[Politico] Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

A couple of these don't really fit. Facebook memes can only hurt your argument.

Clayton Williams (1990) - Said that and lost to Ann Richards because of it--after polling a huge lead. Didn't hold office.
Todd Akin (2012) - Badly lost the election for which he was campaigning when he said this. Offered regrets and apologies.
Rick Santorum (2012) - Trash bag human. Hasn't held office since 2007.
Richard Mourdock (2012) - Treasurer. Left office the day before state employees' pensions cut. Trash.
Jdie Laubenberg (2013) - Still in office. Trash.
Lawrence Lockman (1990) - Elected in 2012. Trash.

 

Maybe 5 members of the highest court? I thought we never get here (multiple members of the court losing all credibility), but that is one nutzy 1st draft of an opinion piece.

 

I mean, it's what happens when ideologues become judges. They simply rationalize the law to fit their agenda. That's what we see in the Supreme Court.

Do your job? Well that's judicial activism.

Serve the interests of Evangelical Christians - now that's justice!

 

I'm not a lawyer, and that's an understatement, but I can have an opinion.

I find it totally bizarre that the draft cites the lack of stated rights preceding RvW.
As if 50 or so land-owning dudes drafting the constitution in the 18th century even thought about women as equal citizens.
As if marital rape wasn't legal for most of American history.
As if women didn't need a man's approval to get a freaking credit card at the time of RvW.

I mean, how far backward do men like Alito want to go?
Disturbing to me that he could draft something so bereft of what most people would consider reasonable context. Maybe I don't fully comprehend these "originalists" but since the original authors were so homogeneous and creatures of the 18th century, that doesn't bode well for the 21st, IMHO.

Damn are the women I know fired the f up right now though.

 

Can't really catch up to this conversation, but I had some random on-topic thoughts. I've never been all that crazy about Roe v. Wade because it made sensible regulation of abortion hard, leaving space only for the stupid regulation designed to make abortion services untenable. But, my preference would be to have a well-considered and explicit civil right in the constitution we can work with, which was never going to happen, so Roe was the best good-enough policy we could manage. With Roe going down, obviously we're in no place right now to provide some kind of right to an abortion in legislation, much less in the constitution.

I can appreciate the moral quandary here between the right of the woman over her body and the right of the fetus to live. But if you set the moral dilemma aside for a moment and just think about as amoral practical public policy, banning abortion is obviously stupid, terrible public policy. It will result in an unregulated black market for abortions, more abortion deaths of mothers, more children born into poverty, more children with low educational attainment, more single mothers, more families in poverty, more economic inequality (including the ugly reality that women with means will still get access to safe abortions while women without money cannot), and more crime. Some people will be born that would not have otherwise had the chance to live, which is great. But at an enormous social and economic cost. To be Machiavellian about it, it's not worth the trade.

I believe people on both sides of the abortion debate actually want to minimize how much abortion is used. Pro-lifers want to do it by fiat, and pro-choicers want to do it with support. In the Roe environment, pro-lifers have an incentive to provide support to mothers to convince them to carry their babies to term. They founded organizations like Care-Net that would provide material needs for mothers struggling to support a baby. Even in this environment, support for mothers who were at-risk for abortion is inadequate. Without Roe and with a fiat ban on abortion, the incentive to support mothers at-risk is even less. Maybe giving from pro-choicers who want to support women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies will be higher, but that signal is going to be even weaker than the Roe signal for pro-lifers. We will be asking of ourselves that we have more babies with less support.

SCOTUS is a joke. I can appreciate that Roe was never the perfect solution and the idea that Congress should fix it properly. But they can see as well as I that that's not going to happen. And that half the states are already poised to ban abortions as soon as they have a chance. They can see all the damage coming that I can see, but they're going to do it anyway out of some judicial purity -- or is it just puritanical moralizing. Roe was political. But the appointments of these Justices aimed specifically at Roe was also political, and their follow through (despite being immune from political pressure) now is political. SCOTUS was always an anti-democratic body, but their legitimacy as a feature in our government is at an all-time low in my mind. Why shouldn't I scoff when they demur on political questions, or when they talk about judicial precedent or lenses of Constitutional interpretation? Why should I hesitate at the suggestion of packing the court? They're just dirty little politicians like all the others, except these ones have anti-democratic lifetime positions with almost no accountability at all. Pack it.

