SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A29S
o Senate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell thinks the leak of the
Supreme Court’s draft opinion
overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle”
and an “attack.” Chief Justice John Roberts
calls it a “betrayal.”
Cry me a river.
There is indeed a toxic spectacle and a
betrayal going on here, but it isn’t the leak. It’s
the betrayal of democracy by McConnell’s
Republicans and the toxic spectacle of the
Roberts court aiding it.
The reported 5-to-4 split on the draft shows
that this cataclysmic ruling would be forced
on the public by the narrowest possible
majority. This means the ruling is possible
only because of the seat on the court
McConnell and his Republican colleagues
effectively stole by refusing for 293 days to
confirm — or even consider — President
Barack Obama’s duly nominated candidate
Merrick Garland.
Republicans handed that seat in 2017 to
Neil Gorsuch — in the process going “nuclear”
and eliminating the filibuster so that only
Republican votes were needed for
confirmation.
Then, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy,
McConnell’s Republicans reversed their pious
claim that Supreme Court vacancies late in a
presidency should be left to the “next
president” and confirmed Amy Coney Barrett
eight days before Joe Biden was elected
president — essentially stealing a second seat.
Some justices reported by Politico to be
voting to overturn Roe now stand accused by
Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) of misrepresenting
their positions on the “super precedent”
during their Senate confirmations.
Three of the five justices reportedly voting
to eliminate Roe were appointed by a
president who didn’t win the popular vote
(Republicans won the popular vote only once
in the past eight presidential elections) and
confirmed with the votes of senators
representing a lopsided minority of the
American people.
And the wife of the senior associate justice
said to be voting to undo Roe encouraged the
Trump White House to overthrow the 2020
election results and to subject President
Biden, Democrats and the media to military
tribunals at sea. Yet Justice Clarence Thomas
refuses to recuse himself from cases stemming
from the insurrection Donald Trump ignited.
Now that’s one toxic spectacle.
Worse, this McConnell-packed Roberts
court has returned the favor by stacking the
deck in favor of minority rule by Republicans.
It has blessed partisan gerrymandering,
giving Republicans representation in the
House disproportionate to their share of the
electorate. It has allowed elections to be
decided by billionaires and corporations
spending unlimited sums of untraceable
money. It has kneecapped labor unions,
co-signed voter suppression schemes by
Republican-run states and eviscerated the
civil-rights-era Voting Rights Act, to
disastrous effect for Black and brown voters.
Now comes this breathtaking assault on the
rights of women, a strongly Democratic
constituency, eliminating the right tens of
millions have firmly relied upon for half a
century to control their own bodies.
The five justices have aligned themselves
with the 16 percent of Americans who,
according to the latest Post-ABC News poll,
believe abortion should be illegal in all
circumstances, and against the 79 percent
who believe it should be legal in at least some
circumstances. Eighty-two percent of
Americans believe abortion should be allowed
if a woman’s life is endangered, 79 percent in
cases of rape or incest, and 67 percent if the
child would be born with a life-threatening
illness.
Under the draft opinion, states would
apparently be free to ban abortions in all of
these circumstances, and to charge women
who have them with homicide. A couple of
states have already considered banning
abortions for life-endangering ectopic
pregnancies.
Adding insult to this grievous injury, the
opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, is a political
screed, dripping with the contempt he
exhibits in rolling his eyes at colleagues
during oral arguments. Alito breezily
dismisses the deep reliance American women
and their families have on the right to
abortion, calling the American people’s views
“extraneous influences” that “we cannot
allow our decisions to be affected by.”
He accuses his predecessors who wrote Roe
of “abuse of judicial authority,” being
“egregiously wrong,” using “exceptionally
weak,” “erroneous” and “plainly incorrect”
reasoning, making an “error that cannot be
allowed to stand,” “relying on two discredited
articles by an abortion advocate” and acting as
usurpers “wielding nothing but raw judicial
power.”
Alito claims Roe was based on a
“constitutionally irrelevant” history — then
offers his own historical irrelevancies from a
time long before abortion was the safe
medical procedure it is today, with more than
half of abortions induced by medication.
“There was no support in American law....
Zero. None,” Alito’s polemic asserts, like a
campaign ad.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and
return the issue of abortion to the people’s
elected representatives,” he writes, echoing
10,000 Republican stump speeches.
“It is time”? Why? Because Republicans
have packed the court with enough
illegitimate votes to do so, and the political
hacks they appointed are now rewarding their
betrayal of democracy.DANA MILBANKA betrayal ofdemocracy hasbeen rewardedInstead, today’s job market recovery is
happening much faster than many ex-
pected early on in the pandemic or was
predicted even as recently as the start of
Joe Biden’s presidency.
