End of Roe v. Wade and other ‘regressive bulls---’ will make it hard for GOP to survive: CNN’s S.E. Cupp

By Jane Wilde - June 28, 2022

On Monday, CNN host S.E. Cupp claimed she has hard time believing that the Republican Party can survive the end of Roe v. Wade and all the other "regressive bulls---" they’ve been pushing for, such as "book banning."

Cupp, who has her own show on CNN, spoke to a panel of pundits on Monday's episode of New Day and expressed her opinion that the GOP would electorally rue the day that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

New Day co-host John Berman prompted Cupp’s answer, asking, "now that anti-abortion activists got what they wanted, right, which is to overturn Roe v. Wade, what happens now politically, do you think?"

"It’s hard to imagine the Republican Party surviving this," Cupp began, adding that because of this and other "regressive bulls---" policies, she doesn’t see a future for the GOP.

"Between anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, book banning, anti-democracy, I mean, add all of the regressive bulls--- – garbage, sorry – to this," she stated, adding, "I don’t take that back."

She then claimed, "Um, add it all together and I don’t know who is left in the future — in future generations to be drawn to this party."

The pundit argued that Trump voters in 2016 had a wider array of reasons for voting for the party than they do now, at least reasons that Cupp said made some sense to her. "If you look back at 2016 I think people voted for Trump for a wide array of reasons, some of them garbage, but some of them legitimately economic or even foreign policy," she claimed.

Now not so much. "I think the people voting for more Trump, more MAGA now are really motivated by very few reasons, and so there are fewer of them," Cupp added.

Cupp played up the drama of the situation, stating that since Roe v. Wade has been overturned, a generation of people don’t have a right that their parents did. "And when you imagine that, I think for the first time – maybe we should ask Jeff Toobin – a generation will be able to say my parents had a right that I don’t have today."

"For the first time a right was taken back," Cupp proclaimed. She then declared, "I can’t imagine how Republicans message to new voters and don’t just keep shrinking and condensing."

Cupp is pro-choice and has expressed support for Roe v. Wade in the past. Despite her pro-abortion stance, the CNN host made recent news for rebuking fellow CNN colleague Ana Navarro after she claimed that abortion is necessary for families who need options for dealing with special needs children.

On Twitter, Cupp told Navarro, "I have an autistic child. I have never met a parent of an autistic child or any parent of a special needs child who said they’d wished they’d aborted him or her."

KEILAR: Let's discuss this with CNN Anchors Laura Jarrett and Poppy Harlow, CNN Political Commentator S.E. Cupp and Irin Carmon, Senior Correspondent at New York Magazine. She's also the co-author of Notorious RBG, the Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Let's just start broadly here. How different, Laura, are women's rights in America this morning?

LAURA JARRETT, CNN ANCHOR: Dramatically. Dramatically right away. Dramatically even before. I mean, think about the fact that Texas effectively banned abortion months ago and we're here right now. Life as women know it has been dramatically changed from what we knew for the past 50 years. I think the question now is really all the questions that you outlined with Jeffrey Toobin is what comes next.

And I think the real fight that you are going to see play out is what happens with medicated abortion, two the pills that induce abortion -- I mean, offer half of women in this country who get abortion are actually doing it through these two pills right now. The FDA has said that they're safe, has said that they're effective, safer than Viagra. The attorney general has said, states, you cannot ban these two pills. And yet states are going to try to ban them. So, then what happens?

BERMAN: I think the FDA said, you can't ban them for safety reasons.

JARRETT: Yes.

BERMAN: Which may end up being where the legal crux of this issue is. They can say, we're not banning it for safety reasons, we're banning them for other reasons.

JARRETT: It's an enormous loophole, though. If, in fact, Merrick Garland's side on this, which he believes he has the argument here that, the federal government has the last say, it preempts state law, as Poppy knows --

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: A big question.

JARRETT: It's a really big question. But if you can get an abortion through two medicated pills up to ten weeks, that is fundamentally different than what states are doing right now, which is trying to ban abortion at the moment of fertilization.

BERMAN: S.E., again, the question that Brianna is asking is the right one, the sort of now what. What are -- now that anti-abortion activists got what they wanted, right, which is to overturn Roe versus Wade, what happens now politically, do you think?

[07:10:09]

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It's hard to imagine the Republican Party surviving this. Between anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, book banning, anti-democracy, I mean, as add of the aggressive bullshit -- garbage, sorry, to this -- I don't take that back -- add it all together and I don't know who is left in the future -- in future generations to be drawn to this party.

