So he reversed course on abortion literally overnight in order to advance his political prospects and he’s willing to tell Republicans who disagree with him that he doesn’t particularly want their votes.
Let’s face it, he’s the perfect VP for Trump. Trump/Flynn it is!
EXCLUSIVE: LTG Mike Flynn tells me he is "a pro-life Democrat," clarifies abortion comments by phone. "I believe the law should be changed."
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
.@GenFlynn tells me "This pro-choice issue is a legal issue that should be decided by the courts. If people want to change the law, vote.
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
Mike Flynn tells me his mother was pro-Life, he attended pro-Life rallies with her as a boy and drove pro-life floats for her. @FoxNews
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
Mike Flynn tells me: "If people are going to decide election on abortion issue they should just stay home." Says he is "pro-Life Democrat."
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
.@GenFlynn tells me #abortion issue shd be decided in the courts. His priority: "national security." "I believe the law should be changed."
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) July 11, 2016
Watch what he said about abortion yesterday below and see if you can detect anything “pro-life” in it. His point, garbled though it is, is straightforward: Women are the ones who’ll be responsible for raising a child to whom they give birth (unless they offer it for adoption, of course, but never mind that), therefore women should be the ones to decide whether they’ll give birth in the first place. Even Trump does better than that when articulating a “pro-life” philosophy.
But look — the guy has a point, sort of, about courts deciding this issue. I think many real pro-lifers are worn down and demoralized about the prospect of undoing Roe v. Wade through democratic means. There’s nothing in the polls to suggest supermajority support for a constitutional amendment and decades of conservative justices on the Supreme Court have produced nothing but frustration, most famously in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and most recently in the Texas abortion decision, for which Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy provided the crucial fifth vote. Social conservatives complain regularly, in fact, that for all the lip service paid to their causes by Republican presidential candidates, the pace of change on a life-and-death issue has been glacial. Flynn’s telling you here that it’s silly to make abortion an electoral litmus test when there’s not a lot to be done about it electorally, at least at the presidential level. Evidently lots of Republican voters agree or else we wouldn’t be blessed with presumptive nominee Donald Trump. The tricky part for Flynn is in how social conservative voters would react if the GOP not only continued to do little about abortion but even stopped paying lip service to it as a presidential issue. Would that be taken by evangelicals as a final kiss off? The nominee has to at least pretend that the base’s social concerns should matter in November, right? Putting Flynn on the ticket would be a bold test of that theory.
And it’d also be a lot of fun. Can you imagine this guy and Trump going loose cannon for four months on which deeply held policy priorities should and shouldn’t matter to the dumb electorate? Gold.
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