Kiss abortion rights goodbye
Laurence Tribe writes in the Globe that Kavanaugh, if confirmed, will vote to kill Roe v Wade, and was tricksy about it in the hearings.
Several senators have said they would not vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice if they believed he would vote to undo the basic protections for women upheld in Roe v. Wade and other cases. So if his testimony and his meetings with those senators had exposed that as his almost-certain path, they would vote no.
But the only reason his public testimony and private meetings didn’t reveal such a clear inclination is that Judge Kavanaugh dissembled about his views, calling the Supreme Court’s abortion rulings “precedent on precedent,” as though that rendered them safe from his slippery keyboard. The truth is it does nothing of the kind.
It’s all of a piece, you know. Kavanaugh thinks women are lesser beings, subject to the rule of men. They should obey when men try to rape them, and they should be forced to bear children they don’t want to bear if men say they have to.
No one who has seriously studied Judge Kavanaugh’s Court of Appeals opinions — or knows anything about the publicly stated criteria used by the groups to which President Trump outsourced his selection of Supreme Court nominees — could fail to recognize that Judge Kavanaugh would, at the first opportunity, gut Roe v. Wade. His 2007 opinion in Doe Tarlow v. District of Columbia upholding compulsory elective surgeries — including abortions — performed on women marked at birth as intellectually challenged, and his 2018 opinion in Garza v. Hargan that sought to block a mature young woman’s access to a lawful abortion, leave no doubt that he would do all in his power to vindicate the expectations of those who handpicked him to satisfy Trump’s evangelical base. Indeed, just last year, in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh called Roe an example of “freewheeling judicial creation of unenumerated rights.”
Easy for him – it’s not a right he has ever needed or ever will need, so it’s just a wild and crazy judicial creation.
Just as Ireland has decided that abortion is a right that should be available for free on the health service.
To be fair (and I don’t want to be) every other not-rapist they’ve got waiting in the wings would do the same damn thing.
“Several senators have said they would not vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice if they believed he would vote to undo the basic protections for women upheld in Roe v. Wade and other cases.”
No senator who said this and still votes for Kavanaugh is being fooled or tricked. They know what he is. They were lying in the first place.
Along with Roe v. Wade, a Kavanaugh confirmation will also bury the idea that “pro-choice Republican” is something that exists in any meaningful way.
It would also bury the idea that a Republican with integrity exists in any meaningful way. (And I suspect if McCain were still alive, he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh).
It reminds me of the scenes in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman confesses that he’s a serial killer, and everyone just acts as if he didn’t say anything.
One does wonder, however, if it’s a right he’s ever had to settle the bill for as maybe the only consequence of his behaviour he’s ever ‘suffered’.
@AoS
That does not really matter – of course the rich will always find a way to get the abortion needed for those “accidents” that are no fault of theirs (or, in that case, their daughters). The important thing is to subjugate women who are poor. Having to struggle with many children, juggle several jobs will exhaust them and hopefully stop them from getting an education that might turn them to evil libruls…
Sonderval, of course, but in a rational world* evidence that it happened would certainly weaken his position on abortion.
* I know!