Why pro-lifers can't support Rudy Giuliani

Sure, he's unabashedly pro-choice--but why should we worry? After all--he's promised to appoint strict constructionists as judges, hasn't he?

...strict constructionists, that is, of the Arlen Specter "superprecedent" variety.

Recall Giuliani's own words, from the first debate:

"It would be OK to repeal it. It would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent."

In other words: no judge that Rudy Giuliani would appoint would ever vote to overturn Roe v. Wade...and his inauguration would mark a return to the abortion policies of the Clinton White House in pretty much everything else.

Make no mistake about it; a Giuliani presidency would be just as bad for the pro-life movement as a Clinton, Obama, or Edwards presidency--worse, in point of fact, because sitting presidents shape their parties in ways that other party leaders can't.

Four or eight years of Giuliani shaping the GOP would leave the party a virtual clone of the Democrats when it comes to abortion. With no standing in either national party, the pro-life movement would in effect be exiled from the political scene for the foreseeable future--and everything that it managed to accomplish in the administrations of Bush, Bush, and Reagan (to a limited degree--he did appoint Scalia, after all) would be undone in short order.

It's long been an open secret that, because of the Democrats' single-minded allegiance to Planned Parenthood and NARAL, the pro-life movement needs the Republican Party far more than the Republican Party needs the pro-life movement. Now, with Giuliani's candidacy, the pro-choice wing of the party is taking the opportunity to argue that the GOP doesn't need the pro-life movement at all.

If they succeed, it will be decades before the pro-life movement recovers.

--Shack