• Home
  • Opinion
  • Quizzes
  • Redistricting
  • Sections
  • About Us
  • Voting
  • Independent Voter News
  • Campaign Finance
  • Civic Ed
  • Directory
  • Election Dissection
  • Events
  • Fact Check
  • Glossary
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. abortion>

How the anti-abortion movement shaped campaign finance law and paved the way for Trump

Amanda Becker, The 19th
June 24, 2022
abortion law historian Mary Ziegler

Abortion law historian Mary Ziegler

Mary Ziegler

Originally published by The 19th.

Donald Trump’s political ascent was initially greeted warily by both the Republican establishment and the anti-abortion groups in the party’s base. But in her latest book published this week, abortion law historian Mary Ziegler argues that Trump was able to reach the White House because of, not in spite of, the grassroots anti-abortion movement.

In “Dollars for Life,” Ziegler, who recently joined the law school faculty at the University of California, Davis, traces how some prominent leaders in the anti-abortion movement were also instrumental in the push to relax campaign finance laws. One result was the rise of populism within the Republican Party that opened the door for candidates like Trump.

The 19th spoke to Ziegler ahead of the book’s release about the anti-abortion movement, campaign finance rules, and how the two intersected to create an opportunity for a non-establishment GOP figurehead.


This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Amanda Becker: This is the first time I’ve really seen this topic explored: campaign finance and links to abortion politics. How did you know this was your next book? Why was this an important story to tell at this moment?

Mary Ziegler: I just started to see anti-abortion groups in all these places having nothing to do with abortion — like campaign finance, like voting restrictions — and I wanted to know what was going on. That made me curious.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Why I wanted to write this was twofold: I began to think the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe, so I saw this as partially a book about how that happened. And relatedly, I think that how that happened is not just a story about abortion, or about women’s rights. During this research, I saw that the effort to overturn Roe had changed the way a lot of our political system had worked, and contributed to really significant changes in the function of our system.

More abortion coverage from The 19th

  • What abortion looks like in every state — right now
  • Medication abortion and clinics on federal land: Here are Democrats’ ideas to protect abortion access
  • In 2020, 1 in 5 pregnancies ended in abortion — the first increase in 30 years

Do you now see the movement to end abortion and the movement to gut campaign finance regulations as parallel movements, intertwined movements, or kind of one and the same?

They’re definitely not one and the same — there are people in the movement to undo campaign finance restrictions who were pro-choice. For example, the ACLU has historically been opposed to campaign finance restrictions and supportive of abortion access. There are organizations on the right that are more libertarian that are maybe not supportive of abortion rights but certainly don’t prioritize abortion rights in the kind of litigation they do. And there are folks in the anti-abortion movement who don’t support or really care about restrictions on campaign finance. So they are more movements that have intersected in particularly consequential ways. They’re not the same movement.

But I think there’s a story about how social conservatives made a major contribution to the fight against campaign finance reform that we often don’t think about. And it’s somewhat counterintuitive, right? Often when we think about the fight against campaign finance reform, we think about the people with the most money, the people who stand to gain the most. There’s an important piece of the story about conservatives trying to fight campaign finance limits for other reasons.

I think the conventional wisdom is that unlimited money in politics hurts the little person. One of the points you make in the book is that relaxation of campaign finance restrictions allowed the grassroots conservative movement to gain more power than the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Did you see that trend on both sides of the aisle? In a way did the relaxation of campaign finance laws make it a more democratic process to influence the Republican Party?

The relaxation of campaign finance laws has had a pretty complicated effect on democracy. On the one hand, more people are donating so the number of people who participate in elections by donating to candidates or campaigns or PACs has gone up over time, and that’s true of progressives as well as conservatives. I think the complicated part has been that on the right, there’s been a kind of perfect storm of factors that have empowered populists … and that’s made it such that you have candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Trump, who the establishment would probably view as unelectable, in part because they’re not committed to democratic principles. So the story isn’t that it’s been good or bad for democracy – it’s been both.

James Bopp, a conservative attorney who has advised the National Right to Life Committee since the 1970s, among other organizations, is a character who surfaces again and again in your book. Is there a way to assess the impact he’s had on the anti-abortion and anti-campaign finance regulation movements? If he wasn’t working on these two things, would the world look a lot different?

He’s obviously kind of the hero, or antihero, of the book. If we’re trying to understand the motives of people who felt this way, it was the easiest for me to understand him. I had the most insight into what he was doing. It wasn’t always true that the strategies he developed or the arguments he made worked; quite often they didn’t. But he was able, along with his colleagues at the National Right to Life Committee, to see opportunities that others weren’t yet recognizing. So it’s hard to say. This isn’t a narrative about one person who changed the world or even one organization. But I think that if you’re trying to understand how social conservatives come on board, the National Right to Life Committee is pretty central to that story. And Bopp was the leader of that effort within the National Right to Life Committee.

Bopp was also an attorney in Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that upended campaign finance rules. He is kind of everywhere on conservative causes here in Washington. What other things and causes has Bopp been involved in over the years that people might recognize or remember?

