Oh Mitt. We all know how utterly unprincipled you are, how you'll say absolutely anything if you think it might help you to secure the Republican nomination, even if it's the exact opposite of what you've said before. And it's not as if you haven't spent the past several years trying to pretend that you never gave full-throated support to protecting women's reproductive rights.
So the endorsement-fishing expedition with Mike Huckabee this weekend is really just more of the same:
HUCKABEE: Would you have supported a constitutional amendment that would have established the definition of life at conception?
ROMNEY: Absolutely.
Wanting an amendment to the state's Constitution to ban women's reproductive rights is a pretty far cry from the Mitt Romney of 1994:
"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. [...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it and I sustain and support that law and the right of the woman to make that choice. [...] And you will not see me wavering on that."
Of course, there's no way that 1994 Pro-choice Romney could have known just how much he'd need to "waver" on women's rights in order to have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the uber-crazy vote known as his party's base. And as Jed Lewison pointed out last week, Romney has a perfectly valid reason for completely reversing himself on his supposed principled positions:
"In the private sector," he said, "if you don't change your view when the facts change, well you'll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, 'When the facts change I change too, Madam." What do you do?"
It's hard to argue with that kind of infallible logic. Oh, except for the part where that wasn't Winston Churchill; that was John Maynard Keynes.
But other than that, it's perfectly obvious that Romney has simply changed his position based on the facts. See, in 1994, Romney supported women's reproductive rights because Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for 20 years. But, see, that's no longer true. Now that Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land for 30 years, that fact has changed. His whole reason for supporting women's rights in the first place is invalid. And what kind of principled leader would Romney be if he continued to support women's rights on the faulty basis that Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land for 20 years when that quite obviously is no longer true?
Would Churchill Keynes continue to support a principled position based on 20 years of precedent even when that precedent extended beyond 20 years? Of course not! And neither will Mitt Romney. Because he's unwavering that way.