Writing in Slate, Mark Joseph Stern explains that the five extremists (and the extraneous Chief Justice) on the Supreme Court have laid the groundwork for reversing rights that did not exist in 1868. They made their rationale clear in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday overruling Roe v. Wade is a devastating blow to individual autonomy and women’s equality, a horrific assault on liberty that will inflict unspeakable suffering and death in the states that are already criminalizing abortion. That decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, marks the culmination of a decadeslong battle against reproductive freedom.
But it also constitutes the start of another crusade—an all-out assault on the many other rights that are “all part of the same constitutional fabric,” as the liberal justices put it in dissent. With Dobbs, the majority has torn down the entire doctrine protecting gay rights, marriage, and contraception, among other personal liberties. These rights are now in grave and immediate jeopardy….
The basic threat is easy to grasp. For more than a century, a debate has raged over how courts should define the “liberty” guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Some say it protects unenumerated rights, but only those deemed “fundamental” in 1868 when the amendment was ratified. Others say it also safeguards modern rights which are “so fundamental that the state must accord them its respect.” The court relied on this second conception of liberty in Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell, as well as other cases like Skinner v. Oklahoma (barring involuntary sterilization) and Loving v. Virginia (safeguarding interracial marriage)…
The conservative legal movement scored its single greatest victory on Friday when the Supreme Court rewarded its relentless assault on a precedent that most Americans thought was settled. That movement will now devote its energy to toppling other precedents that, at this moment, many consider to be sacrosanct, or at least settled. Any statements to the contrary by the court’s far-right bloc are not to be believed. Less than four years ago, Kavanaugh told the nation, under oath, that he believed Roe was “settled,” then proceeded to unsettle it at the earliest opportunity. No constitutional right favored by progressives is safe from this Supreme Court’s wrecking ball.
Will Justice Thomas lead the way in overturning the Loving v Virginia decision? That would dissolve his marriage to Ginni. Is this his devious way of shedding a wife who has become a political burden? Just kidding.
The reality is that this extremist Court is taking a wrecking ball to our personal relations, which we assumed were secure. Now, they assert, we are to live by the rights, mores, and practices of 1868. This is the dream of the Federalist Society, which selected Trump’s three extremist justices for him.
Turning the clock back by a century and a half is not conservative. It’s nuts.
This all started when Five Supremacists elected Dubya President.
The gleam of Supreme Power in the Court has become addictive.
YEP!
Too right. The court appointed the president who then appointed the court. Looking back, though, pushback from Dem corporatist-centrists was mild to moderate for twenty-two years, words about ending the filibuster tossed about meekly, excuses flapping in the wind like hanging chads.
“words about ending the filibuster”
What are you talking about? Ending the filibuster is WHY we are in this mess! The Republicans ended the filibuster for the Supreme Court once Trump was elected in 2016 and pushed their 3 far right choices through. Do you mean that you wanted the Dems to USE the filibuster to block John Roberts and Alito back in 2005??
We had a chance to have a progressive Supreme Court in 2016 when there was an open seat – and those of us who cared about the Supreme Court demonstrated it by voting to make sure a Democrat filled that open seat on a Supreme Court tied 4-4. Are you suggesting that those who amplified how important it was to defeat the Democrat nominee and encouraged people to “send a message” were all Dem Corporate-centrists?
Some of those who did not believe it was important it was to have a Dem fill an open seat in a Supreme Court tied 4-4 are offering excuses flapping in the wind like hanging chads. But ending the filibuster had nothing to do with it.
The radical right seek access to public money without accountability strings attached to the money. Public money should come with strings attached. Otherwise, this is taxation without representation. Public schools are accountable to the local board of education and the state where they are subject to independent audits as well as data reporting of student standardized testing.
Hey, it’s what the MIC has perfected to an art: How to rip off the US taxpayers to make a shitton of $$$. Edudeformers and privateers are Johnny Come Latelies in comparison, but just as deforming to America as the MIC.
Would you please supply the lyrics as, due to my hearing losses, I struggle to hear the words in many songs. Thanks!
To save space here, click this link:
https://www.last.fm/music/Consolidated/_/Friendly+Fascism/+lyrics
Thanks, I greatly appreciate that. 🙂
“It really boils down to our ability to accept”
How true is that simple statement!