He was involved with True The Vote and some of the litigation in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. He’s been involved in representing folks like Madison Cawthorn [a Republican House lawmaker from North Carolina] and Marjorie Taylor Greene [a Republican House lawmaker from Georgia] against charges that they were involved in the insurrection. He’s been kind of a steady figure in the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party, writ large. He’s helped represent organizations opposed to marriage equality and same-sex marriage.

You explain several shifts in anti-abortion electoral strategy in the book. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, you said they tried to “pick winners” among the presidential contenders. Trump was initially embraced by neither his party nor the anti-abortion movement but went on to cement an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court and take a number of other steps the movement lauded. What changed?

They were primarily focused on candidates who could win, much as the GOP establishment was, and only later, I think, began to see the promise of populist movements. I think there was a feeling, eventually, that the various things that made Trump unappealing could be assets in the sense that there was a hope among folks in the anti-abortion movement, and I think to some extent other conservative grassroots movements, that if Trump did not have allies in Washington, D.C., and did not have a lot of support among voters, and didn’t have a lot of the kind of advantages that establishment politicians had because his approval ratings were always low, that it might make him even more beholden to conservative movements. Part of what Bopp and his allies wanted was a Republican Party that would answer to them rather than the kind of model they thought had been in place before, which was essentially powerful candidates dictating to movements. Trump was more willing to cater to the anti-abortion movement than arguably any Republican president before him.

From Your Site Articles
  • What would it mean to codify Roe into law? - The Fulcrum ›
  • What is a trigger law? - The Fulcrum ›
  • What reversing Roe v. wade would mean for the rule of law - The ... ›
  • Texas' abortion ban could drive voter turnout in midterms - The ... ›
  • Supreme Court may take rare step of reversing itself - The Fulcrum ›
Related Articles Around the Web
  • Texas' largest anti-abortion group spent millions on public ... ›
  • Most Americans want to limit campaign spending | Pew Research ... ›
  • Follow the Money Behind Anti-Abortion Laws | Brennan Center for ... ›
  • How anti-abortion activism's opposition to campaign finance laws ... ›
abortion

Join an Upcoming Event

Relationships First Conversation

Living Room Conversations
Sep 28, 2023 at 9:00 am MDT
Read More

Post Covid: The Unequal State of Health in America

USC Center for the Political Future
Oct 04, 2023 at 4:00 pm UTC-7
Read More
View All Events

Want to write
for The Fulcrum?

If you have something to say about ways to protect or repair our American democracy, we want to hear from you.

Submit
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Confirm that you are not a bot.
×
Follow

Support Democracy Journalism; Join The Fulcrum

The Fulcrum daily platform is where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives. Now more than ever our democracy needs a trustworthy outlet

Contribute
Contributors

To advance racial equity, policy makers must move away from the "Black and Brown" discourse

Julio A. Alicea

Policymakers must address worsening civil unrest post Roe

Sarah K. Burke

Video: How to salvage U.S. democracy from the "tyranny of the minority"

Our Staff

What "Progress" should look like, and what we get wrong

Damien De Pyle

The long kiss goodnight: Nancy Pelosi and the protracted decay of public office

Kevin Frazier

Demanding corporate responsibility for food system challenges

C.Anne Long
latest News

Ask Joe: Warring with AI is warring with ourselves

Joe Weston
22 September

Prioritizing the grand challenges

Leland R. Beaumont
22 September

Podcast: All politics is local

Our Staff
22 September

The show must go on

Amy Lockard
21 September

Constitution Day conversation with Jamie Raskin: Preserving democracy today and tomorrow

Rick LaRue
Jamie Raskin
21 September

Meet the Faces of Democracy: Stephen Richer

Michael Beckel
Ariana Rojas
20 September
Videos
Video: Expert baffled by Trump contradicting legal team

Video: Expert baffled by Trump contradicting legal team

Our Staff
Video: Do white leaders hinder black aspirations?

Video: Do white leaders hinder black aspirations?

Our Staff
Video: How to prepare for student loan repayments returning

Video: How to prepare for student loan repayments returning

Our Staff
Video: The history of Labor Day

Video: The history of Labor Day

Our Staff
Video: Trump allies begin to flip as prosecutions move forward

Video: Trump allies begin to flip as prosecutions move forward

Our Staff
Video Rewind: Trans-partisan practices and the "superpower of respect"

Video Rewind: Trans-partisan practices and the "superpower of respect"

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: All politics is local

Our Staff
22 September

Podcast: How states hold fair elections

Our Staff
14 September

Podcast: The MAGA Bubble, Bidenonmics and Playing the Victim

Debilyn Molineaux
David Riordan
12 September

Podcast: Defending the founding principles of our government

Our Staff
07 September
Recommended
Ask Joe: Warring with AI is warring with ourselves

Ask Joe: Warring with AI is warring with ourselves

Pop Culture
Prioritizing the grand challenges

Prioritizing the grand challenges

Big Picture
Podcast: All politics is local

Podcast: All politics is local

Big Picture
The show must go on

The show must go on

Big Picture
To advance racial equity, policy makers must move away from the "Black and Brown" discourse

To advance racial equity, policy makers must move away from the "Black and Brown" discourse

Big Picture
Constitution Day conversation with Jamie Raskin: Preserving democracy today and tomorrow

Constitution Day conversation with Jamie Raskin: Preserving democracy today and tomorrow

Big Picture