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Huckabee Stars In Film Endorsing Gingrich’s Authoritarian Court Defiance Plan

In October, GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich announced that, if elected president, he would openly defy Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with. Now, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) has teamed up with the Constitution-destroying group Citizens United to narrate a film promoting this lawless tactic as a means to impose anti-choice “personhood” laws upon the entire nation:

Citizens United, the conservative advocacy group whose 2008 anti-Hillary Clinton film led to the 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns on First Amendment grounds, is now promoting fetal personhood laws through a new film narrated by Mike Huckabee. . . .

The [film] also promotes the strategy of pursuing federal legislation that would enshrine civil rights for fetuses on the grounds that their equal protection rights are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This argument, recently endorsed by Newt Gingrich, was injected into the campaign by Princeton professor and conservative Catholic activist Robert George during a candidate forum in South Carolina in September. By arguing that fetuses are people, and therefore entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, they hope to bypass the more onerous process of amending the Constitution with a long-sought human life amendment.

Gingrich, Huckabee and others can argue that the Fourteenth Amendment says whatever they want, but nothing they say will change the fact that Congress simply does not have the power to defy a Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution — and the Supreme Court is crystal clear that abortion and contraception bans are illegal.

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Nevertheless, the fact that a former governor and top contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 is participating in this film is disturbing because it shows that two deeply radical ideas are now being mainstreamed within the Republican Party. The first is Gingrich’s deeply authoritarian belief that the Supreme Court can simply be ignored, the other is the personhood proposal itself — which threatens many forms of birth control along with all forms of abortion.