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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll get a take now on how we got to this point on abortion rights where the Supreme Court does actually seem likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming months despite it being precedent for nearly 50 years. Spoiler alert, Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine doesn't just blame the right, but also, in large measure, the liberal establishment which failed to prioritize or protect it enough, including Democrats named Bernie, Hillary and Barack.

Rebecca Traister is New York Magazine's staff writer and author of the influential books, Good and Mad, All the Single Ladies, and Big Girls Don't Cry. I'll also ask for her reaction to the firing of Chris Cuomo by CNN over the weekend. Rebecca, always good to have you on, welcome back to WNYC.

Rebecca Traister: It's always good to be here, Brian.

Brian: Want to start with Chris Cuomo since it just happened, another high profile man willing to deprioritize women's safety and respect while saying he prioritized and respected them?

Rebecca: Yes. I haven't reported on Chris Cuomo. I'm reading the stories about him as you and many listeners as are. One of the things that has struck me about the Chris Cuomo story, is the absolute speed and readiness with which, first, his suspension was framed as, "Well, he put family above his job," because he was advising his brother. That has made me so furious and just sick to my stomach, the notion especially, in the context of this period where you have so many people out there actually juggling their professional responsibilities and their family responsibilities. The idea that he made unethical choices as a journalist to try to work to cover up his powerful brother's misdeeds and power abuses, while maintaining his own power, at a television network where he had the ability to frame all kinds--

Brian: Whoops, did we lose Rebecca's line

Rebecca: -- for someone is sickening.

Brian: Maybe the most poignant line, if poignant is the right word from Chris Cuomo's own mouth, was after Andrew Cuomo resigned, Cuomo defended himself regarding his own role on the August 16th episode of his show, this was quoted in The Times coverage of his firing over the weekend when he said, "I never attacked nor encouraged anyone to attack any woman who came forward, I never made calls to the press about my brother's situation," but the new batch of testimony and text messages that were released by Attorney General Laticia James suggested that Chris Cuomo did function as an advisor, and did reach out to journalists.

He told the investigators, "When asked, I would reach out to sources, other journalists, to see if they had heard of anyone else coming out." Before we move on from this to Roe, how much is that a bright line for you, Rebecca, aiding in the discrediting of women coming forward to report harassment?

Rebecca: Well, it's an extremely bright line, but it's a bright line in so many directions. He also lied. The statement that you just read, versus the reality, is that he lied. I think it's really important to note that lying is also a huge part of the story of Andrew Cuomo. This notion that you can lie and cover up, and not abide by the rules, he clearly understood what the rules were, and he says so in his denial, "I never did this wrong thing."

When you have a degree of power to shape the news, to shape the stories, to shape how millions of viewers are understanding what's happening in terms of politics and pandemic, around issues of harassment and power abuse, be they sexual or otherwise, and you're operating to protect, whether it's your brother or not, but you're fundamentally operating to protect the powerful and then lying to cover it up. These things are all just symptomatic of how powerful people remain powerful, and twist and pervert the work that they're doing in order to protect their own authority.

Brian: All right. Roe v. Wade and the direct challenge to it that the Supreme Court heard last week, you put the possible failure to protect Roe in a larger context in your New York Magazine article, "A failure to protect against a regressive movements project to ensure minority rule." I wonder if you'd go into that a little bit first, what's the largest possible context for this that you're thinking about?

Rebecca: Well, when I think about how the Democratic Party has operated and failed to protect, to vociferously and muscularly protect the victories made, mostly in the middle of the 20th century, some beyond, around civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, that those victories which were achieved as the pinnacle of grassroots, often centuries-long movements of organizers, coming from the margins of power, working together, to push for-- in suffering decades, generations of violence and setbacks, and many of those movements that had been at work over centuries, found their success within our political and legal system in the middle of the 20th century.

That means the legalization of birth control, which we forget was not that far in front of the legalization of abortion, the protection of voting rights and civil rights, and then once those things were won within the courts, and federally, legislatively in some cases, what we found was a Democratic Party that wasn't, in my view, willing to understand that those things, just because they'd won, didn't mean that it was over and that in fact that-- [sound cut] -- worked over those decades since those victories to roll back all of those rights and protections.

The way that the right has done it is, we can talk about that, moving through states, moving through state legislatures, school boards, co-opting language, using that muscular co-optation of language and frameworks around morality, family, life, and Democrats, my party, I am very open about my political leanings. My party has failed to treat this with moral urgency in terms of how it has spoken about these rights, been willing to defend them, and how it's failed to strategize, and look to the grassroots movements that have existed over these years for guidance in terms of--

Brian: Obviously--

Rebecca: Roe is one of them. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, there's the labor protections, LGBTQ protections, they're all at stake now.

Brian: Let me take an example that you cite in the article. It's this moment from the last televised debate in the 2016 Trump-Clinton election. Listeners, I'm going to subject you to just a few seconds of this short clip here that starts with moderator, Chris Wallace, from Fox.

