SCOTUS

[NattyBohChamps04]

The free market solved this a long time ago. Wanna encourage prayer with your kids while you're at work? Coach at a private religious school. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Thought exercise. What would happen if some coach at a public school prayed Islamic prayers at the 50 yard line and created an environment where kids wouldn't feel comfortable not praying in regards to seeing the field.

[runrussellrun]

The coach was an employee of the school, correct? His employer told him several times to stop.

To stop what? Speaking freely?

Supremes love bizness, and I view this coach to be a huckster recruiter for his "religion". On a pledge drive; a mission to bring in more into the fold. A sales pitch....this BS midfield "prayer session". (Obama's good friends, Franklin Graham & family, sure DO have a nice ranch. God IS good

BUT........how IS this any different than a coach owning a "club " team, kind of "hinting" to the players, that you gotta play for X club.
Similar to the pathetic listing of club team participation in college bio's, prevelant on the womens side. It's a promotion. An advertizement.

Tells the POOR......pay up....if you wanna go into "finance", b/c you schooled up b/c you can rock a rocker step....and we all know wall$treet don't hire from "state" colleges.

Any young High school player, anywhere in the country, feel pressure to join "certain" lacrosse clubs?

[runrussellrun]

The coach was an employee of the school, correct? His employer told him several times to stop.

To stop what? Speaking freely?

Supremes love bizness, and I view this coach to be a huckster recruiter for his "religion". On a pledge drive; a mission to bring in more into the fold. A sales pitch....this BS midfield "prayer session". (Obama's good friends, Franklin Graham & family, sure DO have a nice ranch. God IS good

BUT........how IS this any different than a coach owning a "club " team, kind of "hinting" to the players, that you gotta play for X club.
Similar to the pathetic listing of club team participation in college bio's, prevelant on the womens side. It's a promotion. An advertizement.

Tells the POOR......pay up....if you wanna go into "finance", b/c you schooled up b/c you can rock a rocker step....and we all know wall$treet don't hire from "state" colleges.

Any young High school player, anywhere in the country, feel pressure to join "certain" lacrosse clubs?

what about candy bar sales ? raffles? car washes. captains practices

"coach....I gotta work, I can't make the car wash".

"well.......I will have to bench you. "

[runrussellrun]

Good grief, Cranky READ THE FORKIN ARTICLE and get back to us with something approaching cogent commentary. You're flapping your gums here in an extraordinarily uninformed way. This author is actually TRYING to give Brett Kegenough? some credit here...

..

Here, spoonfeeding:

"Not every member of the football team shared their coach’s Christian faith. But virtually all of them felt compelled to participate. Team members later explained that praying with Kennedy was “expected.” The coach even encouraged his own players to recruit their opponents and their coaches into the prayer circle. Some students joined in only because they feared they “wouldn’t get to play as much” if they declined, or because “they did not wish to separate themselves from the team.”

These are exactly the issues that the Founders feared, whatever the context: state actors letting people subordinate to them know that there is a correct religion, and an incorrect one, or worse probably, irreligion. Pilgrims, Puritans and Anne Hutchinson anyone?

... this stuff is only hard if it is your intention to make it hard

You should take your own advice doc. Your making mountains out of molehills. I'm being led to believe the coach was praying at the 50 yard line while taking attendence as to who was joining him in prayer. You folks are ASSUMING these players were being forced or persuaded into praying. I don't read one iota of evidence that coached forced any of his players to do anything they did not want to do. Neither have I read any proof the coach somehow retaliated against any player that chose to not join in any prayer session.

From the Slate article cited by dis:

Not every member of the football team shared their coach’s Christian faith. But virtually all of them felt compelled to participate. Team members later explained that praying with Kennedy was “expected.” The coach even encouraged his own players to recruit their opponents and their coaches into the prayer circle. Some students joined in only because they feared they “wouldn’t get to play as much” if they declined, or because “they did not wish to separate themselves from the team.”

