you can’t change minds with insults
Congressional Candidate Suraj Patel talks about the power of persuasion politics
We are only a few days away from the Supreme Court probably gutting Roe. While several media outlets are focused on the worst case scenarios, I’m committed to trying to help you see this decision in a framing that makes you hopeful about our future.
One of the productive shifts I’ve noticed in the last few weeks is that pro-choice men have finally come out of hiding, challenging the pervading cultural paradigm that women get pregnant alone. Reproductive rights don’t just impact the person who gets pregnant and while there are no laws that control men’s bodies, sexist laws that control a woman’s ultimately oppress us all. As such, a lot of men are coming out of the woodwork to take a stand.
For instance, on the Man Enough Podcast this week, I was moved to tears when Giacomo Gianniotti unprompted, shared his own abortion story on our show. He talked about him and his wife having two medical abortions after suffering two missed miscarriages during the pandemic, and urged men to speak about the issue.
I find it curious that when a male celebrity speaks against abortion, the headline mentions it but when he supports it, it’s somehow omitted. While I was thankful for all the media coverage about Giacomo’s powerful revelation, I noticed that one thing was missing: the word abortion.
When a man explicitly shares his experience with abortion and it’s misrepresented as simply a story about a miscarriage, it warps our understanding of who needs abortions and why. When the media shies away from saying the word abortion, we let people who are committed to misunderstanding it, define it for us. I’ve been trying to say the word more instead of sticking to euphemisms like reproductive rights because I don’t want to give into the idea that there is anything wrong with needing the procedure. Abortion is a medical procedure that happens a lot and it’s safer than getting a colonoscopy. When we avoid the word, we justify the shame that silences us in the first place.
But I haven’t only been frustrated by some of the editorial decisions by my colleagues in the media, I’ve also been thrown off by the Democratic response and I’m sure you have too. The fact that President Biden is lethargically considering an executive order about abortion the way most of us ponder getting pancakes for the table, is just one of the painstakingly slow ways progressive public servants have reacted, puzzling many of the people who voted for them.
That’s why this week I decided to bring you a Democratic candidate than doesn’t infuriate me, my pal Suraj Patel. I met him a few years ago at a Data for Progress happy hour in New York City and he just got engaged to one my dear friends. They are the kind of couple that makes any room brighter just by being in it.
Suraj is running for Congress for New York’s 12th District against U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler or U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, two long-standing establishment Democrats in Congress. He describes them both as “career politicians” who need to be replaced with some fresh blood. At the fresh age of 38, he’s far younger than the two Democratic veterans and even better doesn’t take any corporate PAC money. He campaigned with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and came shy four points of replacing U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney in 2020. He’ll be shooting his shot in a few months during the midterms where a reshuffled New York map might help him stand out. I hope our conversation gives you hope
Liz Plank: We’ve paid a lot of attention to gender differences in terms of who tends to support abortion rights but do you think that we’ve underplayed the generational differences?
Suraj: Just like all other groups, young people overwhelmingly support the right to abortion. We know that affordable and accessible reproductive healthcare – including abortion care – is essential to our autonomy, to control the direction of our lives.
But there’s a fundamental break in the way we think about rights compared to the last generation who believe in a negative conception of rights – you have the right not to be interfered with in political speech, you have the right to not have the government interfere in religion, etc. It’s a legal conception of rights.
For us, rights must be actively furnished to mean anything, not just be on a legal document. A right only means something when it’s activated – it’s why we focus on reproductive justice and equity. A right only matters if it is operationalized or else it’s illusory. That’s how I think and that’s why young people also expect their leaders to move the ball forward. They are not content to have leaders rest on their laurels or coast off victories from fifty years ago. They want leaders who will stand up today and defend their rights by passing laws and expanding access and making that access equitable across intersectional lines rather than expecting thanks for work from a prior time.
One more thought – there’s a generational difference showing up in who is to blame for the evisceration of Roe. Older voters seem to exclusively blame Republicans. Younger voters blame Republicans as we should but also the generation of Democrats who have been in power various times since 1973 only to see a steady and systematic assault on reproductive rights and do nothing. This especially accelerated after Casey as the Republican Party literally told us their strategy to pack Federal Courts and attack Roe at the margins and we did NOTHING. Democrats had majorities and the Presidency numerous times since Casey and failed to codify Roe so we can’t act surprised that the other side told us what they were going to do and did it anyway. It’s infuriating.
Liz Plank: Women’s basic fundamental human rights have been under attack for a while but it feels like they’ve never been THIS vulnerable. Who do you think is responsible for the mess we’re in?
