Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

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Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Woodchopper » Tue May 03, 2022 3:35 am


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

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.

The draft opinion offers an extraordinary window into the justices’ deliberations in one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades. Some court-watchers predicted that the conservative majority would slice away at abortion rights without flatly overturning a 49-year-old precedent. The draft shows that the court is looking to reject Roe’s logic and legal protections.

A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.

The three Democratic-appointed justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – are working on one or more dissents, according to the person. How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.

The document, labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion, includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on Feb. 10. If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document.

[…]

Under longstanding court procedures, justices hold preliminary votes on cases shortly after argument and assign a member of the majority to write a draft of the court’s opinion. The draft is often amended in consultation with other justices, and in some cases the justices change their votes altogether, creating the possibility that the current alignment on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could change.

The chief justice typically assigns majority opinions when he is in the majority. When he is not, that decision is typically made by the most senior justice in the majority.

‘Exceptionally weak’

A George W. Bush appointee who joined the court in 2006, Alito argues that the 1973 abortion rights ruling was an ill-conceived and deeply flawed decision that invented a right mentioned nowhere in the Constitution and unwisely sought to wrench the contentious issue away from the political branches of government.

Alito’s draft ruling would overturn a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability.

Roe’s “survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect,” Alito continues, adding that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak,” and that the original decision has had “damaging consequences.”

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes.

Alito approvingly quotes a broad range of critics of the Roe decision. He also points to liberal icons such as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who at certain points in their careers took issue with the reasoning in Roe or its impact on the political process.

Alito’s skewering of Roe and the endorsement of at least four other justices for that unsparing critique is also a measure of the court’s rightward turn in recent decades. Roe was decided 7-2 in 1973, with five Republican appointees joining two justices nominated by Democratic presidents.

The overturning of Roe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access in large swaths of the South and Midwest, with about half of the states set to immediately impose broad abortion bans. Any state could still legally allow the procedure.

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” the draft concludes. “Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The draft contains the type of caustic rhetorical flourishes Alito is known for and that has caused Roberts, his fellow Bush appointee, some discomfort in the past.

At times, Alito’s draft opinion takes an almost mocking tone as it skewers the majority opinion in Roe, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Richard Nixon appointee who died in 1999.

“Roe expressed the ‘feel[ing]’ that the Fourteenth Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance,” Alito writes.

Alito declares that one of the central tenets of Roe, the “viability” distinction between fetuses not capable of living outside the womb and those which can, “makes no sense.”

In several passages, he describes doctors and nurses who terminate pregnancies as “abortionists.”

When Roberts voted with liberal jurists in 2020 to block a Louisiana law imposing heavier regulations on abortion clinics, his solo concurrence used the more neutral term “abortion providers.” In contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas used the word “abortionist” 25 times in a solo dissent in the same case.

Alito’s use of the phrase “egregiously wrong” to describe Roe echoes language Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart used in December in defending his state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The phrase was also contained in an opinion Kavanaugh wrote as part of a 2020 ruling that jury convictions in criminal cases must be unanimous.

In that opinion, Kavanaugh labeled two well-known Supreme Court decisions “egregiously wrong when decided”: the 1944 ruling upholding the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Korematsu v. United States, and the 1896 decision that blessed racial segregation under the rubric of “separate but equal,” Plessy v. Ferguson.

The high court has never formally overturned Korematsu, but did repudiate the decision in a 2018 ruling by Roberts that upheld then-President Donald Trump’s travel ban policy.

The legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy remained the law of the land for nearly six decades until the court overturned it with the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling in 1954.

Quoting Kavanaugh, Alito writes of Plessy: “It was ‘egregiously wrong,’ on the day it was decided.”

Alito’s draft opinion includes, in small type, a list of about two pages’ worth of decisions in which the justices overruled prior precedents – in many instances reaching results praised by liberals.

The implication that allowing states to outlaw abortion is on par with ending legal racial segregation has been hotly disputed. But the comparison underscores the conservative justices’ belief that Roe is so flawed that the justices should disregard their usual hesitations about overturning precedent and wholeheartedly renounce it.

Alito’s draft opinion ventures even further into this racially sensitive territory by observing in a footnote that some early proponents of abortion rights also had unsavory views in favor of eugenics.

“Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.”

