DEMOCRATS CAN'T SEE THIS FROM 30,000 FEET

Abortion is effectively illegal in Texas and its barely a blip on the @nytimes home page

— Emily C. Singer (@CahnEmily) September 1, 2021

She's referring to this Texas law, which just took effect:

A bill signed into law in May that went into into effect Wednesday offers a $10,000 or more bounty for suing a doctor or anyone who helps to perform or procure an abortion at six weeks gestation or later.

Drive your daughter to an abortion, get sued. Pay for your wife to get an abortion, get sued. Work for an abortion doctor, get sued.

And you won't be taken to court by a county prosecutor or another government official. Anyone can sue you; a nosy neighbor, an ex-spouse or a stranger with a political agenda.

If you are sued maliciously, don't expect any relief. Say someone takes you to court because they merely saw you parked near an abortion clinic and you end up paying thousands in legal fees to defend yourself; the law says judges can't award attorney fees to punish frivolous cases.

In fact, the law says someone sued for "aiding and abetting" an abortion could have to pay their persecutors' court costs.

The Supreme Court refused to issue a stay, and we're told that the strategy of turning ordinary citizens into the enforcers, rather than the state, makes it impossible for anyone to sue until an abortion-stopping lawsuit is actually filed.

I asked:

The press ignored the TX abortion law even before the Afghanistan withdrawal. Why? Too many men in newsrooms? Too many boomers? Is it because the MSM is concentrated in places where abortion will remain available? Or does the press see the abortion wars as an old, boring story?

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) September 1, 2021

But I think there's a more obvious reason: This didn't become a major national news story because the Democratic Party and Democratic influencers didn't spoon-feed it to the press.

The party that failed to make this a national issue is the same party that routinely fails to nationalize local stories and issues, and routinely sleeps through disturbing developments in the states. It's the party that fell asleep when Republicans launched a major campaign to win control of state legislatures in time for the 2010 redistricting -- which led to the gerrymandering that gives Republicans the opportunity to win control of the House of Representatives even if they lose the overall House popular vote, and that has made it impossible for Democrats to win control of state legislatures in many purple states no matter how many Democratic votes are cast.

Republicans spent much of this year nationalizing the issue of how local school districts teach the subject of race. Democrats could have nationalized the Texas abortion story in the same way. They did -- briefly -- nationalize the story of how Georgia rewrote its election laws to disenfranchise Democrats, but they ignored similar laws in Iowa and elsewhere, and the press has spent more time on the flight of Texas's Democratic state legislators to D.C. (presumably because what happens in D.C. is "real news") than it has on the specifics of the election law those legislators unsuccessfully tried to block.

Democrats need to stop observing what's taking place in the states from 30,000 feet -- or maybe reporters and editors at our most important media outlets need to stop waiting for national political operatives to give them all their cues.