James Bopp, the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, who has been the brains behind the dismantling of campaign finance reforms and a driving force in the effort to chip away at abortion rights with incremental legal victories, urged abortion rights opponents to vote for Donald Trump last week, saying that Hillary Clinton as president would be “100 percent evil.”
Speaking to a small group at the National Right to Life Committee’s convention outside of Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Bopp said that the vacancy on the Supreme Court and possible upcoming vacancies give conservatives and abortion rights opponents a “really big stake” in the presidential election.
In politics, he said, “You have two choices. You have to compare the choices. You don’t examine just one and say, ‘Well, I don’t like that so I’m just not going to vote for it.’”
“I think there’s only one conclusion you can come to” in the presidential race, he said, saying that “as flawed as people may think the Republican candidate is,” Clinton “will be 100 percent evil. She will never make a correct decision on anything.”
The four moderate justices on the current Supreme Court, he said, display “unthinking, reflexive voting based on policy results,” which he called “chilling.”
“Five, six, seven of these liberal judges voting in lockstep, mindlessly voting in lockstep to impose every liberal policy agenda that they can think of is what we have at stake” in the election, he said.
Citing an article in The Atlantic by law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, Bopp warned, “These people have crazy, nutty ideas and they’re going to use their bloc to do it.”
On abortion, he warned, a more liberal court could rewrite the Roe v. Wade decision on gender discrimination grounds and “what that would mean is that every limitation, every restriction, every condition on abortions will be illegal. Every one. All of them.”
The anti-abortion movement is regrouping after the Supreme Court struck down unnecessary regulations on Texas abortion clinics in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Bopp acknowledged this, saying that the standard for new anti-abortion laws is “What will [Justice Anthony] Kennedy accept post the Texas abortion case?”
He suggested that anti-abortion legislators and lawyers could turn their attention to 20-week abortion bans, “dismemberment abortion” bans or restrictions such as ultrasound requirements that Kennedy’s previous rulings have indicated that he might accept.
What Kennedy will do, he said, “is really based on the individual circumstances that would be presented in the future,” noting that the circumstances of the Texas case were “somewhat extreme” in the number of clinics that shut down after the law was passed, although he said the clinic shutdowns were merely correlated with, not caused by, the Texas law.
