Moving to the correct thread:
Disingenuous bullshit from the first paragraph:
"A proper application of stare decisis, however, requires an assessment of the strength of the grounds on which Roe was based."
So respect for precedent requires overruling precedent if you disagree with the ruling.
Holy shit- it was a crime if you tried to provide an abortion and killed the mother, therefore abortion was historically well established as a crime?
"Moreover, many authorities asserted that even a pre-quickening abortion was "unlawful" and that, as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from the attempt."
The dissent calls out the bullshit "really trust us only Roe is gone, Griswold Lawrence and Obergefell are fine" claim pretty cleanly, basically calling Alito a lying hack.
And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitu- tional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that noth- ing it does "cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion." Ante, at 66; cf. ante, at 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not "deeply rooted in history": Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution's guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, "there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives]." Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the major- ity does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid- 19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.
Thomas, at least, is honest and says yeah he'd overturn all of those too.
I don't know what is going to happen to this country. With the Supreme Court having abandoned any faint remaining vestige of rationalitity or legitimacy, the country just seems ungovernable.
If California started taking guns and ignoring court orders, what would red states do that would be worse? Just trying to game out defiance.
Not ungovernable for long. Hordes of young people will decline to participate in the midterms, and the Republicans will gain control of both houses of Congress, and many state legislatures. Then Congress will make sure that either Trump or DeSantis wins the presidency, and they'll get a new constitution through. And then, at long last, the trains will be made to run on time.
Uggh, this is awful.
6/7 I do think, in the short term, it's worth trying to mobilize public opinion, and campaign on abortion access -- it's frustrating to have to fight, again, for something so basic, but it's important to demonstrate and motivate public support.
In the longer term . . . I really don't know. It feels like reactionary forces are going to be powerful for a long time, and I really haven't come to terms with that or figured out what to do.
8: technically I don't think they'll bother to pass a new constitution.
It's a peripheral issue, but I'm a bit curious to see a serious analysis of what, if anything changed from the prior draft.
It's interesting to see Roberts fall into line. He is, at least to some extent, an institutionalist, and his assessment of which way the wind is blowing in his institution is particularly disheartening.
I thought he didn't concur. He wanted to do the same thing some other way, but he didn't vote yes in this case.
12: Just checked this. Roberts concurred.
Oh, I see. I saw something saying 5 to 3 to 1, but that was misleading.
9 People in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have to vote, and vote for Democratic candidates. People in other places have to encourage them to do so, in word and deed.
I suppose the equivalent of my 7 for abortion in terms of open defiance might be the executive using the federal purse to keep them performed (require hospitals to do them to participate in Medicare, require states to cover them to participate in Medicaid); the Court would certainly strike down, but they could ignore it.
13: I therefore concur only in the judgment.
He's trying to thread a needle, while Alito has already completed a tight noose.
13, 12 -- Concurred in the judgment. Which is different. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been able to get Kav for this, but he apparently couldn't.
13, 12 -- Concurred in the judgment. Which is different. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been able to get Kav for this, but he apparently couldn't.
Minivet, I don't think open defiance is either viable or in the cards. Dropping FDA rules that unduly burden medical abortions, as Katherine suggests on twitter, is a step that would help.
At long last the right wing has paid its bills to a couple sets of its most energetic supporters: now they can turn to servicing the younger, more candidly violent and depraved demographics by selling them more bounty opportunities and other vigilante permits.
I wonder when the first revanchist mass shooting at a prominent blue city private school will be encouraged and abetted by right wing media.
National Right to Life's proposed model abortion law-- the grim details start on page 5:
https://www.nrlc.org/wp-content/uploads/NRLC-Post-Roe-Model-Abortion-Law-FINAL-1.pdf
President Biden to speak at 12:30 Eastern time.
I think there is a very high likelihood that in the next few years the GOP gets enough state houses to pass some constitutional amendments
With six justices, they don't need a constitutional amendment. If equal protection covers a zygote from the moment of conception, and why shouldn't it if there's no precedent and no rules, then any failure to prosecute abortion as murder is an equal protection violation.
Repealing the civil war amendments or banning gay marriage or whatever would be a big symbolic 'pwn the libs' though.
No need to repeal the Civil War amendments when you can just ignore them. Shelby County??!!
Well I'm in DC for the ALA and seriously thinking of heading down to the SC
A shoutout here to Clarence Thomas, who manages to question the substantive due process rights in Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergfell, but fails to notice that the same rights are implicated in Loving.
Maybe he noticed? Have you seen what his wife is up to?
For anyone in NYC, there's a rally in Washington Square Park at 6:30. I will be there feeling depressed and ineffective.
