Testing the Limits

Ramesh Ponnuru asks "What’s so terrible about 'litmus tests'?":

The phrase “litmus tests” has negative connotations. It smacks of regimentation and intolerance. But we should be careful, when we see the phrase used, not to let the connotations do our mental work for us.

The phrase gets thrown around carelessly in the abortion debates, with activists on both sides — but typically those on the pro-life side — accused of “imposing a litmus test” on candidates. Which means what, exactly? Only that some people have the nerve to prefer candidates who agree with them on the issues that they care about.

Nobody thinks it’s intolerant for anti-tax activists to work to win elections for candidates who pledge not to raise taxes, or for labor leaders to withhold support from candidates who vote for free-trade deals. But for some reason, when pro-lifers engage in this type of normal political behavior something sinister is afoot.

Noemie Emery is capable of writing about abortion politics without resorting to such insinuations. In a recent essay in The Weekly Standard, the closest she comes to the usual tropes is a passing reference to how pro-lifers “tortur[ed]” Bob Dole in 1996 over the language of the party platform. Dole wanted to change the language; pro-life groups didn’t; and the members of the platform committee sided against Dole. So he didn’t get his way. It wasn’t torture. (And contrary to the former senator’s delusions, placing a comma somewhere else in the platform would not have saved his campaign.)

But while she largely avoids the usual traps in writing about litmus tests, Emery is too quick to declare, and to celebrate, its demise. She believes, although she hedges the claim at the start of her essay, that the Giuliani campaign has ended the pro-life litmus test for the Republican nomination: He is running well in the polls, and some social conservatives are receptive to his candidacy. But if that’s enough to show that the litmus test has ended — if we can declare it over before a pro-choice candidate has actually won the nomination, or even a primary — then Colin Powell’s near-candidacy in the fall of 1995 already ended it.

If she is too quick to declare the end of Republican litmus tests, she is wildly premature in declaring the end of Democratic ones. “[T]he Democrats also are starting to change,” she writes, before conceding, “They are not yet at the point of nominating a pro-life candidate on the national level.” No kidding. She goes on, wishfully: “Someday, they too may find a candidate whom they find attractive — say, for irony’s sake, a Bob Casey Jr. — except for this single and glaring impediment. And at that point, they too might deal.” Sure, they might. But let’s not get carried away by Casey’s election. The number of pro-life Democrats in the House and Senate is far below what it was 20 years ago.

Since all of these “mights” have taken us to the realm of speculation, I’ll note that my own guess is that pro-life and pro-choice voters will cease to care about the views of presidential nominees only when the politics of abortion is de-nationalized: which is to say, after Roe v. Wade has fallen.

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