Did Lisa McCormick push Murphy administration into action?

Lisa McCormick was disqualified from appearingon the 2021 Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot, winning nearly 40 percentagainst an incumbent US Senator in 2018 has not earned her candidacy even an acknowledgement from the political establishment and Politico reporter Matt Friedman recently called her, "the new Kanye West."

Still, only days after McCormick called for serious action to win approval of a law designed to protect abortion rights from the new conservative majority that Donald Trump installed on the US Supreme Court, the multimillionaire in the Governor's Office was at least trying to stop looking as if he were dithering on the measure.

"I strongly support the Reproductive Freedom Act, but Democratic lawmakers have not moved it because they prefer having a political issue to solving a problem for women," said McCormick in a tweet posted at 1:07 PM on April 23, 2021. "People must rise up to the responsibility of citizenship by demanding results & replacing politicians."

By April 28 2021 at 3:05 pm, a story was posted on David Wildstein's blog asserting that Murphy's "administration is working to advance a bill codifying abortion protections in the face of a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that stalled after President Joe Biden entered the White House."

Wildstein was the Republican political operative who engineered the George Washington Bridge closure to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse Governor Chris Christie's re-election in 2013.

The GOP dirty trickster is also the founder of two New Jersey political news websites, one that was bought by Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, and the other which often toes a party line to badger or discredit independent voices, like that of McCormick.

While she is an open book, who simply believes in progressive policy and opposes legal forms of bribery and chicanery designed to empower a political establishment that already puts challengers at a great disadvantage, Wildstein has referred to McCormick dozens of times as a "shadowy perennial candidate."

"America’s political history is abounding with models of perseverance, Abraham Lincoln considered the benchmark of stick-to-itiveness," said McCormick, who denied that she had a meaningful impact on the discussion but within hours of her tweet, the Governor's Office reacted-- a result a number of previous efforts to spur action failed to achieve.

A poll conducted during March by Change Research showed strong support for the Reproductive Freedom Act, as well as abortion rights and expanded access to abortion in general, among voters in New Jersey.

Championed by the Thrive NJ coalition, and other progressive groups, the Reproductive Freedom Act would greatly expand access to reproductive health care by removing financial barriers for access to birth control, abortion, and pregnancy care.

Thrive NJ is a statewide coalition of organizations working collectively to promote sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice through policy change and advocacy.

The Reproductive Freedom Act would also remove medically unnecessary regulations that cause barriers to care and declare that all New Jerseyans have a fundamental right to reproductive health care, including abortion.

“Currently, there are 19 cases that could overturn or severely limit the right to an abortion that are before or one-step away from the Supreme Court," said Alejandra Sorto, a strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. "Just in the last decade, there have been over 480 medically-unnecessary and politically-motivated restrictions on abortion that have been enacted. The moment for New Jersey to protect this fundamental right in statute is now."

“We call for the RFA to be debated and then passed into law swiftly in New Jersey, ensuring that the fundamental right to decide for oneself and one’s family the most intimate and delicate decisions about health, dignity and one’s own body remain the prerogative of each New Jerseyan–not shackled by a philosophy foreign to one’s own conscience,” said Rev. Rob Gregson, executive director of the Unitarian Universalist FaithAction NJ.

“Issues of economic justice, the environment, immigrants’ rights, disability rights, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and a host of other community-centered concerns cannot be separated from an individual’s health care decision-making process,” said National Organization for Women of New Jersey President Anjali Mehrotra.

Still, no matter how important the issue appears to be, New Jersey's Democratic leadership ignored this legislation for more than a year and the measure languished in committee for more than six months without a hearing.

Then a few days after McCormick said Democratic lawmakers would prefer having a political issue to use against Republicans over solving a problem for women, the lethargic machinery of government started to churn.

It is very likely that the governor's political advisers sought to blunt such assertions as "Phil Murphy hired a rapist" and this was the best they cold do, but it is a point for McCormick from a political establishment that rarely responds to anything except expediency.

https://twitter.com/LisaMcCorm...

Although she has been denied a spot on the ballot, McCormick is asking voters to write in her name in the June 8 Democratic primary for governor.