Without claiming that this is the most virtuous thing I can do, I'm just going to expand on my scattered critique of Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservatism as a thought-terminating cliché:
It's pithy, right? Damn, is it pithy. Who among us has not struggled to pin down exactly that thing about conservatism, that hypocrisy-as-virtue chutzpah, in an expression of frustration with how intractably dishonest it is? But the frustration is not with the lack of a pithy definition. It's frustration at our failure to find the fucking weakness in the conservative movement and crush it, and Wilhoit's formulation is very little use here. Just a few weeks ago, Slate ran an interview with him, in which he says:
The Republican Party flatters itself as a conservative party, and conservatism has long been surrounded by an enormous shimmering halo of pseudo-philosophy.
But as I said a moment ago, we are at this point devolving so rapidly that the appetite and the patience for that kind of pseudo-philosophy, for that kind of propaganda, is waning every day. What remains of the "conservative" strands in the public discourse is a primal scream. Just the other day, for example, people were shaking their head at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, talking about things being grown in "peach tree dishes," which is a mondegreen of a familiar kind, and is rather shocking coming from someone who has any educational attainment beyond kindergarten.
This is a few steps up in Olympian disdain from the diagnosis of four years ago: "Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing . . . . All that is left is the core proposition itself -- backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence." But against violence -- apparently? -- it is "as sufficient as it is necessary" to uphold "the core proposition of anti-conservatism," which is the universally binding rule of law. How the fuck you actually do this is left as an exercise for the reader.
I get it, man, the thing we want is definitely the opposite of what we have now, for sure, but now I have two conceptual problems.* And this is before we even take a closer look at the details of "the law."
* Not literally.
At Union Station at the moment, I think this gathering is heading to the SC soon...
I don't read MY regularly, so maybe this isn't literally the stupidest thing he's every printed.
At the end of the day there was no conservative "long game" on Roe and the Courts, it's just that Anthony Kennedy as one individual human being chose to do a strategically timed retirement and Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not.
37: WOW. So. Amazingly. Stupid. Or just trolling?
@34
"But the frustration is not with the lack of a pithy definition. It's frustration at our failure to find the fucking weakness in the conservative movement and crush it"
I think having no truck with those who think they can win over 'moderate republicans' by adopting some of that conservative rhetoric would be a start.
The voters you actually want are always open to other sorts of arguments.
37: That's quite a thing. I don't read him much, either, but I run across his work occasionally. I'm deciding it's not stupidity, exactly, but laziness. He just got seems to have gotten tired of thinking about stuff.
19: I don't really get Kavanaugh. I thought he would be more like Roberts on something like this -- just sleazier, personally.
Got my picture taken at a rally yesterday: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/6/24/23182072/ny-abortion-seekers-safe-haven
You need to scroll through the pics to find me.
I liked how my improv sign turned out, although my hyphenation instincts seem to be from 1908.
neB used to complain about me over-hyphenating my comments.
That is a nice photo! I am vaguely amused that they felt they needed to clarify that you used office supplies to make the sign.
You have to explain everything for the digital natives.
That was my fault -- she asked about the sign, and I said "Off the record, it's embezzled state office supplies." I guess it amused her enough that she half-quoted me.
Had a tour of the Library of Congress today, after I went to join the protest in front of the SC for a bit.
43, 45, et seq.: I'd always pictured you more, I dunno, drawn by Lynn Johnston or something.
Yeah, the fact that I'm a line-drawing really doesn't come out in photographs.
At some point can we have a Senate Election strategy thread?
Good idea. I'll save it for a weekday soon?
That would be more convincing if you said it twice.
Does anybody have information about which abortion funds are worth supporting?
40, 41: It's like Geppetto took a wooden Slatepitch and turned it into a real boy.
Anyone have informed opinions about the EPA case? I haven't read it but did a quick word search. The dissent cites Chevron 3 times. The majority cites an article about Chevron only.
Does anybody have information about which abortion funds are worth supporting?
I know about the Lilith fund in Texas and the National network in general: https://abortionfunds.org/
Their "Donate" page lists 90 individual organizations:
New Orleans Abortion Fund, Chelsea's Fund, New York Abortion Access Fund, Reproductive Freedom Fund of New Hampshire, Fund Texas Choice, . . . .
37, 38: I dunno. I think contingency breaks a lot of peoples' brains. The second part is basically true--this happened because of two parallel, contingent, decisions by clearly identifiable people with vast agency--but the first part has nothing to do with the second.
Anyone have informed opinions about the EPA case?
This Twitter thread is a good rundown, and is consistent with what I'm seeing from other knowledgeable observers on Twitter. Basically, the case was ridiculous and the reasoning of the opinion is absurd, but the actual holding is pretty narrow and not nearly as bad as people were worried it could be. It doesn't overrule Chevron or directly kill the administrative state, but it does lay the groundwork for potentially doing so in the future.