One member of the football team during Kennedy’s tenure, who came forward under a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, attested that he refused to bow his head because Kennedy’s prayers did not align with his own beliefs. He was then “persecuted” for failing to conform, treated poorly by the coaches and permitted to play only because of his talent on the field. The experience still haunts him, as well as others who felt queasy about the indoctrination they faced at school. These players, the student said, “would rather forget about that time of their life.”

All this lawsuit really proves is that the HIgh school kids come from families that don't honor their own principles.

Sorry, but all these folks are doing is showing what cowards they are.

"I felt compelled to participate" ....geez.....no wonder why hazing and deaths occur.

Oh...the need to fit in and have "friends"

comical you guys are picking on green guy......as IF you can really, really, nail your point home THIS time......

[ggait]

what about candy bar sales ? raffles? car washes. captains practices

"coach....I gotta work, I can't make the car wash".

"well.......I will have to bench you. "

Excellent job. You've proved the exact point why the coach should lose.

All of those things are coercive.

But the Constitution doesn't guarantee freedom from captains practices. But it does guarantee freedom from having the State force you to worship.

[Andersen]

Andersen wrote: ↑Thu Apr 28, 2022 5:18 pm
The coach was an employee of the school, correct? His employer told him several times to stop.
To stop what? Speaking freely?

Supremes love bizness, and I view this coach to be a huckster recruiter for his "religion". On a pledge drive; a mission to bring in more into the fold. A sales pitch....this BS midfield "prayer session". (Obama's good friends, Franklin Graham & family, sure DO have a nice ranch. God IS good

BUT........how IS this any different than a coach owning a "club " team, kind of "hinting" to the players, that you gotta play for X club.
Similar to the pathetic listing of club team participation in college bio's, prevelant on the womens side. It's a promotion. An advertizement.

Tells the POOR......pay up....if you wanna go into "finance", b/c you schooled up b/c you can rock a rocker step....and we all know wall$treet don't hire from "state" colleges.

Any young High school player, anywhere in the country, feel pressure to join "certain" lacrosse clubs?

The school told a school employee to stop holding prayers on school property after a school function. He's perfectly free to hold prayers at another time and another place.

[cradleandshoot]

Andersen wrote: ↑Thu Apr 28, 2022 5:18 pm
The coach was an employee of the school, correct? His employer told him several times to stop.
To stop what? Speaking freely?

Supremes love bizness, and I view this coach to be a huckster recruiter for his "religion". On a pledge drive; a mission to bring in more into the fold. A sales pitch....this BS midfield "prayer session". (Obama's good friends, Franklin Graham & family, sure DO have a nice ranch. God IS good

BUT........how IS this any different than a coach owning a "club " team, kind of "hinting" to the players, that you gotta play for X club.
Similar to the pathetic listing of club team participation in college bio's, prevelant on the womens side. It's a promotion. An advertizement.

Tells the POOR......pay up....if you wanna go into "finance", b/c you schooled up b/c you can rock a rocker step....and we all know wall$treet don't hire from "state" colleges.

Any young High school player, anywhere in the country, feel pressure to join "certain" lacrosse clubs?

The school told a school employee to stop holding prayers on school property after a school function. He's perfectly free to hold prayers at another time and another place.

So define what a prayer is???

[dislaxxic]

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.”

Samuel Alito...who else?

..

[DocBarrister]

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.”

Samuel Alito...who else?

..

If the final decision reflects this draft, this Supreme Court is very dangerous to our democracy.

I have not donated money to Democratic candidates since the 2020 election … until now.

Those who believe in Life and Liberty need to fight the Fascist Far Right that is threatening us all.

DocBarrister

[ggait]

Reports are that Roberts will dissent from this.

While that guy is really conservative on partisan issues, he is a true conservative.

Knows this is just wrong and will disgrace the Court.

