

This novel new approach Democrats have suddenly discovered while desperately campaigning for president is to take the issue to Congress and pass legislation that would enshrine abortion rights into federal law.

Others, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Cory A. Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have jumped wildly onto this radical bandwagon of turning to Congress to hammer out abortion laws in America.

That’s right. Against all odds, a handful of Washington politicians have stumbled accidentally into doing the right thing.

Of course, turning to the legislature to make abortion law has been the “pro-life” position of conservatives from the very beginning. That is, after all, exactly what frustrated voters in Missouri and Alabama and Utah are doing today by passing new limits on abortions in their states.

The whole reason abortion became the single most divisive issue in America nearly 50 years ago is that those activist judges — the very ones supported by politicians like Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren and Spartacus and Ms. Gillibrand — stripped the issue out of the hands of voters, giving sole discretion over the issue to unelected judges in black robes.

Geniuses on the Supreme Court, of course, managed to find abortion as some kind of guaranteed, sacred right in a document that never once mentions the gruesome procedure. The very same politicians who still see this phantom right to abortion in the Constitution today are also the first to go blind about gun rights, which are clearly spelled out in actual words in the Second Amendment.

So, it is really great to see so many Democrats finally come to their senses and join the good, long struggle of returning the issue of abortion to voters. Of course, the moment they discover the wisdom of their newfound strategy, they will surely abandon it.

⦁ Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.