The Senate, last December, voted unanimously to pass the Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act of 2018.  That bill fails to cite even a single example of lynching since 1968 as reason for its enactment, and it is little more than a bit of political subterfuge meant to redefine the historical definition of lynching to include instance there two or more people seek to inflict “bodily harm” against a victim based upon the race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identification of the victim, thereby giving the government power to prosecute any future acts of “lynching” that happen to fit the new definition.

Assuming that at least some Republican senators read the short text of that bill, they likely concluded the same, but also concluded that the risk in opposing the content of the bill outweighed the value in supporting its name. 

Firstly, while the Democrats’ bill is entirely disrespectful to the legacy of actual victims of lynching in America, it doesn’t really give the federal government an incredible amount of new powers, as the crime of “lynching” according to the new bill is already prosecutable as a hate crime due to previous legislation.  For example, two white men attacking a black man due to race is already prosecutable by the federal government as a hate crime.  What is the harm in making such crimes federally prosecutable as a “lynching?”

Secondly, the left-leaning media would pound any Republican with incessant questions about how he or she might have found themselves in opposition to an “anti-lynching” bill.  That is attention that Republicans wouldn’t want or need.

So, Republicans voted for it unanimously.  In short, they were simply virtue signaling for political benefit.

What’s amazing, though, is that this principle doesn’t seem to work inversely.  Just as any Republican would have an understandable concern in opposing a “Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act,” one might imagine that Democrats might have similar reservations about voting against a “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.” 

Yet each of the six Senate Democrats running for president in 2020 voted against protecting such an infant’s life.

Their calculation did not involve any obscure or deceitful content of the bill, as there clearly was in the Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act that few Americans would ever read.  The Senate’s proposed law was clear and concise.  It didn’t seek to redefine our cultural conception of life, but only to ensure that children who survive an abortion attempt should be protected by federal law.

Each of these Democrats are now on record as having unequivocally opposed that idea, and their calculation in voting against protecting those babies is based on three things. 

First, the increasingly radicalized leftist base would construe that any vote to support the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act signals the offending Democrat’s softness on women’s rights.  That alone is a logical mess, if only for the reason that the mother’s health is no longer even the slightest consideration when the question is to either kill or care for the baby which now exists outside her womb.

Second, drawing attention to babies who survive abortion attempts draws attention to the murderous implements and practices the doctor must employ to destroy the child that exists within the womb, like saline immolation, or “dilation and extraction,” which involves the use of a vacuum to suction a developing child’s brain from its developing fontanels.  Yet despite the viciousness of such acts, there are several survivors of abortion attempts who endure the lasting scars of the abortion doctor’s violent acts against them in the womb.  Not allowing more of those children to grow up with such afflictions makes it easier for abortion advocates to keep the horrifying nature of abortion shrouded behind the thick curtain of “choice,” “healthcare,” and “women’s rights.”    

But the last is the most important political consideration for the left.  Democrats are comfortable in knowing that they won’t be pounded by the media, over and over again, for their having failed to support a bill which protects infants from being killed if they happen to escape the mothers’ and doctors’ attempts to legally kill them inside the womb.

They appear to be correct about that.  While the media would certainly pounce upon any Republican with the audacity to oppose the Democrats’ anti-lynching bill (though the bill has little, if anything, to do with actual lynching), Democrats have endured no harrowing inquisitions as to why they oppose providing medical support to infants who survive a mother and her doctor’s attempt to kill them.

But the media isn’t needed to expose them, because Trump will be running for president in 2020.  As we all know, our president doesn’t mince words, and he openly detests political correctness.  What he will do is find a political pressure point in his opponent, and beat it to death.  It’s a viable strategy, brilliantly observed by Winston Churchill.  “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever,” Churchill famously says.  “Use a pile driver.  Hit the point once.  Then come back and hit it again.  Then hit it a third time -- a tremendous whack.”

Consider that Democrats’ position on abortion is clearly fringe radicalism.  According to Gallup, 81% of Americans believe that third trimester abortions should be illegal.  A new poll by YouGov suggests that even two-thirds of Americans who would describe themselves as “pro-choice” also oppose third trimester abortions, and nearly 80% of those Americans oppose removing medical care for a viable child outside the womb.  Getting four in five Americans to agree on anything is a difficult thing to do, but even four in five “pro-choice” abortion advocates agree that children who survive abortion attempts should be provided care.

If any of the six Senate Democrats vying for the presidency finds him or herself on the stage with Trump in a debate in 2020, we can expect that Trump will do what the media will not, and remind Americans that his opponent voted to allow the killing infants who survive abortion attempts by mothers and doctors. 

So, what are the chances that Kamala Harris, or Cory Booker, or Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, can earn the presidency in 2020 when Trump repeatedly reminds America that they all voted against a federal law which requires that doctors provide life support to the living babies who survive the doctors’ and mothers’ violent attempts to prematurely kill them in a late-term abortion?

Not even the media can hide them from what should be the eternal shame of their having done so.  Because Trump, and thank God for it, lacks the political couth needed to be mealy-mouthed about his opposition to killing babies.  He will relentlessly pound his opponent with the truth, which is that his opponent could not even muster the courage to vote in favor of protecting babies from a legal murder by a mother or her abortion “doctor.”

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.