The good thing is, the MAGAs and GOP will have some accountability on this after decades of skating.

Game on for November 2022.

[jhu72]

Reports are that Roberts will dissent from this.

While that guy is really conservative on partisan issues, he is a true conservative.

Knows this is just wrong and will disgrace the Court.

The good thing is, the MAGAs and GOP will have some accountability on this after decades of skating.

Game on for November 2022.

Yup. Not even a little surprised re Roberts dissent.

[jhu72]

Mark Levine and Laura Ingraham have both had meltdowns over the news. Such snowflakes. They can't be happy with their victory. They are outraged (faux of course) that someone and they are certain they know who, leaked the document (damn democrats of course).

[dislaxxic]

The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost Dahlia Lithwick calls balls 'n strikes...and this is a full-on strike OUT.

If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey this June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the Court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the Court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.

If this draft opinion becomes precedent of the Court, the results will be catastrophic for women, particularly for women in the states that will immediately make abortion unlawful, and in those places, particularly for young women, poor women, and black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state. The Court’s staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy is exceeded only but its vicious disregard for the real consequences for real pregnant people who are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from terminating a pregnancy. The Mississippi law—the law that this opinion is upholding—has no exception for rape or incest. We will immediately see a raft of bans that give rights to fathers, including sexual assailants, and punish with ever more cruelty and violence women who miscarry or do harm to their fetuses. The days of pretending that women’s health and safety were of paramount concern are over.

For all the shock has been expressed at what is truly a shocking opinion, polling suggests that the American public may turn its shock into legitimate political anger. CNN polling from January showed that just 30 percent of Americans wanted the Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and 52 percent said that should Roe be overturned, they would want their state to become a safe haven for women seeking abortion. Thirty-five percent said they would be angry if the ruling were overturned compared with just 14 percent who said they would be happy.

But in his draft opinion Justice Alito wants America to know he doesn’t care about voters’ feelings. “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.”

Ironically, whoever decided to leak the opinion cared very much about the political implications of the impending decision. It is one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the Court, actually. It is perhaps the most emphatic confirmation that there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules, but is instead currently under unprecedented public scrutiny for its very absence of binding rules. The same Supreme Court that blames journalists for its sinking polling numbers and refuses to be bound by ethics rules wants you to know that it doesn’t answer to politics. But it surely produces politics.

In other words, in addition to Justice Alito’s sneering references to “abortionists” and eugenics and his gleeful mockery of the authors of both Roe and Casey, anyone who believed that the Court would pretend to have any solicitude whatsoever for women, for public opinion, for its own reputation as a moderate branch, was well and truly kidding themselves. This draft opinion, whatever may be done to it in the days to come, is Exhibit A for anyone who believed that Barrett or Kavanaugh or time or history or respect for their colleagues or the Justices who came before them would moderate the 5 justices in this current majority, a majority that ought to know it stole its way into a majority, but again refuses to even feign self-moderation in the face of that fact. We knew this when Texas’ SB 8 law banning abortion after 6 weeks was decided on the shadow docket in September, and when the Court let it stand again this winter. We knew it when we watched the Dobbs arguments last fall. Roe had already been effectively overturned then, we have just had trouble catching up.

It is hard to keep this in perspective tonight, in light of the shattering ruling it portends, but there are real and enduring consequences to the fact that the draft opinion was leaked. There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that someone told Politico what the vote count was, 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.” There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that we now seem to know what Chief Justice Roberts wants to do, already. The implications for trust and confidence in secret proceedings for the nine Justices are stunning. The leaks from the court around Justice Gorsuch declining to wear a mask at oral arguments this winter were a dry run for today’s. Whatever norm had been keeping the Justices from showing us their Real Housewives of One First Street antics is now gone as well.

