“We realized,” Cullman said, “that we really didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.” The eventual nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is a devout Catholic as a professor at Notre Dame Law School, she was a member of University Faculty for Life, and she once signed her name to an ad calling Roe v. had run ads in Iowa and New Hampshire that called out Romney for his “flip-flops” on reproductive rights. And, back in 2007, ahead of the Presidential primaries, the R.M.C. But none of the women had any current connections to Portman or Capito. (Murkowski reversed her position on October 24th.) The group tried to think of other, relatively moderate Republicans who might be swayed to delay confirmation: Rob Portman, of Ohio Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia Mitt Romney, of Utah. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, the last two pro-choice Republicans remaining in the Senate, confirmed that weekend that they would not support a vote on a Supreme Court nominee before the election. The group would need to convince a handful of Republican senators to delay a vote on Ginsburg’s replacement. The e-mail thread began in despair and moved to possible action. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal feminist icon, would give President Trump his third Supreme Court appointment, cementing the rightward turn of the court for a generation or more, and placing the future of Roe v. leadership that the Party’s increasingly narrow outlook on abortion, as reflected in its platform, candidates, and judges, did not reflect the views of a majority of Republican voters. These women had spent decades arguing to G.O.P. She left the dinner table, turned on MSNBC, and started e-mailing her “old gang” from the R.M.C. ![]() “I felt horror in my bones, just horror,” Cullman said. She had just sat down to dinner with her stepson and his wife in her home in Stamford, Connecticut, when her stepson’s phone dinged. It was these women, all of them white and well-connected, to whom Cullman turned on the evening of Friday, September 18th. The group, renamed the Republican Majority for Choice (R.M.C.) in the early two-thousands, shut down operations two years ago, but many former R.M.C. “So I was going to fight them, and I wanted to fight them on the inside.” “I discovered that I joined an Administration that was starting to reduce women’s ability to manage their own life,” Cullman said. In 1991, Cullman, by then divorced from Kudlow (who is now director of the National Economic Council), joined a nascent advocacy organization and political-action committee founded by Mary Dent Crisp, the former co-chair of the R.N.C., called the National Republican Coalition for Choice. “And he would say, ‘Well, don’t tell anybody.’ ” (A spokesperson for Kudlow denied that these exchanges ever took place.) “I would say, ‘Larry, I just got a thing in the mail from Planned Parenthood-I think I’m going to send some money,’ ” Cullman recalled. ![]() Reagan and Bush had both turned against abortion rights, and the 1980 Republican Party platform supported a constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe v. had become less hospitable to pro-choice views. By that time, after a decade of courting Catholic voters and amid new efforts to sway evangelical Christians, the G.O.P. ![]() In 1981, Cullman moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., as a consummate Republican insider: her former husband, Larry Kudlow, advised President Ronald Reagan on economic policy, and Cullman joined the President’s task force on private-sector initiatives. “The government isn’t supposed to enter your home, never mind your body.” “The conservative view at the time when Goldwater was around was that you don’t want the government in your life,” Cullman said. ![]() Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for President in 1964, was himself pro-choice, and his wife, Peggy, had helped to found an Arizona chapter of Planned Parenthood. Susan Cullman, a cigar heiress, philanthropist, and pro-choice activist, joined the Republican Party in the nineteen-seventies, when support for abortion rights was widely seen as consistent with conservative ideology.
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