Good lord, I am going to miss Jen Psaki in the White House. No one is better at messaging than she is, and no one brings a reporter's question around to the compelling, most urgent issues of the day.
Here's one reporter asking for comment on GOP fascist governor from Texas, Greg Abbott, and his horrible move to punish innocent brown and Black children by denying them access to public schools.
"In the wake of the draft Supreme Court decision, Texas Governor Abbott indicated that Texas may seek to overturn the 1982 Supreme Court decision that found that states were required to offer free public education to all students, including the children of undocumented immigrants. Does the White House have any response to those comments from Abbott?" asked the reporter.
"Well, that is ultra-MAGA, right there, that the president talked about yesterday. Just to restate that," Psaki began. "Denying public education to kids, including immigrants to this country. That is not a mainstream point of view."
These Republican white supremacists will do anything to isolate, bully, and oppress children who have done nothing other than exist where their parents brought them. Psaki was completely right to excoriate this move as ultra-MAGA and out of the mainstream. But then she went on to bring it back to the true precedent that Roe's fall will demolish: that of the right to privacy.
"What I will tell you, as the president has looked at it, since you referenced the draft opinion, and he's talked about this a little bit -- just to build this out a little bit more -- he's talked about how it raised alarms for him, how the draft decision would endanger other American rights in addition to the basic right of every woman's right to keep her personal health care decisions between herself and her doctor," she said.
"There are decisions like that way out of the mainstream that Governor Abbott has announced, but it's also, if you look at Roe, Roe is the precedent for the right to privacy. That decision has been upheld numerous times since, and everybody doesn't make the connections between what Roe has been the basis of, so let me just spell it out for you, and this is what is on the mind of the president. The right to privacy has been the basis for other landmark decisions that safeguard our basic rights as Americans, including who we choose to marry, with whom to have romantic relationships, and whether to use contraception."
Abbott's disgusting move to deprive innocent kids a public education is not to be minimized, nor is his rush to capitalize on the willingness of SCOTUS to tear down protections for anyone not cis, white, and male. At the same time, Psaki understands the urgency of focusing on Roe and what its downfall means for the pillar upon which it stands: privacy.
"I mentioned Griswold vs. Connecticut yesterday. Eisenstadt vs. (?) which ensures that the right to use contraception was protected. Obergfell vs. Hodges, which protects the right to marry. Lawrence vs. Texas, which stopped government from preventing sexual relationships between consenting adults. The basis for the draft decision would cut against decades of precedent and throw millions of lives into turmoil. When he talks about this and when he talks about privacy and when he goes back and talks about the fight against Bork, he is talking about this as a precedent for a lot of these decisions that have enormous impacts on people's lives."
I only wish she'd also mentioned how passionately the ultra-MAGA crowd howled about their own privacy when it comes to gun ownership. Remember when there was a push for pediatricians to ask parents if there were firearms in the home? They cared an awful lot about privacy, then, didn't they?