If you look back at 2016, I think people voted for Trump for a wide array of reasons, some of them garbage, but some of them legitimately economic or even foreign policy. I think the people voting for more Trump, more MAGA now are really motivated by very few reasons, and so there are fewer of them. And when you imagine that I think for the first time, maybe we should ask Jeff Toobin, a generation will be able to say my parents had a right that I don't have today. For the first time a right was taken back. I can't imagine how Republicans message to new voters and don't just keep shrinking and condensing.

IRIN CARMON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: May I jump in? I mean, I hear you on that but I think that we cannot take for granted that a younger generation isn't actually cheering a backlash to the kind of progress that we saw. All you have to do is go on the internet and go into the manosphere, go into men's rights, there is a profound dislocation because of the progress that certain groups have made and this is seen wrongly, I think, as a zero sum game, whether it's progress for LGBTQ individuals, women and other people who can become pregnant controlling their reproduction, Black Lives Matter, Trump was elected on the backlash and I don't think that backlash has gone away, even as they've accomplished some goals. There is still this feeling, if you control someone's reproduction, you control their life.

CUPP: Absolutely. But that view --

CARMON: There are some people who are on board with that.

CUPP: -- in the minority, if you look at the spectrum of where people are on abortion, 8 percent of this country wants a full ban. 8 percent, that is an extreme minority. Most people want legal abortion, I count myself in this category, legal abortion with restrictions. And then you have folks who want no restrictions, they are also a minority. So, absolutely they are there, believe me, I hear from them. But it's an increasingly minority position.

CARMON: It's a minority that's insulated from political accountability because of the system we have.

CUPP: Yes.

KEILAR: Poppy, the premise for protecting abortion rights before protects other rights, and Justice Thomas has opened the door to that. Should that be challenge on the right to contraception, the protection of same-sex marriage? What questions has that raised for you?

HARLOW: Every question about modern America and where we are. I mean, I will never forget Friday, Jim and I were anchoring the show when the decision came down and Jeffrey Toobin sitting next to us said, look at page three of Thomas' concurrence. That's where it was. I mean, no one joined that, but Thomas is clearly saying -- and he used the word, duty. We have a duty as an institution to reassess all of these, they're called substantive due process rights, but, basically, contraception, same-sex marriage, you could put interracial marriage in there decided on those grounds.

I mean, Irin, you wrote a book on Justice Ginsburg. You knew her well. I had that one interview with her. But we will remember how she had argued that Roe, she wasn't a justice yet, should have been decided on equal protection grounds, not on privacy grounds, like Griswold. And she warned -- and people have twisted her words and they are wrong when they do it, but she did warn in '92. (INAUDIBLE) too swiftly shaped may prove unstable. And Roberts was also saying, go slowly. She wanted to go slowly but she wanted this fundamentally, believed it should fundamentally be on different grounds, equal protection grounds, not on the grounds they are on now, which is how Thomas is bringing up that argument that this could change all of those rights.

KEILAR: Are those protections, are they really at risk? When -- Clarence Thomas is -- he is one justice. Are they really at risk? Should people who are very concerned about that be very worried this morning?

HARLOW: I mean, I think some of them could very much be at risk. If you look at Jonathan Mitchell's brief in the Dobbs case, also the author, I believe, of the Texas abortion six-week law, right, a brilliant legal mind, whether you agree with him or not in terms of how to shape things legally and have successful legal arguments that hold, he wrote in his brief in Dobbs, there are no reliance interests that warrant the retention of Roe or Casey and went on to write about the potential impact on all of those other rights.

JARRETT: What's interesting, though, is, politically, you see the other justices, namely Alito and Kavanaugh, go out of their way to say --

HARLOW: To say no.

[07:15:00]

JARRETT: -- absolutely not, these other rights aren't affected, nothing to see here, don't worry about it, abortion is special. Why?

HARLOW: But that's not the central holding of the case.

JARRETT: Yes. And they're saying trust us. And, by the way, Clarence Thomas was the only one who openly called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade from Planned Parenthood versus Casey onward.

CARMON: He is the only one who actually said --

JARRETT: There's seem to be a move there politically to try to say, don't worry about same-sex marriage, and somehow a woman's right to choose what happens to her body politically is not seen. I think what's happening there is not seen as somehow the political sort of lightning rod that upending same-sex marriage after only a few years would be for them.

HARLOW: I just think, really quickly, you make a great point because remember when Missouri brought this case to the court, Missouri didn't ask for them to overturn Roe versus Wade. Initially, Missouri's petition to the court was look at the 15 weeks, that's it, and then it changed in their briefs -- I'm sorry, yes, Mississippi, and then it changed in their briefs.