The court will surely suffer for this shattering self-own to its own legitimacy. But the rule of law and the public will suffer as well. The three Republican-appointed justices who authored the plurality opinion in Casey knew very well what would happen to the Court if it disregarded and disparaged the American public, the Constitution and itself. Be afraid for what’s coming next in terms of personal autonomy and liberty, for LGBTQ protections and the right to contraception, yes. But be equally afraid for the abstraction of an independent and principled judiciary. No matter what happens next, that’s already lost.

..

[Seacoaster(1)]

The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost Dahlia Lithwick calls balls 'n strikes...and this is a full-on strike OUT.

If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey this June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the Court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the Court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.

If this draft opinion becomes precedent of the Court, the results will be catastrophic for women, particularly for women in the states that will immediately make abortion unlawful, and in those places, particularly for young women, poor women, and black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state. The Court’s staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy is exceeded only but its vicious disregard for the real consequences for real pregnant people who are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from terminating a pregnancy. The Mississippi law—the law that this opinion is upholding—has no exception for rape or incest. We will immediately see a raft of bans that give rights to fathers, including sexual assailants, and punish with ever more cruelty and violence women who miscarry or do harm to their fetuses. The days of pretending that women’s health and safety were of paramount concern are over.

For all the shock has been expressed at what is truly a shocking opinion, polling suggests that the American public may turn its shock into legitimate political anger. CNN polling from January showed that just 30 percent of Americans wanted the Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and 52 percent said that should Roe be overturned, they would want their state to become a safe haven for women seeking abortion. Thirty-five percent said they would be angry if the ruling were overturned compared with just 14 percent who said they would be happy.

But in his draft opinion Justice Alito wants America to know he doesn’t care about voters’ feelings. “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.”

Ironically, whoever decided to leak the opinion cared very much about the political implications of the impending decision. It is one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the Court, actually. It is perhaps the most emphatic confirmation that there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules, but is instead currently under unprecedented public scrutiny for its very absence of binding rules. The same Supreme Court that blames journalists for its sinking polling numbers and refuses to be bound by ethics rules wants you to know that it doesn’t answer to politics. But it surely produces politics.

In other words, in addition to Justice Alito’s sneering references to “abortionists” and eugenics and his gleeful mockery of the authors of both Roe and Casey, anyone who believed that the Court would pretend to have any solicitude whatsoever for women, for public opinion, for its own reputation as a moderate branch, was well and truly kidding themselves. This draft opinion, whatever may be done to it in the days to come, is Exhibit A for anyone who believed that Barrett or Kavanaugh or time or history or respect for their colleagues or the Justices who came before them would moderate the 5 justices in this current majority, a majority that ought to know it stole its way into a majority, but again refuses to even feign self-moderation in the face of that fact. We knew this when Texas’ SB 8 law banning abortion after 6 weeks was decided on the shadow docket in September, and when the Court let it stand again this winter. We knew it when we watched the Dobbs arguments last fall. Roe had already been effectively overturned then, we have just had trouble catching up.

It is hard to keep this in perspective tonight, in light of the shattering ruling it portends, but there are real and enduring consequences to the fact that the draft opinion was leaked. There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that someone told Politico what the vote count was, 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.” There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that we now seem to know what Chief Justice Roberts wants to do, already. The implications for trust and confidence in secret proceedings for the nine Justices are stunning. The leaks from the court around Justice Gorsuch declining to wear a mask at oral arguments this winter were a dry run for today’s. Whatever norm had been keeping the Justices from showing us their Real Housewives of One First Street antics is now gone as well.

The court will surely suffer for this shattering self-own to its own legitimacy. But the rule of law and the public will suffer as well. The three Republican-appointed justices who authored the plurality opinion in Casey knew very well what would happen to the Court if it disregarded and disparaged the American public, the Constitution and itself. Be afraid for what’s coming next in terms of personal autonomy and liberty, for LGBTQ protections and the right to contraception, yes. But be equally afraid for the abstraction of an independent and principled judiciary. No matter what happens next, that’s already lost.

..

Yes, this nicely sums it up. Thanks for posting.

[jhu72]

The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost Dahlia Lithwick calls balls 'n strikes...and this is a full-on strike OUT.

If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey this June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the Court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the Court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.

If this draft opinion becomes precedent of the Court, the results will be catastrophic for women, particularly for women in the states that will immediately make abortion unlawful, and in those places, particularly for young women, poor women, and black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state. The Court’s staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy is exceeded only but its vicious disregard for the real consequences for real pregnant people who are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from terminating a pregnancy. The Mississippi law—the law that this opinion is upholding—has no exception for rape or incest. We will immediately see a raft of bans that give rights to fathers, including sexual assailants, and punish with ever more cruelty and violence women who miscarry or do harm to their fetuses. The days of pretending that women’s health and safety were of paramount concern are over.

For all the shock has been expressed at what is truly a shocking opinion, polling suggests that the American public may turn its shock into legitimate political anger. CNN polling from January showed that just 30 percent of Americans wanted the Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and 52 percent said that should Roe be overturned, they would want their state to become a safe haven for women seeking abortion. Thirty-five percent said they would be angry if the ruling were overturned compared with just 14 percent who said they would be happy.

But in his draft opinion Justice Alito wants America to know he doesn’t care about voters’ feelings. “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.”

Ironically, whoever decided to leak the opinion cared very much about the political implications of the impending decision. It is one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the Court, actually. It is perhaps the most emphatic confirmation that there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules, but is instead currently under unprecedented public scrutiny for its very absence of binding rules. The same Supreme Court that blames journalists for its sinking polling numbers and refuses to be bound by ethics rules wants you to know that it doesn’t answer to politics. But it surely produces politics.

In other words, in addition to Justice Alito’s sneering references to “abortionists” and eugenics and his gleeful mockery of the authors of both Roe and Casey, anyone who believed that the Court would pretend to have any solicitude whatsoever for women, for public opinion, for its own reputation as a moderate branch, was well and truly kidding themselves. This draft opinion, whatever may be done to it in the days to come, is Exhibit A for anyone who believed that Barrett or Kavanaugh or time or history or respect for their colleagues or the Justices who came before them would moderate the 5 justices in this current majority, a majority that ought to know it stole its way into a majority, but again refuses to even feign self-moderation in the face of that fact. We knew this when Texas’ SB 8 law banning abortion after 6 weeks was decided on the shadow docket in September, and when the Court let it stand again this winter. We knew it when we watched the Dobbs arguments last fall. Roe had already been effectively overturned then, we have just had trouble catching up.

It is hard to keep this in perspective tonight, in light of the shattering ruling it portends, but there are real and enduring consequences to the fact that the draft opinion was leaked. There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that someone told Politico what the vote count was, 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.” There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that we now seem to know what Chief Justice Roberts wants to do, already. The implications for trust and confidence in secret proceedings for the nine Justices are stunning. The leaks from the court around Justice Gorsuch declining to wear a mask at oral arguments this winter were a dry run for today’s. Whatever norm had been keeping the Justices from showing us their Real Housewives of One First Street antics is now gone as well.

The court will surely suffer for this shattering self-own to its own legitimacy. But the rule of law and the public will suffer as well. The three Republican-appointed justices who authored the plurality opinion in Casey knew very well what would happen to the Court if it disregarded and disparaged the American public, the Constitution and itself. Be afraid for what’s coming next in terms of personal autonomy and liberty, for LGBTQ protections and the right to contraception, yes. But be equally afraid for the abstraction of an independent and principled judiciary. No matter what happens next, that’s already lost.

..

Yes, this nicely sums it up. Thanks for posting.

+1

[DocBarrister]

The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost Dahlia Lithwick calls balls 'n strikes...and this is a full-on strike OUT.

If the Supreme Court indeed strikes down Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey this June, as the draft opinion leaked to and published by Politico tonight suggests it will, years of conventional wisdom about the Court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong. Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or “chipping away” at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the Court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.

