David Siders is a politics editor at POLITICO. He previously was a national political correspondent at POLITICO and a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee.For decades, Nebraska’s Democratic Party not only accepted, but elevated members who opposed abortion rights. There was former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who considered “thethe state can legally offer” when he first ran for governor, before shifting to the left on the issue. There was former Sen.
“We just have put in place these litmus tests,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can to eat our young.” Until they didn’t. Earlier this year, in a precursor to the state party’s censure vote, the local Democratic Party in Omaha’s Douglas County passed a measure to formally“I just said, ‘Please, we are supposed to be the party of the big tent,’” she told me. “If you go back, Democrats were full of Irish Catholics who all were anti-choice, and that’s just the way they came.”
Standing at the microphone on a small stage, Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, told delegates what the party had done was “obviously a very difficult thing, not because the party doesn’t condemn the actions and the words of Senator McDonnell, but because many in the party know that sometimes our actions are then taken out of context and used against us, used against those in the community, used against other candidates.
“We need our elected Democrats to protect women’s reproductive rights, period,” she said. “There’s no more squishy middle in that, and I think that has changed in the last four years … When he got elected four years ago, we did not have the Supreme Court decision.
In that light, the censure of McDonnell is one more sign not just of the eroding center in American politics, but of how the abortion issue is changing Democrats, who, in the absence ofMcDonnell’s offense, in Democrats’ minds, was not just that he had voted for the bill; it was that he’d cleared the way procedurally for it to happen. Joining Republicans in the legislature, heand advance legislation that would have banned abortion once cardiac activity could be detected.
Still, even if public sentiment on abortion has shifted in Democrats’ favor, Rhoades thought the censure of McDonnell was a mistake. “It’s terrible for the party, because if they withdraw their support, the people who are in those rooms, that’s the money that comes in reliably that they don’t have to work very hard for,” she said. “This is not helping us.”
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