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Politico illustration by Jade Cuevas | It's become almost a cliché to say that the United States is more polarized than at any time since the 1850s. But a visitor from the real 1850s would be baffled by that idea, writes Michael Schaffer in his latest column. Compared to that era, regional distinctions have been hugely sanded down. We all use the same Netflix accounts, have access to the same news and live in the same post-industrial service economy. The country is far more homogeneous than the one that fought a civil war. That's one reason the imminent Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade represents such a significant milestone. Today, your location within the United States has less impact on your broad legal rights than it did in the 1850s, including your ability to carry a gun, read radical newspapers or marry whomever you want. But if the Court does overturn Roe, as an initial draft majority opinion suggests it will, that would create an enormous and immediate practical difference between living in a red state or a blue state. On one side of the line, you'll have a right; on the other, you won't. The looming abortion landscape will be about the hard borders of jurisdiction, not the soft ones of cultural affinity, Schaffer writes. This is a version of America we really haven't seen in living memory. Rather than a clean break, there will be plenty of partisans trapped behind the lines — on both sides. Which means more aggrieved fellow citizens, more contention over national political power, and more fear of states unlike our own.
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| |  Joe Biden's appearance on Meet the Press on May 4, 2012, shaped the type of president he would become. | POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas; Photos: Getty Images, iStock | What Gay Marriage Taught Joe Biden … This week marks 10 years since the perennially off-script Joe Biden, then vice president, went on Meet the Press and proclaimed that he supported gay marriage, even though President Obama hadn't yet endorsed the idea. To hear Biden tell it, he set in motion a chain of events that would change the country. In fact, reports Sasha Issenberg in The Friday Read, Obama himself was only weeks away from making such a reversal. But the vice president's announcement did change something: Biden himself. Once slow to engage in sexual politics, Biden now confronts the end of Roe v. Wade just as the American right rediscovers a wide-ranging strain of anti-LGBTQ politics. How he responds will be determined by what he learned a decade ago from a single television interview, and the world's reaction to it.
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| "He was born with a silver foot in his mouth." Can you guess who said this about George H.W. Bush in 1988? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
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Demonstrators demanding a woman's right to choose march to the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the same year Laura Kaplan joined the underground abortion network called "Jane." | AP Photo | The 1970s Abortion Underground ... In pre-Roe Chicago, a group of women formed a clandestine network known simply as "Jane," organizing thousands of illegal abortions — and even learning to do the procedure themselves. Dylon Jones talked to Laura Kaplan, a former member of Jane, about the reality of criminalized abortion in America.
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| This week, everyone's a Supreme Court expert. Wanna one-up them? Drop one of these tidbits.
- SCOTUS has an old-school elevator with a metal accordion door that has to be closed by hand by an elevator operator who waits on a little stool just in case anyone needs to go up or down.
- The justices have working fireplaces in chambers. It is someone's job to provide each chambers with firewood.
- After oral arguments, the justices meet in a private conference room. Not even clerks are allowed in, which means the junior-most justice has to open the door if someone knocks. Right now that's Amy Coney Barrett, but it's soon to be Ketanji Brown Jackson. For 11 years, it was Stephen Breyer.
- Clerks and court insiders refer to justices by their three initials. Kennedy is AMK, Gorsuch is NMG, etc. Clarence Thomas doesn't have a middle name, though, so he's just CT. And don't mess up by calling Kavanaugh BMK; he just goes by BK.
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Republican U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance arrives onstage after winning the primary on May 3 in Cincinnati, Ohio. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | Hillbilly Reckoning … Before J.D. Vance became a polarizing, Trump-style conservative, winning the Republican Senate primary in Ohio this week, he charmed both liberals and conservatives with his bestselling rags-to-riches memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. But where others saw a heartwarming story, Kentucky author and Appalachian expert Silas House saw a "dangerous" collection of dog-whistles and stereotypes. Michael Kruse interviewed House about what Hillbilly Elegy gets wrong about Appalachia, and how it foreshadowed the politician Vance has become.
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| 42 percent … of Gen Zers think Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, compared to 56 percent of voters over 65. And 39 percent of Gen Zers have no opinion on the issue, vs. 13 percent of voters over 65. Every week, The Weekend inserts a question in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll and see what the crosstabs yield. Got any suggestions? Email us at politicoweekend@email.politico.com.
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Orrin Hatch in 2018. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | When Orrin Hatch Fought Jesse Helms … Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, died last month at age 88. Today, as Hatch is laid to rest in Utah, William Doyle, author of a biography of Hatch, takes us back to 1990 to witness what he calls the senator's finest hour, when the conservative lawmaker saved the Americans With Disabilities Act from a legislation-killing move by former segregationist Jesse Helms of North Carolina that would have discriminated against people with HIV/AIDS.
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Ronald Reagan Presidential Library | President Ronald Reagan and Rep. Henry Hyde meet in the Oval Office on Aug. 5, 1983. In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment — named after its chief sponsor — barring federal funding for abortions in most circumstances. In 1980, anti-abortion messaging was a central pillar of Reagan's presidential campaign. "I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born," he famously noted during a debate. Thanks to the Ronald Reagan Library for providing this image. *Who Dissed? answer: The famously witty former Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, who was the Texas state treasurer at the time, said this at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. | | | | Follow us | | | | |
