Your Bodily Autonomy is at Stake
Michael Baumgartner, the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from eastern Washington (Congressional District 5) wants it both ways. He wants the enthusiastic voter turnout of the “Christian” right. Simultaneously, he wants to reassure Washingtonians concerned about access to reproductive healthcare that as a U.S. Congressman he won’t be asked to decide. “It’s a ’States’ Rights’ issue.” By conviction, he wants you to know that he’s a “pro-life Catholic,” but, don’t worry, the issue would be out of his hands.
You’ve heard this before—and recently. The leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump wants full credit for installing the U.S. Supreme Court’s right wing majority that “got rid of Roe v. Wade.” But, like Baumgartner, Trump doesn’t want to discuss access to life-saving reproductive healthcare because it is really a matter “for the states to decide.”
Every Republican candidate is dependent on the voting support of the minority of Americans who, based on their particular narrow religious beliefs, want to legislate away every women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned federal protections for women’s rights opened the floodgates to all manner of Draconian state laws that render woman as second-class citizens.
Were such legislation to come before him in Congress, Baumgartner—or any Republican U.S. congressperson—would risk the wrath of the far religious right if he failed to vote for legislation to restrict access to reproductive healthcare, contraception, or In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). “States’ rights” be damned.
Business-minded and anti-regulation Republicans sold out the Republican Party decades ago to the Christian version of the Muslim Taliban [the bold is mine].
Heather Cox Richardson captured it in her October 24, 2024 Substack post:
In 2015, the [Republican] party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.
Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wadedecision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.
In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.
But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
Vote wisely. “States’ rights” is a dodge. After Dobbs a vote for any Republican at any level is a vote to surrender your bodily autonomy to a party totally dependent on the far religious right to attain—and to stay in—office. Vote for Carmela Conroy, Baumgartner’s highly qualified opponent, who will defend women’s rights and doesn’t need to twist herself into knots to court the votes of the reactionary right.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry