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Roe v Wade is on deck

Indiana just passed an incredibly restrictive bill.
According to it's sponsor it will eliminate 99% of all abortions. :(

I couldn't help but notice that she didn't qualify that with "elective", "legal", or anything like that.
Tom
It'll be interesting to see what the long term outcome of that is. Mike Pence shot his own political foot off pushing hard for an anti-marriage equality amendment to the state Constitution. Turned out that it brought out the liberal base, but not the conservative base. Rather the opposite of his goal.

I could easily imagine this bill having a similar effect.
Tom
 
Precedence has the same meaning it has always had.

I am challenging TomC's strange idea that SCOTUS should reflect the will of the people.

What you and I are talking about here is a huge subject and a total derailment of this thread. It should have it's own thread if we're going to really discuss it.

"Originalist" and "Living Document" are the vague terms used to describe the different views. And they aren't any binary. It's a broad spectrum of views.

To my mind, too much has changed since SCOTUS and COTUS were designed to put complete faith in the Original documents.
Tom
 
It's a contradiction in terms. The Constitution was never intended to be a static document in the first place, let alone an object of unreasoning faith. As far as I know, only the Mormons actually claim divine inspiration for the document. For everyone else, it is a statement of political consensus that means nothing unless its text is amendable and its interpretation corresponds to a consistent and common understanding. Not some radical re-interpretation that has satisfactory meaning to only one political party over another.
 
It's a contradiction in terms. The Constitution was never intended to be a static document in the first place, let alone an object of unreasoning faith. As far as I know, only the Mormons actually claim divine inspiration for the document. For everyone else, it is a statement of political consensus that means nothing unless its text is amendable and its interpretation corresponds to a consistent and common understanding. Not some radical re-interpretation that has satisfactory meaning to only one political party over another.
Small note for those who are not aware: the first amendment to the US Constitution was adopted about 3 and a half years after the constitution was ratified.

The Constitution was never intended to be static.
 
It's a contradiction in terms. The Constitution was never intended to be a static document in the first place, let alone an object of unreasoning faith. As far as I know, only the Mormons actually claim divine inspiration for the document. For everyone else, it is a statement of political consensus that means nothing unless its text is amendable and its interpretation corresponds to a consistent and common understanding. Not some radical re-interpretation that has satisfactory meaning to only one political party over another.
Small note for those who are not aware: the first amendment to the US Constitution was adopted about 3 and a half years after the constitution was ratified.

The Constitution was never intended to be static.
Whoever claimed it was? The method to amend the Constitution is written into the Constitution.
 
Three paths in a post-Roe America
"Ignore your rights, and they’ll go away,” the bumper sticker goes.

I think about that a lot these days.
THen about what kind of world that we elders are creating for our descendants, like 3 early-teen girls in front of author Adam Lee at a deli.

Though AL doesn't have much to say that others have not already said, he nevertheless has some thoughts.
Start with the obvious: Women are going to die. It’s only a matter of time before we have an American Savita Halappanavar, who was murdered by anti-choice ideology when her doctors refused to treat her septic miscarriage as long as there was a fetal heartbeat. There will be many such cases.
We already have a lot of women who were only given abortions after they were judged very sick, so it may be a matter of time before the doctors slip up.
Everyone who said in 2016 that Donald Trump’s presidency wouldn’t be that bad, that the extreme rhetoric was for show and he’d become a moderate populist once in office, that Democrats were engaged in needless hysteria—those people need to make a heartfelt apology and then withdraw from political punditry for a long period of self-reflection.
He then considers three possible scenarios.

First, an optimistic one, what he calls the “dog that caught the car” scenario, of not being sure what to do next. Car-chasing dogs acts according to instincts that gave their wild ancestors their meals, but cars aren't very edible, and dogs don't usually have a lot of practice in eating caught food.

The Republican Party gets a reputation for anti-abortion nastiness, and it turns off suburban women who might otherwise like its promised tax cuts. Democrats hold Congress, abolish the filibuster, and pack the Supreme Court with progressive justices. Religion continues to decline, with right-wing Xianity becoming permanently discredited as a political force.

