Linda Greenhouse: ‘Justice Alito’s Invisible Women’

 

 

 From the New York Times:

Yes, the leak of the draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was a shock. And it was shocking to read Justice Samuel Alito’s airy dismissal of a decision the Supreme Court has reaffirmed numerous times in the past 49 years as “egregiously wrong from the start.” That was on Page 6 of the draft opinion that Politico published last Monday, and Justice Alito spent the next 61 pages explaining why, in his view and perhaps ultimately in the view of four other justices, the court needs to overturn Roe now.

But the real shock to me was not what those 67 pages contain — mostly warmed-over stock phrases from the anti-abortion playbook that read like a law clerk’s cut-and-paste job — but rather who is missing: women.

Women were largely absent from Roe v. Wade too. While Roe exists in the culture as some kind of feminist screed about the right to abortion, it was anything but that. If people set preconceptions aside and actually read Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion, they would see that Roe was really a decision about the right of doctors to exercise their judgment about a patient’s best interest without risking prosecution and prison. How else to interpret this summary sentence from near the end of the opinion? “The decision vindicates the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment up to the points where important state interests provide compelling justifications for intervention.”

 

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That was then. Forty-nine years later, we live in a different constitutional universe — or thought we did. Mississippi, defending a ban on virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy that is flatly unconstitutional under current Supreme Court precedents, is asking the court to overturn those precedents. Granted that the young Samuel Alito, as a recent Princeton graduate, joined an organization of conservatives who sought to limit the inclusion of women at his alma mater. Granted that he has made clear his desire to overturn Roe since even before his days on the court. It is still astonishing that in 2022 he would use his power to erase the right to abortion without in any way meaningfully acknowledging the impact both on women and on the constitutional understanding of sex equality as it has evolved in the past half-century.

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Peggy Cooper Davis: ‘The Reconstruction amendments matter when considering abortion rights’

 

From the Washington Post:

On Monday night [May 2, 2022], Politico reported that a Supreme Court made significantly more conservative by President Donald Trump’s appointments had voted in an initial conference on a Mississippi abortion case to overturn the line of decisions beginning with Roe v. Wade in 1973 that provide the right to have an abortion. The bombshell report also included a draft opinion that it said Justice Samuel Alito had written.

The Founders may not have intended in 1789 to secure for the people of the United States liberty to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. The framers of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not known to have contemplated abortion choice as it relates to the balance between individual and family autonomy on the one hand and state power on the other.

But, the Constitution underwent a radical transformation after the Civil War. A document that had tolerated human bondage and been interpreted to deny Black people the privileges of citizenship was amended to embrace principles of human equality and republican freedom. The 13th Amendment secured the blessings of liberty by ending slavery. The 14th Amendment protected against unwarranted invasions of human liberty.

The lawmakers who implemented those changes did so in direct response to slavery’s heartless separations of families and to enslavers’ brutal practices of human breeding.

 

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Brian Tyler Cohen: ‘Elizabeth Warren goes megaviral with stunning speech after “Roe” news’

Bill Maher: ‘The [Republicans’] War on Democracy’

 

Bill Maher has been directing a lot of his verbal fire at Democrats lately — and with them in charge in the White House and in the Congress, that’s understandable.  But he’s also been getting a lot of stuff wrong lately.  The plight of people of color seems to be particularly off Maher’s radar.  He’s been needlessly cynical regarding health regulations in the wake of the coronavirus.  And because of this, he’s come down with foot-in-mouth disease several times over the last year and a half.  But he’s still spot-on when it comes to articulating the threat posed to U.S. democracy by the Republican Party.  This is his best “New Rule” in a while.

Brian Tyler Cohen: ‘Michigan Democrat Gives the Most Viral Speech of the Year’

Paul Waldman: ‘Republicans just gave us a terrifying preview of their 2024 strategy’

 From the Washington Post:

If Republicans announce now, two-and-a-half years in advance, that they’re refusing to participate in the debates, it could save them a last-minute act of cowardice. But the more important reason they’re doing this is to reinforce the idea that every institution and practice associated with the presidential campaign must be considered corrupt and biased against Trump and therefore illegitimate, whether it’s the news media, the debates, maybe even the weather — and especially the vote counting.

 

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Jonathan Chait: ‘Why Ketanji Brown Jackson will be the last Democratic justice for a long time’

 

From New York magazine:

On the surface, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court appeared to portend a hopeful future for liberals. She was the bright, youthful (as these things go) face of a more enlightened judiciary.

But appearances can be deceiving. A more accurate picture of the Court’s future could actually be discerned from two other stories that flanked it. The first was Ginni Thomas’s ravings to Donald Trump’s chief of staff — more specifically, the nonplussed response thereto from the Republican Establishment, which is perfectly satisfied to allow a prominent conservative activist to draw on her connection to an esteemed conservative jurist to promote QAnon-inflected conspiracy theories in the highest corridors of power.

The second was Mitch McConnell’s refusal to commit to hold any hearings for a potential Supreme Court vacancy should his party win a Senate majority when prodded by Jonathan Swan. McConnell made it clear that Jackson is likely the last Supreme Court justice Democrats will nominate for years, maybe even a decade or more.

Jackson’s confirmation was a brief, joyful respite. The future is a semi-permanent Republican judicial majority in which, contrary to the visual impression, Thomas’s worldview is much closer to the mainstream and Jackson’s is a relic of a rapidly fading past.

 

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