Horowitz: Most important outcome of Dobbs decision? Making state legislatures great again

It’s the body of government closest to the people, yet it’s the most forgotten, overshadowed, and weakened body in recent years. However, with the Dobbs opinion returning the power to regulate abortions to state legislatures, we now have the opportunity to focus our attention on legislative elections, sessions, and policies and settle our acerbic cultural and legal differences in the most prudent and democratic process.

We are an irrevocably divided nation, and it will only get worse over time. We can’t agree on the definition of a marriage, a woman, a citizen, a criminal, a fundamental right, or the purpose of our existence, much less the purpose of our government. We can either continue forging ahead with a winner-take-all approach to politics and have the federal executive bureaucracy – the least accountable and transparent branch of government and most distant from the people – decide every important political question. Or we settle those debates in state legislatures – the branch closest to the people where most members are elected every two years.

Whether you abhor abortion as murder or think it’s the greatest sacrament of virtue, the reality is that red states are going to ban abortions (many already have) and the blue states are going to obsessively expand access to them. Unlike the seven justices who initially banned all regulation of abortion in 1973, all those legislators in each state will be subject to removal every two or four years. For the most part, the legislators will vote in a way that reflects the values of the majority in their areas. This is the self-sorting process we’ve always needed. This dynamic needs to expand to every other important issue of our time. It’s not a perfect process, but it’s much better than where we are today, and it will allow us to live side by side harmoniously in a de facto amicable separation, albeit with shared custody over certain issues that are national in scope.