Chris Wallace: Do you want to see the court overturn Roe v. Wade?

Donald Trump: Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that's really what's going to be, that will happen, and that'll happen automatically in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.

Brian: That's really a campaign promise, and it was so explicit. Rebecca, looking at the Supreme Court appointments by Trump, and he said two, possibly three, that was 2016. Well, he got his three, as we know, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett. You're right that after that, the Democrats chose not to vocally fight, or when the nomination processes were going on, the confirmation processes, that the Democrats chose not to vocally fight those nominations as an assault on Roe.

But make that case because the public perception might be that whenever a Republican nominates a justice, Roe is the first thing the Democrats talk about, and maybe as such, it's the primary Supreme Court issue at stake that most people could even name.

Rebecca: Well, see, I disagree. I have not seen the party make the absolute case that Roe is going to fall, not as an organizing principle against these candidates. Yes, it is something that people talk about, but Democrats haven't made a morally compelling argument. First of all, I want to back up a little bit to before Roe, because in fact, one of the things Democrats have failed to do is fight for abortion accessibility beyond Roe, because Democrats ceded the ability to access safe and affordable abortions for poor Americans way back in the '70s when the Hyde Amendment passed.

Abortion has become all but inaccessible to millions of people, women and people who can get pregnant across America, over decades. It is true that when you have a Supreme Court nominee, there is some press coverage about Roe specifically, but what there is not, is coordinated penetrating argument and questioning about the record. There is a the kind of acceptance, this pantomime of Brett Kavanaugh's case, "Oh, and this comes not from the left, but from Susan Collins, a Republican, who always said she would fight for continued abortion access, but does not."

The belief, the acceptance of, "He says he's going to stand by the side of the law, Roe is decided law." Then everybody says, "Okay, that's great." After the hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, a justice who everybody knew had anti-abortion stances. There was the Dianne Feinstein statement that, "Oh, this went as well as any confirmation hearing, I can hear."

There's no active fighting, first of all, about the fact that many of these seats were ill-gotten during the Trump administration. The failure of Republicans to even hear Merrick Garland and disallow President Barack Obama, a Supreme Court appointment. The rushing through of Amy Coney Barrett's appointment at absolute odds with what happened around Merrick Garland.

I have not felt that Democrats muscularly fight individually. Individually, there are certainly Democrats who have made compelling arguments, but I have not seen strategizing coming from a Democratic caucus saying we are going to make abundantly clear to the American people what it means to not have abortion access, to have abortion become illegal. What are the stakes? What can happen moving forward, what has already happened, who has already not permitted, because of the erosion of abortion rights around the country to not access this safe, legal and medically necessary procedure?

Brian: You mentioned Susan Collins, I want to play a clip of hers that after this coming Supreme Court decision, may or may not come back to haunt her. I guess it probably won't affect her, at least not for a long time, because as a six-year-term senator, she's not up for reelection for quite a few years yet. This is what she said in defending her being a nominally pro-choice Republican senator, and her support for Brett Kavanaugh when his nomination was taking place. Listen.

Susan Collins: In his testimony, he noted repeatedly that Roe had been upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, describing it as precedent on precedent. When I asked him, "Would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed that it was wrongly decided?" He emphatically said, "No."

Brian: Emphatically said no. Rebecca, I wonder if the loophole there is that she said if five current justices, now it looks like they have six.

Rebecca: Right, but it's not even a loophole, she was not telling the truth. This is what I mean when I say pantomime, and again, that Susan Collins is a Republican, though nominally a pro-choice one, but it is also true, and Dianne Feinstein congratulates everybody on the wonderful confirmation proceedings, nobody has been telling the truth. I mean that across two parties. I don't mean to say nobody, because, again, obviously there have been individuals who have been fighting hard over decades, but as a party, and institutionally, Democrats have not done a good job about saying, "Look, this is what's going to happen. This is who these people are."

It goes back even to the willingness to say what Mitch McConnell was doing when he refused to permit President Barack Obama to fill that seat, was a takeover, was a perverse, a breaking of the system to ensure minority rule, and it did, because Donald Trump, remember that Donald Trump is a person, is a president, who won fewer votes than his opponent, and had got to confirm three justices to the United States Supreme Court. That other members of the Supreme Court, including some that he appointed were on the legal team that helped to win George Bush the presidency in 2000, when he won fewer votes than his opponent, and yet became the president.

We are living in a period in which a president selected by a minority of voters have taken over the Supreme Court, and are going to reverse all those victories that were won in the middle of the 20th century and those stakes, and that manipulation of the system, I have not heard made clear enough to the American people, and to voters, including by the leadership of the party that I support, the Democrats.

Brian: Not only that, statistically about minority rule, you cite as a Republican fiction, the idea that the country is deeply divided on this issue at all, when abortion rights is one of the most popular planks you write for the Democratic Party, even in red states. I thought, "Is that true?" I looked up a Pew survey from this year that found 59% supported abortion rights in most or all cases, to just 39% opposed, but we see all these restrictions at the state level, mostly in red states. How would that happen in those red states if they're not popular there?