Second, a pessimistic path, much like what Nicolae Ceausescu's regime implemented in Romania.
ed-state legislatures, drunk on power and eager to see how far they can go, will create a regime of mandatory regular pregnancy testing for all women. Secret police will infiltrate hospitals, and women who suffer miscarriages will be shackled to their beds for trial. They’ll set up checkpoints and make it illegal for pregnant people to leave the state in case they get an abortion elsewhere, as if Utah forbade its own citizens from traveling to Nevada to gamble or drink.
Seems like a recipe for a constitutional crisis, when blue states refuse to extradite women from red states who get abortions in their states.

Third, the "War on Drugs" scenario.
In this scenario, abortion is outlawed, but widely available through drugs and underground clinics. The law will be enforced selectively against poor women and people of color, in showy raids trumpeted by “law and order” politicians. Meanwhile, middle-class white women will be able to terminate a pregnancy without much trouble, and rich people with private jets and concierge doctors won’t have any trouble at all. It’s the brand of hypocrisy that America excels at.
Commenter Atea noted that a good part of our current problems was from the neglect of previous Democrats, like the Obama Administration's breaking promises to codify RvW and to eliminate George Bush II's Office of Faith-Based Initiative.

Pam:
It's funny, but I haven't heard any conservatives complaining about activist judges making laws from the bench lately.

I wonder why that is.
 
Opinion | Mitt Romney Is Inventing Policies for a Fantasy G.O.P. - The New York Times
He proposed $350/child/month up to age 6, and then $250/c/m up to age 18.
Republicans hated it. His Senate colleagues Marco Rubio and Mike Lee denounced Romney’s plan as “welfare assistance,” and called for “pro-work” policies to assist families. “An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work,” the senators said. “Congress should expand the child tax credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”
He backed off, and proposed a plan where one would get the full benefit only for more than $10,000/year of income. Lower than that, and it scales linearly with income - $5,000/yr gives 50%.
The hostile and then indifferent response to Romney’s child allowance from his Republican colleagues — as well as the nearly total absence of meaningfully pro-family legislation from conservative lawmakers — tells us something very important about the future of the pro-life cause in the Republican Party. But maybe not quite what you think.

...
Free, now, to pursue whatever policies they’d like on abortion, most Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists appear to be focused on passing harsh new restrictions on reproductive autonomy and creating broad protections for “fetal life.”

...
What you won’t find passing anytime soon in any Republican-led state legislature are bills to reduce the cost of childbearing and child-rearing. At most, a few states that have or will ban abortion have extended postpartum care under Medicaid. But there are no major plans to improve coverage or provide new benefits. As a practical matter, the pro-welfare, anti-abortion politician does not exist, at least not in the Republican Party.

...
The policy correlation is, in fact, what you would expect it to be. As a rule, the states with the most generous safety nets and anti-poverty programs are also the states with the widest access to abortion and other reproductive health services. The states with the most restrictive abortion laws are also, as a rule, the states that do the least for families and children as a matter of public policy.
Some opponents of abortion claim to be concerned with children after they are born, but they haven't had any policy influence over most Republican Federal and state legislators. Mitt Romney is an outlier in his party.
That’s because the Republican ideal of a “pro-family” agenda is girded on traditional hierarchies. Reproductive autonomy, up to and including the right to get an abortion, weakens hierarchies of gender. And the social safety net — especially one that extends directly to mothers and children — undermines the preferred conservative social order of isolated, atomized households kept in line through market discipline.

If the goal of abortion opponents and politicians is to encourage life and promote families, then, yes, their interests and priorities are at odds with their actions. But if the goal is a more rigid and hierarchical world of untrammeled patriarchal authority, then, well, things are pretty much going according to plan.
That also accounts for their hatred of labor unions. They hate it when anyone except their favorite elites has any power.
 
The inside story of how John Roberts failed to save abortion rights - CNNPolitics
Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May's unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade made the effort all but impossible, multiple sources familiar with negotiations told CNN.