In February 2021, the Congressional
Budget Office estimated that we’d return
to the pre-pandemic jobs peak only
around the second half of 2023. The CBO
also forecast then that the unemploy-
ment rate as of the first quarter of this
year would be 5.1 percent, as did the
economists polled around then in the
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s
Survey of Professional Forecasters.
So what happened? Fiscal and mon-
etary policy has been extremely expan-
sionary in the past year. In plainer Eng-
lish: Congress gave Americans a lot of
cash to spend, and the Federal Reserve
kept interest rates low. Those measures
helped juice consumer demand and also
demand for workers.
Now, a few important caveats.
First, in a healthy economy, we would
expect the total number of jobs to be
higher today than it was in February2020, not more or less flat. The popula-
tion, and specifically the working-age
population, has grown since then, and
there should have been commensurate
growth in jobs. Simply returning to
where we were is not good enough.
Second, the official unemployment
rate, which is nearly down to its pre-
pandemic low, somewhat exaggerates
the job market’s health.
That’s because it counts only those
who do not have a job and are actively
looking for work. If you have dropped
out of the labor force entirely — maybe
you retired, became a full-time care-
giver, went back to school or have a
disability — you won’t be reflected in this
number. This matters because labor
force participation rates remain lower
than they were pre-pandemic, and not
only because baby boomers are retiring.
Participation rates for Americans
ages 25 to 54 — the range considered
prime working age — are down, especial-
ly for women.
These depressed labor force participa-
tion rates can make the headline unem-Amid some other unfortunate
economic developments — ac-
celerating inflation, a stock-
market plunge, declining pro-
ductivity — there’s one bright spot. So
bright, in fact, it’s almost blinding.
That good news: job growth.
U.S. employers added 428,000 jobs on
net in April, about the same number
added in March, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported Friday. Unemploy-
ment remained flat at 3.6 percent —
close to a half-century low.
Perhaps we’ve gotten accustomed to
(even spoiled by!) similar headline num-
bers in recent months. Over the past
year, job growth has averaged more than
half a million new positions on net each
month. But step back a bit and you’ll
realize how remarkable the pace of hir-
ing has been.
Take a look at the chart to the right,
which I’ve been regularly updating since
mid-2020. I used to refer to it as the
Scariest Jobs Chart You Will See Today.
Lately, it doesn’t look so scary.
The graph shows the change in num-
ber of jobs relative to the start of every
downturn since World War II. As you can
see, jobs plummeted in the pandemic
recession that began February 2020.
Employment fell further and faster than
in any other postwar recession, includ-
ing the Great Recession. But now we’ve
recovered nearly all of the ground we
lost in those early covid-19 months; in
fact, if April’s pace of job growth contin-
ues, we’ll return to pre-pandemic levels
of employment in about three months.
In other words, we might patch up
that deep hole by midsummer. By con-
trast, the jobs hole from the Great Reces-
sion was much shallower, in relative
terms, but took more than six years to
fill. The labor-market recovery then was
painfully slow, which gave reason to fear
a similarly sluggish crawl back to eco-
nomic health this time around.ployment numbers look artificially low.
And third (as I’ve noted before): An
abundance of jobs might be little com-
fort if wage growth isn’t keeping up with
the rising cost of living.
Wages grew, in nominal terms, 5.5 per-
cent in April from the year prior. When
April inflation numbers come out this
week, they will likely show that once
again inflation outpaced wage growth.
Job trends aren’t the only forecast
that most people got wrong last year;
inflation has also run far higher, for
much longer, than most had predicted.
That is partly because of those expan-
sionary fiscal and monetary policy
choices, compounded by persistently
snarled supply chains, plus some really
bad luck (more coronavirus variants,
war in Ukraine, Chinese lockdowns that
delay manufacturing and shipping, etc.).
The Federal Reserve has recently be-
gun raising interest rates in an effort to
reduce inflation. Higher interest rates
make it a little more expensive to borrow
so should reduce demand for houses,
cars and other purchases. The Fed’s goal
is to cool demand just enough that infla-
tion comes down but not so much that it
tips the U.S. economy into recession or
throws a lot of people out of work.
Fed officials have argued that even if
higher interest rates end up reducing
demand for workers, that won’t neces-
sarily cause people to lose their jobs.
Why? As of March, there were about
twice as many jobs open as there were
unemployed workers available to fill
them. Maybe employers can take down
some of their job ads without laying
more people off.
