They can’t believe their luck
What next? The Post says likely a push for a nationwide ban on abortion.
Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.
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A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation.
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One top advocate, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, has spoken privately with 10 possible Republican presidential contenders, including former president Donald Trump, to talk through national antiabortion strategy. Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.
Falling all over themselves to enchain women.
What’s next?
Obergefell v. Hodges.
Once stare decisis is no longer a thing, anything is up for overturning. And these creeps hate gays almost as much as they hate women.
Maybe they’ll get Brown vs. the Board of Education stand…maybe they’ll come gunning for that, too. And I bet they would still have Clarence Thomas on their side. He is an avowed enemy of Affirmative Action or any other law that assists other people of color the way it assisted him.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and (sorry, R.E.M.) I don’t feel fine.
Griswold is what they really want to kill, though I’m sure they could invent a flimsy new excuse for Obergefell. I think they may be getting a bit too big for their britches… The USA isn’t Hungary or Russia; we’re not a nation of slaves.
My guess is that Brown is safe, in part because even among conservatives it’s fairly popular, in the same way that their Diet Coke version of MLK (you know, the one who only uttered one sentence in his entire life) is popular, and in part because it’s not terribly relevant these days. Conservatives who don’t want their kids going to school with “those” people have found workarounds: private schools, restrictive zoning, etc. It’s similar to Miranda — for a couple of decades, there was talk of overturning it, but eventually the Rehnquist Court decided not to bother, in large part because law enforcement had discovered that it wasn’t really an obstacle for them.
Obergefell and Griswold are a different story. The statement in Alito’s opinion that nothing in this decision affects those cases is worthless. He’s not affirming the validity of those cases, just saving the issue for another day, and the “reasoning” in Dobbs is equally applicable to those cases. The Dobbs opinion essentially says that unless the Constitution specifically mentions something by name (“bear arms” is in!), or the Framers specifically thought it was covered, then it isn’t protected. Well, the Constitution doesn’t say “birth control” or “gay marriage”, and neither right was commonly established in the 1780s, so….
And unlike Brown, where it’s hard to see how the issue would get tee’d up, it’s easy to see how Obergefell and Griswold will be. They’ll come after Obergefell via one of their “religious freedom” cases — another county clerk who doesn’t want to issue a marriage license — and Griswold via restrictions on “abortifacients” like birth control pills.
And in both instances, we’ll be assured by the justices and Reasonable Conservatives and their media enablers that you know, this just Sends The Issue Back To the States. California can still have birth control and gay marriage, so why worry about those women in red states?
Yeah, I hate that idea of “our constitution only covers what the founders knew about and thought”. From what I’ve read, it appears to me the founders didn’t think that. For one thing, the first thing they did once passing the constitution was to amend it. I imagine they perceived it as a living document that could adjust to the times. By the time they wrote it, things were changing so rapidly, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, that I imagine they assumed they would continue to change. As they did.
The Constitution was also the product of a lot of compromise and some punting (let’s just use some vague terminology that will get figured out later), not to mention that the founding generation was just as capable of inconsistency and hypocrisy as any other. I don’t know how else you explain the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts that plainly violated the First Amendment.
And there was no bigger punt than the Ninth Amendment — put in there specifically because some people worried that people would argue that if something wasn’t specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, that it couldn’t be a right. The Ninth is basically legalese for “hey, we’re not claiming to be putting together a comprehensive list here,” and yet conservatives — those lovers of textualism and originalism — treat it as an ink blot.
Well I know something that Thomas Paine and John Locke both talked about was that new generations could not be bound in perpetuity by the agreements of their ancestors (specifically in the “constitution” of the Glorious Revolution I believe). So it’s certain that the framers thought a periodic refresh of the Constitution was in order.