It appears unlikely that Roberts' best prospect -- Justice Brett Kavanaugh -- was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts' attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.
Why did he do it?
In the past, Roberts himself has switched his vote, or persuaded others to do so, toward middle-ground, institutionalist outcomes, such as saving the Affordable Care Act. It's a pattern that has generated suspicion among some right-wing justices and conservatives outside the court.
So not wanting to overturn RvW is in character with those earlier actions.
The final decision flouted the court's traditional adherence to judicial restraint and precedent. Polls show public approval of the court falling significantly, as the decision has been regarded as a product of politics rather than neutral decision-making.
Which John Roberts didn't want, I'm sure.

John Roberts Was Lobbying Kavanaugh to Save Roe. Then the Draft Opinion Leaked
While some have seen Roberts as a potential ally toward the more liberal justices, the slate of recent Supreme Court decisions, including on gun rights, religious rights, and regulatory powers for federal agencies indicate that Roberts remains favorable to the conservative agenda. This all makes Thomas’ suggestion that the court review a slew of legal protections for minorities of all kinds even more alarming, as Roberts’ negotiating powers — and his ability to keep the rabid right at bay — appear to have already been weakened.
 
SCOTUS is not there to judge based on the views of the American people. It is their to interpret the law.

It's worse than that, they judged based on the views of a minority of Americans.
 
SCOTUS is not there to judge based on the views of the American people. It is their to interpret the law.

It's worse than that, they judged based on the views of a minority of Americans.
It's even worse than that.

The SCOTUS was intended to be insulated from politics, partisanship, and the tyranny of the majority. The Founders set it up that way for very good reasons.

That insulation has been eroded over the last few decades. But it was 2016 when the TeaPartiers like McConnell took a sledgehammer to one of our most fundamental institutions. They ignored the Constitution to turn SCOTUS into a partisan group.
Now SCOTUS is just another political football, to use to score points in the power and wealth game being played by the elite.
Tom
 
Here's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if 75% of voters oppose the SCOTUS ruling. What matters is who comes out to vote in November.

Past experience suggests that the people who oppose it will just sigh, Facebook their friends, and take a long lunch. That's how Trump got elected in the first place. That's why this is happening.

"Dem/leanDem" voters are a majority in the U.S.. But they're drawn from low turn out demographics, so the minority keeps winning elections.
Tom
 
Here's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if 75% of voters oppose the SCOTUS ruling. What matters is who comes out to vote in November.

Past experience suggests that the people who oppose it will just sigh, Facebook their friends, and take a long lunch. That's how Trump got elected in the first place. That's why this is happening.

"Dem/leanDem" voters are a majority in the U.S.. But they're drawn from low turn out demographics, so the minority keeps winning elections.
Tom
I might have said the same thing before Kansas.
 
Here's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if 75% of voters oppose the SCOTUS ruling. What matters is who comes out to vote in November.

Past experience suggests that the people who oppose it will just sigh, Facebook their friends, and take a long lunch. That's how Trump got elected in the first place. That's why this is happening.

"Dem/leanDem" voters are a majority in the U.S.. But they're drawn from low turn out demographics, so the minority keeps winning elections.
Tom
I might have said the same thing before Kansas.

Who knows?

After 2016, when Trump-Pence won and Billary didn't, I stopped thinking I could predict outcomes of elections.

Nevertheless, the results will depend on turn out. We'll see.
Tom
 
Here's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if 75% of voters oppose the SCOTUS ruling. What matters is who comes out to vote in November.

Past experience suggests that the people who oppose it will just sigh, Facebook their friends, and take a long lunch. That's how Trump got elected in the first place. That's why this is happening.

"Dem/leanDem" voters are a majority in the U.S.. But they're drawn from low turn out demographics, so the minority keeps winning elections.
Tom
But here's the thing: no.
They do turn out - Democrats have resoundingly won every single popular vote since 1992, and out of the 2 Republicans who have been president since 1992, one of them had their victory handed to them unilaterally by the Supreme Court.

Democrats turn out, that isn't the problem.
The problem is the political system is specifically designed to handicap people from large cities and populace states and give massively disproportionate voting power to rural and low population states.
And it so happens that over the last 80 years or so, that has become the political nesting ground for racism, christian nationalism, and inbred sister-fucking hillbillies who vote en masse for people who give a political platform explicitly promising to ruin the lives of their voters.

