With abortion answer, Trump showed that he never studied for his Conservatism 101 finals

By this time, everyone with a television, a smart phone or a computer has already seen the MSNBC town hall exchange between Chris Matthews and Donald Trump where the abortion question came up. (Even if you lack all three of those modern devices, you may have caught wind of it via the screams of horror emanating from the windows of your neighbors, both Democrat and Republican.) But on the odd chance that you were in a coma for the past sixteen hours and happened to turn to Hot Air before doing anything else this morning, here’s the short but brutal recap. (WaPo)

Before going any further, I’d like to preface this column with something that at least approaches a bit of an apology to my friends in the #NeverTrump camp because yesterday’s events led to a wake-up call of sorts for me on a personal level. As regular readers know by now, I’ve gone out of my way to leave some maneuvering room for the GOP this fall by attempting to maintain Donald Trump’s status as a viable back-up plan if Ted Cruz fails to secure the nomination. (And I’ve been gently taken to task for it by some very prominent writers.) I recognize that I may have even engaged in a bit of willful disregard for some of the more troubling aspects of his campaign rather than simply throwing up my hands and tossing the keys to the Oval Office to Hillary Clinton. But after a night to sleep on and digest last night’s debacle, even I must confess that something in the stew smells like it’s gone past its expiration date here.

Allahpundit seemed to touch on part of what went wrong yesterday when he wrote this:

I think part of that analysis is correct, but it doesn’t fully get to the uneasy feeling that interview brought on. It’s a suspicion that I’ve had nagging at the back of my mind for months, even as I’ve tried my best to keep Trump viable as a general election candidate. Unlike Allahpundit, I don’t see this as Donald Trump making a quick calculation of how to best position himself against Cruz here. The more likely (and disturbing) conclusion is that Donald Trump is someone who really doesn’t know much of anything about the conservative movement beyond what he read in some headlines while contemplating a run for the GOP nomination. He’s like the student who failed to study for the test and is now picking the multiple choice answers which sound the best even if they are extreme catnip designed to catch the unwary in a failing grade.

This isn’t a crazy theory because what we’re seeing is the essence of a populist strategy without any real research behind it. If you want to win over the hearts and minds of conservatives, you identify what they most want but can’t obtain under the current rules and then offer them the moon. In retrospect, we’ve seen this too many times before, and while some of the answers sound great and stir up the masses with great support, they all fall short to one degree or another in terms of practicality. Immigration? Everyone else wants more border patrol and aggressive ICE enforcement. So I’ll give you a wall the size of the moon which won’t cost a dime. Trade deals? The other candidates are free traders who don’t address issues of job outsourcing and trade deficits. I’ll just screw everyone else on the planet and build virtual tariff walls. War on terror? Those other guys talk tough about confronting the enemy, but I’ll give you torture and huge conquering armies laying waste to the Arabian Peninsula.

And when it came to the abortion question, Mr. Trump obviously recognized that everyone on the conservative side of the fence was, to one degree or another, against the procedure. So his first impulse was to start putting pregnant women in jail. Too many authors on the Right have already described how damaging this is to the pro-life movement, but it took several hours of immediate backlash before Trump finally arrived at his third answer which was at least somewhat close to the correct one.

What this tells me is that Donald Trump never studied for the test when he decided to win over conservatives in his quest for the nomination. He just trusted in his instincts, scanned a few topic summaries and went into it like a real estate negotiation, promising the clients a mansion when he knew they’d wind up in a condo. Unfortunately this is akin to trying to win over the affection of a petulant child you’re babysitting who doesn’t want to eat their vegetables. Rather than promising a better selection of healthy options and a treat after the meal, your first move is to simply tell them everyone will have chocolate layer cake for their entire dinner.

It’s difficult to admit it, particularly when so many pieces of the plans Trump has proposed at least sounded like great ideas on paper. And the rest were able to be written off by saying, “at least he got a conversation started” on the issue. All that may be true, but underneath it all, Donald Trump doesn’t understand conservatism. He’s winging it as he goes along and the learning curve has finally left him behind.

