The national Democratic Party and its candidates formally accepted the Supreme Court decision and its larger implications for women, even though many elected Catholic Democrats in the Midwest remained pro-life. The Democratic Party platform in 1980 said, “The Democratic Party supports the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion rights as the law of the land and opposes any constitutional amendment to restrict or overturn that decision.”16
The GOP, by contrast, nationalized and politicized their voters’ opposition to the sexual revolution and abortion, affirmed by President Ronald Reagan’s executive orders on the “squeal rule,” which prohibited government-funded family planning clinics serving low-income communities from counseling on abortion, and the Mexico City protocol, or “gag rule,” which prohibited U.S. aid to international clinics that used their own funds to provide counseling or referrals for abortions. He responded to lobbying from pro-life groups and the Catholic bishops and reflected a 1980 party platform that said, “We affirm our support of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”17
Within hours of being sworn in as president in 1993, Bill Clinton reversed five executive orders regarding abortion, family planning, and stem cell research.18 This included reversing both the squeal rule and the “Mexico City policy.”19 He commented at the time, “As a result of today’s action, every woman will be able to receive medical advice and referrals that will not be censored or distorted by ideological arguments that should not be a part of medicine.” Shortly after taking the oath of office, President Clinton also tried to change the long-standing prohibition against gays in the military, ordering the secretary of defense to draft legislation to overturn existing policies.20
Religious conservatives reacted with horror. Focus on the Family president James Dobson told his followers that Bill Clinton had “debase[d] the presidency” with his “homosexual agenda” and his “hands are stained with the blood of countless innocent babies.” Pat Robertson warned of the stark choice this created: “Either we will return to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this nation … or we will give ourselves over more and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior.” A Christian Voice pamphlet commanded its followers to “make sure government is … punishing what is wrong and rewarding what is right.” And homosexuality was the ultimate wrong, Rev. Jerry Falwell declared, a sin “so grievous, so abominable in the sight of God that he destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of [it].”21
The battle of religion and politics was joined, and the parties became newly polarized over the traditional family, sexuality, and freedom of women.
Large numbers of pro-choice Republican women changed their party affiliations in these two decades. By the estimate of one group that followed a panel of voters, only half of those who were pro-choice in 1982 continued to identify as Republicans in 1997.22 At the same time, one half of pro-life Democrats changed their position on abortion. Everyone knew Roe v. Wade was about more than abortion; it was about sexual freedom and equality for women.
In the Senate, 80 percent of Democratic senators were casting pro-choice votes by 1987. Interestingly, almost 40 percent of Republicans were still casting pro-choice votes then, too, but that plummeted to virtually zero by 2005 as the culture war was fully joined. The House was fully polarized by 2008: about 90 percent of House Democrats but only 10 percent of House Republicans were pro-choice.23
When the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2004, GOP strategist Karl Rove saw his opportunity to push party polarization even further. Gay marriage and abortion became the incendiary material in President Bush’s divisive 2004 reelection campaign that escalated the culture war.
What Rove saw in 2004 was an evenly divided country and a declining bloc of genuine swing voters, and he decided the GOP could win by raising the turnout of the base rather than by working to persuade swing voters across the electorate. His own campaign team described the plan as a radical departure, but Rove was intently focused on the millions of missing Evangelicals who did not turn out for the 2000 national election.
President Bush invited expressions of faith during his time in the White House, including prayer, and said in debates that the Bible was his favorite book, cautioning against the teaching of the theory of evolution, saying, “Religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism.” He hired Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, and reached deeply into the religious communities to fuel his campaign: 350,000 of his 1.4 million campaign volunteers were “pro-family” Evangelicals. President Bush promised a constitutional amendment to nullify the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage and supported the thirteen states that held referendums to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Evangelical minister Rick Warren wrote to the 136,000 subscribers of his weekly newsletter for pastors urging them to use the pulpit to compare the presidential candidates on five nonnegotiable issues: abortion, stem cell research, cloning, gay marriage, and euthanasia.24
On Election Day, Bush voters pushed “moral values” as their biggest issue—the first time that had topped the list. Gay marriage and abortion also topped the list of doubts about John Kerry. A whopping 6 million new Evangelical voters came out for Bush.25
When contemplating the GOP’s suicidal decisions, historians will look back on 2004 as the year the legions crossed the Rubicon.
