The Democrats clearly believe that they have found a political winner this summer that might bail out their fading hopes to retain their majorities in Congress after the midterms. As soon as Roe was overturned, liberals began setting their hair on fire and claiming that Republicans have some sort of secret plan to eliminate birth control, gay marriage, and a host of other things. As a result, the House is expected to vote today on a bill that would mandate the legality of contraceptives at the federal level. The measure is expected to pass, but its future in the Senate is being described as “uncertain.” Nancy Pelosi quickly grabbed a microphone and listed off all of the other aspects of modern society that Republicans are supposedly planning to eliminate.

The House planned to vote Thursday on the legislation and send it to the Senate, where its fate seemed uncertain. The push underscored that Democrats are latching onto their own version of culture-war battles to appeal to female, progressive and minority voters by casting the court and Republicans as extremists intent on obliterating rights taken for granted for years.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said now that the “radical, Republican-stacked Supreme Court” overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, GOP lawmakers want to do more than ban abortion.

“Those of us who’ve been in Congress a while can tell you that they have been against contraception, family planning, birth control the entire time,” said Pelosi, D-Calif. “This is their moment. Clarence Thomas has made that clear. They’re right down to the fundamentals of privacy that they want to erase.”

The separate ruling issued in Dobbs by Clarence Thomas is quickly turning into the greatest gift the Democrats could hope for heading into the midterms. They are seizing his suggestion that other rulings should be reexamined with many questions being returned to the states. They are doing this despite the fact that the majority ruling clearly stated that their decision in Dobbs should not be construed as applying to any other currently understood rights. But that’s not stopping Pelosi and her crew from making the claim and most of the media is playing along with them.

The bigger problem, at least with this initial bill, is that we apparently have some Republicans in the Senate who are preparing to help the Democrats in their efforts. I wouldn’t expect this bill (or almost any bill, really) to sail through with 100% bipartisan support. But I had assumed that there would easily be more than 10 Senate Republicans who would have no problem with ensuring the legality of contraception because contraception and abortion are two very different things.

Is that not the case? Are we really about to watch the Senate GOP make this issue into the hill they want to die on? When the Democrats are making wild claims about all of your evil plots, including banning contraception, and you turn around and block a bill legalizing contraception, you’re kind of making their point for them, aren’t you?

The Democrats are latching onto a political winner here and I will be shocked if the Senate Republicans don’t realize that. A vast majority of Americans are not opposed to the availability of contraceptive products including birth control pills. The Catholic church still forbids the use of contraceptives, but only a tiny percentage of American Catholics follow that command. The Methodist Church openly allows the use of contraception if both spouses agree and the decision is made “in a prayerful fashion.”

Opposing this bill is one of the biggest political losers imaginable. The Democrats are only pushing it to distract from their horrible national approval numbers and to try to scare their voters out to the polls in November. If the GOP smugly goes along with the plan and shoots this bill down, they just might manage the feat.

I will never be able to understand this type of knee-jerk reaction among some conservatives. If you really want to see an end to nearly all abortions, the easiest way to achieve that goal would be to put an end to unplanned pregnancies. (This is something I wrote about at length last month.) But even if you want to approach this question from nothing more than a callous political slant, you shouldn’t want to see this bill fail. Republicans are poised for a crucial potential victory in November that could slam the brakes on the worst parts of the progressive agenda for at least the next two years. Don’t hand the Democrats an excuse to prevent that from happening.