Trump's AG pick is letting a a 111-year-old corpse dictate your rights

Todd Blanche Isn’t Selling Law. He’s Selling Coercion.The Point Is EnforcementTodd Blanche is not floating a legal theory in the abstract. He is signaling to anti-abortion extremists that the federal government can be turned into a weapon again. His promise that “victory will be soon” is not rhetoric for the cheap seats. It is a pledge to use state power to choke off abortion access through the Comstock Act, starting with the mail, then moving outward until the procedure becomes functionally impossible.That is the real story here: not a debate over doctrine, but a search for the most efficient choke point in the federal apparatus.Dormant Law, Revived As a ClubThe Comstock Act is being presented as an old statute waiting patiently to be rediscovered. That framing is dishonest. For decades, lawmakers and courts treated the abortion language as dead letter in practice, even while the text sat there like a loaded weapon on the shelf. Republicans now want to pretend that history never happened, because pretending allows them to launder a radical project as “enforcement.”That is the misdirection. This is not about neutral administration. It is about reviving a punitive Victorian obscenity law to police pregnancy, contraception, and bodily autonomy in the 21st century.The Court Has Been WinkingThe article’s most important warning is that this is not merely a Blanche problem. It is a pipeline. Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the anti-abortion legal faction around them have already been testing the Comstock language in plain view. The legal movement knows exactly what it is doing: building a future case in which the Court can bless an executive branch crackdown while pretending the result was compelled by text.That is how authoritarianism likes to move now. It rarely announces itself as conquest. It arrives as “serious legal analysis,” backed by justices who know their citations will do the political violence for them.Congress Is Not Watching From the SidelinesThe Republican senators pressuring CVS are not confused about the statute. They are trying to erase the settled understanding that kept the law from being used as a national ban. Their letter is not a request for clarification; it is a threat. They are telling pharmacies that the federal government should be treated as if it already has the authority to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication.And once that logic is accepted, the target list expands exactly as the source notes: abortion drugs, then surgical equipment, then birth control, then anything else the same reactionary machinery decides is morally intolerable.What This Story Is Really AboutThe connective tissue here is institutional cowardice dressed up as legal seriousness. Blanche is telling activists what they want to hear. Senators are writing intimidation letters. Judges are breathing life into antique bans. Supreme Court conservatives are preparing the jurisprudential runway. Each actor plays a different role, but the destination is the same: state power retooled for forced reproduction.That is the larger pattern. Reactionary politics does not always win by persuading the public. It wins by capturing the institutions that can overrule the public, then calling the result “law.” Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe