Nothing Makes Liberals Fiscally Conservative Like The Idea Of Defending States Rights

On Friday, with no small amount of drama, North Dakota’s state Senate passed two laws restricting abortion. One would prohibit an abortion after a heart beat is detected. The other would prohibit an abortion for the purposes of gender selection, or to kill off children with genetic abnormalities such as Down’s Syndrome.

Now that the bills have passed in the legislature and are pending Governor Jack Dalrymple’s signature, the left is making a fiscally conservative argument against them. The claims, such as those made in this Salon article, are that the cost of litigating legal challenges to the law will be too high, and that fiscal conservatives are hypocritical for ignoring that cost.

Which is amusing. On the national level liberals are busy trying to poo-poo the seriousness of our national debt, but on the state level they go into paroxysms at the cost of legal challenges to anti-abortion bills (which, frankly, will amount to something around the size of a rounding error in the state budget).

I think what is really bothering our friends on the left isn’t the cost, which will be minimal, but rather the idea of a state challenging federal legal precedent. And the idea that the state might just be successful at doing it.

The left doesn’t want the State of North Dakota to stand up for its sovereignty, and they especially don’t want any legal challenges to the court-mandated legality of abortion.

The “fiscal conservative” argument against challenging federal overreach on abortion isn’t reality. It’s just a political tactic.