If this draft opinion becomes precedent of the Court, the results will be catastrophic for women, particularly for women in the states that will immediately make abortion unlawful, and in those places, particularly for young women, poor women, and black and brown women who will not have the time, resources, or ability to travel out of state. The Court’s staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy is exceeded only but its vicious disregard for the real consequences for real pregnant people who are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from terminating a pregnancy. The Mississippi law—the law that this opinion is upholding—has no exception for rape or incest. We will immediately see a raft of bans that give rights to fathers, including sexual assailants, and punish with ever more cruelty and violence women who miscarry or do harm to their fetuses. The days of pretending that women’s health and safety were of paramount concern are over.

For all the shock has been expressed at what is truly a shocking opinion, polling suggests that the American public may turn its shock into legitimate political anger. CNN polling from January showed that just 30 percent of Americans wanted the Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and 52 percent said that should Roe be overturned, they would want their state to become a safe haven for women seeking abortion. Thirty-five percent said they would be angry if the ruling were overturned compared with just 14 percent who said they would be happy.

But in his draft opinion Justice Alito wants America to know he doesn’t care about voters’ feelings. “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.”

Ironically, whoever decided to leak the opinion cared very much about the political implications of the impending decision. It is one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the Court, actually. It is perhaps the most emphatic confirmation that there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules, but is instead currently under unprecedented public scrutiny for its very absence of binding rules. The same Supreme Court that blames journalists for its sinking polling numbers and refuses to be bound by ethics rules wants you to know that it doesn’t answer to politics. But it surely produces politics.

In other words, in addition to Justice Alito’s sneering references to “abortionists” and eugenics and his gleeful mockery of the authors of both Roe and Casey, anyone who believed that the Court would pretend to have any solicitude whatsoever for women, for public opinion, for its own reputation as a moderate branch, was well and truly kidding themselves. This draft opinion, whatever may be done to it in the days to come, is Exhibit A for anyone who believed that Barrett or Kavanaugh or time or history or respect for their colleagues or the Justices who came before them would moderate the 5 justices in this current majority, a majority that ought to know it stole its way into a majority, but again refuses to even feign self-moderation in the face of that fact. We knew this when Texas’ SB 8 law banning abortion after 6 weeks was decided on the shadow docket in September, and when the Court let it stand again this winter. We knew it when we watched the Dobbs arguments last fall. Roe had already been effectively overturned then, we have just had trouble catching up.

It is hard to keep this in perspective tonight, in light of the shattering ruling it portends, but there are real and enduring consequences to the fact that the draft opinion was leaked. There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that someone told Politico what the vote count was, 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.” There are real and enduring consequences to the fact that we now seem to know what Chief Justice Roberts wants to do, already. The implications for trust and confidence in secret proceedings for the nine Justices are stunning. The leaks from the court around Justice Gorsuch declining to wear a mask at oral arguments this winter were a dry run for today’s. Whatever norm had been keeping the Justices from showing us their Real Housewives of One First Street antics is now gone as well.

The court will surely suffer for this shattering self-own to its own legitimacy. But the rule of law and the public will suffer as well. The three Republican-appointed justices who authored the plurality opinion in Casey knew very well what would happen to the Court if it disregarded and disparaged the American public, the Constitution and itself. Be afraid for what’s coming next in terms of personal autonomy and liberty, for LGBTQ protections and the right to contraception, yes. But be equally afraid for the abstraction of an independent and principled judiciary. No matter what happens next, that’s already lost.

..

Yes, this nicely sums it up. Thanks for posting.

+1

Rule by ultra-conservative theocratic trash may be accepted in Iran, but there is no reason it should be accepted in the United States.