BERMAN: Again, we're waking up on a Monday morning here with a different country than we woke up with on Friday and everyone I think is trying to figure out how to navigate it now.

And, Poppy, you know, you cover business and business angles. So many different companies are doing so many different things here.

HARLOW: Yes, so many. I mean, you guys probably have a graph. Like there is a litany. Most -- I would say most of the really big companies right now are coming out from Starbucks, Goldman Sachs, Meta, Facebook, Disney and saying they will help employees travel if they need to, fund this, help protect that. Some companies are not.

But I think even beyond the companies, the impact is mostly on poor women, women without means, who many won't be employed by these companies. So, then what? Which was also a warning from Justice Ginsburg. So, then what?

I mean, there's a nonpartisan study two years old out of NBER, and the initial finding said that when women have access to abortion and when it's taken away, when that access is taken away, there is a large increase in financial distress that is sustained for years.

KEILAR: So, S.E., what is the responsibility of those who support this?

CUPP: Yes.

KEILAR: Right? If you are in Texas and there are 40,000 -- I mean, there's probably not going to be 40,000 babies born in the next year that would not have been born. I imagine some women will go elsewhere and find a place to have an abortion, but there may be tens of thousands of babies that there wouldn't have been before this. What is the responsibility of, say, Republican senators who normally don't want to vote for spending on social safety net items that would protect the families and the babies that may need it?

CUPP: Well, in many ways, it's too late. That should have been, you know, part of the plan here, to have that in place. The idea that we're going to have an army of police and prosecutors going out to round up women and doctors and Uber drivers and whomever else is tangentially connected to this is medieval and draconian. And it's the responsibility of our legislators both at the federal and state and local levels to figure this out for us and not just allow this kind of chaos and draconian, you know, experience to happen to us. And Poppy is right, this is mostly going to affect poor and rural women who have limited access to all kinds of health care to begin with. So, it's really irresponsible of legislators, it's not the Supreme Court's job to do this, but it is the job of legislators to put into place some protections for what's about to happen. Like you said, I mean, there are more people alive today who never lived in America without Roe. It's older than I am. More people have never known it without it. So, we've got to provide for the reality of this.

Listen, I'm pro-life, I sympathize with the pro-life position, but I'm a modern gal. I understand the necessity for this. For many women, I don't judge that. And I've always accepted Roe as the law of the land because it's older than me. It always has been. To make this monumental a shift in American cultural life and experience, it is our duty to then explain how life goes on today, tomorrow and the next year.

BERMAN: What do you think happens politically? I can see Democratic voters being animated by this but I could also see them being deflated by this, saying what good do we get from electing a Democratic president? Why didn't you stop this?

CARMON: Right. I think that's very much in the hands of the Democrats. They may have limited tools but still have tools. For example, could they join a lawsuit from somebody who needs to use an abortion pill and says the FDA says it's safe, why is the state barring me? Could they even bring such a lawsuit, for example, like they did when they challenged way back when they challenged Arizona's immigration law, because they said this is the job of the federal government? Could they stop people from being prosecuted for leaving state lines?

[07:20:02]

The federal government has limited power without that filibuster-proof majority but still can do some things.

That said, I do think it cannot be taken for granted that people will rise up particularly because those who are going to be the most affected, people of color, poor people, rural people, as we've been saying, these are the most politically disenfranchised people. So, the majority of the country may support this but they may not see the immediate effects because they either live in a state in which, for now, for now, very much, access is available even if there's going to be a backlog. Will they feel that urgency that they feel now?

I think that the opinion is there. Is the mobilization there? Is the organization there? Will they join existing efforts of abortion funds and other practical support organizations? I don't think that's going to happen on its own. I think that needs to happen with a great amount of organizing and participation and people need to stay focused on it, it's only June right now, until November.

JARRETT: It's interesting politically to see the generational divide too. Over the weekend, AOC was tweeting about this and saying, you actually -- Democrats, she said, where are you? What's good? Like you actually need to have very specific plans here and just saying go vote is not enough, which is interesting just tactic there. She's saying, you really need to actually be strategic and surgical about what you're asking people to do so that they feel like they have some stake in the game. Just saying this is outrageous, at least for her, was sort of not enough.

KEILAR: Laura, thank you so much. Poppy, S.E., Irin, thanks for being here for this discussion. We do really appreciate it.

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End of Roe v. Wade and other ‘regressive bulls---’ will make it hard for GOP to survive: CNN’s S.E. Cupp

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