In fact, I think Biden should start a presidential tradition of enlarging the court by 50% in every first presidential term. So, by 2024 we'd have 13. The when Trump comes back, he can boost it to 19. President AOC can take it to 28. That's an even number, but at that point having an odd number won't matter much anymore anyway. Just keep packing it until that joke of a leadership body collapses under its own weight.

 

The drafters of the Constitution knew that times would change and thus included in the Constitution the means to change it. That is what the amendment process is for, and it worked. There was an amendment to give everyone equal protection under the law. There was an amendment granting women the right to vote. Marital rape was addressed through legislation at the state level (exactly where this draft opinion would have abortion addressed). The fact is that there was no right to abortion written into the Constitution. It isn't like the founders had never heard of abortions, those predate the Constitution by thousands of years. They just did not see it as a right. In fact, there were laws against abortion at the time of ratification of the Constitution which were not overturned (which would make it pretty difficult to say those laws were not Constitutional).

I think people should be allowed to prostitute themselves, gamble, or take recreational drugs. These are all personal choices that have no direct negative effects on anyone else. Even so, I can recognize that there is no Constitutional right to do these things. They are simply my preferences. I would never try to argue that the 9th Amendment or the 14th Amendment or the penumbras of the bill of rights demand that recreational cocaine use is a fundamental right.

 

tl;dr "I don't like the fact that my side is now losing, therefore let's change the rules of the game."

honestly I think that kind of thinking is more of a threat to the Republic than many other alleged "threats"

and this isn't necessarily aimed at you directly @JuanValdez , it's just the latter part of your post invokes the concern

 

Let me ask you something.

Do you have a right to masturbate? That's not in the constitution. So can a state take that away?
What about a right to eat meat? I don't see that in the constitution?
Do you have a right to piss and take a crap? That's not in the constitution either.
Not even the rights to breath and walk are in the constitution by this logic.

Yet we all know states can't take these rights away. Why?

This is the problem with the logic that "abortion isn't in the constitution"

No it's not, But thats true for a lot of things we have rights too. And the logic for RvW is the same as the logic that protects these other inalienable rights.

 

Yeah right. The party that defended a coup leader embraces radical ways.

 

So what. They are still Republicans. I bet they love the way the party has turned. Suits their mentality.

 

True the drafters of the Constitution didn't include everything and they understood that the Constitution wasn't supposed to address everything but as a structure to operate within. As such they did including a Judicial Branch to make interpretations of the Constitution.

While there is an amendment process it is unwieldy by nature and isn't meant to address many things. We saw that with the 18th Amendment.

 

Historical interpretation of laws is one of four main methods of interpretation, the other ones being textual, systematic and teleological.

 

True it is but so is precedent and as such recent history and recent precedent should matter more than that from centuries ago.

 

The Supreme Court's role interpreting the Constitution isn't really in the Constitution either. You'd think a good Originalist Justice would rule themselves out of existence if they really wanted to follow their own logic to its rational conclusion.

 

True they did not specifically say "interpret" in the Constitution but Article III Section one says that they shall extend the Constitution to all cases before all courts. How they extend the Constitution to all cases without interpreting what it means would be be nonsensical. Anyway Marbury v Madison clarified that yes they do have the power to interpret the Constitution.

 

I agree, and that's why I'm not an Originalist. Marbury was 1803, so we went 15 years before the Supreme Court crowned itself the prophet of the Constitution. They decided it logically followed that this role was implied by the role described by the Constitution, much like the penumbra of rights was later found to naturally flow from the enumerated rights. Sorry to be argumentative; I'm just feeling jaded and cynical today.

 

Given my own track record I'm not upset by a poster being argumentative.

 

Funny you mentioned marital rape. Sir Matthew Hale is the father of legalizing marital rape. Guess who Alito used in the draft to justify overturning RvW?

 

"libertarians are against murder"

At some point, it's a child and so it's murder. Why would there be an exception for any reason? You can't murder a child to save your life. You can't cross over to another state and murder that child.

Libertarians that see a lump of cells, or maybe a sperm, or maybe an egg, or something a bit more advanced as a child must not support any legal exception to abortion, even if it means the death of their mother, their sister, their daughter, their grand-daughter...