E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mitt’s morning after Romney’s cynical abortion reversal, and Roberts is a scary prospect

For the past 11 years Mitt Romney has been dancing — very successfully — on the head of a pin.

When he tried to unseat Senator Edward Kennedy in 1994, Romney did a credible job of reassuring voters that while, as a matter of conscience, he opposed abortion, if a woman chose to have one it should be "safe and legal."

When running for governor, just three years ago, Romney maintained his philosophical opposition to abortion but reinforced his civic commitment to choice. In fact, he effectively strengthened it by arguing that in this personal matter a woman should be guided by her own beliefs, not his — and certainly not the government’s. (Nice libertarian touch.) And, for good measure, Romney even nudged into the mainstream when he said he accepted the "substance" of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.

But that was then, as the cliché goes; this is now. Having slaked his political thirst on Beacon Hill, he now covets — like so many local boys before him (John Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, and John Kerry) — the waters of the White House. To move up, he must abandon old positions (something at which he is clearly adept) and stake out more conservative turf. And to do that, he vetoed a bill that would make access to a "morning-after pill," or emergency contraception (EC), widely available to women who wish to prevent pregnancy within five days after intercourse.

The terms of his veto were particularly cute. Citing his campaign pledge not to change state abortion law, he adopted what seems to be a minority opinion that regards EC as an agent of abortion, rather than as a means of contraception. Thus Romney violates the spirit of his earlier promise, which was clearly meant to reassure voters, by invoking its letter. Very cute indeed. The good news is that the legislature seems to have enough votes to override Romney.

Of less importance but greater significance was Romney’s repudiation of his previously civilized acceptance of Roe v. Wade, which for the past 32 years has guaranteed women the right to have an abortion. In Romney’s new view, Roe v. Wade is null. Medically supervised abortion would be void, unless a state legislature approved it. In blue states, such as Massachusetts, that would most likely happen, but not without a bitter fight and much polarizing and poisonous anxiety. Women in red states, where access to abortion is already minimal, would have the option of traveling to less-backward communities. But those without the money to do so would be forced into back alleys. It’s fundamentalist thinking at its worst: a Third World vision for the 21st century.

Of course Romney, a Massachusetts Republican, is by definition an odd political duck. His White House ambition seems improbable to many here in Massachusetts. But if a report published this week in the Atlantic Monthly, which anoints him the Republicans’ "Next Big Thing," deserves any credence, it might not — from a national perspective — be an entirely impossible dream.

Voters seem to like electing governors president. And for the past 14 years, the Republicans have had a tight hold on this state’s executive office. Never mind that the local GOP is less a political party than a vehicle that enables the ambitious to take a shot at higher aspirations with no apparent thought for the people who elected them. Take a bow, William Weld and Paul Cellucci. Like Cellucci, Romney even came to office complete with a female sidekick to add the shimmer of gender diversity to his pedigree. So, following in the footsteps of his cut-and-run predecessors, Romney seeks to make himself acceptable to the nation’s Republican yahoos.

In a perverse sort of way, this might be all for the better. In little more than a year, when it comes time to elect a new governor, the largely suburban independent voters who in the final analysis decide statewide elections may finally wake up to the fact the Republicans are the party of "me," not the vehicle for "us."

John Roberts

George W. Bush, who in 2004 won a solid electoral victory with a narrow popular vote, has seen his second term get off to a rocky start. His ill-conceived Social Security remake is in shambles. His nomination of bullyboy John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations is — fortunately, for now — bogged down. And Rove-gate plants serious scandal right on the threshold of his duplicitous Oval Office.

His nomination of John G. Roberts, a conservative constitutional lawyer whose largely corporate clients typically pay up to $700 an hour for his services, was an inspired piece of political stagecraft. For the time being, it has reordered the Washington agenda.

Roberts’s middle-class origins, his engaging personality and obvious smarts — a summa undergraduate and a magna law degree, both from Harvard — anoint him a poster child of the work-hard, get-ahead American dream.

Penetrating the fog of that dream is going to be difficult. Roberts’s tenure as a Washington, DC, appellate judge has been a brief two years. So assessing his judicial frame of mind in action will, as Bush intended, be difficult. The clues to how he thinks and how he might rule will have to come from the files of the work he did when he served in various capacities near the top of the Reagan administration. The snapshot that has emerged so far is of a sharp and committed conservative. That is no surprise. His demeanor is intellectual, rather than political. But he is a partisan all the same: many who know him well suggest that his charm and personal appeal mask his extreme conservative views. Chances are good indeed that he is only the latest clear-and-present danger foisted on the nation.

In the weeks to come, we will be assessing Roberts’s track record as it emerges from the dusty archives of the Reagan years, and his partisanship will undoubtedly shine through. But what will probably emerge less clearly is how Roberts might rule on cases that involve abortion. It’s a safe bet that in incremental cases that could limit women’s options, he will be on the wrong side. That’s all the more reason why he should not be allowed to equivocate on the key question of whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. He should give what’s come to be called an up-or-down answer: yes or no. The all-but-powerless Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are unlikely to force such an answer, however, and we will have to wait until Roberts is seated on the bench — seemingly a foregone conclusion — to learn his views. And then it will be too late to do anything about them.

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