WHERE ARE THE HUGE MARCHES?

The first Women's Marches took place on January 21, 2017, one day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Nearly half a million people marched in Washington, and at least three million marched overall in big cities and other locations across the country. It was an anti-inaugural for Trump that outdrew his real inaugural.

I've been expecting something similar in response to the wave of extreme abortion laws we're seeing in the states, and in response to the Supreme Court's decision to allow those laws to stand in defiance of Court precedent. But Texas's "Heartbeat Law" was signed last May and went into effect in September -- and nothing. The law has led to an 800% increase in abortion patients in surrounding states -- and now a legislator from Missouri, a state that's certain to ban abortion altogether as soon as it's given permission by the Supreme Court, wants to make it illegal for Missouri residents to obtain abortions by crossing state lines.

An unusual new provision, introduced by state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R), would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident obtain an abortion out of state, using the novel legal strategy behind the restrictive law in Texas that since September has banned abortions in that state after six weeks of pregnancy.

... The measure would target anyone even tangentially involved in an abortion performed on a Missouri resident, including the hotline staffers who make the appointments, the marketing representatives who advertise out-of-state clinics, and the Illinois and Kansas-based doctors who handle the procedure. Her amendment also would make it illegal to manufacture, transport, possess or distribute abortion pills in Missouri.

And it's not just abortion.

Idaho's house just passed HB 675.

It passed by a vote of 55-13.

It would make providing gender affirming care to trans teens a felony with a life sentence..

Worse... it makes leaving the state with your trans teen to move elsewhere and provide them with care a felony as well. pic.twitter.com/k3jX086h9a

— Erin, Trail Mom (@ErinInTheMorn) March 8, 2022

Our side focuses on presidential elections, and occasionally on other elections. There was rage in January 2017 because Trump had just been elected. Now, even though terrible things are happening in the states, we have our president and Congress (though they clearly aren't enough to push the country leftward), so most of us are standing down and waiting for Biden to take care of us. We did that after Barack Obama was elected. We seem to think presidents are all that's needed to make change. The message of the Bernie Sanders movement appeared to be that electing Sanders would bring about the Revolution, even though he would have been working with a 535-member Congress of whom more than 500 were to his right.

I'm not suggesting that large demonstrations make an immediate difference. A huge march on Washington wouldn't suddenly reverse the rush to restrict abortion or the crackdown on trans kids in red America. But big protests remind like-minded people that they're not alone. They serve as seedbeds for further organizing. They tell the right that we're angry. They remind the media, which obsesses over the conservative electorate, that ordinary Americans from Anytown USA can lean left, too.

And while elections aren't everything, protests can generate the kind of energy that leads to election victories. There's a direct line from the 2017 Women's Marches to the 2018 midterms, and even to the Democratic wins in 2020. So we need to make some noise.