Alito writes that by raising the point he isn’t casting aspersions on anyone. “For our part, we do not question the motives of either those who have supported and those who have opposed laws restricting abortion,” he writes.

Alito also addresses concern about the impact the decision could have on public discourse. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito writes. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.”

In the main opinion in the 1992 Casey decision, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Davis Souter warned that the court would pay a “terrible price” for overruling Roe, despite criticism of the decision from some in the public and the legal community.

“While it has engendered disapproval, it has not been unworkable,” the three justices wrote then. “An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe‘s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions; no erosion of principle going to liberty or personal autonomy has left Roe‘s central holding a doctrinal remnant.”

When Dobbs was argued in December, Roberts seemed out of sync with the other conservative justices, as he has been in a number of cases including one challenging the Affordable Care Act.

At the argument session last fall, Roberts seemed to be searching for a way to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week ban without completely abandoning the Roe framework.

“Viability, it seems to me, doesn’t have anything to do with choice. But, if it really is an issue about choice, why is 15 weeks not enough time?” Roberts asked during the arguments. “The thing that is at issue before us today is 15 weeks.”

Nods to conservative colleagues

While Alito’s draft opinion doesn’t cater much to Roberts’ views, portions of it seem intended to address the specific interests of other justices. One passage argues that social attitudes toward out-of-wedlock pregnancies “have changed drastically” since the 1970s and that increased demand for adoption makes abortion less necessary.

Those points dovetail with issues that Barrett – a Trump appointee and the court’s newest member – raised at the December arguments. She suggested laws allowing people to surrender newborn babies on a no-questions-asked basis mean carrying a pregnancy to term doesn’t oblige one to engage in child rearing.

“Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?” asked Barrett, who adopted two of her seven children.

Much of Alito’s draft is devoted to arguing that widespread criminalization of abortion during the 19th and early 20th century belies the notion that a right to abortion is implied in the Constitution.

The conservative justice attached to his draft a 31-page appendix listing laws passed to criminalize abortion during that period. Alito claims “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment…from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right,” Alito adds.

Alito’s draft argues that rights protected by the Constitution but not explicitly mentioned in it – so-called unenumerated rights – must be strongly rooted in U.S. history and tradition. That form of analysis seems at odds with several of the court’s recent decisions, including many of its rulings backing gay rights.

Liberal justices seem likely to take issue with Alito’s assertion in the draft opinion that overturning Roe would not jeopardize other rights the courts have grounded in privacy, such as the right to contraception, to engage in private consensual sexual activity and to marry someone of the same sex.

“We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito writes. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Alito’s draft opinion rejects the idea that abortion bans reflect the subjugation of women in American society. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” he writes. “The percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

The Supreme Court remains one of Washington’s most secretive institutions, priding itself on protecting the confidentiality of its internal deliberations.

“At the Supreme Court, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know,” Ginsburg was fond of saying.

That tight-lipped reputation has eroded somewhat in recent decades due to a series of books by law clerks, law professors and investigative journalists. Some of these authors clearly had access to draft opinions such as the one obtained by POLITICO, but their books emerged well after the cases in question were resolved.

The justices held their final arguments of the current term on Wednesday. The court has set a series of sessions over the next two months to release rulings in its still-unresolved cases, including the Mississippi abortion case.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

This would be an attack on the health, freedom and dignity of women in the US, especially those who couldn’t afford to travel to where abortion would be available.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by jimbob » Tue May 03, 2022 5:35 am

The left have been playing by imaginary rules, conventions, really on matters of utmost importance.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by headshot » Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am

Time to expand the court.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by jimbob » Tue May 03, 2022 6:08 am

headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
yes

One of the "playing by imagined conventions" when the right are not bothering by the rules.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by IvanV » Tue May 03, 2022 7:23 am

headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
A politically appointed supreme court is a deeply flawed institution. Packing it just makes the problem worse, whatever the short term expedience of it. That way lies Venezuela. Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the court in 1937, but fortunately even his own side knew that was so wrong they prevented him.

I think everyone knows that RvW was not built on legally solid ground, whatever its expedience. It was a political solution implemented by a political institution. I think everyone knew that a solidly right wing supreme court could eventually arise, and reverse it, even though the liberal interest hoped it wouldn't happen. But now it is happening, as was always a risk.