When President Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, abortion and contraception of all things became the main points of attack that nearly defeated the law. The Republicans allied with the U.S. Catholic bishops, who worked to defeat the introduction of universal health care.26 They declared inaccurately that Obamacare would require insurance companies to cover abortion, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.27 Former Arkansas governor Michael Huckabee was derisive: “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”28
Conservatives prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court when they won the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, which ensured the right of religiously conservative employers to refuse to include contraceptive coverage in health insurance policies for their employees.29
During this battle against the Affordable Care Act, almost half of Evangelicals believed it is “always wrong” to have sex before marriage. Half. When at the time just one in five of all Americans believed premarital sex is “always wrong.”30 And in case you were not paying attention, the Republicans in Congress during the 2018 budget battle sought to abolish sex education and expand abstinence programs in the public schools.31
Every election in America now is just the next iteration of Presidents Reagan and Bush’s culture war that the GOP chose to join.
Battling abortion as a life-and-death, moral issue is the other original sin of the GOP, whose base expanded under President Reagan and afterward among Evangelicals and religious conservatives in the Deep South, border states, Appalachian Valley, Plains states, and Mountain West. That bloc of up to twenty states gave all the reason GOP leaders needed to maintain an absolutist position on abortion and fight a losing battle against the sexual revolution and against women.
This cultural war is also quite exceptional for the United States. Everywhere else in the world when citizens have voted in referenda or where the highest court has legalized abortion or gay marriage, the issue has been settled and depoliticized. These social issues disappear from partisan politics. But not in the United States, where the Republican leaders used those U.S. Supreme Court decisions to launch a culture war, made electorally possible by its Evangelical and rural religious base in the states where the U.S. Constitution gives them inordinate influence.
THE GOP BATTLE AGAINST IMMIGRATION TO PUT AMERICA FIRST
T
he nation’s civic, business, agricultural, and religious leaders and both political parties under President Ronald Reagan and President George Herbert Walker Bush rallied to pass bold reforms of the immigration system, namely the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990. They dramatically changed the country’s approach to legal and illegal immigration, both of which expanded greatly during the 1990s. But the political revolt in the GOP to reverse it was just as stark. Insurgent, antiestablishment leaders quickly upended the complicit Republican leaders, and the GOP would own a determined three-decade campaign against immigration. The years 1994, 1995, and 1996 were ground zero for a Republican Party that committed its third original sin that made it an anti-immigration party.
President Reagan had supported the effort to pass reform legislation that would grant asylum to millions who had come here illegally to work. The new Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 created a process for legalizing undocumented immigrants while strengthening border enforcement to discourage future migrants from crossing illegally. The “keystone” of the bill was new sanctions to be imposed against employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers and a 50 percent increase in border staffing. The new law created a two-step process for the undocumented people who had lived here peaceably and continuously since 1982 to gain permanent status. The result was 3 million undocumented immigrants getting amnesty, including 2.3 million Mexicans.32
President Reagan supported expanded immigration for the country, if not his party, when he signed the new law at the Statue of Liberty, observing, “We have a statue in New York Harbor [of] a woman holding a torch of welcome to those who enter our country to become Americans. [She] represents our open door.” The diversity of those entering the country “became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.”33
President H. W. Bush welcomed and signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which dramatically changed the character and scale of immigration to the country, and unabashedly embraced immigration as a powerful and positive vehicle to enrich America.
The system of immigration up to this point had prioritized family reunification—or “chain migration,” in Donald Trump’s words—but the reforms in the 1990 law created a second-track, “employment-based immigration.” It tripled the number of annual visas given for employment from 54,000 to 140,000. And it allotted visas for people with extraordinary ability in “the sciences, arts, education, business or athletics,” for multinational executives, those with advanced degrees, skilled workers, and those who were investing in new ventures worth more than $1 million. The goal of the reforms was to make America more competitive, innovative, and diverse.34
“What we are really talking about is how all of us basically arrived here,” Senator Ted Kennedy observed. “Whether it was three hundred years ago or one hundred years ago, it was immigration and immigration policy that really defined how America became America.” The Immigration Act of 1990 was meant to change the face of America, and it did.
Legal immigration grew from 16 million people in 1990 to 19 million in 1994 and 22.5 million by 2000.35 The foreign-born population jumped by 12.5 million to 31.1 million by 2000.36 They were now 11.1 percent of the population, with dramatically more coming from Mexico and Central America.37 And despite the heavier border security and employer penalties, the number of undocumented immigrants (“illegals”) grew from 3.5 million to 8.6 million by 2000.38
Initially, the public became more concerned about the changes in immigration. Before the enactment of the new immigration reform laws, about half thought the country should be reducing immigration, but in 1994, that had spiked to two thirds.