Historically, though, the Fed has
struggled to reduce inflation without
harming hiring or broader economic
growth — or pushing us into full-blown
recession. Despite the strong jobs num-
bers to date, we might nonetheless be in
for a bumpy ride in the year ahead.CATHERINE RAMPELLThe job market has recovered faster than (almost) anyone predictedWhen I was a young mother, I was certain
my husband and I could raise our two
boys to be feminists. We took all the
necessary steps. They got a clunky but
equitable surname and painted toenails upon
r equest.
They also got a male role model with traditionally
“masculine” jobs (farmer, builder) but also plenty of
stereotypically “feminine” traits. He bonded with
babies, treasured his female friends and wept
through the opening sequence of “Up.” For my part, I
could teach them to cook, write thank-you notes and
not be grossed out by menstruation.
Picture me whistling down the road with a double
stroller, confident that we could bring up fair-
m inded and whole human beings.
Now picture me stopping in my tracks when I
learned that our third child would be... a girl.
What would she learn from my example? That
women do the cooking and write the thank-you
notes? That mothers put their families first? Sure, my
husband did that, too, but when he did it, it was
progress; when I did it, it was the 1950s all over again.
Even worse: As a feminist, I was good on theory
but mediocre in practice. I shied from conflict,
craved approval and reflexively deferred to male
authority. I knew that trying to get thinner to
conform to patriarchal beauty standards was a
betrayal both of my intrinsic self-worth and of
women everywhere, and yet every day, I tried any-
way. Every single day.What if my daughter grew up to be like me?
I was on guard from the moment she was born. No
Barbie dolls shall breach this perimeter! But as soon
as she went to preschool, princesses and teen pop
stars entered her consciousness and worked their
Disney magic. At age 3, she would wear only dresses
and announced, to her brothers’ consternation, that
pink was a “girl color.”
I couldn’t control her taste, I thought, but I could
control myself. I made sure to praise her brains and
not her looks. I refrained from counting calories in
her presence. And I stopped hugging her without
permission.
That last one took me longer than I like to admit.
She was 12, and the #MeToo movement was pointing
out just how casually and commonly girls had their
bodily autonomy taken from them. I realized how
often I had made her kiss this or that relative
whether she wanted to or not, ignoring her reluc-
tance in the name of politeness.
I began to ask for permission before hugging her.
When she said no, I felt a kind of woeful joy. As a girl,
I had not fully believed I had a right to my own body;
maybe, as a woman, I still didn’t. But she did.
So when she started wearing makeup and asked
for a razor to shave her legs, I was conflicted. Clearly,
she was under the sway of the patriarchal beauty
standards I so desperately wanted her to defy. But
just as clearly, she was defying us.
Growing up, I had done the opposite: declined to
wear mascara or shave my legs or even pierce my ears,not for myself but because I didn’t want to disappoint
my left-wing father. That’s right: I totally stuck it to
the patriarchy to please a male authority figure.
Needless to say, I bought my daughter the damn
razor. Who was I to lecture her?
I had the same feeling when she fought with her
dad, which she did often as a young teen: heated
skirmishes between two strong-willed people whose
politics were close enough to clash. Visiting her
afterward in her room — no, she did not want a hug
— I was tempted to suggest that she yell less and
placate more. Be more like me, in other words.
But I didn’t. I was astonished that she could make
a smart, passionate argument and stand her ground.
The least I could do was refrain from chastising her
for it.
Her stance on makeup has since shifted, but her
sense of self-possession hasn’t budged. The other
day, while she was arguing with her father, her
brother sat beside her heckling nonstop. Annoyed,
she paused midsentence and turned to him. “I get
that you like to make fun of me,” she said, “but wait
until I’ve finished what I’m saying and then make fun
of me.” He shut up. And she turned back to her father
to finish making her point.
I pictured her then with a sword in each hand,
parrying with her left while advancing with her
right. She definitely didn’t learn that from her
mother. But I hope I have modeled one lesson for my
daughter: It’s never too late to do better.
Maybe one day I’ll grow up to be like her.KATE COHENRaising feminist sons seemed easy.A daughter? Much trickier.KATYE BRIER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
The author with her daughter.sunday opinionHow this recession compares with previous ones
Percent change in employment since the most recent peak.Months since the last employment peak
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics THE WASHINGTON POST
11020304050607 0 months
Great Recession
and subsequent
recovery
Where
we are
nowNotes: Black line represents current recession/recovery. Other lines represent previous downturns.
Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these payroll employment trends are not exactly
synchronized with the National Bureau of Economic Research’s official business cycle dates.-5%
0
-10%
-15%
Other post-World War II
recessions