The general trend has been to liberalise abortion across the world. Even such solidly conservative countries such as Ireland and Argentina have recently liberalised it. Typically there has been some series of appalling scandal arising from the policy, and the folly of the policy was eventually exposed for enough of the population to realise what a terrible and oppressive policy it was, so it had to fall. Individual US states have been protected from seeing that over the last 50 years by RvW. It is now sad that individual US states will have to go through the serial unpleasantnesses that have led the majority of the population in countries like Argentina and Ireland to realise that strict abortion bans are oppressive. Recently Poland has stepped back, but that remains against trend. (And Nicaragua is something else.)

My suspicion would be that once, in the modern era of communications, once those inevitable scandals start occurring in the individual states, eventually a few conservative states will open their eyes to it and start a trend of liberalising, as eventually happened in places like Ireland. Sadly it will take time and much unpleasantness on the route.

I wonder if there is a broader issue that the US constitution protects illiberal states from many of the worst natural consequences of their illiberal polities. And that is how so many individual US states have preserved those illiberalities, because many of the worst natural consequences are prevented and thus not visible and exposed to scandal and ridicule.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Woodchopper » Tue May 03, 2022 8:03 am

jimbob wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 6:08 am
headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
yes

One of the "playing by imagined conventions" when the right are not bothering by the rules.
The bill was introduced a year ago: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-con ... 7D&r=1&s=1

However, the Democrats have a majority of 4 in the House and effectively 1 in the Senate (assuming a tie is broken by the Vice President). So I'm not hopeful that it would work.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by IvanV » Tue May 03, 2022 8:56 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 8:03 am
jimbob wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 6:08 am
headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
yes

One of the "playing by imagined conventions" when the right are not bothering by the rules.
The bill was introduced a year ago: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-con ... 7D&r=1&s=1

However, the Democrats have a majority of 4 in the House and effectively 1 in the Senate (assuming a tie is broken by the Vice President). So I'm not hopeful that it would work.
I strongly suggest that you should be happy about that. It is an extremely dangerous and foolish idea, just as it was extremely dangerous and foolish when previously introduced in 1937, far more dangerous and foolish than the dangerous and foolish reversing of RvW. Fortunately, as things stand, it is not going to happen. Because there are enough Democrats who oppose it, as there were when Franklin Roosevelt proposed the same thing in 1937. Nancy Pelosi has said she has no plans to introduce it to the house.

Now if it also reformed the supreme court to make it a non-political institution, with an independent appointments commission, then that would be a valuable reform and a move in the right direction. But that lacks expedience so that won't happen. Since nothing happens without short term expedience.

US democracy is flawed enough without wilful wrecking moves like this one.

As with all political moves intending to remove checks and balances for the short term expedience of achieving one thing, you have to remember what the Other Side will do with it when they get in charge, as they will. They will use it to reverse what you did, and much else worse besides.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue May 03, 2022 8:59 am

The right has already packed the court. We don't need to worry about what they would do, because they're doing it already.
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by jimbob » Tue May 03, 2022 9:00 am

It is an extremely dangerous idea, but the GOP has been stacking the court and altering the balance.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Fishnut » Tue May 03, 2022 9:01 am

Opening Arguments has an emergency episode on this. I've only just started listening so can't say how good it is but I suspect it will have some excellent legal analysis.
it's okay to say "I don't know"

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by IvanV » Tue May 03, 2022 9:27 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 8:59 am
The right has already packed the court. We don't need to worry about what they would do, because they're doing it already.
And that's what Franklin Roosevelt said in 1937. But, by chance, a few years later, someone died and the conservative majority that reigned on the supreme court in the 1930s came to an end, and has never been regained until just recently.

RvW only happened because the supreme court had a sufficiently liberal majority at the time. It has persisted only because that has not been reversed until recently. Much as it was expedient, don't forget it was achieved by, and has persisted so long, by taking advantage of a flaw in the system, that by chance leant in one particular direction for so long.

Both sides choose supreme court justices of political expedience, when the opportunity arises. Trump had a bit of luck. That luck factor limits the cost of it of this flaw in the system. If you change the rules to take the luck out, so either side can pack it whenever they like, that expands the abuse, and the US becomes less of a democracy.

I really think you need to be very careful of what you wish for here. There is a serious risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by purplehaze » Tue May 03, 2022 9:44 am

It's a mark of a civilised society that unlimited abortion rights are enshrined in law. The first to introduce these rights, up to 12 weeks, with limitations after, was the USSR under Lenin in 1920, with Ukraine following a year later. When Stalin took power, the dictator banned abortion, overturned almost immediately following his death.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by EACLucifer » Tue May 03, 2022 9:57 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 8:59 am
The right has already packed the court. We don't need to worry about what they would do, because they're doing it already.
At supreme court level they've used dirty tricks to skew it. At state level, they've done the actually adding more judges thing.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by jimbob » Tue May 03, 2022 10:13 am

EACLucifer wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 9:57 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 8:59 am
The right has already packed the court. We don't need to worry about what they would do, because they're doing it already.
At supreme court level they've used dirty tricks to skew it. At state level, they've done the actually adding more judges thing.
And those feed into the justice system. See also Trump's appointments for Federal courts
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Chris Preston » Tue May 03, 2022 10:21 am

This decision was only a matter of time. GOP run state legislatures have been introducing anti-abortion legislation with a hope that it will end up in SCOTUS in an effort to overturn Roe v Wade. This is also why the Federalist Society had a list of candidates for the Supreme Court for Trump to choose from.

The end result will be a form of abortion apartheid where poor residents of conservative states will be denied access to abortion services, but all others will be able to access them.

Do not underestimate the influence of conservative Christian evangelism in most of the conservative states and in many of the purple states.
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by IvanV » Tue May 03, 2022 11:20 am

purplehaze wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 9:44 am
It's a mark of a civilised society that unlimited abortion rights are enshrined in law. The first to introduce these rights, up to 12 weeks, with limitations after, was the USSR under Lenin in 1920, with Ukraine following a year later. When Stalin took power, the dictator banned abortion, overturned almost immediately following his death.
Indeed. And as a mark of being flawed democracies, Honduras and Poland both recently banned abortion. And as a much more flawed democracy, Honduras did it in a way that only a 75% majority could overturn.

But let us not confuse the actions of a flawed democracy with the action of making a democracy more flawed. The latter is far worse. If you have a more flawed democracy, abortion rights are not the only civilised rights that will be removed.

The US is a flawed democracy, and many of the individual states that make it up are flawed democracies. The US has been getting more of a flawed democracy of late, as its institutions prove not up to the task of protecting itself. Both RvW and its likely reversal coming up are symptoms of those flaws. It really is not a suitable response to it to make it an even more flawed democracy. By packing the supreme court, you will only get temporary relief from this, and what happens next will be a lot worse.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by dyqik » Tue May 03, 2022 12:14 pm

IvanV wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 7:23 am
headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
A politically appointed supreme court is a deeply flawed institution. Packing it just makes the problem worse, whatever the short term expedience of it. That way lies Venezuela. Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the court in 1937, but fortunately even his own side knew that was so wrong they prevented him.
Only a straight white English speaking male with his head up his ass could write that.

The draft ruling also goes after the legalization of gay marriage, legalization of sodomy, legalization of contraception, legalization of interracial marriage, legalization of teaching children languages other than English, and the ban on forced sterilization of "undesirables", all of which were decided on the same principle of a constitutional right to privacy as Roe v Wade.

https://twitter.com/a_h_reaume/status/1 ... kzhnA&s=19

That's before we go into the other rulings and principles that this court could well overturn.

Packing the court is pretty much the only way to preserve any semblance of democracy and freedom in the United States.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by headshot » Tue May 03, 2022 12:21 pm

dyqik wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 12:14 pm
IvanV wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 7:23 am
headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
A politically appointed supreme court is a deeply flawed institution. Packing it just makes the problem worse, whatever the short term expedience of it. That way lies Venezuela. Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the court in 1937, but fortunately even his own side knew that was so wrong they prevented him.
Only a straight white English speaking male with his head up his ass could write that.

The draft ruling also goes after the legalization of gay marriage, legalization of sodomy, legalization of contraception, legalization of interracial marriage, legalization of teaching children languages other than English, and the ban on forced sterilization of "undesirables", all of which were decided on the same principle of a constitutional right to privacy as Roe v Wade.

https://twitter.com/a_h_reaume/status/1 ... kzhnA&s=19

That's before we go into the other rulings and principles that this court could well overturn.

Packing the court is pretty much the only way to preserve any semblance of democracy and freedom in the United States.
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Woodchopper » Tue May 03, 2022 12:46 pm

EACLucifer wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 9:57 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 8:59 am
The right has already packed the court. We don't need to worry about what they would do, because they're doing it already.
At supreme court level they've used dirty tricks to skew it. At state level, they've done the actually adding more judges thing.
Certainly, at the Supreme Court level if the Republicans had followed the proper process Merrick Garland would be a Justice and not Neil Gorsuch.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue May 03, 2022 1:16 pm

The choice seems to be between
1. Leave the court at it is, dysfunctional in a way that gives further privilege to a small, privileged elite
2. Make the court more dysfunctional, but in a way that serves closer to a majority of voters, by privileging whichever party is in power

Only the second option prevents imminent catastrophe. Dithering because it might make things even worse is silly: the baddies already control the court, can already do what they want, and already ignore the rules when they feel like it.

Plus you know, I'm not generally given to accelerationism, but if the court's dysfunction sometimes served the democrats rather than the GOP maybe reforming it properly would become a bipartisan issue rather than something only the rules-nerds of the left care about.
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by Woodchopper » Tue May 03, 2022 1:28 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 1:16 pm
The choice seems to be between
1. Leave the court at it is, dysfunctional in a way that gives further privilege to a small, privileged elite
2. Make the court more dysfunctional, but in a way that serves closer to a majority of voters, by privileging whichever party is in power

Only the second option prevents imminent catastrophe. Dithering because it might make things even worse is silly: the baddies already control the court, can already do what they want, and already ignore the rules when they feel like it.
I don't disagree, but unless a lot of Democrat members of the Senate change their minds there isn't going to be a majority in favour of reform of the Supreme Court. I don't think we can rule that out as a risk is less urgent than the actuality. But still, it seems that 1) is the most likely outcome.
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 1:16 pm
Plus you know, I'm not generally given to accelerationism, but if the court's dysfunction sometimes served the democrats rather than the GOP maybe reforming it properly would become a bipartisan issue rather than something only the rules-nerds of the left care about.
That would be the sensible outcome. Unlikely to happen though.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue May 03, 2022 1:39 pm

dyqik wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 12:14 pm
IvanV wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 7:23 am
headshot wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 5:54 am
Time to expand the court.
A politically appointed supreme court is a deeply flawed institution. Packing it just makes the problem worse, whatever the short term expedience of it. That way lies Venezuela. Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the court in 1937, but fortunately even his own side knew that was so wrong they prevented him.
Only a straight white English speaking male with his head up his ass could write that.

The draft ruling also goes after the legalization of gay marriage, legalization of sodomy, legalization of contraception, legalization of interracial marriage, legalization of teaching children languages other than English, and the ban on forced sterilization of "undesirables", all of which were decided on the same principle of a constitutional right to privacy as Roe v Wade.

https://twitter.com/a_h_reaume/status/1 ... kzhnA&s=19

That's before we go into the other rulings and principles that this court could well overturn.

Packing the court is pretty much the only way to preserve any semblance of democracy and freedom in the United States.
I think you're being unfair to Ivan here. His position to be concerned about court packing is perfectly legitimate. We all appreciate the seismic impact of the rulings on women, gay people, non-whites, etc., but packing the court is a Rubicon which, once crossed, opens even more opportunity to Republicans to make the US a worse, more hostile country.

Ivan is right that the original Roe vs Wade ruling, whilst it has made a huge difference to women's lives in the US in the last 50 years, was on a weak footing and needed more legal and constitutional ground underneath it to survive attacks which were sadly inevitable. All it needed was the sort of run of luck and game-playing which Trump had, and it could be attacked again.

I understand that this is an appalling and terrifying situation for women in the US to be in, and I understand too that the impacts of failing to pack the court are very bad, but packing the court itself could lead to some awful outcomes whenever the Republicans find themselves in a strong position again in future, which could be as soon as 2024 or 2026.
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dyqik
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by dyqik » Tue May 03, 2022 1:53 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 1:39 pm
dyqik wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 12:14 pm
IvanV wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 7:23 am

A politically appointed supreme court is a deeply flawed institution. Packing it just makes the problem worse, whatever the short term expedience of it. That way lies Venezuela. Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the court in 1937, but fortunately even his own side knew that was so wrong they prevented him.
Only a straight white English speaking male with his head up his ass could write that.

