26 June 2022

And the Supreme Court Makes it Official

Some Selected Takes on the Ruling

By this logic, it would invalidate Loving v. Virginia as well making his marriage illegal in Virginia


This will doubtless be the response of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)


You know that you will see this. They have been using it to fundraise for decades.


Obama also said that the Freedom of Choice Act was not a priority.


Also, Cuellar is opposed to any gun control. Not a good look.


"The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority."
We have the recipts, Mr. Obama.

I've been having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that the Supreme Court just overturned Roe v. Wade.

In fact, I spent most of yesterday staring at the screen, which explains why I did not post this Saturday.

Clearly this decision was intellectually bankrupt, hypocritical, nakedly partisan, and  corrupt, but so was Bush v. Gore, and there was no consequences for that.

Interestingly enough, this is likely not to be the most significant decision of this session.  In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the conservatives on the court ate looking to strip most of the regulatory powers of federal agencies.  

This would have the effect of largely dismantling the the ability of federal regulations to institute regulations that ware not specifically authorized through legislation.

While this might not completely roll back the regulatory role of the federal government to before 1935, it comes pretty close.

The Roe decision is not a surprise.  It was leaked 1½ months ago, and the final version is largely unchanged:

The Supreme Court on Friday eliminated the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, casting aside 49 years of precedent that began with Roe v. Wade.

The decision by Justice Samuel Alito will set off a seismic shift in reproductive rights across the United States. It will allow states to ban abortion, and experts expect about half the states to do so.

In one of the most anticipated rulings in decades, the court overturned Roe, which first declared a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which re-affirmed that right in 1992. The decision followed the leak in early May of a draft opinion showing that a majority of the justices were privately poised to take that step. On Friday, they made it official.

The vote to overturn Roe was 5-4. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito’s opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join the opinion. He agreed with the majority that the Mississippi abortion restriction at issue in the case should be upheld, but in a separate opinion, he argued that the court should not have overturned Roe.

The court’s three liberals — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — filed a joint dissent. They called the majority opinion a violation of women’s autonomy and said it would harm the court’s legitimacy and jeopardize other constitutional rights.

………

The majority contended that Friday’s ruling would not undermine other decisions by the court involving fundamental rights that the Constitution does not expressly mention, such as the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut) and the rights to same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas) and marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). Unlike those rights, Alito wrote, abortion terminates what Roe and Casey refer to as “potential life” and what the Mississippi law refers to as an “unborn human being.” “Nothing in this opinion,” Alito added later, “should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” 

This last bit is crap.  Roe flows from the the right for people not to have the state, or the states, dictate their personal decisions, and this precedent flows from Griswold and Loving v. Virginia, which ruled anti-miscegenation (interracial marriage) laws unconstitutional.

If you pull that string, it all unravels, and saying, as the hacktacular Samuel Alito, "Because Babies," (actually, he says, "Potential Life") it does not apply to other rulings, is dishonest and stupid.

Unsurprisingly, this does not hold up to scrutiny.  At the core of his argument is that since abortion was not considered a fundamental right in 1868, there is no right to abortion.

This argument also invalidates the idea that the 14th amendment protects, contraception, gay marriage, and interracial marriage.

In a separate concurrence, Clarence Thomas gets this right: (I cannot believe that I just wrote that)

………

But a concurring opinion by Thomas indicated that, at least for him, decisions like Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell are very much in doubt. Thomas reiterated his view that the Constitution’s due process clause only protects process – the right to have the government follow proper procedures before taking away someone’s life, liberty, or property. The due process clause, Thomas wrote, does not protect any substantive rights. Because the Alito opinion concluded that there is no right to an abortion even under the Supreme Court’s substantive due process cases, Thomas explained, he joined the court’s opinion. But in a future case, he urged, the court should “reject substantive due process entirely” and reconsider cases like Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

And, as I had noted, Loving v. Virginia. 

Even if this opinion is not applied to LGBTQ rights or contraception, and it will be, it creates a mess, where in vitro fertilization will be criminalized, as will pregnancy, with criminal investigations of miscarriages becoming common in many parts of the nation.

This is a disaster, promulgated by a deeply evil and deeply corrupt group of people, and it is going to get much worse before it gets better.

Posted by Matthew Saroff at 7:01 PM
Labels: , , , ,

0 comments :

Post a Comment