Rebecca: Consider what happens all the time, many of the most popular issues in this country, and by the way, they're ones that are tied to abortion rights, they are the kinds of protections-- We just had this big fight over Build Back Better, around paid leave, and subsidized childcare. Some of those are the most popular positions, including in red states, and yet, and this is, again, a complaint about the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party won't make the moral and muscular case, and won't show the way that all of these things are connected.

That in fact, building better economic policies, along with protections, especially for vulnerable Americans, for people of color, for poor people, for young people, for people in rural communities, is going to make their lives better, their families stronger. Yet, there is an unwillingness on the part of Democrats at a federal level to make that case, and the right wing has, in fact, taken over red state legislatures, gerrymandered the heck out of them, to the point where they can often maintain control, and the right wing doesn't want to put those kinds of economic and civil rights measures in place. They want to roll them back.

Brian: Here's a tweet from a listener who says, "Can you ask what exactly Democrats are supposed to do? The GOP doesn't care about people talking. What actual power to change these events that anyone have in the Democratic Party?", tweets a listener.

Rebecca: Democrats could have operated more strategically on a state level over decades, is one thing that they could do. B, I actually disagree that nobody cares about talking. When we're talking about an entire framework, we are talking about a failure to make an energetic and muscular case for abortion, for the protected right to access, to reproductive health care and abortion, as something that is key to familial thriving.

The left ceded the language of life, and morality, and family, to the right, and to anti-abortion forces in a way that was totally unnecessary, and I actually do believe that talking matters when you're talking about how you frame an entire issue. Thirdly, Democrats have not been listening to the activists and the grassroots people, including leaders of the Reproductive Justice Movement, who have been making vociferous, powerful cases for how all of these kinds of policy priorities are related.

Everything from increased and fighting against the gutting of social safety programs, against welfare and SNAP benefits, right-wing fighting against affordable housing, how all of those things are linked to continuing to fight for voting rights and reproductive rights. The Democratic Party hasn't taken cues from those on-the-ground activists who have been doing this work and talking about this over decades. The party is not taking that language and understanding how that fight can play out and then there is the very practical failure to not take the state legislatures, the school board's seriously.

This is how the right wing, the courts-- the right wing has been plotting the takeover of the courts over the decades since the courts decided against them in the mid-20th century, and Democrats did not take that fight seriously enough.

Brian: We have a few minutes left with Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine. Her new article was called the Betrayal of Roe. I want to end by asking you to look forward. I was reading an article on The Nation on how to protect abortion rights in the possible post Roe world and a lot of it was going beyond the necessary evil frame of characterizing abortion to a fuller embrace.

It refers to protesters outside the Supreme Court during the hearing last week that had signs like, "I Had An Abortion," and, "Me And My Homies Heart Abortion," and, "Abortion Positive," and as with some of them were part of a group called Shout Your Abortion. I'm just curious if that's new and different to your eye, and if you think that change of tactics can have more impact than say, what the Clinton's used to talk about, safe, legal and rare.

Rebecca: I also heart abortion. I do think it's absolutely crucial that we start to talk about abortion differently, acknowledging that abortion existed for millions of people, in millions of different ways, but that it is-- abortion is not a necessary evil, abortion is a cornerstone of reproductive healthcare, an abortion for those who need it or want it, is liberation. Abortion is the ability to access abortion care when you and your family requires it.

Provides a basis for people to have stronger, healthier, more economically stable, emotionally stable families of their shape and choosing. 60% of people who require abortion care are already parents, and that's something that we lose too often. Start to think about abortion that way, while also acknowledging that there are a million different ways to experience this procedure, and that lots of people for reasons of personal belief or faith, feel very differently about it for themselves. To fight for continued access and legality and affordability isn't to force anyone who doesn't feel that way about abortion to have one.

The reverse is to force those who require it, need it, want it, and understand that it is key to full human thriving in this country, and around the world, to force them, either not to have them to, or to have them in ways that are unsafe physically, and at this point, increasingly as we look into the future, legally, and that is terrifying. The other thing that I think is crucial to know is that people will always have abortions, they have always had abortions. Making abortion illegal is not going to stop people from getting abortions or from ending pregnancy. We have to start valuing the lives of the people who require abortion care.

The individuals who may find themselves pregnant and need to end a pregnancy, but also the people who are their loved ones, their family, their friends. We have to start valuing those lives and that well-being as much and more, as we value, as the right has forced the framework to somehow value the imagined character of the fetus.

Brian: Rebecca Traister is the author of the best-selling books, Good and Mad, and All The Single Ladies, and the award-winning Big Girls Don't Cry and her new article in New York Magazine, The Betrayal of Roe. Thanks as always Rebecca.

Rebecca: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more to come.

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