Suraj: We’re witnessing a ruthless minority party in America use the counter-majoritarian nature of our government to rule and legislate our lives with some sort of prehistoric religious zeal. If I had to place an order on it, I would say the right-wing Supreme Court and politicians hellbent on controlling women’s bodies bear the most direct responsibility for that harm. Eviscerating decades of precedent is surprising even for them. And with lifelong appointments, we’re going to increasingly see the GOP legislate using court cases that affect our lives across the board.
But we Democrats must also hold a critical mirror up to ourselves. The current generation of Democrats has fallen asleep at the switch and has been outmatched by the right at every turn. They have failed for decades to take meaningful steps to protect and expand abortion access, even though Roe has been under siege by hostile state lawmakers for years. They have failed to take power out of the Supreme Court’s hands by passing legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion, even as the Court became increasingly stacked with conservatives eager to yank that right away.
If it feels like our team is playing with a different playbook than their team, it’s because we are. Think about their tactics and institutional experience: you know, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban passed with both Republican and Democratic support and with less than 60 votes because it was not filibustered. Back then the filibuster was rarely if ever used in a single Congressional term, today it’s reported as the “norm of Senate rules.” Now think about this, the average age of the Dem House Leadership is 70, for the Republicans was it is 56, which means we literally have 1990s Democrats playing with a 1990s playbook against 2022 Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and a cabal that stole two Supreme Court seats, nuked the filibuster for Justices, and the majority of whom tried to overturn the 2020 Election.
We need more than Democrats whose hearts are in the right place or who say the right things about abortion access. We need new activist Democrats playing offense who will step up and take action to make access a reality.
Liz Plank: The Democratic response has been frustrating for a lot of folks who have been supporting progressive candidates who promised to protect reproductive rights. This is your party and you’re running for office to be part of their coalition. What do you make of all the Democrats who are just telling people to vote… but like more?
Suraj: I think it’s beyond infuriating to tell people to vote in November when we all spent every waking minute of the Trump years writing postcards, making calls, organizing, and donating to elect Democrats. We have the Presidency, the House and the Senate so the idea of telling people “oh let’s use this to motivate us in November” to… um what exactly? Win what you have and say you can’t do any more with it?
Yes of course voting does matter. The Supreme Court is downstream of electoral politics: whoever wins the presidency and controls the Senate gets to pick the justices. And the Republican Party is on the brink of overturning Roe because they’ve eked out electoral college victories in close elections – and in our winner-take-all system, they’ve gotten to put their justices on the bench. If more Democrats voted in 2000 and 2016, and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton had won those razor-thin elections instead of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, we wouldn’t be here today: not a single one of the conservative justices (except Clarence Thomas) in the leaked Dobbs majority would have been on the Court.
But it’s not going to matter if we don’t have better more activist Democrats on this issue - we need Democrats who will pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would secure a federal right to abortion regardless of what the Supreme Court thinks. We need Democrats who will pass the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance Act, which would repeal the Hyde Amendment and end the discriminatory treatment of low-income Medicaid patients who are currently forced to pay out of pocket for essential reproductive healthcare. And we need Democrats who will pass the Judiciary Act and other efforts to reform the Supreme Court to restore its legitimacy, including adding new justices in recognition that Mitch McConnell stole a seat from Merrick Garland, and that five sitting justices – a majority of the Court – were appointed by presidents who took office despite losing the popular vote.
And to motivate us, we need the current Democrats in office to step up. We need President Biden to step up to use the Department of Justice to protect women traveling out of state for abortions and to bat down state laws defying FDA regulations approving people’s access to medication abortion. We will need President Biden to expand access to telemedicine abortion. If the Court overrules Roe, he should immediately declare a public health emergency and issue an executive order suspending rules that prevent doctors from freely prescribing medication abortion to women across state lines.
Lastly, we need Democrats to look ahead. If Roe goes, so does potentially every other right that hinges on privacy. They keep telling us there are not 60 votes to codify Roe, but there might be 60 to codify Griswold (contraception), to codify Obergefell (gay marriage), to codify Loving (interracial marriage). Codify them NOW or else put Susan Collins or Ted Cruz on the record as opposing a national statutory right to marry a person who is not your race. That’s what I mean by playing offense, seeing past the horizon.
Liz Plank: People often say that Republicans are playing three-dimensional chess but they’re actually just flipping the board, throwing it on the ground and the pieces in their opponent’s face and making up new rules. Should the Democrats play by the old rules of should they play dirty too?
Suraj: I would not say dirty but I would say I’m sick and tired of playing defense. We literally have all 3 law making bodies of the government! Use them! The GOP is using the judiciary to legislate away fundamental rights. We have the legislature, it’s time we use the legislature to codify these rights. Once again we have 1990s Democrats playing by 1990s rules while Republicans are playing a new 2022 game. We haven’t adapted and they’ve accelerated. And even where it seems Democrats are right on the issues based on polling, we keep losing the battle on values. That’s the point of forcing a vote on Loving or Griswold or Obergerfell. It’s to get law passed and be on the right side of values nearly all Americans hold dear like the freedom to marry.
Liz Plank: There are a lot of pro-choice men but we don’t often hear from them. What would you like to see men do in this moment?
Suraj: You often hear about how abortion has a lot of “single-issue voters” who vote exclusively on the issue and it’s often associated with single issue women. We need pro-choice men to be single issue voters and start acting like it. We men need to recognize the stake we have in this issue and be vocal about it. I for one, have funded an abortion for a high school friend whose parents refused to help and essentially disowned her and she asked me for help. I know I could have been in that situation many times in my life because this isn’t only on women. I think men could be more vocal in telling their own abortion stories. I’ve purchased Plan B and I’ve seen how the pharmacist can look at you, I don’t know why it isn’t over the counter when I can buy contraception without an extra phase of judgment. Well I know why - because men in office still like to exercise paternalistic control over all of our bodies, women’s and men’s. Many men have supported their partners through decisions about whether to continue an unexpected pregnancy. Others have gone through the devastating experience of having to terminate a pregnancy for health reasons. We should speak up about what abortion access has meant for their lives too.
A woman’s right to choose doesn’t disempower men’s freedom, it liberates us. Just like liberating us from the outdated concept that men have to be the primary earner in a family and women are meant to take primary care of the home even when both partners work. That’s outdated, and frankly it’s less freeing than equality in those assumptions. Men have to listen and be part of this fight because an attack on the bodily autonomy of women does not just affect women, it affects our assumptions about gender roles, family planning, and freedom to live as we want as men too.
Liz Plank: Because the consequences are so great for women, I think a lot of men don’t understand how Roe being overturned will affect them. How will this monumental decision also chip away at men’s freedoms and liberties?
Suraj: Roe is not a standalone right. It is a basic American principle embedded in our Constitution that there are core personal areas of our lives that ought to be free from government intrusion. By revoking the right to abortion, the Supreme Court is affecting all of us – men included – by shrinking our liberty, and by greenlighting government to intervene into personal choices around our autonomy and our lives.
As I mentioned above, Roe is particularly interwoven with other constitutional liberties, like the right to use contraception (recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut), and the right to marry anyone regardless of their sex (recognized in Obergefell v. Hodges) or race (recognized in Loving v. Virginia). The Court cannot just pull out one thread: those other rights could be next to fall if the Court reverses Roe.
Congress should have codified Roe years ago to insulate the right to abortion from Supreme politics. It should still do so. But we need Democratic leaders looking ahead to what’s coming next. We need to codify Obergefell, Griswold, and Loving to protect our ability to use contraception and marry who we want. And we need to do the same for any other right that might be at risk under this radical Supreme Court.
Congress can protect these core personal rights – to abortion, to contraception, to marriage – and protect its work from the hostile Supreme Court. Congress has the power to limit the Court’s jurisdiction to hear certain classes of cases; to impose supermajority rules that would require the votes of at least seven justices to strike down federal laws; and to give Congress itself the power to override a Supreme Court decision striking down a federal law.
Liz Plank: What’s the last thing that gave you hope?
Suraj: Wow, as I typed this all out, I was losing it, truly was at a loss of words when I came to this final question given how the above went. But I think about how we’re always just one small adjustment away from making it work. Back in 2008 if you can imagine, we had a Democratic Senator from Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Alaska, Indiana – literally places right now that we think are so gone from the fold, that there’s no possible way we could get there again. But the difference was subtle, my first boss Barack Obama use to talk about politics as the art of persuasion. It means not belittling or condescending or even blaming the people who disagree with you, no one on Earth has ever been persuaded like that. It also means not finding someone irredeemable on everything because you disagree with them on one thing. I am hopeful because I know that a subtle change, employed by many people can change the world much more so than a major change by one person. If we get back to persuading again, we can get to that place where this isn’t so rife, so caustic and we can get these rights back. It gives me hope because I’ve seen it done and I’m hopeful we’re on the precipe of doing it again.