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For months, the Democratic Party leadership knew the Supreme Court was preparing to gut Roe v. Wade. When it happened, they sprang into action and immediately did nothing.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

Observers of American politics should by now know the Democratic Party is a feckless, corrupt institution incapable of meeting the challenges of our time — congenitally averse to fighting for its principles, to the extent that it actually has any. But even the most jaded cynics have to be shocked at just how useless the party’s response has been to the Right’s most recent assault on abortion rights.

Protests holding pro-abortion signs at demonstration in response to the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

As an increasingly rogue Supreme Court snatched the remnants of the right to abortion away from 40 million women around the country, party leadership boldly ruled out doing much about it. President Joe Biden wouldn’t expand the number of judges on the court or curb its jurisdiction, as progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) suggested. He and his team fret that this “would be politically polarizing” ahead of the midterms and “undermine public trust in institutions like the Supreme Court” — the implication being that the court’s attack on abortion rights somehow did neither of those.

As calls to eliminate the Senate filibuster and pass Roe into law grew louder, the Biden administration ruled that out too, dispatching Vice President Kamala Harris to CNN to deliver the bad news. “What do you say to Democratic voters who argue, ‘Wait a minute, we worked really hard to elect a Democratic president and vice president, a Democrat-led House, a Democrat-led Senate — do it now’?” asked Dana Bash.

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