Back in 2005, David Brooks wrote this about Roe v. Wade and the Alito confirmation for the Supreme Court:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

Check out the U.S. Senate today and you will see what Mr. Brooks was talking about.

We can't even get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to have a vote on late-term abortion, a practice that most Americans reject, according to a very recent poll:

Americans strongly support legislation that would ban late-term abortions and protect babies who are capable of feeling intense pain during an abortion. 

So why can't we have a vote on a law that restricts late-term abortions but keeps abortion in place?  The answer is Roe v. Wade and the poisonous political landscape that it created.  Frankly, Roe v. Wade has become like a religion for the left, even when the law being discussed in Congress does not stop a woman from a having an abortion – only a late-term abortion.  

We will go through the same charade with Planned Parenthood, another sacred cow of the left.

I ask you this: would we be going through all of this if the Supreme Court had let voters and state legislatures decide the issue of abortion in 1973?  The answer is no.  In fact, I argue that voters would have come up with a far more workable solution – probably one that allowed abortion in most states but did not permit late-term abortion.

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