DocBarrister

[cradleandshoot]

https://college.cengage.com/polisci/edu ... ssent.html

Justice Rehnquist was correct in his dissent 50 years ago. In his opinion there was NO constitutional right to an abortion. What Justice Alito has said in the leaked decision by some SCUMBAG FLP.. is that abortion rights are state rights. The same effing thing Justice Rehnquist said in his dissent 50 years ago. Right on cue the FLP hatemongers have stepped forward to spew their venom. Here in NYS you folks don't have to worry. The right to an abortion has been guaranteed as should have been done in the first place... IT IS A STATE RIGHT!!!! Let the states and the people of the states decide

"There apparently was no question concerning the validity of this provision or of any of the other state statutes when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. The only conclusion possible from this history is that the drafters did not intend to have the Fourteenth Amendment withdraw from the States the power to legislate with respect to this matter"

[dislaxxic]

Why Justice Alito can’t find a reference to the right to abortion in our nation’s defining document.

In Samuel Alito’s draft of the opinion that is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, the conservative justice makes a familiar argument about the ruling that he seeks to overturn: that Roe was a poorly reasoned decision that isn’t based on anything in the U.S. Constitution.

Here is Alito’s version of that argument, which comes in the second paragraph of the 98-page draft (the first paragraph acknowledges Americans’ divergent views on abortion itself):

For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. … After cataloguing a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by the legislature.

This reasoning sounds logical enough. The Supreme Court is not meant to legislate. It is tasked with parsing and interpreting the Constitution—to understand it so it can enforce it.

But there’s a major problem with the argument that Alito makes here and that others have made before him: It ignores the context in which the Constitution was written, and who it was written by and for.

The right to abortion is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution because the Constitution does not concern itself with the rights of women. As originally written, the Constitution did not even guarantee women the right to vote—it endowed no one with that right aside from propertied white men. The omission of abortion, then, says less about the issue itself than about who the Founding Fathers considered people.

Nearly 200 years after the Constitution was drafted, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women across America pushed to liberalize restrictive abortion laws. These advocates were coming into their own as professionals, and they realized that reproductive autonomy was essential for them to live full lives.

I interviewed one of those women recently. Ann Hill started law school at Yale in 1968, getting admitted only because so many men were fighting in Vietnam. In her first few weeks of school, she realized she was pregnant, and chose to get an illegal abortion. In the aftermath of that procedure, thinking about how she’d been forced to risk her life to control her reproduction, she got angry. “I was furious that … a whole state, a whole country would place women in jeopardy,” she told me. “I was bound and determined to change it. So nobody else, no other woman would have to go through the danger and the fear and the anger that I went through when I realized that I was a second-class citizen.”

Her usage of second-class is intentional; it’s an apt description of how the Constitution and those who interpreted it regarded women in 1968. Hill would spend her three years in law school honing an argument that a woman’s right to abortion can be found in the Constitution—that, among other places, it’s covered by the 14th Amendment, which guarantees all people equal protection under the law, and that pregnancy and childbirth can constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Those claims formed the basis of a case Hill brought with other lawyers against the state of Connecticut—a case she won.

The argument that won the day in Roe—what became the basis for women’s right to abortion nationwide—was based on the right to privacy, another point that Hill and her fellow lawyers seized on in their case. The Supreme Court ruled that such a right could be found in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This has historically been viewed as a weak justification, even by liberals, a fact that Alito pointed out in his draft opinion. But it’s worth remembering that the 14th Amendment was one of a suite of amendments that was enacted after the Civil War to correct the wrongs of slavery, and to address the fundamental failings of the Constitution itself.

This is what Samuel Alito leaves out when he says “the Constitution makes no mention of abortion.” With regards to abortion, the most notable thing that’s missing from the Constitution is the perspective of anyone who might get one. When the right to an abortion was enshrined in America, it was in large part because of women like Ann Hill, who dared to imagine that the Constitution’s sweeping language about equality could apply to them too.

..

[cradleandshoot]

Why Justice Alito can’t find a reference to the right to abortion in our nation’s defining document.

