Hardball for Nov 7 (Chris Matthews discusses abortion and loses it with Marc Racicot)

MATTHEWS: We have the Republican Caucus, the Republican Party on here, ideologically speaking, the most far right group ever to assemble, I think. G. Gordon Liddy, Patrick J. Buchanan and Bob Dornan are whooping it up here. We’re going to be joined right now by Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mr. Racicot, thanks for joining us.

MATTHEWS: Are you going to try to appease these wild Indians I got here of the political right or what are you going to do? Are you going to give them an anti-abortion judge that can drive Nita Lowey and the left crazy for the next couple of months?

RACICOT: ... and Catholic as well. So I think we all have some disqualifying characteristics.

MATTHEWS: Judgeships are probably the hottest question in the country because when you put a judge up, you have to-they basically now have to say OK, I’m pro for abortion rights or I’m anti abortion rights, I’m choice or I’m life. How do you avoid that fight if Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, retires or one of the other judges retires in the next couple of months?

RACICOT: Well, I think you focus upon what the constitution contemplates and that is whether or not they’re qualified by reason of experience and training, and then you talk about the constitutional principles that have been articulated throughout the many generations that the court has sat and heard cases like whether or not you’re going to observe precedent.

There’s a reason for having the rule to observe precedent, and that is to bring about stability in the law. There’s a reason why courts are not consigned with the responsibility to legislate...

MATTHEWS: ... that? I accept all that as sort of backdrop or background music, but the fact is the Republican Party has made a commitment to the far right crowd, to the religious conservatives of this country, to outlaw abortion. Will they make good on that promise?

RACICOT: I don’t think that there’s been any commitment of that kind. What this president has talked about is recommending to the Senate judges who are qualified by reason of their experience and training, and judicial capacity. These people that have been presented to the judiciary committee like...

RACICOT: ... Priscilla Owen or Miguel Estrada, these are people who are highly qualified. They have unanimous recommendations from the American Bar Association; they’re well qualified. These people ought to be considered and ought to receive a vote. The reason they didn’t is because those who control the committee were afraid the Democrats would vote for them too.

MATTHEWS: If all the people in the deep south, and I’m talking about pretty much up to the northern tobacco south, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, all across the south and what you might call the Bible Belt-I don’t mind calling it that-all voted Republican for governor as well as senator, a huge sweep on the red part of the map from last time. You don’t think that’s a mandate to outlaw abortion by the president, by putting pro-life judges on the bench? You don’t read it that way?

RACICOT: I don’t think that it’s an expressed requirement or an express expectation. I mean I’m pro-life. I would like to see judges who construe the law in reference to that issue with a great deal of firmness, conviction and faith in the innocence of human life, but I’d never required that when I made an appointment.

RACICOT: ... to what it is that they had to say about how they were going to be a judge.

MATTHEWS: OK, thank you very much, Marc Racicot, Republican National Chairman. Back to the panel. Does everybody agree with that? I hear you Bob Dornan. Aren’t you amazed to hear that the RNC chair is basically pooh-poohing the idea that this is a big priority question?

binky2000 said:

"I can't understand how people that speak so intelligently and rationally on issues of economy and foreign policy can get so wrapped up in religious fervor over abortion.

"I am pro-choice. There is no other way for me to see it. I have to look at it as cold as possible. There are pregnant kids who have NO BUSINESS caring for a child. These children, if allowed to be born, would cause further money drain on our already too socialized country (for the most part). The mothers (for the most part) may also be forced to alter their life plans, and possibly quit their hourly waged jobs and get on the welfare system (in this scenario, the child's husband was a complete waste and spliut town). Who is benefitting from this child's birth? Not me, not the child, not the mother, not the taxpayer, not the country."

Welcome!

You make a good point about our "too socialized country." As a matter of fact, advocates of socialism, knowingly or not, actually devalue the individual's right to the fruits of his own labors (an underlying foundation of our Declaration of Independence), and, as certain Americans have embraced the ideas of socialism, they also have come to devalue the primary idea of that Declaration of Independence, the "self-evident" truth that individuals are "created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Rather than containing ideas that are dangerous to liberty, that Declaration's assertions are the very foundation of the protections our Constitution of 1787 affords.

Given that backdrop of history, is it logical that the right to life is the most basic right of all?

Perhaps children may now be looked upon as a "drain" because we first accepted the premise you identified, and if the individual's right to property produced by his own work is not honored, neither is his/her right to life.

On a more down-to-earth level, there is another idea which always bothers me when I hear discussions about whether what has, in my lifetime, come to be called a "fetus" is, in fact, a human life, separate and apart from the body that houses it, or merely an appendage of the woman. The bothersome and overlooked reality is this:

Whether the "thing" inside the woman's womb is referred to by the woman as a "fetus" or a "baby" relies exclusively on whether she, herself, wants a child. If she wants a child, every time she refers to it, she will call it a "baby." On the other hand, if she does not want to give birth to a child, there are less personal ways by which society has made it acceptable to refer to the womb's contents. If she miscarries in the early weeks of a pregnancy, one never hears a woman say, "I lost my fetus." It is always, "I lost my baby." Perhaps this is merely a matter of semantics, or is it a deeper acknowledgment that there was, in fact, a live little person whose life was at stake? And, why is it that doctors will work hard to save the "life" in the womb of a pregnant accident victim?

Another thought: I've never heard an advocate of what is called "a woman's right to choose" declare with confidence, "The world would have been a better place if my mother had ended the pregnancy that resulted in me." Does this mean that our nation's law is based on an "everyone else but me" premise?

As citizens of America and of the world, we are faced with great problems which beg for solutions if the cause of liberty is to survive for future generations. All of which brings me to another troubling question:

If, over the last few decades, our nation's law possibly has been wrong on the abortion question, how many potentially brilliant minds and gifted leaders may we have extinguished--men and women who might have developed solutions to the problems we face? I suppose this approach questions whether, for the society, a full-term human being is a potential "drain" or a potential blessing, remembering that some of history's most prominent leaders have come from circumstances of abject poverty.

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