One important point: this song is more than 30 years old! The Bush cited is Bush I. Crazy how it fits today even better than then.
My lord. Topical.
The ‘Federalist Society’ should be labeled a ‘terrorist organization’. It has nothing to do with Hamilton (main author of the ‘Federalist Papers’). It is a right-wing clique that wants to turn the US into an official oligarchy. It’s been doing a pretty effective job at that from WAY before Trump. There’s nothing ‘originalist’ about it. The original was Thomas Paine.
“Turning the clock back by a century and a half is not conservative. It’s nuts.”
And that is why they are not “conservatives” but they are xtian fundi regressive reactionaries. As Lakoff and others have noted, the using of their language gives them the rhetorical advantage, allowing them to control the debate. We lose when we use their language.
THEY ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES. Plain and simple!
Found this on Crooks and Liars, insight into perversion of anti-abortion movement. If we look at its origins, its actually an issue liberals and conservatives could find a lot of common ground on:
Thanks will check it out!
I encourage everyone to take the time to watch this video this weekend. Finally an original, articulate voice in abortion debate. And a demonstration how reactionary (not radical) this Court is. Using 13th century law as precedent, then effectively declaring precedent dead demands psychological intervention, not legitimate debate. Declaring states can do one thing one day and the opposite the next is not jurisprudence. But mostly, they do not live in the real world. Neither do 45% of Americans.
Schenck says that his current campaign is having effect. He himself had to experience the consequence/reality of his right to life fantasy view of life before he was able to change. So, he correctly states, the young may change but, not people like him. and he understands that the Right to Life campaign is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.
He has an understanding that Alito’s Roe decision is a form of Catholicism not the evangelical religion. The President of Right to Life formerly worked for the Catholic Church and she attended the Pope John Paul II Instute at the Wash.-based Catholic University of America whose Board is cozy with Koch.
The don’t want to conserve anything. They want to demolish civil society and democracy. They are not trying to defend the Constitution. The right are ideological extremists.
If they are going that far back, that also means women may lose the vote and end up being chattel (property) again, of men.
The child labor laws will also vanish. Considering how many older Republican men keep getting caught having sexual relationships with statutory children, that must be on the list for sure.
Imagine the chaos if children as young as 7 can be sold into servitude by their parents as it was before the 1930s. Sold to factories, sold to farms to pick crops, sold into prostitution as young as 10 or even young as it was before. No more mandatory K-12 education
That far back about 7% of children graduated from high school, 3% from college and almost half of America lived in poverty.
How will they get the poverty rate back to almost half of the population? Get rid of Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, minimum wage laws, labor unions.
All that could be on the chopping block by those five/six theofascist Supreme Court Justices. This isn’t justice at work. This is another coup in the making.
There’s Traitor Trump’s coup attempt.
Then there is this second coup coming from those five/six Supreme Court justices.
All they need to succeed is keep Congress deadlocked by not allowing the Democrats to have a strong majority in both houses, and FiveThirtyEight favors the Republicans taking back the House, but the Democrats may keep the Senate. It’s a toss up right now but the House looks like a done deal. If the Republican Party wins the majority in both houses of Congress with the current US Supreme Court, I think we can kiss the United States goodbye.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/
How can so many voters be that easily manipulated and stupid?
In Greg’s linked video, Schenck says the current Right to Life power brokers have a contempt for women and, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, they will act in ways that further endanger women (and children). Peter Thiel has said, women voting a capitalistic democracy is an oxymoron.
Sun Tze- “…if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat…”
It is the wins of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo (9 kids) that put the conservative Catholic majority on SCOTUS. He received an award from a Catholic organization for what he has done to the country. Evangelical, Rev. Schenck, a leader in the pro-birth campaign for 30 years, who is now trying to undo the harm he caused, described Alito’s Roe decision as a form of Catholicism not the evangelical religion.
We can look to Pius XII’s agreement with Mussolini to end liberal Italy’s separation of church and state as the template followed by SCOTUS. We can look to the Catholic church’s overt discrimination against women as a sign of the contempt they have for women.
the five extremists (and the extraneous Chief Justice)”
Roberts is every bit as extreme as the others.
He just wants everyone to believe otherwise.
In that regard he is actually more dishonest than the others.
He’d better pray there is no Hell, since he is going to burn There for all eternity with it there is.
Along with the pedophile protector whose bidding Roberts and the
others are doing, Pope Francis:
AThis archbishop wants Pope Francis to resign
Newsroom
In a statement seen by CNN, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, said he told the Pope about allegations of sexual abuse against then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick five years ago, but the Pontiff did nothing about it”
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2018/08/27/pope-francis-vigano-resign-baldwin-sandoval-nr.cnn
“sexual abuse” nothing new there, Kertzer’s June, 2022 book about Pope Pius XII describes a deal made with Hitler that involved keeping a lid on pedophilia crimes by monks and priests. Kertzer reports the Church had files listing involvements with thousands of boys under 13 years old. In communications with Hitler the pope said there had been investigations and the issue had been dealt with. You can guess what that meant…file marked closed. Deal moved ahead.
SomDAM and Linda: A friend of mine had a house in Malden, and at the end of her street was a really big house from which priests were continually coming and going. Turns out that this was a halfway house that they would send priests to for decompression when the heat was on for their abusive activities in the previous parish. They would go to this place for a cool off before being shipped off to a new parish in a new city to start it all over again.
Roberts is the Citizens United extremist. After Citizens United, he laid low because he recognized that there was an immediate danger of people losing all faith in their government. “Corporations are people” didn’t go over too well. It doesn’t matter if he’s extreme or not, though, because five other extremists hold a majority without him. And now, again, there is an immediate danger of people losing all faith in their government. Do they care?
The other give give him cover, allowing him to seem “moderate” in his abstaining from the decision to overturn Roe.
Roberts sided with the majority on their opinion to uphold the Mississippi las banning abortion but Roberts claimed overturning Roe was going too far.
In other words, Roberts wants to go have his came and eat it too. He is just fundamentally dishonest.
His cake”
What kind of idiotic AI ( and AI programner) would change that to “have his came”?
Chief Justice Roberts appears to have the backbone of an amoeba.
Another story. Years ago, I stopped to see my boss (the president of a publishing house) and sitting outside his office was his secretary. She was a lovely, hard-working, kind, intelligent, efficient woman whom I had come to like a lot. She had The Boston Globe spread out on her desk, and she was choking back tears. This stopped me in my tracks. I asked, “What’s wrong?”
She said, “They knew. They all knew. All the way up. They knew for years and years and years. Thousands of victims. Kids. Little kids. And they all knew all about it. I have been a good Catholic all my life. I give money. Ten percent. I’m always in church on Sundays. At times in my life, I’ve gone to mass every day. No more. No more. Ever. Ever. I’m done. It was all a lie.”
She was furious and weeping.
Luckily there are good alternative grounds (equal protection) to uphold the decisions on interracial marriage and gay marriage.
Yes. But they will find a way to support the former while denying the latter. It will be pretzel logic, but hey, that’s how this court rolls.
I’m not so sure. Scalia would surely reverse Lawrence and Obergefell, but he’s gone. Thomas and Alito would probably rule like Scalia would have. But I consider Gorsuch a likely affirmance. Roberts was a dissent on Obergefell but I don’t see him voting to overturn it or Lawrence. Coney Barrett is a bit of a cipher to me on this issue.
Cipher no more. Obergefell is history.
Not if Roberts and Gorsuch vote to uphold it. Don’t forget that Gorsuch authored Bostock (joined by Roberts and the Kagan/Sotomayor/Breyer group).
The now Extreme Court is in the process of taking on a number of cases with the goal of disempowering the federal government in order to return power to the states, which they expect, in many cases, to establish theocracies. And so it is taking on cases involving the delegation of authority from Congress to Executive branch agencies (like the EPA case) and cases involving nonenumerated rights. In the former case, the Extreme Court intends to disempower the federal government by taking away the powers of agencies and departments of that government. In the latter case, the Extreme Court intends to remove federal protection of a huge body of liberties that have been interpreted, over the years, as implied by the Constitution. Conservatives in America have long, long, long wanted to be in this position. Steve Bannon recently did a War Room podcast on the coming plan to “Dismantle the Administrative State.” And on that same program, early on, he laid out many of the various methods that Trump planned to use to overthrow the 2020 election. He’s worth listening to. He and Stephen Miller are the brains (the twisted brains) of the MAGA outfit.