The problem is that the system is utterly fucked and does not convey the political will of a numerical majority of the populace.
Dems don't have to just "turn out" to win, they have to turn out to such a higher percentage than Repugs that it's often physically impossible.

Also, there's the fact that presidents in the US aren't really chosen by merit or demographics or voters anyways, it's just a function of which party's turn it is to be president.
We're in kind of uncharted waters there, as I suspect that Biden won't run again, which will be the first time that we've had different people multiple years in a row.
 
Here's the bottom line.

It doesn't matter if 75% of voters oppose the SCOTUS ruling. What matters is who comes out to vote in November every election.
FIFY. It is a cliche, but the only important election is the current one. Dobbs was predicated on the elections of '00, '04, and '16. Dobbs didn't occur earlier due to the results in the elections in '92, '96, '08 and '12.
Past experience suggests that the people who oppose it will just sigh, Facebook their friends, and take a long lunch. That's how Trump got elected in the first place. That's why this is happening.
Kansas sank their pro-"life" referendum... even with shady proposition wording and shady advertising. KANSAS! Young women (and maybe some young men) have been mobilized.
 
It's a contradiction in terms. The Constitution was never intended to be a static document in the first place, let alone an object of unreasoning faith. As far as I know, only the Mormons actually claim divine inspiration for the document. For everyone else, it is a statement of political consensus that means nothing unless its text is amendable and its interpretation corresponds to a consistent and common understanding. Not some radical re-interpretation that has satisfactory meaning to only one political party over another.
Small note for those who are not aware: the first amendment to the US Constitution was adopted about 3 and a half years after the constitution was ratified.

The Constitution was never intended to be static.
That isn't really true. The Constitution was created by two wings of people, the Madisonionitests and the Jeffersonians. Madison school of thought was an uber-rigid founding document, the foundation needed to be rigid and steadfast. Jeffersonian school of thought was the nation was going to change with time, the foundation needed to adjust to it.

Amending the Constitution is near impossible, and the Madison school of thought won.

Then there is SCOTUS. In general, there seems to be two schools of thought for SCOTUS now days. Those that think the question is "Why should a citizen have their rights restricted?" (the majority of SCOTUS has been in this camp until around now) verses "What authority does the Federal Government have to ensure rights are not restricted?" (our darling SCOTUS majority these days). The new SCOTUS is tying their own hands behind their back via grossly over technical "analysis" in order to make them 'powerless' to address rights. And they are tearing at 130 years of post Civil War constitutional law to get there (yes, Civil war is over 150 years ago, but 14th Amendment crossovers start in 1890s).
 
near impossible
Code for: we've done it 27 times, it's only impossible when the Congress is deadlocked by partisan bickering.
18 times, the Bill of Rights was a package deal. Then we could put the 13 to 15th under one wrapper, and that required a war. So 16 times. Eight of the 16 times were then related to elections, election rights, electoral rights, or Presidential stuff like if the President falls off a llama and fails concussion protocol. Now down to 8 over nearly 250 years. That isn't a lot. That is once every six Presidencies!

The threshold for amending the Constitution is extraordinarily high. It isn't like passing one in California. It requires a super-majority of Congress (67%) and/or a super-super majority of the States (75%). 75%, that is Zoo tax levy support level.
 
My personal observation is that society is a living thing and must change over time. But too rapid change creates too much instability. Slow change is best for long term survival. There is wisdom in allowing change—some came fairly quickly—but with regards to long term survival, generally slow change is favored.


I realize for all of the posters a generation or more younger than I am, change is excruciatingly slow. I was young once as well. My generation was impatient and frustrated as well. Some changes have been so enormous ( LGBTQ rights) that they were not even dreamed of by perhaps most of my generation. I’m extremely disappointed that women’s rights movement and racial equality have not experienced such success but the difference between now and the 60’s and 70’s is again, enormous. Yes there has been pushback in more recent years but we can push past that-we just have to be determined. The difference in attitudes with regards to the environment again, is enormous. Not enough by a long shot but enormous.

We’ll never legislate a perfect society into existence —but we can try.
 
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