Brooks: Roe Lengthened the Abortion BattleAs I have written before, when the courts interject themselves into political battles, they generally do not solve them. Why? Because nobody considers the courts to have had the
final word on the matter except the winners.
When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.Consider Brown v. Board of Education for another example. Had segregation been eliminated state by state through the legislatures (as it surely would have been, albeit not as swiftly), you would not have seen "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards throughout the South well into the 1960s. Now you can make the argument that Brown v. Board of Education was the right decision to make on equal protection grounds, but it's hard to deny that it did not settle the matter for good.
So it is with abortion. Had Roe not been handed down, odds are that abortion would be legal in many states, although perhaps not all. New York and several other states had already legalized it by the early 1970s; over the years the battle would have played out state by state.
Brooks notes that Roe is almost the sole reason we have these debillitating battles over judges, to the point where one side is talking about limiting debate, and the other is talking about shutting down the government. But it's his last paragraph that will have liberals in NYC spitting up their morning latte:
The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.