Even so, I think Obergefell will stand.
I think Loving V Virginia will stand because Clarence Thomas’s marriage would be dissolved if it doesn’t.
Not so sure about gay marriage.
These justices are not libertarian. They want the Court to direct everyone’s private lives. They want to plant a surveillance device in every bedroom.
The Dobbs decision is a blueprint and template for erasing an entire body of law based on unenumerated rights. The same is true of the decision to come in Moore v. Harper, which deals with the supposed absolute discretion of state legislatures to determine how elections are to be conducted in their states (with so-called “independent state legislature theory,” or ISL). Dobbs was revolutionary and was meant to be. To quote from another context the brilliant political commentator James O’Brien, “”This is not the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning.” (Thanks, Greg Brozeit, for hooking me up with O’Brien!)
This court is laying the judicial foundation for The Turn to fascism in the United States. You are witnessing history in the making. And it’s not going to be pretty.
The smarter folks on the right recognize that it’s now or never. They have to seize control and undo democratic processes, and especially voting rights, or they will be history soon.
Brozeit: Spirit bro, lol
I thought that quote was attributed to Winston Churchill talking about Germany’s giving up on the bombing of Britain
I thought that sounded familiar. I’ve never been a fan of Churchill, so I don’t pay close attention to his quotes. But I would say the similarity of the tenor of the times for the use of it in both cases is accurate. The next 4-5 years will likely produce a global upheaval on the scale of WWII, it’ll just be less noticeable to most…and cheered on my many.
I was just watching a preview of a film of survivor stories. One of these people, a woman, says, “People always ask, why didn’t you leave? Didn’t you know what was happening? But it happened so slowly. A law here. A law there. Little by little.”
The Supreme Court is NOT supreme:
The conservative “originalists” on the Supreme Court can find no more original authority on our Constitution than James Madison, whom we honor as “The Father of the Constitution” — and James Madison recorded in the actual minutes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that when writing Article III, the intent of and the understanding among the delegates was that “the jurisdiction given [to the Supreme Court] was constructively LIMITED TO CASES OF A JUDICIARY NATURE” and did not include issues of constitutionality.
Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, pointed out: “The question whether the [Supreme Court] judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law…there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches.”
Founding Father Jefferson also pointed out the very real danger to our republic of allowing the Supreme Court the non-constitutional power to decide the constitutionality of laws: “Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so,” Jefferson noted. “They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…and their power is all the more dangerous because they are in office for life and are not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots” and “Experience has already shown that the impeachment it [our Constitution] has provided is not even a scare-crow…The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
Since the Constitution does NOT give the Supreme Court any authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws, where did the Court seize the authority that it claims to have? Well, the Court GAVE ITSELF that alleged authority in its Marbury v. Madison ruling.
Must be nice to give yourself constitutional authority that the Constitution doesn’t give you.
When the Court gave itself that unconstitutional authority, Jefferson sadly said that it was “the end of our democracy.”
He was right, as is clear today.
And the REASON why the Supreme Court has been allowed to get away with unconstitutionally making constitutional decisions is because with the Supreme Court doing the job for them, members of Congress don’t have to pass often unpopular laws — they can let the Supreme Court do the dirty work and then the members of Congress can say to their voters “See — it’s that terrible activist Supreme Court that has done this, not us.” In short, allowing the Supreme Court to make the hard decisions gets the cowardly Congress off the hook with voters.
Who should have decided whether Mississippi’s abortion law is constitutional?
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, that authority resides with We the People through their elected congressional representatives.
You believe that Congress should decide whether state laws are constitutional? By what margin, a bare majority?
I assume you also believe Congress should decide whether its own laws are constitutional?
Should Congress decide whether State laws are constitutional?
Depends.
How about a law that says women can’t vote?
Or people of a particular faith are excluded from federal benefits.
My opinion is that it would be insane and dangerous for Congress to have that kind of power. Imagine what Congress would be doing every time there was a Republican majority.
Here’s a useful resource page …
https://jewishphilosophyplace.com/2022/07/17/scotus-guns-abortion-religion-subverting-the-public-sphere/