It’s pathetic to watch Cruz supporters here who claim they are more Christian and Conservative than we Trump sinners brigade are spin the notion that if by some miracle abortion were illegal that women who pay for illegal abortions and murder their babies anyhow should suffer no statutory penalty

If there is no penalty for illegal abortions then it’s not against the law

It’s just a suggestion

I personally don’t care what the pro life professional lobbying orgs say

I don’t have much in common with them beyond opposing abortion

Their queasiness hasn’t gotten 45 million spared since Roe has it

I’m anti abortion

Tying that up in a culture of sanctity of life in general complicates it

Being against murdering babies isn’t complicated

Trump gave an honest answer he should not have parsed later

Cruz gave a political evasive non answer because he has no balks

Heidi and Amanda are still arguing how to divide them up with Michelle Fields

2 divided by 3 ain’t purty

Any true constitutional conservative knows that Trump, not Cruz is right on this one. I guess Cruz missed the “Founding Fathers 101” class at Haaa-vaad.

The founding Fathers and the Right to Life by Jameson Taylor

The Declaration of Independence draws a very clear line between sanity and insanity by proclaiming the existence of certain self-evident truths that all rational men should recognize: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A self-evident truth is, by definition, evident to anyone who is sane. Persons who do not accept that all human beings are endowed with an inalienable right to life—for example, the 82 percent of Americans who think abortion should be legal—are, by this definition, insane.

The right to life is inalienable because it is not of human, but of divine origin. Because man does not create himself, he cannot deprive himself of the primary goods that are inherent to human existence: life, freedom and happiness. Just as no government can deny its citizens these inalienable rights, neither can a man deprive himself of these rights. The “inalienable” right to life thus precludes abortion as well as suicide.

A Closer Look at Roe

But what about Roe vs. Wade? Does a “penumbra,” or shadow, of the 14th Amendment guarantee a right to privacy that includes the right to an abortion?

The fact is, as Justice Byron White’s dissenting opinion in Roe vs. Wade concluded, there is “nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgement.” Indeed, just as the logical development of the Declaration’s recognition of man’s inherent liberty required federal intervention to abolish slavery, the Declaration’s acknowledgment of the inalienable right to life would seem to favor federal intervention to end abortion.

James Wilson’s “Lectures on Law,” given at what eventually was to become the University of Pennsylvania, clearly affirm that the right to life encompasses the unborn. Wilson was one of only six men to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, and was a Supreme Court justice from 1789 to 1798. Recognized as “the most learned and profound legal scholar of his generation,” Wilson’s lectures were attended by President George Washington, Vice President John Adams, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and a “galaxy of other republican worthies.” For this reason, as constitutional scholar Walter Berns states, “Wilson, when speaking on the law, might be said to be speaking for the Founders generally.” So what do the Founders say about the right to life?

Wilson clearly answers this question: “With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from every degree of actual violence, and in some cases, from every degree of danger.”

Given Wilson’s exegesis, one cannot doubt that the Founders recognized that unborn infants are owed the full protection of the law. The key question thus becomes the point at which the unborn fetus becomes an unborn child.

Wilson, in agreement with the limited medical jurisprudence of his time, assumed that life begins with the “quickening” of the infant in his mother’s womb. As taught by Aristotle, the quickening was the point at which the fetus was infused with a human, rational soul. John Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, first printed in 1839, defines the quickening as follows: “The motion of the foetus, when felt by the mother, is called quickening, and the mother is then said to be quick with child. This happens at different periods of pregnancy in different women, and in different circumstances, but most usually about the fifteenth or sixteenth week after conception….”

One of the sources of both Wilson’s and Bouvier’s opinion is William Blackstone’s widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). Blackstone’s discussion of the quickening observes: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb… this, though not murder, was by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter. But at present it is not looked upon in quite so atrocious a light, though it remains a very heinous misdemeanor…”

cont. reading here: http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/tay/tay_03foundingfather.html

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