Steve Kornacki in The Red and the Blue posits rightly that Newt Gingrich’s “revolt against establishment power” shaped all our polarized politics thereafter, but he also highlighted the role played by Pat Buchanan, the conservative “brawler” on CNN’s Crossfire. Buchanan was the first to warn against the country’s changing immigrant character and attack the elite’s embrace of expanded immigration. He ran to win the GOP nomination in 1992 and 1996 and surprised the GOP establishment and traditional conservatives by over-performing, tying, or winning early primary and caucus states, like Iowa and New Hampshire. He ultimately won 35 percent of the Super Tuesday states in 1992 and a quarter in 1996, but he never went away quietly.39
Buchanan ran so strongly the first time that the national party was forced to give him a prime-time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention in Houston, where he promptly attacked the Clintons as “Mr. and Mrs. Mao of the culture war,” Hillary Clinton as a radical feminist, and declared, “There is a religious war going in our country for the soul of America,” and it will be “as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself.” That campaign and speech, Timothy Stanley wrote, “fired the first shot in the American culture war.”40
Other GOP leaders carried the banner against abortion, “liberal permissiveness,” taxes, and big government, but Buchanan alone among the national leaders attacked the elites on immigration and foreign trade. And he was not shy about using examples that betrayed his real worries about the nation’s demographic changes: “If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”41 When responding to a student question in Arizona about how hard Mexicans work, he retorted, “But they’ve got no right to break our laws and break into our country and go on welfare, and some commit crimes.”
He decried the fact that “one in five felons in a federal prison is an illegal alien” and that in California “immigrants are coming in such numbers that they’re swamping the schools, and you have to raise taxes.” To address this “mass immigration,” he proposed building “an impenetrable wall on the Mexican border” and a five-year moratorium on legal immigration.42
And Buchanan’s culture war also included an attack on the international alliances and trade deals that “sold out” the American worker. In 1991, he drew a stark contrast with George Bush: “He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis. We believe in the Old Republic. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order. We will put America First.”43 In 1996, he lamented that South American flowers were putting Iowa farmers out of business and labeled Senator Bob Dole “Mr. NAFTA, Mr. WTO, and Mr. Mexican bailout.”44
And the result was a surge of anti-immigrant, nativist hate groups that “proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigrant xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.45
Newt Gingrich eschewed Pat Buchanan’s anti-establishment populism because his conservative revolution did not include an aversion to America’s military alliances and indeed, he led the fight to pass NAFTA and other trade agreements. His 1994 “Contract with America” included no steps to roll back the immigration laws. So, others would ultimately lead the fight to make the GOP an “America first” Party.
But Newt Gingrich led a Republican Party that would strike a dramatically different course on immigration. In the titanic battle to reform welfare in 1996, the Republicans’ bill barred both legal and undocumented immigrants from receiving cash assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid benefits.46 President Clinton vetoed the first plans, because they went too far on denying government benefits to legal immigrants, but he reluctantly agreed in order to win passage of these major reforms. The new law, for the first time, barred legal immigrants from receiving government benefits for five years.47
California Governor Pete Wilson in 1994 led the party’s anti-immigration effort in the states by getting Proposition 187 on the ballot: it would bar illegal immigrants from using public services, including education and health care, and required all state and local officials to report undocumented immigrants to law enforcement
. Nearly 60 percent of the voters supported it, though federal courts ultimately declared the referendum unconstitutional and kept the law from ever being implemented. GOP state leaders also moved to bar illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, which became the next hot issue in California, Georgia, New York, and other states.48
The Democratic Party did not join the battle because it was divided on the issue. Even though President Clinton campaigned in California against Prop 187, Democrats nationally had not settled on how to handle the undocumented population or how to create a path to legalization or citizenship.
The fading GOP establishment tried periodically to put comprehensive immigration reform back on the table to be passed by a bipartisan majority in the Congress, but those efforts were marginalized within a GOP that was now virulently anti-immigration. President George W. Bush pushed for reform before it died in the U.S. Senate. After President Obama won reelection in 2012 and the GOP lost ignominiously among both Hispanics and Asians and lost more states in the Southwest, the Republican Party leaders pressed the pause button. Their official postmortem declared, “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.”49
Comprehensive immigration reform passed in the U.S. Senate, but Republican senators knew their party. Two thirds of the Republican senators had voted to kill it. House Republicans hated the reforms, and the party leaders never even considered bringing it to the floor for a vote. House and Senate GOP leaders knew their caucuses and committed to reversing President Obama’s executive order legalizing the DACA “Dreamers” and 5 million additional undocumented immigrants. After a member of the House leadership lost in a primary for seeming to be open to immigration reform, the House GOP would never give in to the pleadings of the GOP establishment.50
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