In Samuel Alito’s draft of the opinion that is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, the conservative justice makes a familiar argument about the ruling that he seeks to overturn: that Roe was a poorly reasoned decision that isn’t based on anything in the U.S. Constitution.

Here is Alito’s version of that argument, which comes in the second paragraph of the 98-page draft (the first paragraph acknowledges Americans’ divergent views on abortion itself):

For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. … After cataloguing a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by the legislature.

This reasoning sounds logical enough. The Supreme Court is not meant to legislate. It is tasked with parsing and interpreting the Constitution—to understand it so it can enforce it.

But there’s a major problem with the argument that Alito makes here and that others have made before him: It ignores the context in which the Constitution was written, and who it was written by and for.

The right to abortion is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution because the Constitution does not concern itself with the rights of women. As originally written, the Constitution did not even guarantee women the right to vote—it endowed no one with that right aside from propertied white men. The omission of abortion, then, says less about the issue itself than about who the Founding Fathers considered people.

Nearly 200 years after the Constitution was drafted, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women across America pushed to liberalize restrictive abortion laws. These advocates were coming into their own as professionals, and they realized that reproductive autonomy was essential for them to live full lives.

I interviewed one of those women recently. Ann Hill started law school at Yale in 1968, getting admitted only because so many men were fighting in Vietnam. In her first few weeks of school, she realized she was pregnant, and chose to get an illegal abortion. In the aftermath of that procedure, thinking about how she’d been forced to risk her life to control her reproduction, she got angry. “I was furious that … a whole state, a whole country would place women in jeopardy,” she told me. “I was bound and determined to change it. So nobody else, no other woman would have to go through the danger and the fear and the anger that I went through when I realized that I was a second-class citizen.”

Her usage of second-class is intentional; it’s an apt description of how the Constitution and those who interpreted it regarded women in 1968. Hill would spend her three years in law school honing an argument that a woman’s right to abortion can be found in the Constitution—that, among other places, it’s covered by the 14th Amendment, which guarantees all people equal protection under the law, and that pregnancy and childbirth can constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Those claims formed the basis of a case Hill brought with other lawyers against the state of Connecticut—a case she won.

The argument that won the day in Roe—what became the basis for women’s right to abortion nationwide—was based on the right to privacy, another point that Hill and her fellow lawyers seized on in their case. The Supreme Court ruled that such a right could be found in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This has historically been viewed as a weak justification, even by liberals, a fact that Alito pointed out in his draft opinion. But it’s worth remembering that the 14th Amendment was one of a suite of amendments that was enacted after the Civil War to correct the wrongs of slavery, and to address the fundamental failings of the Constitution itself.

This is what Samuel Alito leaves out when he says “the Constitution makes no mention of abortion.” With regards to abortion, the most notable thing that’s missing from the Constitution is the perspective of anyone who might get one. When the right to an abortion was enshrined in America, it was in large part because of women like Ann Hill, who dared to imagine that the Constitution’s sweeping language about equality could apply to them too.

..

Refer back to Justice Rehnquists original dissent that i linked to above. Justice Alito has pretty sound reasoning in agreeing with Justice Rehnquist. The right to an abortion SHOULD be a states rights issue. There is a valid legal argument that the SCOTUS, for a variety of reasons, overstepped their boundaries in 1973. Why do so many people here have a problem with the individual states deciding this issue on their own???

"There apparently was no question concerning the validity of this provision or of any of the other state statutes when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. The only conclusion possible from this history is that the drafters did not intend to have the Fourteenth Amendment withdraw from the States the power to legislate with respect to this matter"

These are Justice Rehnquists thoughts... not mine.

[ggait]

FYI, abortion would not be reserved to the states.

Congress could enact a national law banning or protecting abortions.

States can act, but feds could act too.

TBD if either side would eliminate the filibuster in the Senate in order to get a law passed.