This will be the abortion election, and Republicans are bracing for voter retribution

It didn’t take long for the panic to set in among Republicans after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Tuesday morning to ban virtually every abortion in the Grand Canyon State.

Suddenly, some of those who proudly declared their anti-abortion bonafides when it was purely theoretical were staring down a reality that wasn’t so clear cut — and is politically disastrous.

Within an hour, one of the top Republicans in the state Senate was publicly saying the court got it wrong and lawmakers needed to work quickly to repeal the Civil War-era ban that the justices said is now the law of the land.

Minutes later, another GOP lawmaker — this one in a hotly contested swing district — declared that the decision “cannot stand” and that legislators “should be looking for ways to empower these women – not take them back in time.”

Then there was the Republican legislator whose husband is a Supreme Court justice who voted to uphold the 1864 abortion ban. Less than three hours after the ruling, this pro-life lawmaker who cheered on the U.S. Supreme Court stripping abortion rights away from American women after nearly 50 years (and urged the court to do so) said that Arizona should swiftly repeal the territorial ban and allow abortion up to 15 weeks.

Suddenly, these supposedly anti-abortion Republicans see value in “modernizing” Arizona’s abortion laws. What they really mean is that they clearly see just how politically disastrous the state Supreme Court’s ruling is.