The draft ruling also goes after the legalization of gay marriage, legalization of sodomy, legalization of contraception, legalization of interracial marriage, legalization of teaching children languages other than English, and the ban on forced sterilization of "undesirables", all of which were decided on the same principle of a constitutional right to privacy as Roe v Wade.

https://twitter.com/a_h_reaume/status/1 ... kzhnA&s=19

That's before we go into the other rulings and principles that this court could well overturn.

Packing the court is pretty much the only way to preserve any semblance of democracy and freedom in the United States.
I think you're being unfair to Ivan here. His position to be concerned about court packing is perfectly legitimate. We all appreciate the seismic impact of the rulings on women, gay people, non-whites, etc., but packing the court is a Rubicon which, once crossed, opens even more opportunity to Republicans to make the US a worse, more hostile country.

Ivan is right that the original Roe vs Wade ruling, whilst it has made a huge difference to women's lives in the US in the last 50 years, was on a weak footing and needed more legal and constitutional ground underneath it to survive attacks which were sadly inevitable. All it needed was the sort of run of luck and game-playing which Trump had, and it could be attacked again.

I understand that this is an appalling and terrifying situation for women in the US to be in, and I understand too that the impacts of failing to pack the court are very bad, but packing the court itself could lead to some awful outcomes whenever the Republicans find themselves in a strong position again in future, which could be as soon as 2024 or 2026.
It's not "just" women. It's also gay men, non-white men, non-evangelical Christians, men who don't wish to have children. And anyone who doesn't vote Republican.

The court has been packed before, and is essentially packed now, as are the lower courts. There is no Rubicon to cross here.

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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by jimbob » Tue May 03, 2022 2:14 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 1:16 pm
The choice seems to be between
1. Leave the court at it is, dysfunctional in a way that gives further privilege to a small, privileged elite
2. Make the court more dysfunctional, but in a way that serves closer to a majority of voters, by privileging whichever party is in power

Only the second option prevents imminent catastrophe. Dithering because it might make things even worse is silly: the baddies already control the court, can already do what they want, and already ignore the rules when they feel like it.

Plus you know, I'm not generally given to accelerationism, but if the court's dysfunction sometimes served the democrats rather than the GOP maybe reforming it properly would become a bipartisan issue rather than something only the rules-nerds of the left care about.
Dysfunctional and ratcheting to the right as the Religious Right have stopped playing by the conventions that gave it some semblance of evenness.
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Re: Roe v Wade likely to be overturned

Post by IvanV » Tue May 03, 2022 2:50 pm

dyqik wrote:
Tue May 03, 2022 12:14 pm
The court has been packed before, and is essentially packed now, as are the lower courts. There is no Rubicon to cross here.
OK, so you think this isn't crossing a Rubicon. So that explains why you think that the other side are utterly not going to play by the rules anyway. But I think that raising the bar for misbehaviour will result in them raising it further.

You are right that the supreme court has been packed before. And there is much else wrong in US jurisprudence. But the supreme court has not been packed legislatively for a long time, only by taking advantage when it is your turn to choose a justice, which both sides do. So they took a bit more than is usually taken when the Gorsuch case arose. But that was a small escalation. I think the holding back from legislative packing in 1937, when Roosevelt had his New Deal held up by the court on very flimsy grounds, suggests that there is now a long term truce on not packing the court legislatively.

Abortion is a bigger issue for conservative voters than liberal voters. Do not forget that. It is often the biggest thing that determines how they vote, whereas it rarely is for liberals. If now the liberals pack the court by legislatively, the conservatives will in turn will have absolutely no compunction about packing the court in the same way, or even worse, to ensure the overturning of it. Because it matters big time to them. And then they'll just splurge all their other terrible stuff because all of a sudden they will think that they can do that.

Ultimately if we advocate democracy, we have to have some faith in voters. Cancelling RvW sends this back to state legislatures. Half of them have already liberalised abortion voluntarily. The others remain appalled 60 years later that this was ever foisted on them involutarily, and their first instinct is to put the clock back. Most other electorates in the world have eventually seen the sense in permitting abortion, even in many somewhat less than perfect democracies like Argentina. Even in conservative catholic countries. Perhaps the individual US states aren't so exceptional that won't happen there too. I think that is a better chance for the US to grow up politically than raising the war of anti-democratic methods. Because whatever the liberals do, the conservatives will throw back in their faces and much worse, as soon as they can.

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